Letters: Let’s hope Putin’s pride comes before a fall

John Sweeney is right to highlight the corruption that is spreading in Ukraine. Rich Ukrainians aren’t just paying to avoid the draft; I have just heard from a friend there about how many luxury products are being bought in from western Europe. It’ll be the death of the country if they don’t address it soon.
Angela Preece

Labour disappointment
Re: “The tone-deaf Tory six” by Patience Wheatcroft (TNE #402). Predictably, the Tories manage to be pathetic and obnoxious at the same time, and that includes even those who are supposedly more moderate like the principle-free Tug End Hat, as I call him.

They still maintain their deranged anti-Europeanism and equally crazy anti-immigration stance. How wonderful it would be if this party finally went extinct.

A shame then that they’ve been replaced by a Labour Party who meekly accept their disastrous Brexit and refuse to reverse it, and who are still pandering to the anti-immigration idiots even though this country desperately needs immigrants in so many areas of the economy and society.
Alexander Blackburn

The only thing that puzzled me in Patience Wheatcroft’s article was the use of the verb “rebuild” when discussing the Tories’ supposed reputation for economic competence.

One thinks about the restoration of the gold standard, privatisation and Brexit, to name just a few examples of Conservative economic incompetence!
Eric Owen Smith

Thorns in the rose garden
I read James Ball’s “Bitter Harvest” (TNE #402) with enormous sadness. The fact that so many farmers voted for the Brexit that has betrayed them makes me want to scream out in frustration. Likewise the fishers, who have been devastated.

There is no joy whatsoever for me in saying to these people: “I told you so.”
Sarah Spinks

The real folly was the decision by the NFU not to actively campaign in the referendum despite advising their members that remaining in the EU was the best outcome for farmers in 2016.
David Irwin

More Brexit damage was excellently exposed by James Ball in “Bitter Harvest”. I understand the value of caution for Keir Starmer, but this is real harm being felt by real people every day. Just step up and do something about it, prime minister.
Sarah Hunter

Does Keir Starmer get his international trade advice from David Davis? I’m a Brexit-induced French bi-national who ditched all financial links with the UK but voted for Starmer as saviour. He didn’t take long to disappoint.
Andrew Robinson

I wonder what Keir Starmer’s own teenage children think of his failure to reinstate membership of the Erasmus+ scheme? Surely they would like to benefit from it when they go to university?
Paul Cawthorne

I’m sure Starmer aimed for stately symbolism in his Rose Garden address but it may not be the imagery he intended.

If, like me, you are sensing an early autumn, the sunny surroundings simply serve to remind you that soon it’s going to be cold and a lot of old people are going to be a lot worse off thanks to Labour.

Any sane person wanted rid of the Tories. But in Labour’s leafy “rose” garden I spy thorns keeping much-needed compassion at bay.
Amanda Baker 
Edinburgh

Points of disorder
Re: Alastair Campbell’s Diary (TNE #402) The key difference between Boris Johnson and Donald Trump is that while Johnson is arrogant and selfish, he doesn’t have a serious mental disorder, which Trump does. I’d recommend the Shrinking Trump podcast with psychologists John Gartner and Harry Segal, for more discussion of this.

Trump is also the puppet of some seriously dangerous people. In this respect he seems to me to be more like Suella Braverman than Boris Johnson.
Lauren Smith

Johnson ticks pretty much all the boxes of someone suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder. As does Trump.
Bill Yates

Forgetting the past
“The kids are far right” (TNE #402), about Irish youth on anti-migrant demos was so sad. Ireland, whose main export in the 1950s-60s was people (like me), has now forgotten what it was like to be a reluctant immigrant.
John Loughlin

A sad ciao to Camisa
Very sad to read of the demise of I Camisa (“Death of a deli”, TNE #402). I suspected it was on the cards, but sorry to see it confirmed in print.

For a while it has been – was – my go-to snack destination in central London. My favourite nibble was focaccia stuffed with mortadella, Emmental cheese, sun-dried tomatoes and rocket. Delicious and probably the best sandwich in London. The staff were also superb, and the care and attention with which they prepared food often seemed hypnotic. The last time I was there the lovely young Italian lass who made my sandwich bid me farewell – appropriately – with a “ciao”.

As Josh Barrie writes, the circumstances surrounding its closure are “a damning indictment of modern Britain”.
Will Goble 
Rayleigh, Essex

Modernise MPs
I wonder why, in the days when County Hall was scrapped, and Red Ken was ousted, the building was not purchased and converted into accommodation for MPs? It may have saved millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money and prevented the abuse that had been going on for so long. It was, I believe, turned into a hotel.

Now that many of the dinosaurs have left (to paraphrase Marie Le Conte in Dilettante, TNE #402) would this still be an option?
Allan Jones

We often hear from Conservatives that trade unions are unwilling to accept new practices that are proposed to improve productivity. Surely our parliament should be showing the way forward in this respect. 

