Two articles in Wednesday’s Guardian cast useful light on the causes of current discontents. Dominic Cummings’ opinion that Tory MPs don’t care about poorer people (Cummings: Tory MPs don’t care about NHS) goes perfectly with Jon Boutcher’s that the police are distracted by having to deal with the effects of social disadvantage (Police left to tackle impact of damage to social fabric, says chief constable).
The main function of the Conservative party has been to maintain the structure of privilege in society, and recently this has developed into an extreme strategy of cutting state services in favour of increasing the income of the already wealthy by tax cuts. It is led by a group that is not just insulated from cuts by great wealth but brought up in isolation from society at large, heavily interconnected by schooling, intermarriage and lifestyle. Its members and supporters are dominated by people who do not believe that their incomes should subsidise the poor.
This explains the failure of recent governments to deal with multiple crises in society (of which knife crime is only one): the common factor is a determination not to spend enough on remedying what most of us recognise are the results of disadvantage. Conferences are arranged, targets announced, token amounts of spending allocated and promises uttered, but no progress is made: as Yvette Cooper is quoted as saying, “The rhetoric … is right but too often that’s all it is – rhetoric.” This is, of course, perfectly consistent with the government’s real strategy.
Jeremy Cushing
Exeter
• There can have been few more inappropriate places for Boris Johnson to visit in Scotland than the Faslane Trident base. The no-deal supporters who voted him in are content with losing Scotland and it becoming independent. However, SNP policy is that there will be no nuclear base at Faslane or elsewhere in Scotland after independence. Since there is no suitable site in England to relocate the base, the deterrent will have to be scrapped. Are the rightwing extremists who support Johnson willing to give up the “independent nuclear deterrent”? Are they happy with the decommissioning costs and paying for removal of all nuclear material from Scotland to England?
John Cookson
Bournemouth, Dorset
• A better comparison than Paul McGilchrist suggests (Letters, 30 July) may be with David Lloyd George, who Churchill was said to hold in the kind of awe Johnson reserves for Churchill. A political chameleon, Lloyd George was outwardly a social reformer and ferocious opponent of the landed classes yet led the suppression of workers who threatened their interests after the Great War in Glasgow and South Wales while sending in the Black and Tans to ruthlessly quell the independence revolt in Ireland.
His personal life was filled with scandals that would probably have led to his fall had they been made public. Never trusted by the establishment in his own Liberal party or his Tory coalition partners, who exploited his political skills, the “Welsh wizard’s” legacy effectively kept the Liberals out of power for nearly a century, ushering in the Labour party and losing Ireland (southern Ireland) to the union.
Paul Dolan
Northwich, Cheshire
• Paul McGilchrist’s comparison of Johnson to Harold Macmillan is wide of the mark. Macmillan was a brave officer in the first world war, who saw the consequences of the Great Depression when he served as MP for Stockton-on- Tees. As housing minister in the 1950s, he restricted private speculative projects and presided over a successful council housebuilding programme, which reached his ambitious target of 300,000 completions a year. He was also an enthusiastic European.
Although he experienced ill-health and political failure during his latter years as PM, his career embodied the one-nation Tory approach later trashed by Thatcher and now Johnson. I have never voted Tory but would rather live under a reborn Macmillan than under Johnson, who is on record as saying that building council houses “only serves to create Labour voters”.
Steve Smart
Malvern, Worcestershire
• I wish Simon Jenkins (Is there a Greek hero in No 10, or just a bust?, 27 July) would give Johnson a chance. He has only been prime minister for a short while and has an uphill struggle trying to deliver Brexit. As a Brexiter who voted for Johnson in the Tory leadership election I have no problem with a second EU referendum, another Scottish independence plebiscite and an early general election, and I like my republican Labour Kensington MP, Emma Dent Coad. An admirer of Margaret Thatcher, I also found merit in Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, too. Constructive party politics should be the order of the day. Johnson’s political honeymoon will soon be over; let’s be generous and allow him a week or two more.
Dominic Shelmerdine
London
• Alun Cairns (secretary of state for Wales) on removing the impact of a no-deal Brexit: “I will point to the market in Japan that has just been opened to Welsh and British sheep for example.” That would be the Economic Partnership Agreement with Japan, which came into force on 1 February – for EU member states.
Martin Knight
Hove, East Sussex
• If Boris Johnson wants Northern Ireland to have power-sharing, should he not lead by example?
Peter Emerson
The de Borda Institute
• The most obvious question about Johnson’s “prime minister” jacket is: how long has he had it?
David Arthur
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
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