BNP is party of the Left
From Lord Tebbit
Sir: Oh dear! Oh dear! How can we expect the Guardian and the BBC to get it right when the Telegraph and even The Spectator (Leading article, 22 April) fall into the trap of calling the BNP an extreme right-wing party. In my book it is left-wing, not right-wing, to oppose both capitalism and free trade, and to promote a ‘significant direction of the commanding heights of the economy’ as well as workers’ co-operatives and programmes of nationalisation including, of all things, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, all of which are part of the BNP manifesto.
Of course the BBC/Guardian establishment regards anyone who advocates patriotism, escape from the European Union and control of immigration as ‘extreme right-wing’, but I find many of my left-wing friends are patriotic, anti-EU and in favour of tough immigration controls. Unfortunately the ruling clique of New Labour is not, but then perhaps someone would tell me if my party is.
Tebbit
London SW1
Credulous, moi?
From Peter Riddell
Sir: Peter Oborne has departed from his usual standards of balance and fairness. In his column (Politics, 22 April) he describes me as being among ‘the more credulous Blairite commentators’ in accepting that everything in the NHS is ‘fundamentally on course’ when I wrote in the Times that the Prime Minister is ‘correct that the overall deficit is small and there is no overall NHS “crisis”’. However, Oborne omits my next sentence: ‘But the severe problems in some hospitals are producing real pain for some patients as well as damaging headlines in the press.’ I am sure he will agree that this gives a very different impression and shows that I am far from credulous.
Peter Riddell
Chief political commentator, The Times
London E1
Parris is worth a Mass
From the Revd Thomas Crean OP
Sir: Matthew Parris’s claim that the Church has ignored or effectively repudiated the teachings of Jesus Christ (Another voice, 22 April) is not based on a careful study of those teachings. He affirms that Christ spoke little about heaven or hell; in fact he spoke about both of those awesome things much more than many of us preachers do today. The Sermon on the Mount is dominated by the dual destiny of man. The same is true of many of the parables, as for example the sheep and the goats.
Matthew Parris writes that Christ ‘plainly despised ritual’, instancing his entry into Jerusalem on a donkey. Yet this was itself a ritual act, an action not casual or spontaneous but deliberate and symbolic, and designed (like the Church’s liturgy) to manifest something imperceptible to the senses: in this case his status as the long-awaited Messiah whose kingdom would not be of this world. That Christ did not ‘preach Thatcherite entrepreneurialism or socialist materialism’ is true but irrelevant, since neither of these doctrines is part of historic Christianity. That Christ did not uphold the rule of law is untrue, as implied by the text ‘Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.’
Thomas Crean
St Bede’s Church, London SW12
From Helen Brady
Sir: I know of no other magazine that would print articles and letters about Jesus and his resurrection, which is one reason why I am a grateful subscriber. Matthew Parris’ thumbnail sketch of Jesus is excellent. The glaring disparity between scriptural truth and church teaching is what keeps many from attending church services.
Helen Brady
Halesowen
We can’t all B&Q it
From Don Manley
Sir: When I started reading Allister Heath’s article about pensioners starting work again (‘The future is grey’, 15 April) I wondered how long it would be before that old boy at B&Q would get wheeled out. Well, bully for 91-year-old Sydney Prior and the other over-60s at John Lewis and Sainsbury’s! Theirs is a happy story which I am glad to celebrate. However, the ‘retirement problem’ as a whole needs a much more serious analysis than Mr Heath has just offered us. It is a sad fact that many companies (evidently not B&Q) seem to want to get rid of their employees in their fifties, and some are compulsorily reducing the pension age to 60. Thus it is that many senior and by no means incompetent people in publishing (for example) finish on the scrap heap at about 55, quite possibly with an inadequate pension and little prospect of finding alternative suitable employment. All this, while the government wants folk to work beyond 65 — to 67, say. Thus we typically have something like a 12-year-gap problem. Now it simply won’t do to load this huge problem on to supermarkets and do-it-yourself stores. It may be the answer for some but surely not for everyone.
Don Manley
Oxford
Don’t Confucius
From David Tang
Sir: Even the intellectual Boris Johnson commits the howler of conflating being Chinese with being communist (‘They love capitalism, but not elections’, 22 April). The former has a history of nearly 2,500 years, entrenched by Confucius (so from 551 bc to 1905), while the latter has only 57 years (1949 to 2006) entrenched by Karl Marx.
David Tang
Hong Kong
From George Bathurst
Sir: Boris Johnson expresses his surprise at the Chinese practice of giving journalists bundles of notes just for turning up to a briefing. Is this really morally inferior to our practice of bribing sympathetic journalists with privileged information by the likes of Alastair Campbell?
George Bathurst
Windsor, Berkshire
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