It was heartening to hear Ed Miliband say in his speech that tackling climate change is a passion of his and that solving it could be a massive job-generating opportunity (Report, 24 September). The inevitable question of how to pay for this can be tackled by writing to Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England. He is on record as saying that if the government requested it, then the next round of QE could be used to buy assets other than government debt. Miliband said that the Green Investment Bank would be used to fund green economic activity and so Labour should allow it to issue bonds that could then be bought by the Bank using “Green QE”. Similarly, local authorities could issue bonds to build new energy-efficient public homes funded by “Housing QE”.

The Bank has already pumped £375bn of QE into the economy, but with little tangible benefit to the majority. Imagine the galvanising effect on the real economy of every city and town if a £50bn programme of infrastructural QE became the next government’s priority. This could make every building in the UK energy-tight and build enough highly insulated new homes to tackle the housing crisis. It would provide a secure career structure for those involved for the next 10 years and beyond, massive numbers of adequately paid apprenticeships and jobs for the self employed, a market for local small businesses, and reduced energy bills for all. Such a nationwide programme would generate tax revenue to help tackle the deficit, but in an economically and socially constructive way. Best of all it would not be categorised as increased public funding, since QE spending has not and would not be counted as government expenditure.

Colin Hines

Convener, Green New Deal Group

• Ian Martin (I can’t remember a more spineless opposition, 24 September) sums up the feeling of millions of working-class people. Millions are desperate to get rid of the current government, yet at the same time depressed because they don’t believe a Labour government would mark a real change. As Ian says: “Labour’s message to the electorate is clear – austerity is the new reality.”

To get rid of the Tories many, like Ian is clearly considering doing, will vote Labour in the general election next year. Others will abstain from the elections in disgust, or even vote for the rightwing stockbrokers of Ukip to express their anger. One clear result from Scotland is proof that it is not “apathy”, but disillusionment with the diet of pro-big-business, pro-austerity parties on offer, that is responsible for falling election turnouts. But trade unionists and socialists cannot continue to accept a choice between parties whose policies are so similar you can barely get a fag-paper between them. That only leaves the road open to Ukip and its ilk. That is why the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC – to which Ian refers) was co-founded by the late Bob Crow to begin to build an electoral voice for working-class people. In May 2014, TUSC fielded 560 local election candidates in nearly 90 towns and cities, in the widest socialist challenge to Labour for 60 years. In May 2015 – for both the general and the local elections – we are going to up our game, aiming to stand even more widely, to ensure austerity is not unchallenged at the ballot box.

Dave Nellist

Chair, TUSC

• Ian Martin highlights the dramatic change that followed the coalition legislating the five-year parliament. By removing the opportunity to force a general election at any time following a government defeat, for example when the government lost the vote on alterations to the “bedroom tax”, this government has removed the incentive for persuasive, adversarial discussion in the house as the government can rely on the “five-year rule” to override the opposition. There is no longer the tense, adversarial atmosphere that used to exist and so we get the impression that the opposition is “spineless”.

David Hurry

Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex

• Ian Martin’s “spineless opposition” has a good deal more to offer to my constituents in a hard-pressed ward in Newcastle’s West End than he allows. From the scrapping of the bedroom tax to rescuing the NHS, new social and council house building to dealing with the problems of the private rented sector, better training and job creation, and above all fairer funding for local council services slashed by the Tory/Lib Dem government, a Labour government will make a huge difference. The author of The Thick of It may not recognise it; the people who live in the thick of it will if Labour wins next May.

Jeremy Beecham

Labour, House of Lords

• Smoking costs the NHS between £2.7bn and £5.2bn a year, and Mr Miliband wants to add a windfall tax to the £9.5bn annual excise revenue to help fund the NHS. Obesity cost the NHS £16bn in 2007, but I hear no calls from him to tax the supermarkets that sell us the processed food that makes us fat, or calls for taxes (or at least reduced subsidies) on the sugar that goes into them. The link between sugar and obesity is now as clear as the link between tobacco and cancer. The time to act on obesity is now, and taxing those who cause us harm would be a popular and sensible policy.

Richard Cooper

Chichester, West Sussex

• Owen Jones (Memo to Miliband: Britain’s social order is bankrupt, 22 September) rightly points out that, since the start of the recession, the richest 1,000 people in the country have doubled their wealth to £519bn, as much as the annual earnings of two-thirds of the British workforce, but it is even worse than that. We now have more billionaires per capita than any other country and London has more billionaires than any other world city. We have more million-earning bankers than the rest of Europe combined. FTSE 100 chief executives are being paid an average of £4.7m a year, almost £13,000 a day, and get 170 times as much as the average worker. And the richest five families in the country have as much wealth as the poorest 20% of the population.

Yet, since the start of the recession, average incomes have fallen by 10% after inflation is taken into account, the number of adults in poverty has risen to 8.7 million and the number of children in poverty has risen to 4.1 million. A third of households are living below the breadline and a million people are forced to use food banks every year. And, according to the OECD, our poorest fifth of households are among the most economically deprived in western Europe and have levels of deprivation which are more on a par with a number of eastern European countries. These attacks on working people and those unable to work must be resisted, and a mass turnout for the “Britain needs a pay rise” demonstration, which the TUC is organising in London on 18 October, is now more important than ever.

Richard Lynch

London

• I’m a retired Tory party activist but also a long-time reader of the Guardian, a paper that strives for accuracy and intelligently challenges my prejudices. So I’ve little time for Ed Miliband, but John Crace’s offensive and ill-directed mockery of his alleged pronunciation (Sketch, 24 September) leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth. Miliband speaks an ordinary and clearly pronounced educated English. Crace’s diatribe appears facing a headline “Playground insults from the right”. How apt.

Eugene Byrne

London