Danger of drawing borders
We Anglophile Europeans have difficulties persuading our compatriots that British people are not as insular as often depicted, but the Scottish referendum and your seven pages of coverage on it undermine our efforts with the glaring absence of a European perspective (26 September). I’m not referring to the compatibility of British arrangements with EU laws or an independent Scotland in the EU. The problem is much deeper: Europeans have been killing each other for generations on the question of borders, on the alleged right of “cultural nations” to have an independent state. After the second world war, things were sorted out in western Europe but not in the eastern bloc, where we have recently seen the results in ethnic cleansing and mass graves. By all means Britain must solve constitutional problems, but it mustn’t awaken the spectre of ethnic rearrangement.
The contention that democratic voting is always good is a naive bromide: in my Basque country the very suggestion of such a vote a few years back created social divisions whose scars are still being nursed. Basque nationalists have been drooling with envy for the Scottish referendum and though disappointed with the result still consider it a milestone on the route to secession.
There is such a thing as a European project, even if Britons cannot decide whether to join it, and drawing new frontier lines on the map certainly goes against it. European leaders ought to stop pretending these are internal matters: they engage the heart of Europe. After the lessons we thought we had learned from history, the sight of David Cameron, a western European leader, giving a veneer of respectability to tribalism, is appalling.
Anton Digon
Vitoria, Spain
• Alexandra Jones of research unit Centre for Cities argues that further devolution is “all about galvanising urban hubs” like those in Lancashire and Yorkshire (26 September). But what about the rural sector? On a visit to my ancestral homeland I was disconcerted to hear a Cornishman say he had just “taken a break in England”, which for him is a foreign land across the river Tamar.
Under English rule Cornwall has become one of the most deprived regions. Further devolution might be similarly attractive in parts of Wales, whose union goes right back to Edward I and a later Act of Union in 1535; and we have long known that in Ulster a significant minority wants out of the UK. The Scots may be leading all the Celts to recover their identities and autonomy in Timothy Garton Ash’s “federal kingdom of Britain” (26 September).
Ren Kempthorne
Nelson, New Zealand
• You noted the challenges of asymmetrical federalism (26 September). Canada has had just such a situation for years. Quebec, which has a relatively small share of the overall population, has control of their pension plan, their healthcare and their immigration strategy. It seems to work. Support for independence is the lowest it has been in years.
Jane McCall
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
• How do you describe a vote of 55% to 45%, with a percentage margin of 10 points? According to Irvine Welsh, the “yes” side came “within a whisker of victory”. But Alberto Nardelli writes that “Scotland’s answer was a resounding no … a decisive result … and in reality nearer to a landslide”. So who is right?
Stuart McKelvie
Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada
We need Human Rights Act
I am appalled and horrified by the Conservative plans for the European Convention on Human Rights (3 October). Their proposals are tantamount to saying that we will agree with the court’s judgment if we like it, if not, we will ignore it. That is no justice at all. I am equally appalled that the supposed justification is the decision to allow prisoners the right to vote. Even if you disagree with that specific ruling, the fact that a minority of our population, only 85,000, has caused the loss of fundamental rights for over 64 million people is fundamentally wrong.
These are rights which were drafted by British lawyers after the second world war, a time when it could not have been clearer that a continent wide agreement was necessary. The ECHR codified our human rights and fundamental freedoms to protect us all from the horrors that were perpetrated. Our soldiers fought and died to protect future generations from those appalling acts.
We would be complacent in the extreme if we did not think that such atrocities are behind us. Around the world in countries without such a convention, torture, police brutality, no right to a free and fair vote, education for boys and not girls, are commonplace. The Conservatives should not play politic with rights that were hard fought for us all. We should stand up now, as others did before us, to protect them.
Grace Cullen
London, UK
In a better world
Priyamvada Gopal’s piece on India’s Mars mission (3 October) notes that not only “in a better world the search for knowledge and the quest for social justice would be necessarily intertwined” but all nations would work together to achieve both goals, universally and collaboratively.
It is essential that we curb the ever more pervasive worship of privatisation, profit, competition, individualism and nationalism. All of these are solidly rooted in a culture of permanent war.
We urgently need to acknowledge that only by working together do we stand a chance to save our civilisation and maybe start to improve it.
In fact, if we do not resurrect community spirit, our dominion on earth will destroy all of us, and Margaret Thatcher’s quip that “there is no such a thing as society” will become a reality to the point that there will not be humanity.
Bruna Nota
Toronto, Canada
We are able to adapt
What a dreadful picture Paul Verhaeghe (3 October) paints of our put-upon, post-industrial selves, the hapless victims of a “meritocratic neoliberalism [which] favours certain personality traits and penalises others”, such as “emotional commitment” or “thinking independently”. In short, he says that our fiercely competitive economy is “bringing out the worst in us”.
Not only have the nice guys finished last, but the bad guys are certifiable psychopaths. What Verhaeghe does not seem to take into account, however, in his sweeping condemnation of the sheep we have all become, is that some of us are trying to adapt, using whatever emotional intelligence we have left. As one wise man once said, “Life is 10% what happens to us, and 90% how we react to it.”
Now that is independent thinking, an option that Verhaeghe implies we no longer possess.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
Celebrating Ursula K Le Guin
Hallelujah to Alison Flood’s celebration of Ursula K Le Guin (Elegant, popular and enduring, 26 September). I’ve been reading and rereading this remarkable woman with untrammelled delight for 40 years. There are so many gifts in her work: perfect pitch for language; endless curiosity and concomitant willingness to be wrong; humour; fine-honed, stellar imagination; the ecology – boundless, intricate, evolving – of her mythic universes, Earthsea and Hain; passion and compassion; a fierce commitment to justice and truth; and a grappling with fundamentalism, particularly patriarchy and war, in all its odium.
And like fireflies all through her work are the aphorisms: “When the word becomes not sword but shuttle” (Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences); “If power were trust …” (Tehanu); “They didn’t rule, they only blighted” (City of Illusions); “Belief is the wound that knowledge heals” (The Telling); “…because he didn’t seek for dominance, he was indomitable” (The Dispossessed); “the verb ‘to be rich’ is the same as the verb ‘to give’” (Always Coming Home).
It’s an honour to share a galaxy with her.
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia
New Zealand lurches to right
Bronwyn Sherman repeats the kind of tired political frame that actively helped John Key to keep power in last month’s New Zealand election (Reply, 3 October). The government’s apologists consistently miscast the message of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. These disturbingly well-informed specialists warned eloquently of the dangers of current massive government electronic snooping on New Zealand’s citizens.
So in a mixture of rightwing recasting of critical commentary and consciously ignoring major issues, they created a mood that carefully supports the rightward lurch of New Zealand politics over the last decade. The fact that it was foreigners bringing the bad news fed cheerfully into New Zealanders’ defensive rejection of outsiders, when we don’t want to hear the message.
David Cooke
Auckland, New Zealand
Briefly
• You quote a Rome-based professor of theology: “the Catholic church doesn’t recognise divorce, so those individuals are still married ... in the eyes of Christ” (3 October). True, if Christ were guided by the Catholic church rather than, as others might hope, the other way round.
Adrian Betham
London, UK
• Come back, Saddam: all is forgiven (Iraq air strikes, 3 October).
David Coy
Hamilton, New Zealand
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