Healing Labour’s wounds
I agree with your editorial (Election to heal wounds, 16 September) that the Labour party must unite to move forward. You rightly say that it has always been a broad church and that the two wings of the party must respect each other.
However, I find baffling your conclusion that allowing the parliamentary Labour party (PLP) to elect the shadow cabinet would heal the wounds. Leader Jeremy Corbyn was elected by an overwhelming majority of members a year ago and the re-run of his election this year due to the undermining of that vote has caused ill-feeling among members towards the PLP.
Gerrymandering and a McCarthy-style purging of members by the National Executive Committee has made the feelings all the more bitter. So the question is: how do we re-unite ? There must be some form of negotiations. The new direction of the party is the wish of a majority of its more than half a million members and must be respected.
David Murray
Montbrun, Bocage, France
Rock, muskeg and welcome
Patrick Kingsley (Europe turns its back again, 9 September) writes that Canada “promised” to resettle 25,000 Syrians. This promise was kept over six months ago. More refugees will arrive next year. There has been little criticism of this policy, only of the lack of enough ready accommodation.
Essentially we live on a strip of land and water of varying width along the northern border of the United States, having over the years lost choice bits to the Americans, backed by Britain. If the warming world destroys the ice of the Arctic it will not expose fertile farmland but rock and muskeg. So Canada is not as big as it looks, yet is able to accept many thousands. We welcome those we can.
Elizabeth Quance
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
Shedding light on Nauru
It is a relief to see Australia feature on your World roundup (16 September). One small correction: the asylum seekers are not Nauru “detainees”, they are actually hostages.
I would like to add that Guardian Australia has been invaluable in raising the profile of their plight in this country by publishing the Nauru files.
Stephen Langford
Paddington, New South Wales, Australia
Britain’s latest nostalgia trip
Britain’s foible for nostalgia is dominant these days (Jonathan Freedland, 16 September). After Brexit catapulted Britain into a pre-1973 era, the new plans for the re-introduction of grammar schools go back even further to an era of pre-1965.
What’s next? The crowning of Elizabeth II? Independence talks with India? Or even the British Empire exhibition? Living in the past is not the most promising way to master the challenges of the future.
Klaus Schäfer
Cologne, Germany
Canonising Mother Teresa
I disagree with Paul Vallely (9 September) that canonising Mother Teresa in haste was a mistake. So many of those who were elevated to sainthood decades and often centuries after their deaths were written about by people who never knew them. They became one-dimensional and therefore not quite human like the rest of us. At least with Mother Teresa’s early canonisation there is now a contemporary record of what she was actually like.
Barbara Goodwin
Ensenada, Mexico
Nuclear bodybuilders
Ben Jennings’ editorial cartoon (16 September) was very clever. The image of Kim Jong-un looking through binoculars whose lenses showed mushroom clouds, and with his hair arranged to resemble a bodybuilder flexing his muscles, captured North Korea’s approach to nuclear weapons very well.
I trust this is the first in a series about nuclear weapons, and that the cartoonist will find a way to include the muscle-flaunting theme when it’s the turn of Mrs May, Mr Obama, Mr Hollande, and Mr Xi. (You can skip Mr Putin, as he provides his own bodybuilder photographs.)
Those supporting renewal of Britain’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet appeared to me to rely heavily on the argument that such muscle flexing for its own sake is in the national interest. I have no time for Mr Kim, and he deserves condemnation for many of his policies and actions. But when it comes to nuclear weapons, those of us in countries such as Canada, the UK and some of our closest friends need to be cautious about criticising and mocking him when he’s only imitating our own earlier actions.
Bill Singleton
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Technology and the truth
I share Katharine Viner’s dismay at the quality of “information” being propagated nowadays (Technology’s disruption of the truth, 22 July). I take on trust her judgement of social media; my dismay relates equally to the print and broadcast media, almost all of which display obvious bias according to the agenda of the producer/editor/proprietor.
However, Viner is wrong to blame the technology for the misrepresentations of Facebook et al; technology is merely the battery of tools used by practitioners to manipulate the truth for their own ends and it is these ends that are the cause of the problem. The information industry has made a rod for its own back by over-valuing influence, ratings and revenue at the expense of quality (including reliability) of content.
What we are witnessing is a clear case of market failure. Market forces alone do not deliver reliable information any more than they would a reliable judiciary, universal healthcare or education. Some things in democratic society are too important to be left to profit-seekers, and information is one of them. If we cannot devise an information system that delivers truth, our performance at the ballot box and in daily life will be equally, and possibly fatally, flawed.
David Barker
Bunbury, Western Australia
Staying on the ball
Bryan Kay’s Base ball gives us a look at game’s origins (On history, 23 September) describes modern players of the vintage game as “Playing like they did in 1864. The very roots.”
Well, actually, not quite the very roots. Jane Austen, in the first chapter of her novel Northanger Abbey of 1818, tells of her heroine in her youth, that “it was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had by nature nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books ...”
Neville Holmes
Creswick, Victoria, Australia
Briefly
• I read with interest Peter Conrad’s piece about Air Force One (9 September) but was jarred by the statement that the US’s president’s twin aircraft are “as tall as a six-storey building and as long as a football field.” I have little trouble with a six-storey building. I am, however, stymied by the football field. As a boy, I kicked balls around spaces that ranged from 10 metres to about 100 metres. Into which does the president’s flying fortress fit?
Philip Hiscock
St John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
• Hadley Freeman’s article on the death of Gene Wilder (9 September) celebrated his comic gifts. But please correct the error concerning his wife Gilda Radner, whom he married in 1984. She did not die “two years ago” but in May 1989.
Anne Blott
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
• Brigid Delaney got it right in her article on the “conquest” of the natural world (The days of the early explorers are over, 9 September). It is a delusion that humans conquer anything in nature. If there was ever a symptom of hubris, it is our failure to conquer our egos and our failure to live in a balanced relationship with the natural systems that allow us life.
Denys Trussell
Auckland, New Zealand
• I was dismayed to read, in the article about wingsuiting in the Sport section (9 September), the subheading, “Rising death toll begs new questions of world’s most dangerous pastime”. “Begs questions” is quite wrong in this context and “raises/prompts questions” would have been a better choice.
Neil Gwillim
Dreux, France
• Wow. Good news on the front page of the Guardian Weekly (Beginning of an end for malaria,16 September). Keep it up, please!
Edward Black
Church Point, NSW, Australia
• With regard to your 19 August article (Peta: change name of Eggs and Bacon Bay) I am hopefully reminded of Gandhi’s saying: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.”
It is not just that the name encourages poor dietary choices; it encourages a callousness toward the suffering of “food” animals and a disregard for the environment that we cannot afford.
Layne Powell
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Email letters for publication to weekly.letters@theguardian.com
