You are wrong to say that plans to block Britons from returning to the UK raise no issue of principle (Editorial, 25 November). What could be more fundamental to British citizenship than the right to be in the UK? The state has the power to arrest, charge and imprison British people for crimes. Passports can be withheld. But the right to come home – even if only to face justice – is sacred. Exile is the shameful tool of our colonialist past. Parliament has no power to enact it without the express, deliberate, consent of the British people.
Simon Cox
Migration lawyer, Open Society Justice Initiative
• David Cameron and Malcolm Rifkind lazily scapegoat Facebook over the activities of Lee Rigby’s killers (Report, 26 November). Probably less well known is the unbroadcast footage of the men at numerous peaceful anti-war protests. Given the media has spent a decade and a half denying a voice to protesters and even the basic existence of these events, and a generation of elected political representatives has refused to recognise the strength of anti-war feeling, perhaps we should not be surprised if a minority of people have turned to violence?
Instead of learning from this, Britain’s political elite thinks that yet more repression is the answer. Muslim reprisals were predictable from the entire history of British colonialism. Even the head of MI5 warned of inevitable retaliations, but now establishment politicians are blaming internet companies? And they wonder why voters turn their back on them.
Gavin Lewis
Manchester
• When Jordan Blackshaw, a young man with no previous record, posted a message on Facebook facetiously proposing a riot in the sleepy market town of Northwich, the authorities were on to it in an instant and he was jailed for four years (Report, 17 August 2011). When Michael Adebowale, an al-Muhajiroun activist and former drug dealer who heard the voices of spirits in prison, posted his intention to kill someone on Facebook, nothing happened.
Could it be that the threat to the lives of pedestrians and commuters in this country is of less consequence to the authorities than even the possibility of a threat to the political system and private property?
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
• The government’s plans “to order universities to ban extremist speakers from their campuses” (Terror bill requires universities to ban extremist speakers, 25 November) face the obvious problem that there is no consensus on what constitutes “extremism”. Or am I the only person left who still considers Thatcherism an “extreme” position?
Trevor Curnow
Professor of philosophy, University of Cumbria
• If a lecturer, in say international relations or Middle Eastern politics or conflict studies has the temerity to suggest that American, British or Israeli foreign policy may be the cause of terrorism and extremism, is this inciting terrorism or extremism? If they point to the role of our ally Saudi Arabia in inciting extremism or terrorism, should they be dismissed? Should their reading lists be purged of concepts such as imperialism or blowback? We are on a slippery slope that leads where Brecht forecast … Then they came for me [see footnote].
Clive Tempest
Westbury on Severn, Gloucestershire
• The way to counter radicalisation in colleges et al is to engage them in dialogue and win the argument/debate, not to push them underground where they will become more attractive to students. Failing to have a reasoned answer to extremism is admitting defeat.
David Wheatley
Margate, Kent
• University students are intelligent enough to listen to radical speakers and make up their own minds about what is being said. Would that our politicians were intelligent enough to see that limiting any kind of free speech is a limitation of all.
Malcolm Brown
Kingston, Surrey
• With the proposed counter-terrorism and security bill in the news it is surprising that the most effective and obvious way of curbing terrorism is rarely mentioned. That, of course, is to stop killing Muslims. The military historian and former US army colonel Andrew Bacevich informs us that our American allies have bombed or invaded 14 Muslim countries since 1980-81.
We have participated in making war with Iraq and laying waste the state, killing many of the inhabitants. We have participated in the killing of tens of thousands of Afghans, whose land we have now invaded five times since 1838. We cannot stop terrorism by killing Muslims.
Jim McCluskey
Twickenham, Middlesex
• This footnote was appended on 28 November 2014. The words “Then they came for me” should have been attributed not to Bertolt Brecht but to the anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller. His famous statement has been published in several forms, one of which begins “First they came for the Socialists…” and ends “Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.”
