The item the customer chooses is the item the customer chooses

I no longer go to Holland + Barrett. Not that I went there much, give how dry in the mouth most of their stuff is. I have returned my points card to them, repudiated and cut in half, with a strongly worded note and email.

It's not because there was anything wrong with a bought item - in my view. It's actually the offensiveness of the opposite situation - the till cashier having the arrogance to insist on changing an item that I thought was okay and did not want changed, and when I was in a hurry. It was nothing more than a single vegetarian scotch egg! For which, their shop in Dunfermline Kingsgate mall, on the cashier's opinion not mine that it was "all broken", ignored that I was in a hurry and persisted in expecting me to wait tor them to change it, until instead I stormed out not buying anything. As it was labelled reduced and the replacement would not have been, they were also attempting a rip-off by this.

As I have told H+B: For customers in some vulnerable social groups, who I have experience of working with - that's not only autism - changing their chosen purchase for another against their will would constitute illegal monetary taking advantage of. This case flags up against H+B that prospect. No literal minded aspie can disagree with that. H+B stands under shadow of being a place of risk to go to, risk to more manipulable customers and insulting offence to all customers.

Until H+B stands nationally committed to blank cheque automatic backing of the wronged customer in absolutistly absolutistly every case ever. And H+B would not do this. Its customer services e-address, for which its website promises "we'll respond within 24 hours", never responded at all. Either to the first email warning that unless they gave the right answer I would repudiate my card and never go them, nor to the copy of the notice I handed in with my cut in half card to their biggest local shop. It's critical to civil liberty and not having controlled lives, that high handedness by shops must never exist and must never win.

Maurice Frank

BBC openly prevents a civil liberty question getting answered

For a month, here www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b077n7ks/scotland-2016-12042016 is a BBC election debate broadcast Apr 12.

There is a question on mental health. It is in progress when, at time 39:52, Claire Muir of Psychiatric Rights Scotland, a survivor of sectioning that was proved wrong after the event, raises the civil liberty question of mental health sectioning. She tells them about the United Nations, UNCRPD, now taking a position against forced mental health treatments, for their bad and traumatic outcomes in many cases, and seeking for all countries to abolish them. You then see the BBC presenter immediately switch the debate back to resources and stigma, so deciding that the point on forced treatment will not be answered, and she saves the 4 politicians from having to answer it. She directs them away from it.

And indeed, none of them do answer it. Citizens' safety, your safety, from a loss of liberty, was shut out of politics, on open TV and by the broadcaster that never stops claiming worldwide admiration. Now do you still trust the BBC? Or kid yourself other than that it is part of a political class intentionally filtering and manipulating the range of issues to be recognised?

Maurice Frank