Letters | 7 February 2019

Fawning over China

Sir: In reading your recent leading article on Huawei (‘Red-handed’, 2 February), I feel I should point out that it is not solely the British government who have been wrong-footed by the rise of China.

Here in Canada, Prime Minister Trudeau has long desired to open up Canadian markets to Chinese companies, going so far as to express admiration for the country’s ‘basic dictatorship’. The Chinese press even bequeathed him with
a charming nickname: the Little Potato.

Now, in the face of the Huawei charges, Mr Potato has been forced to change course and has fired his ambassador, John McCallum, after he defended Huawei’s Chinese executives rather than supporting Canadians who have recently been imprisoned in China. Someone apparently forgot to rewrite his script.
Malcolm Coady

St John’s, Canada

Troubles ahead?

Sir: Matthew Parris seems to display a disturbingly one-eyed view of Brexit (‘Those who warn of Brexit unrest invite it’, 2 February). He condemns as ‘desperate stuff’ the warnings of a few British politicians and pundits about potential voter disillusionment and civic instability if parliament fails to honour the result of the 2016 referendum. Yet he says nothing about the pernicious pronouncements of those trying to derail or dilute Brexit who have been invoking the sinister spectre of renewed Irish terrorism. Diehard Remainer MPs and pundits, Brussels and, worst of all, the Taoiseach himself have been piling in to talk up the risk of a return to the Troubles to try to frighten the UK into submitting to the fatuous proposed Irish border backstop mechanism. That is what I would call desperate stuff. As Lionel Shriver puts it in her own excellent piece on the subject, in the same issue, ‘when you use terrorists to advance your own purposes, are you not also a terrorist yourself?’
Nigel Henson

Farningham, Kent

The independent sector

Sir: Those who write about independent education rarely manage to stray beyond the 200-odd establishments they love to pillory as public schools, an antiquated term long since abandoned by all save their critics.