Here is a flavour of some of the recent letters we’ve received in The New European’s mailbag. Send your letters for publication to letters@theneweuropean.co.uk
Boris Johnson blunders over Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, with potentially horrific consequences. Boris then appears before the House of Commons but declines to apologise.
Michael Gove appears on TV to defend Boris but himself blunders over Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, again with potentially horrific consequences. Boris and Gove are slapped down by the Prime Minister and Gove apologises.
Boris and Gove then send the Prime Minister a list of how she should be running the country before Boris nips into the Commons to finally apologise for what he should have apologised for a week earlier.
I have seen a double act like this before. If Boris and Gove are looking for a joint catchphrase I regret to inform them that ‘to me, to you’ is already taken.
Grant Baldwin
How very curious. One night Theresa May attends a dinner for celebrate the brutish Paul Dacre, the next she writes an article about how she ‘will not tolerate’ attempts to delay Brexit.
This is, of course, pure Dacrespeak and could have come from any Daily Mail editorial since late June 2016.
May is so useless she cannot even put up a decent pretence that her ideas are her own and not being dictated to her directly by the editors of right-wing newspapers.
Ross Butler, Bristol
A commentator speaking recently on the BBC bemoaned the lack of leadership in the UK. Brexit, she observed, had sucked all the oxygen out of the room, leaving only toxicity behind.
Indeed it has.
The latest display of weakness from Theresa May confirms as much, the ludicrous assertion that she will not ‘tolerate’ a delay to Brexit.
How much longer will the destiny of a still great nation be held hostage by a small, fanatical wing of the ruling party, and a Prime Minister unable or unwilling to take it on?
John Gemmell, Shropshire
Beekeepers will welcome Michael Gove’s decision to back a total ban on neonicotinoids, the insect-harming pesticides. But, wait a minute! I recall a recent TV interview in which Ken Clarke asked Jacob Rees-Mogg to name three EU laws which in his opinion made life impossible in the UK.
Rees-Mogg named ‘set-aside’ and ‘the working time directive’ but the arch-culprit was the EU’s ban on neonicotinoids, which he said was ‘damaging to agriculture’.
If Rees-Mogg is to be consistent with his own antiquarian logic, then he must support the UK exiting the organisation that is making our daily life impossible: the Tory Party.
Can it really get any more unhinged – in that late 18th century Georgian gin-soaked way – than this?
Unfortunately, yes, yes it can.
Nick Gould, Cardiff
Liz Gerard recently described the Mail’s attack on universities as a coded warning to MPs not to defy Brexit.
She wrote in a previous article about refugee charities being afraid to speak out, for fear of being targeted by the right-wing press.
Along similar lines, the recent front page Telegraph article about student Lola Olufemi, who has campaigned to broaden a course reading list to include BME authors, feels like a veiled threat to all would-be left-wing campaigners.
The Telegraph, along with the rest of the right-wing press, appear to be saying: if your view is different to ours, you do not have the right to express it.
No matter how small your campaign is, we can place a photograph of you on the front page of a national newspaper, twist your words and actions until they are unrecognisable, and make an example of you.
Sarah
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