IN view of Thursday's announcement that the current cost of the Olympics is £9.5bn, is it not now the time to pull the plug and cancel the games. These games only benefit a minority of people, but the cost is borne by the majority, who will be paying for many decades to come. I say pull the plug and divert the money into hospitals and make life-saving drugs readily available to those in urgent need.

RD Jackson, Ripon.

WHO would have thought that, after the shambles of the Dome, this incompetent Government would repeat the fiasco - but it has done so.

I'm talking about the quadrupling of the Olympics budget to £9.3bn from £2.4bn, a figure announced only a year ago.

I daren't even begin to imagine how much higher this will climb before 2012, but I'll be amazed if this is the end of the story. Would anyone care to bet on the final bill?

Isn't it astonishing that the voice of the North-East, crippled by being squeezed between the affluent Scots (courtesy of the Barnett Formula) and the even more affluent South, remains silent. Not one MP has the guts to stand up and scream blue murder. They are a bunch of spineless jobsworths and deserve to be ejected en bloc at the next election in favour of politicians who will champion our cause.

David Lacey, Newton Hall, Durham City.