I’m not sure what the average hourly rate is for an MP, but surely they could more productively use their (our) time than endlessly filing in and out of lobbies. Electronic voting mechanisms are hardly new technologies.
Tim Allen

HS3 is the solution
Further to Alan Robinson’s excellent explanation (Letters, TNE #402) of the reasons for the failure of HS2, as effectively specified by other EU countries – 300km/h, network compatibility, built on brownfield sites – may I add a fourth? 

Connectivity: HS2 was conceived with no thought whatever as to how it might connect with HS1 and with Europe in general. Did the designers ever look at a map? 

HS1 approaches London not from the west but from the east; where, in addition to Ashford, the line was built with two potential continental termini, at Stratford and Ebbsfleet. Let us imagine an alternative route, HS3: a high-speed line up the east side of England connecting with HS1 at Stratford or Ebbsfleet. 

The most costly element would be to get north out of London along the Lea Valley; but then it is open and almost level farmland virtually all the way to Yorkshire. Before reaching a terminus in Leeds, the once-promised HS branch through the Pennines would enable trains to reach Manchester from St Pancras in about 100 minutes. 

It would carry travellers from the large population centres of the north to Paris in around four hours with no change of train or need to negotiate London. HS3 would also link Europe directly with the growing hi-tech boom zone of Cambridge/Peterborough, as well as Nottingham and Sheffield, Leeds and the East Coast Main Line. 

And the cost? The flat countryside of East Anglia has to be very much cheaper than tunnelling through the Chilterns and urban areas around Birmingham, and the easier horizontal and vertical curves would also save on operating and maintenance costs.
Peter D Brown 
Morecambe

Called to account
Patience Wheatcroft discusses responsibility, accountability and justice (“Shame in public life seems to have vanished”, TNE #401) stating that a lack of contrition in British political life is a relatively recent phenomenon. But good examples include Bloody Sunday (1972), Hillsborough (1989) and the Iraq war (2003). More recent examples are Grenfell Tower (2017) and infection control mistakes in the construction of two flagship Scottish hospitals (2015 and 2019).

In the same week as this article was published, a 10-year investigation into the treatment of workers from abroad working on Scottish trawlers reported its findings. At the conclusion of this lengthy process, one worker from the Philippines said: “I see now how it works. This is how your UK law is done… you favour the wealthy people, and you don’t care about the poor.” 

Patience Wheatcroft goes on to comment on the government’s prompt and tough response to the recent civil disobedience, concluding that dangerous behaviour has to have consequences. This is correct. But is it proportionate, just and correct that some citizens with no previous convictions who were identified as being “in the mob” are sent to prison for years?

We have become accustomed to these aberrant standards. This is bad for a Britain that believes in fair play.
James D Walker 
Edinburgh

Has society rejected accountability on a global scale, and is it the reality that corporate strength is now greater than state and governmental power? I point to the behaviour of the likes of Elon Musk for many of the actions of X, including where harmful content leading to hatred, suicide and murder has not been dealt with responsibly and it goes lately unpunished – potentially for a man of such means, unpunishable. 

Furthermore, when Putin annexed Crimea the appetite of the global community to call him to account was virtually nil, with now obvious outcomes.

Perhaps, in the UK, this strong response to the rioting may signal the rebuilding of accountability from the foundations upwards. I hope this is the case.
Matt Howells

BELOW THE LINE
Comments, conversation and correspondence from our online subscribers

Re: Robert Jenrick in “Lie of the Week” (TNE #402). This is the same Jenrick who has gone back to Cameron’s policy of getting net migration down to the tens of thousands. Technically it always has been in the tens of thousands, last year it was 60 tens of thousands.
Keith Hobbs

I am a constituent of Robert Jenrick, and unsurprised to see him in Lie of the Week. In the Commons debate on the King’s Speech, he laid claim to having just been re-elected on an anti-immigration “centre right” (!) ticket. Yet his campaign in Newark was entirely about local schools, hospitals and potholes and his eight-page election leaflet mentioned the Conservative Party once – in the footnote to p8 where it said “printed on behalf of the Conservative Party”.

Re: “My quest to belong in France” (TNE #402). When asked “Where do you come from?”, my answer is “nowhere in particular”. My dad was an RAF pilot; both parents are English but I was conceived in Northern Ireland and born in transit in a convent hospital in Beaconsfield. First home was in Little Rissington in the Cotswolds, an RAF posting with no family connection. I have lived near York, then Singapore, north-east Scotland, Gibraltar, boarding school in Gloucester, north-east Scotland again, Gloucester again and now west Wales. 

I am neither proud nor ashamed to be English, I just am. My DNA check is fairly standard for an Englishman – mostly Norman origin with a dollop of Celt, so more Norse, a dash of West Asian, Greek and Italian. I blame the last three on the Romans. Some of my ancestors will have arrived by boat across the Channel.
Nick Howard

As a child visiting my grandparents in Surrey, my brother and I were accused of being American by children at a playground. When we said we were from Lancashire they looked at our feet. They were looking for clogs.
Michael Bax

Re: “More queues, right on cue” (TNE #401). Join the Rejoin Europe march in London on September 28 and let’s stop this Brexit nonsense. It’s created hatred and division with our European friends and inflicted hardship on our fellow UK citizens.
Pauline Allon

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