Brexit and its aftermath
Like many other Brits abroad, I was shocked – even appalled – by the Brexit referendum (1 July). The result was completely inconsistent with what my pre-referendum Facebook feed would have led me to believe. All of my friends back in Blighty who were on Facebook seemed to be posting remain sentiments. Even to this day, I don’t know any friends on Facebook that may have wanted to leave.
I wonder how many young pro-European Brits simply decided not to vote because, like me, everyone on their Facebook feed was pro-remain and Brexit seemed so improbable. If young voters were apathetic in the first place, a constant stream of opinions that endorsed their own views may have unwittingly reassured them that the referendum result was safe and their vote was unnecessary.
More than ever before, Facebook and Twitter make it easier to connect with people who share common ground. In the internet age, I am surrounded by like-minded people. We tweet into echo-chambers, we take selfies to “get likes” or we delete the posts if we don’t.
As I adjust to the Brexit shock, I think there are profound lessons for how political discourse is done in the era of online echo-chambers. There has to be a better way of debating populist ideas than silencing conversation. Lack of ideological diversity may engender voter apathy, but it has the potential to sow deep social discord.
Mike Reid
San Francisco, California, US
• Regarding your article The age of disintegration: one lesson the British people may take from the role of David Cameron and Boris Johnson in the Brexit fiasco is that education at the country’s most prestigious school is no guarantee of wisdom, honesty or vision. It may, however, be responsible for an unrealistic view of the United Kingdom’s importance in the world and a quite extraordinary failure to understand the mood of normal people.
Robert Horn
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Jonathan Freedland says “hold on to our fury”, even as “we grow calmer” over the Brexit debacle (8 July). As an Englishman in the US with no chance to vote in Britain, I will try to do both.
But I’d pull one “calmer” moment from the ensuing furore: though David Cameron was unbelievably stupid to institute the referendum, when he quickly ducked out of having anything to do with Britain’s departure, it was perhaps a brilliant move: with one stroke he dislodged Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage and exposed their fraudulent claims more quickly than some endless debate could have done.
John Dixon Hunt
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US
• Them that can’t connexit, Brexit. The English have a genius for partitioning, with resultant turmoil: the Middle East after 1918, Ireland 1922, India 1947.
So what’s nexit for the UK? Probably Scexit, and perhaps the Annexit of Northern Ireland by the Republic. And because Wales is only a principality, the resulting rump can’t even be called the Untied Kingdom. That wrexit.
Douglas Porteous
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
• Congratulations to Geoffrey Wheatcroft for his piece on the Somme (8 July). I am Irish, and have been boring my friends in pubs and clubs for 15 years trying to get Wheatcroft’s message across: the inspiration of the EU in crafting a system that has avoided wars between states – something that was rampant for 800 years before.
Tony Murray
Letterkenny, Ireland
• I am grateful to Anne Wheldon’s apology offer to us mainland Europeans (Reply, 8 July). This was not necessary, for there is nothing to apologise for. With the Greek banks collapsing merrily, now the Italians ones following suit (and who’s next and what’s next?) and the euro calamity, the EU needed a shock. I wish I’d had the chance of a vote in a referendum.
Derek Murphy
Bad Pyrmont, Germany
Chilcot’s damning judgment
At the end of her monumental book The War that Ended Peace, on the factors that led to the first world war, Margaret MacMillan writes that “we can accuse those who led us into war of two things. First, a failure of imagination in not seeing how destructive such a conflict would be and second, their lack of courage to stand up to those who said there was no choice left but to go to war. There are always choices.”
Her conclusion resonates with that of the Chilcot inquiry (15 July). I suggest that a lack of imagination and courage lie behind most wars.
Geoff Harris
Durban, South Africa
• When I read “They did it with lies; they did it with no plan; they did it with no care for the chaos they were about to unleash” (8 July), I didn’t know whether I was reading about Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s antics with Brexit (which I was), or George Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard’s disastrous Iraqi adventure. Plus ça change.
Dave Robinson
Newstead, Tasmania, Australia
Corbyn deserves support
Shame on Will Hutton for his deeply flawed and prejudiced article Why we need a new Labour (8 July). Britain has already had New Labour under Tony Blair, the prime minister who took us into an illegal war with Iraq on a lie. Hundreds of thousands of deaths and chaos in the Middle East are largely down to that war.
Jeremy Corbyn is a man of deep socialist conviction and integrity. He voted against the Iraq war in 2003 and in favour of remaining in the European Union.
Just as MPs voted for a war that has had catastrophic consequences based on a lie, now the population have voted to leave the EU because they were given false information and that too could be catastrophic for peace and stability.
It is those MPs who have chosen this moment of political chaos to stage a coup against Corbyn who threaten the future of the Labour party. With unity right now, they could achieve much, and Corbyn has asked them to stand with him to help ensure a better standard of living for the most disadvantaged.
Hutton is right when he says: “Such a party would be a real threat to Brexit Tories”, but so very wrong to suggest that their democratically elected leader should stand down.
Angela Smith
Norwich, UK
Selling human organs
I was chilled by your article about buying human organs (8 July) and the assumption that the rich consumers of the west are more entitled, by way of affordability, to a kidney transplant than poor people in developing countries.
The question that comes to me is: why is there such an intensive industry to keeping western people alive at all costs, while another just as intensive industry manufactures the means to slaughter people, usually in developing countries?
Still others argue for euthanasia, abortion, IVF, life support for humans barely alive, etc.
It seems to be that we need some perspective. If human life is deemed valuable, then let’s value it, wherever and whoever it is; allow everyone their three score and 10 if that is their lot, and stop interfering from either end of the spectrum.
Gaynor McGrath
Armidale, NSW, Australia
Briefly
• Apart from a couple of passing references in his entertaining and illuminating article on zombie ideas (8 July), Stephen Poole manages to avoid mentioning the R word – the biggest and most enduring conspiracy theory of all: religion. Whatever damage has been done by whacky quasi-scientific theories pales into insignificance compared with the catalogue of destruction driven by religious intolerance.
Tragically, that seems ever more immune to scientific and logical analysis and its influence grows exponentially.
Neil Blackshaw
Barbizon, France
• The draconian president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, seems to have taken more than a page from cliched spaghetti-westerns: his programme for cleaning up Dodge entails bounty hunters, vigilante justice, hangin’ judges, pinewood boxes and boothills (8 July). Such extra-judicial killing has long-term consequences: multi-generational vendettas. And this is how fascism begins; soon ever greater force will become requisite.
R M Fransson
Wheat Ridge, Colorado, US
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