Matthew parris

Matthew Parris feels that he has become a genuine Remainiac, and kindly readers, fearing for his mental health, have been springing to his aid. The Roman elite, who felt the same sense of disempowerment after the republic collapsed and Augustus became the first Roman emperor in 27bc, might have a solution. The point about Augustus was that he did not call himself ‘emperor’ but princeps (‘first citizen’) or Caesar (as the later emperors did); and he maintained the trappings of the republican system (senators, consuls, etc). But he was now the final source of all authority. Any popular control over laws and appointment of officials was gone. So Romans began

The education gap Sir: It is disappointing that Toby Young (‘Parents, not schools, are key to the knowledge gap’, 5 August) conforms to the ‘Close the gap’ mentality that obsesses Ofsted and leftish thinking in state schools. Young deplores ‘the attainment gap between disadvantaged and non-disadvantaged 16-year-olds in England’. I prefer to get away from the tendentious terms ‘disadvantaged’ and ‘non-disadvantaged’ pupils and stick to the idea of high- and low-attaining pupils. Left-inclined schools have various ways of closing this gap in attainment. One is to impose limits on how abler pupils can be challenged. Some secondary schools have gone soft on homework, even banning it altogether except for ‘optional’

Libyan solution Sir: Boris Johnson correctly reports glimmers of hope in Libya, but to say its problems can be solved by political will risks falling into the same trap of wishful thinking that has hobbled the international community’s intervention there (‘Libya’s best hope’, 13 May). To fix Libya, its political process must be restructured to incentivise cooperation between its various factions. One thing nearly all Libyans can agree on is that the country’s oil should flow freely, since oil revenues pay for everybody’s fuel, medicine and salaries. In recent years, oil production has been repeatedly blockaded by criminal militias and politicians alike; sometimes by the same people engaged in people-trafficking.

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

Golden age problems Sir: Johan Norberg’s ‘Our golden age’ (20 August) is absolutely right — we do live in a golden age; antibiotics still work, we have less starvation, the world is open for trade, with all its benefits. But there is a fly in the ointment: human overpopulation. Global warming (if you believe in it), degradation of the environment, extinction of species, all are consequences of it. It is a result, in fact, of our success. The only country to have grasped the nettle — China — is now having second thoughts. Perhaps wind and solar power can provide for our needs when we are 70 million in these islands; but what when

The hate is real Sir: It is clearly an exaggeration to call Britain a bigoted country (‘We are not a hateful nation’, 6 August), but downplaying the recent wave of xenophobic and racist incidents across the UK as ‘somebody shouting something nasty on a bus’ is equally wrong. Verbal abuse in itself is worthy of condemnation, yet the character of recorded harassment is actually much more serious. In the past few weeks, Poles in this country were shocked by vulgar graffiti (West London; Hertfordshire; Portsmouth) and hurtful leaflets (Cambridgeshire) urging them to ‘go home’ in most offensive ways possible, while a family in Plymouth fell victim to an arson attack.

Lurid about Leavers Sir: Matthew Parris has spent much of the past few months denigrating those of us who want to leave the EU, but his latest article (‘For the first time, I feel ashamed to be British’, 9 July) really does go too far. It is simply untrue to claim that the leaders of the Leave campaign relied on hatred of immigration, and that this won it for Leave. As Brendan O’Neill pointed out (‘Not thick or racist: just poor’, 2 July), a majority of Leave voters (including me, for what it is worth) rejected the EU primarily for sovereignty reasons. But whatever Mr Parris may feel, there is nothing immoral