YOUR decision to replace Iain Mac-whirter with Gerry Hassan at least secures continuity. Although both correspondents live, we would wager, in leafy suburbs, both feel able to comment dismissively on the scale of the misery suffered by people who live in less affluent parts of the country. Perhaps they should spend less time pontificating and more time investigating what happens in the communities they seek to comment on.

Hassan asks if turf wars over hedges are really more serious than litter or graffiti. Ask that of anyone who has to suffer the daily grind of abuse, noise, drunkenness, and violence from their own neighbours. They would shake their heads in amazement at the ignorance of the comfortable middle classes who would be so blind and deaf as to ask the question in the first place.

Hassan's claim that we are attacking the poor and the young similarly fails to stand up to scrutiny. It is widely accepted that a small minority of young people do a disproportionate amount of damage to their communities. It is also accepted that young, predominantly socially disadvantaged, people are the main victims of this sort of behaviour. How, then, is tackling the problem an attack on poor young people? That is like saying moves to deal with sectarianism are an attack on Christians.

To be fair to Mr Hassan, his vantage point in comfortable middle-class academia is probably not the best place from which to comment on this debate. We would, therefore, be more than happy to extend an open invitation to him, or any of your other correspondents who feel politicians have invented this issue for electoral purposes, to visit Inverclyde and listen to people who live with utterly unacceptable behaviour day-in, day-out. Perhaps then it would no longer be seen as acceptable to ignore our decent, hard-working communities.

David Cairns, MP for Greenock and Inverclyde; Duncan McNeil,

MSP for Greenock and Inverclyde.