Letters

7 March 2009

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Sack the Scots

Sir: If anyone has written a better rant than Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life column (21 February) please show me. Having read Clarke’s masterpiece, I felt calmer, knowing that there is at least one other person in the country who feels similarly depressed about the outcome of the last 11 years. In 410 ad, the Barbarians successfully sacked Rome. Is it too much of an exaggeration to say that 1,600 years later, the Scottish-dominated Labour party have embarked on a similar mission — to destroy the British way of life? Happily, the outcome will be different; the Scots will be repelled — and it cannot come soon enough — at the next general election.

Andrew Hamilton
East Lothian, Scotland

From extreme to extreme

Sir: Tim Shipman writes that ‘The US believes that if there is to be a repeat of 9/11, it is most likely to be carried out by British Muslim terrorists’ (‘The CIA now has to spy on Britain’, 28 February). There is an historic precedent for the current British free rein to extremism, as well as a precedent for the British suddenly and dramatically waking up and then going, if anything, too far in the correct direction.

The precedent is provided by the end of appeasement of the Nazis. This came about with Churchill’s order to ‘Collar the lot’ — ‘the lot’ meaning everyone who had come from Germany, including Jewish refugees. So Jews who had managed to flee from Germany to Britain to save their lives suddenly found themselves interned as enemy aliens — and their right to remain in Britain at all, let alone to consider themselves Britons, hung in the balance for quite a time.

Shipman reports that ‘the CIA is now running its own agent networks on an unprecedented scale in the British Pakistani community’. That community should take note of the appeasement precedent. After all, the British authorities of the time treated the innocent majority roughly because they had finally realised that they had treated the guilty minority far too leniently for far too long.

Osman Streater
London NW3