Fighting fires may harm Australians’ freedoms
Your opening weekly teaser summary on the catastrophic Australian bushfires poses an important question: “With the planet at a climate tipping point, will large-scale disasters such as these help push even climate-sceptical governments into taking major action?” (3 January). Our Australian experience suggests that it will – but too slowly and at some cost to our liberty.
We are now seeing an increasingly authoritarian tone in recent moves to combat the current bushfire crisis by our climate-sceptical federal government.
It recently announced it is overriding the states and dictating the action it is taking in response to the fires. At the same time it is now deploying not only regular troops but, in a move unprecedented in peacetime, reservist troops as well.
Given that our fire services are organised along quasi-military lines, Australia has a militaristic feel last seen on the home front in the second world war. So, the question is not so much whether climate-sceptical governments can find the resolve to effectively combat short-term specific climatic contingencies, but to what degree as a matter of practicality this can happen with the longer-term measures needed to avert disaster while still remaining a free society.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia
Boris Johnson faces grave challenges
Andrew Rawnsley may think the jury is out on Boris Johnson (Now we will see what Boris Johnson thinks and believes, 20 December), but given the total failure of the succession of promises made on the NHS since 2010, only a fool would expect the Johnson administration to deliver on his more recent shopping list. What’s more, there is virtually no chance that it will be held to account – government’s congenital tendency to obfuscate and manipulate figures and Johnson’s legendary parsimony with the truth will guarantee it.
However, I am shocked, but not surprised, given the flakiness of our commentariat on climate issues, that Rawnsley does not identify the really inescapable challenge that Johnson will face – that of the climate. The next five years will be as crucial as any, and unless massive steps are taken to make a deep cut in emissions and to shift the global economy into a radically more sustainable path there will be nowhere to hide, as Australia’s Scott Morrison is beginning to find out.
Neil Blackshaw
Barbizon, France
• Your post-UK election summary (20 December) offers little optimism for those who had hoped for an outcome that reflected the evident discontent with Boris Johnson’s government, shown in the recent mass protests across the nation. Commentators including Timothy Garton Ash, Robert Ford, Tim Bale, Heather Stewart and Aditya Chakrabortty quite rightly lay the blame on a dysfunctional and wishy-washy Labour campaign under Jeremy Corbyn, which failed to consolidate the opposition to Brexit, instead trying to straddle both sides of an imaginary fence.
However, they all fail to identify a new set of policies that might unify the now demoralised Labour party, while capturing the votes of the growing bloc of younger voters. This could embody more emphasis on social justice, a fair wage and immediate action on climate change. Sounds rather like the platform of the Greens? This is where the future of a progressive Labour party lies, though we may have to wait for the almost inevitable failure of the Johnson government to revive the British economy, as well as a possible fragmentation of the UK, before the penny drops. Brexit may constitute the bitter remedy that brings this about.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia
Disaster tourists deserve no special protection
Tourists who ignore their own governments’ warnings against travel to Syria so that they can “mingle with locals while also passing destroyed villages”, should be offered no assistance whatsoever by those governments when they find themselves in trouble (6 December). Chances are some of those locals will object to tourists taking selfies in front of a smashed home or bombed-out family business: and who could blame them?
Ken Burns
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
Please don’t confuse the bell with the tower
I was taught the bell is Big Ben, while the tower, alluded to in Dan Hancox’s article on London’s proposed MSG Sphere, is the Elizabeth tower to commemorate Queen Elizabeth’s diamond jubilee (3 January). But Yankees long to emulate British history.
Donald E Stanley
Nobleboro, Maine, US
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