Strange kind of love
Sir: Liam Byrne’s breathless panegyric (‘Rise up, Englishmen’, 28 April) on the glories of being British must have left some of us pretty punch drunk.
This is a man who eagerly serves a government that has spent a decade transferring the rights of the British to govern themselves out of Britain and assigning them to an EU government in which his own country has 8 per cent voting stock. Most of this has been done covertly, out of sight of a sycophantic House of Commons and without a referendum.
This is a man who has been happily destroying what was once Europe’s finest constitution and calling it reform. This is a man who reveres an outgoing mountebank who hopes, as his last act, to railroad into law the Merkel EU constitution, a major step towards the superstate and its commensurate end to the nation-state. And once again, without asking the people by referendum despite an earlier binding pledge.
If Mr Byrne loves his country, he has a damnably weird way of proving it. But he does at least demonstrate why so many British today regard politicians of all stripes with utter disdain.
Frederick Forsyth Hertfordshire Sir: Liam Byrne’s call for Englishmen to rise up and defend the United Kingdom is pretty rich coming from a Labour politician. It is only recently that Jack Straw was talking about the English with their propensity to violence subjecting the small nations of this island to the cosh.
One thing that has distinguished British socialists over the last century is their visceral loathing of anything British in general and English in particular.
To set the wheels in motion for the break-up of the UK and then shout warnings when it begins to happen is like setting someone’s house on fire and claiming the credit for calling the fire brigade.
John Fannon Weymouth, Dorset
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