Critiquing an article published in a local newspaper is simply that: a criticism of what has been written. It is not a personal attack against the person who wrote it. Nicholas Franks should learn the difference.

Otherwise, if he is inferring that no one should be allowed to disagree publicly with a newspaper article, especially one written by his MP, he is encouraging the suppression of free speech.

Nowhere in my letter, December 29, did I criticise Dr Wollaston parliamentary work. I believe her to be hard working.

I merely took exception to an article she wrote concerning the actions of some 300 people who were exercising their legal right to exercise freedom of speech when they protested against the actions of her Government, which they claimed had caused the deaths of hundreds of people through benefits and NHS cuts.

The majority of those demonstrators were the constituents whom Dr Wollaston represents in parliament, and came from all political persuasions. So her article was a criticism of her own constituents. Is it surprising that she kept labelling them as members of the Labour Party, no doubt in an effort to disguise their true identity?

Incidentally, I believe that had this been a Conservative Party demonstration about the death of 120,000 people, and Charles Saatchi had organised it in Westminster, the use of a coffin lid to hammer home the importance of the demonstrations’ message would have been praised as being highly appropriate and quite brilliant.

When Dr Wollaston chose to ignore the message written plainly on that coffin lid, she belittled and dismissed the whole ethos of the demonstration by those 300 concerned people.

And it was when she twisted and deliberately misconstrued the message, and turned the whole incident into a personal threat of physical attack against her, that I began to feel uneasy about my MP and wrote my original letter to the editor.

Jill Murray

Churchfields, Dartmouth