Fossil Free Books has heightened the risk of sponsoring the arts, says Finbarr O’Mahony

In his article (Our Baillie Gifford boycotts aren’t about tearing down the arts – they’re about building them up, 27 June), Tom Jeffreys writes: “The furore over festival funding is obscuring the real issue here, which is that in the last nine months Israel has slaughtered more than 37,000 people in Gaza.” I agree. Fossil Free Books has caused the furore, but without leading to divestment from either Israel or the oil and gas sector, merely the divestment from literary festivals. Surely a blow for justice and the environment so tangential as to be useless.

Jeffreys is confident that pure, alternative sources of arts funding are available. This is not the case. Fossil Free Books has heightened the risk of sponsoring the arts. Now that Baillie Gifford has walked away, I doubt anyone else will want to drink from that poisoned chalice.

Readers respond to an article by Shaniya Odulawa on how young people have been put off politics and from voting in the general election

Good on Shaniya Odulawa for expressing the views of many young people about politics (I never thought I’d abstain from voting, but many young people will – and can you blame us?, 21 June). I share her feelings about Brexit. But what options do we have? Young people have the option to oust the present government – surely that alone is enough to vote, albeit grudgingly, for a Labour government? It’s not all about the leader, it’s about what Labour will do on the ground if elected. There will be a new feeling of optimism and actual change, which is impossible to imagine, given how we have lived for the last 14 years.

I must vote. I am 68 years old. The Equality and Franchise Act 1928 gave women over 21 the right to vote for the first time. This meant 15 million women could vote. My mother was born two years after that act and it was drilled into me by her that women fought for us to have that right to vote, so I must exercise it.