3 FEBRUARY 2001, Page 26

Ignoble phobias

From Mr John R. Gordon Sir: I do wish some of your correspondents would grow up. Mr Tom Burkard (Letters, 13 January) says that he is a despised minority because he 'suffers from mild homophobia' — by which I assume he means he has a mild, unreasonable (that is, phobic) dislike of homosexuals — which would seem to me to put him in the majority. I would say it is, of course, homosexuals who suffer from his prejudice — certainly he does not.

He also claims that 'CRE types are fanning the dying embers of racial strife in Britain for their own ignoble purposes'. Leaving aside the killers of Stephen Lawrence and the bombs planted by David Copeland in Brick Lane, Brixton and Soho, and ignoring the stabbing in the back of a black gay man last week (accompanied by racist and homophobic abuse) in Holland Park Walk by two white youths, has he not noticed the relentless whipping-up of antiimmigrant/anti-asylum-seeker sentiments by the popular right-wing press over the last couple of years? And yet it is the CRE that is 'ignoble'.

John Gordon

johngordon.voodoo@virgin.net