Our broken democracy
Those who were at the anti-Trump marches should appreciate Suzanne Moore’s eloquence (27 January). However, criticism that the goals of the marches were too vague, the perennial complaint that attends protests, has no validity. Protest should not be confused with lobbying, proposing terms to circumscribe its goals. Gandhi’s genius was to recognise that non-violent resistance challenges the legitimacy of authority: there’s your purpose.
I recall the frustration we felt as marchers in Washington, New York and San Francisco (where I was) protesting the Vietnam war: the response we got was never anything but bad. Seen from this distance, it’s different. All that protest that had seemed only to ignite more repressive responses did in fact discredit the US government. A government that provokes protest is in danger of losing its right to govern. Far from not working or being useless, protest is vital. Resistance pursued with persistence can work, at least to the extent that our society is a functioning democracy.
How about some protests about corruption, not unconstitutionality or a smoking gun or any of the myriad other distractions that can confuse and deflate the issue? The corruption of the Republican party – and its poster boy.
Felix Prael
San Diego, California, US
• Our broken democracy is debased precisely because it has no base (3 February). Without some foundation in direct democracy, people deciding and acting together for themselves on what they know best, we have no basis for understanding or counteracting the political and economic institutions that bear down on us.
As George Monbiot suggests, it’s a matter of architecture. Not just better listening and fairer party funding, but reshaping a mighty pyramid of bureaucratic ladders that extends far beyond party politics and government, sustaining prodigious wealth and excluding the majority on whom it rests.
Across private and public sectors, members of relatively prosperous professional hierarchies can count on some measure of security and the prospect of advancement. They do better out of their jobs than most of those they may wish to serve: the majority who live on less than the average wage and never reach the bottom rungs.
What we need is not a refinement of top-down listening devices or tick-box policy choices but effective self-determination wherever we live and work. It’s in our everyday employment that we are likely to be most effective. Until we begin to reconnect – hand to hand and face to face, and take hold of what we know best, how can we make sense of a wider world, exert some leverage on the powers-that-be and know what to expect from those we send away to represent us?
Greg Wilkinson
Swansea, UK
Corbyn wrong on Brexit vote
As a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the British Labour party, I beg to differ with him on the Brexit vote and the use of a three-line whip (10 February). The majority of Labour voters voted remain. Younger and future voters overwhelmingly support remain.
Yes, blue-collar Labour voters in the north-east of England voted for Brexit. They are still suffering from Thatcherite de-industrialisation and the impacts of capitalist globalisation. Labour members in the northeast would have been within their rights to vote in favour of Brexit. However, by trying to bind all Labour MPs to vote for the Brexit bill, Corbyn created another excuse for his internal opponents to destabilise his leadership.
Make no mistake: the Brexit debacle is the result of the Tories’ internal squabbling for a generation and their desire to appease the little Englanders in their base.
Scottish Labour made the wrong call on the Scottish referendum. British Labour has made the wrong call on the Brexit bill. It’s the Tories’ mess; leave them to sort it out.
Paul Pearce
Bronte, NSW, Australia
Let China have its way
I am continually surprised by the arrogance of activists who believe they have the right to subvert the authority of governments to further their own ideas. Peter Dahlin, in Lifting the lid on a Chinese “black prison” (20 January), is a case in point.
The Chinese run their country their way; we may not like it and we have every right to say so, but we do not have the right to break their laws. If we do so and get caught, we must expect the penalties that their regime imposes, not those that we might expect under our own laws.
His incarceration for three weeks without significant abuse was hardly the stuff of black prisons – if anything, this would rank as one of the least rigorous penalties imposed by a totalitarian regime for the type of breach for which he was arrested.
It is extremely naive to think that we can change such regimes by covert activities such as those conducted by Dahlin in China. Far better, if less dramatic, to continuously publicise better ways of conducting our affairs that can be applied by others as they see fit. But first we have to be able to demonstrate that our methods do indeed have better outcomes. We can hardly criticise another country’s failure to create a just society if our own includes serious disadvantages.
David Barker
Bunbury, Western Australia
Chickens can bring change
I took great interest in the article on chickens changing the world (27 January). Before retiring many years ago, I was the director of R&D for a major poultry incubation company. We set up a research project at the University of Guelph (Ontario) to see if we could improve hatchability in artificial incubation by utilising all of the vocalisations made between chicks still confined within their eggs, coupled with the vocalisations of the brooding mother hen.
We allowed the hen to sit on the eggs in isolation for the complete cycle. During the last three days we started to record all the sounds under the hen. We then played back the recording inside a hatcher containing about 10,000 eggs. To our great delight, we not only increased hatchability, but we also compressed the hatch into a shorter time frame.
A hen will lay eggs over many days before starting to sit on them, and yet they all hatch in a relatively short time. Hatching late may well mean that a chick will be abandoned as the others leave to forage. Now we can better understand how they can hatch together.
Matthew Foster
Cambridge, Ontario, Canada
Legislating public behaviour
I do sympathise with Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett (27 January, Watching porn in public is not OK). And yet, there’s something troubling in trying to regulate public behaviour.
I’ve always had a problem with laws that set a boundary that is then open to interpretation. “Outraging public decency”? Would kissing in public do that? Or two gay men holding hands? Wearing a burka? What about a child using a mobile phone to play a violent computer game involving gratuitous killing? I know which one offends my sense of decency most, but I accept that your sense might be different.
So the writer’s calling for a change in culture seems right on. I’d like to see people less accepting of porn and violence, but more accepting of nudity (for example).
Steve Cassidy
Tábua, Portugal
Briefly
• In trying to understand the problems we face – for example, climate change (27 January), loss of biodiversity, environmental destruction etc – is it too simplistic to consider that this state of affairs is the expected result of evolution? Through our intelligence, competitiveness and exploitation of the environment we have survived and reproduced more successfully than most other species. Without these attributes we would not have reached our present status and perhaps the world would not be in such dire straits.
Richard Pickering
Christchurch, New Zealand
• The article by Robin McKie (27 January) reports a study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluding that “… eating less meat could reduce global mortality by 6-10%”. Amazing. I would think that global mortality, for whatever species, has been and will be … 100%.
Paul Scotti
Auckland, New Zealand
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