Feedback | 28 May 2005

French lessons

Peter Oborne (Politics, 21 May) finds it curious that British and French opponents of the European constitution find precisely opposite faults in what it would impose upon their countries.

As he correctly observes, the French see it as the imposition of Thatcherism on France while the British see it as the imposition of bureaucratic corporatism on Britain. Clearly they cannot both be right, but that does not render their shared opposition to the constitution illogical, contrary or ill founded.

It is the imposition of decrees that they cannot challenge by a foreign government that they can neither elect, dismiss nor change to which British and most French opponents object.

French and British alike wish to govern their own countries and neither to govern nor be governed by each other or by unelected foreign masters in Belgium.
Lord Tebbit
London SW1

Peter Oborne’s account of French bolshiness about the Whit Monday holiday tells only part of the story. None of the pay for work done on that day was to go to the worker. All of it was to be snaffled for a fund in aid of the elderly. This admirable act of ‘social solidarity’, proposed to much acclaim after old people had fallen victim to the heatwave of 2003, would be unimaginable in Britain. It cannot fairly be described as a ‘feeble attempt to impose a tiny measure of control on Gallic working practices’.
Patrick Ussher
Dublin

Undemocratic reaction

If you really think that first-past-the-post is as brilliant as all that (Leading article, 21 May), please consider what happened in Northern Ireland in the Westminster election of February 1974. Fifty-one per cent of the Northern Irish electorate voted against power-sharing and 11 anti-power-sharing Unionist MPs were returned. Forty-nine per cent voted in favour of power-sharing, and one pro-power-sharing MP was elected: Gerry Fitt.