Anything Labour can do to make life uncomfortable for the dominant players will be welcomed by the rest

Anything Labour can do to make life uncomfortable for the dominant players will be welcomed by the rest.Next, Labour should seek to tailor policies for small business. There is no reason why the Blair party should not prove attractive to the growing army of small businesses, including the many self-employed. Big business, for all its advocacy of the markets, likes cosy arrangements which limit competition. More importantly, the heads of big businesses are not as a rule particularly involved in British politics. Generations of children are brought up to "fill" the kettle, and keep the globe warming A suggested new word is to "pow" the kettle. GREG LEONARD Department of Information ScienceUniversity of Portsmouth. Sir: Your leading article on hedges (29 August) lends support to what the historian Oliver Rackham has called "the Enclosure-Act Myth, the notion that the countryside is not merely an artefact, but a very recent one".

As he says in the preface to The History of the Countryside, "This notion is quite prevalent even among Ministers of Agriculture, and exerts its defeatist influence against the conservation of the landscape." Certainly the enclosure of open fields and commons resulted in many new hedges being planted, especially between about 1770 and 1830; but hedges, and very old hedges, were a typical feature long before then. Not only were many parts of the country never subject to the open-field system of farming, but those that were had a significant proportion of old enclosure, as well as hedges around parish boundaries, woods etc. The hedge, as a feature of the British countryside, probably goes back to the prehistoric beginnings of agriculture. S WIERBANKMarket Rasen, Lincolnshire. Labour needs tacit support among ordinary managers and professionals, not the people who attend seminars.Mistake two is to focus on manufacturing and on big business. Britain is just one market among many: half the profits of the top 100 companies come from abroad and many of our big manufacturing companies are not British- owned. None of the top rank of the shadow cabinet has business experience. It is a gaping hole, and it shows. It is very hard to think of any successful economy anywhere in the world where business is at loggerheads with government, and a modicum of economic success is utterly essential to Labour if it is to achieve any of its social objectives.

If the business community is demoralised, economic catastrophe awaits. So it is powerfully in its own self-interest for Labour to build a relationship of trust with business people. But how? By stopping, I suggest, making three mistakes and by exploiting two opportunities.Mistake one is to assume that by talking to the representatives of businesses you talk to business people. For a start, the Confederation of British Industry does not represent business in the way the Trades Union Congress represents the unions. It must be a bit dispiriting: all the efforts by Labour leaders to show that they are not anti-business, and, save the occasional maverick bigwig who is prepared to sign up (and hope for a peerage for his courage), hardly anyone of note in the business community will openly support them. Labour's relationship with business is a bigger problem than its problems over tax At least tax is a clear-cut issue Business is about ideas and instincts. Labour - uniquely among parties in developed countries - knows very little about business Hardly any Labour candidates have a business background.

Suddenly the election is for real. The unofficial campaign kicked off this week with the wholly unsurprising trading of insults about taxation and the somewhat more surprising appeal by Labour to the business community. Labour's manifesto for business got, it seems, a ho-hummy reception: not too much open hostility except on taxation and the Social Chapter, but not much warmth either despite a supposed concession by Labour on takeovers. And amongst my friends the most adventurous are the women. COLIN BARTLETTTadworth, Surrey. Sir: J Richard Pater (Letters, 5 September) likens teaching children the importance of religious belief to the need to look both ways before crossing a road: "if there really is no traffic it makes no difference ..." But what really happens is that the believer tends to take the child to a manifestly empty road, with no sign of traffic, and to say: "Look at that enormous lorry, it's heading straight for you, don't pretend that you cannot see it, it's vital to your whole future that you admit to recognising it..." MIKE DOUSENorwich. Almost everything in the arts since the late 1980s that has seemed to me to be fresh, adventurous or moving has had a - often the - major input from women.

Sir: According to Hugh Peto (Letters, 30 August) "social, scientific, and artistic experimentation have always been generated in the male-dominated public sphere" My experience is quite the reverse. The engineers and production workers whose jobs will be saved by the purchase, their dependants and the taxpaying public will by their gallant actions in the polling booths be able to safeguard the prosperity and freedom of Britain for continued enjoyment by the Conservatives. Seldom in the history of political conflict will so much have been owed to so many by so few. GRANT LEWISONRichmond, Surrey. On the contrary: it shows a remarkable grasp of the changed threat and new danger to Britain in the form of New Labour. Sir: You suggest (Business comment , 3 September) that the Conservatives' decision to purchase 230 Eurofighters is a product of obsolete defence attitudes. Sir: Philip Daubeney (letters, 4 September) failed to spot a major cause of global warming - the English language's lack of a single word to express "put only enough water" in the kettle to make a cup of tea. President Clinton's decision to punish Saddam undermines the authority of the UN, whose own inspectors uncovering covert Iraqi military establishments are currently in Iraq.Dr DAVID LOWRYStoneleigh, Surrey.