Re: “Badenoch is a dud” by Patience Wheatcroft (TNE #423). At a time when the Tories need a competent leader to hold off the surge of Nigel Farage, Badenoch and the Conservatives jump from cause to cause every week. Instead, they should be thinking of how they define themselves.
It was about four weeks ago that Badenoch was outraged about grooming gangs and the need for a public inquiry, claiming care and concern for the past victims and potential future victims. Within a week they had moved on. Did she really care? Or was such opportunism a prime example of how they will exploit any situation for their own gain, and such shameful shallowness one of the reasons they are not making progress?
Alan Walley
The Tories should realise that they won’t be able to out-tough Nigel Farage on immigration; they will only draw attention to their own record. The best they could do is, jointly with Labour, have a proper open discussion with the electorate explaining why, with an ageing population and low birth rates, we need immigration, expelling all the myths and exploring all the trade-offs.
If both Labour and the Tories decide to take chunks out of each other on this issue, the only winner will be Farage.
Richard Holynski
I always relish reading Patience Wheatcroft’s columns because she doesn’t mince her words, and goes for the political jugular. “Badenoch is a dud” was another example.
She is correct about the Conservative leader, who has been torturous in finding her feet, and I chuckled at her apposite description of Robert Jenrick as our version of JD Vance.
Yes, James Cleverly would have proved a more ameliorative choice for the Tories.
Judith A Daniels
Cobholm, Norfolk
A new kind of America
Marie Le Conte’s “The America we knew may well be gone for ever”
(TNE #423) was a great article that sums it up nicely.
Having relatives from Tennessee, I was always an Americanophile. I loved the country on my many visits and often argued its case. Now, it seems just grubby, selfish and uncaring – things I’d never have thought possible.
Christopher Harrison
The US, where I was born, may not ever be what it was, after Donald Trump. But there are many there who are fighting to keep all from being destroyed, and there is good in the country that needs to be preserved. A world that gives up on the US will be be missing a lot.
Too much attention is being focused on the president and not enough on the many brave people who are working very hard to stop the worst things he is doing.
The Republicans have always stood for states’ right – the idea that states have certain political powers that are separate from the federal government. They need to be held to this now, and legal organisations like the American Civil Liberties Union will work to keep them to that. Speaking of which, one good thing to show you are not giving up on the US is to contribute to the ACLU. As it is nonpartisan, it can and does accept foreign contributions.
Shelley Walsh
When the EU referendum was held in 2016, I remember Leave campaigners telling us that we should continue to trade with the EU but we should also have closer trading ties with Commonwealth states.
When Donald Trump said that Canada should be America’s 51st state and called its prime minister, Justin Trudeau, “Governor Trudeau”, this should have elicited a response from these champions of the Commonwealth, but their silence has been deafening. Too many MPs and the right wing media seem more interested in not upsetting Trump than sticking by a Commonwealth member state.
In the first world war, 650,000 Canadian soldiers fought alongside British soldiers and 66,000 were killed. In the second world war, 117 Canadian pilots fought in the Battle of Britain and in the days and weeks after D-day more than 5,000 Canadian soldiers were killed in the Battle of Normandy. However, their wartime service and sacrifice – usually a favourite subject of right wingers – does not seem to matter when they can cosy up to Trump.
If the president of Argentina made a speech calling the Falkland Islands Las Islas Malvinas, and said that they were a province of Argentina, we can only imagine the jingoistic fury this would produce from right wing MPs and media. There would be an expectation that Commonwealth states would be equally angry, but given a choice between Trump and Canada they are quite happy to hang Canada out to dry.
Phil McElhinney
Jazz fans
In his memories of John Prescott (Diary, TNE #423), Alastair Campbell doesn’t mention John’s love of jazz, which was shared by Ken Clarke on the opposite front bench, and the two often shared a taxi to Ronnie Scott’s after the division bell. Some taxi drivers must have overheard some interesting conversations.
Tim Fell
Brutal sound
Matt d’Ancona’s enthusiastic piece on The Brutalist although excellent fails to mention Daniel Blumberg’s soundtrack.
At my viewing (at the excellent Jam Jar cinema in Whitley Bay) I felt myself almost dragged into the screen by the driving music.
Steve Dales
The demise of honesty
It’s quite some time since Alastair Campbell referenced the Nolan principles. Going through them again and scoring the new government against them in relation to Brexit is not a pretty sight though: honesty about Brexit? Openness? Objectivity? Selflessness? Integrity? Accountability? Leadership on Brexit? On a scale of one to 10 across the seven criteria, I doubt they’d score seven.
Using different criteria, eg cowardice, denial, avoidance, blindness, self-interest, the score shoots up. We seem to have gone from idle isolationist boasts to pathetic denial without reference to the facts. Where is the leadership?
Phil Green
Thank you to Alastair Campbell for alerting me to the wonderful poem Hope performed at Davos by its author, Salome Agbaroji (Diary, TNE #422). In these uncertain times it distilled all the types and meanings of hope and gave me encouragement to keep hopeful, believe in goodness, truth and the human capacity to love each other and want to make life better for all of us.
Jo Mare
Quantum confusion
Philip Ball on quantum tech (TNE #423) was a great article of which I did not understand a word. Mind-boggling!
