Letters | 12 January 2017

Freudian slap

Sir: In his Notes (7 January), Charles Moore explores the uncharacteristic reaction of Matthew Parris to the referendum result. What is most puzzling about Parris and so many others like him is that their present outrage has so little in common with their rather tepid support for the EU in the run-up to the vote. Such a mismatch of cause and effect suggests a Freudian explanation may be appropriate. When an impulse is felt to be so dire that it cannot be expressed, a new object is substituted and the feelings are thus ventilated. Yet what original threat could be so catastrophic as to provoke such end-of-our-world hysteria in the first place?
Ian Harrow
York

Rotten borough

Sir: I share Rod Liddle’s admiration for Ms Anne Maple, who is being persecuted by Lewisham Council officials for daring to put up posters in support of her beliefs (‘My poster girl for free speech’, 7 January). With only a single non-Labour councillor, Lewisham Council is typical of Labour’s rotten boroughs in which dogmatic political correctness is normal, routine incompetence goes unnoticed and questions about dubious business deals are shrugged off. They get away with it because there’s no effective opposition to their rule. As John Maples (no relation), Conservative MP in the west of the borough during the 1980s, said, ‘Lewisham is three square miles of concrete with no identity, where many constituents don’t even know which borough they live in.’ There are now, at least, signs of a grass-roots fightback, and the council’s plans to compulsorily purchase land around Millwall Football Club are not going through as quietly as they hoped.
Tony Heal
London SE2