Adam Primhak
Razor sharp
Peter Trudgill’s column is a jewel every week, yet I think he may be mistaken about the origin of the name “Istanbul” (TNE #422). Using Occam’s razor, I think the most likely derivation is a misheard and mispronounced version of “Constantinopoulos”, mangled through the variety of languages used in the area throughout the centuries.
Bill Cooper
Kinross, Scotland
Can Peter Trudgill explain the temporally confusing nominative determinism which links the concepts of trumped-up arguments and trumped-up charges with their primary exponent?
Colin Garwood
Berkhamsted, Herts
Cupitt’s bow
Contrary to your correspondent Hugh Brodie (Letters, TNE #423), I’ve found that the writings of Don Cupitt have been very influential on my own thinking, helping me to develop over time from a conservative Christian believer to a progressive one.
Cupitt’s rejection of supernaturalism and his explanation of religion as a human creation rather than a divine revelation made good sense to me. For me, at its heart Christianity is a way to live following an ethic of love and the example of the historical Jesus; it’s not about having to subscribe to some rather dubious and unbelievable ancient doctrines. Cupitt enabled me to realise that.
Mark Stubbs
Sandy, Bedfordshire
Respect to Don Cupitt for stressing the acquaintance of modern theologians with Darwin and Marx, and protesting about condescension, both for his sincerity and understated irritation. I would have been more reassured to have been informed that Dr Rowan Williams was similarly expert on the psychopathy of political autocrats.
Arrested and fined for singing psalms as part of the CND protest at Lakenheath air base in 1984, he certainly earned his credentials to speak for that tradition of peacenikery, which continues to run strongly in his (and my) generation.
Around that time, I spent some of my time on exercise in West German trenches and similar training grounds in the UK, from my own conviction that allowing oneself to be led into the amphitheatre singing psalms is no answer to the mindset of psychopaths like Vladimir Putin. They simply scoff.
We owe it to ourselves, our families’ values and our institutions to defend ourselves by whatever means are necessary in this life, not delude ourselves that our naivety, however learned and sincere, will be vindicated in the next.
Simon Flett
Norwich, England
Unequal wealth
Zoë Grünewald asks in TNE #422 how Keir Starmer can best respond to the populist surge across Europe. He should tackle the issue of increasing inequality. The economist Gary Stevenson, an Oxfam campaign, and the Inequality Knocks report from King’s College all call for urgent taxing of the super-rich to avoid increasing impoverishment and social unrest.
We must build up a competing argument, with the facts behind us, that ordinary people are suffering because the wealth and assets are increasingly in the hands of the few. Starmer should join the growing movement to tax the super-rich.
Janet Welsh
Further to the many letters about Peter Hyman on populism (TNE #420), there is nothing new in the populist surge and the threat it poses. The manipulation of popular discontent from below by opportunistic elites from above are defining characteristics of populism/fascism, and this is increasingly evident today.
The postwar social democratic economic consensus broke in 1979-80 and the baleful consequences of this are key to understanding what is happening today. Now a political omertà is breaking, too.
For 80 years any talk of a fascist revival has been shunned, but that possibility has returned, not least as a consequence of policies promoting grotesque levels of inequality embraced by both Conservative and Labour, Republican and Democrat, over the past 40 years.
For Mr Hyman, who played a key role in a New Labour project that saw a wholehearted embrace of market fundamentalism, this must be an uncomfortable truth. I hope he now has the courage to argue for the genuinely disruptive policies that will be necessary to reverse this precipitous slide into chaos and disaster.
John Bailey
BELOW THE LINE
Comments, conversation and correspondence from our online subscribers
The way the English press treated Marianne Faithfull (“So long, Marianne”, TNE #423) was disgraceful. She was a lovely woman and underestimated. A track of hers I still regularly play is Coquillages from Love in a Mist, the last of her 1960s studio albums. It is really delightful.
Steve Buch
Vale Marianne. Often misunderstood, always underestimated.
Charles Lees
Re: Rats in a Sack on Andrea Jenkyns (TNE #423). I note that her former husband, Jack Lopresti, has joined the Ukraine International Brigade. Possibly to avoid Andrea?
Stuart Shingler
Re: British brutalism (TNE #423). The British Gas Research Station in Killingworth is absolutely beautiful. One of the things that you often notice in pictures of the newly opened buildings is that they are in black and white. I am not claiming any artistic insight, but it really helps make the concrete look pristine, and gives really crisp lines.
Chris Whelan
You write, “In the 1990s, Britain fell out of love with its concrete masterpieces”. This is untrue. I never fell out of love with them because I hated them from the start.
Peter Wilton
Re: “The restless odyssey of Alma Karlin” (TNE #422). Unfortunately, none of Karlin’s books seem to be available in English translation. If anyone can point me in the direction of any I’d be very grateful.
John Dallimore
Josh Barrie on the heavenly hams being cured in the towers of a French church was a lovely article (TNE #423). I have just added Saint-Flour to my list of places I must visit.
Stephen Oates
I am Italian, and I think Josh Barrie is completely right about the snobbish hate of Hawaiian pizza (TNE #421). I am partial to pineapple in savoury combinations. Another great pizza restaurant in the fine city of Norwich, where I live, has a proper wood oven and some months ago had in the specials a divine Hawaiian with slightly smoked ham, pineapple and sweet and hot chilli sauce, a thing of wonder!
Francesca Stefanato
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