Class war
Sir: Your leading article, ‘More in common’ (24 January), laments the ‘civil war’ between Reform and the Conservatives. But this division goes much deeper. Reform’s core support is the patriotic white working class in the so-called Red Wall seats – the people (often male) who supported Brexit and flocked to Boris Johnson in 2019 when he promised to get Brexit done. They are cultural conservatives but economic statists. That’s why (against his better instincts) Nigel Farage backs steel and water nationalisation and is soft on welfare and pensions. Reform’s natural political bedfellows are not the Tories, but the SDP (left economically, right culturally). This leaves the Conservatives, potentially, as the only pro-capitalist, free-market, low-tax, small-state party. Their problem is this Thatcherite agenda never did appeal to more than a third of voters. That’s why Kemi Badenoch has to cosy up to the ‘one-nation’ Cameroons, whose support is rooted in the respectable middle class (often female) in the suburbs and the south.
Your leading article dreams of uniting these two parties behind a ‘coherent right-wing agenda’, but many Reform voters hated Margaret Thatcher and many suburban Tories can’t stand Farage. Like so much else in Britain, this ‘civil war’ is rooted in the class system.
Peter Saunders
Hastings, East Sussex
Peer groups
Sir: Madeline Grant (‘The Valkyries of the House of Lords’, 24 January) could not be more wrong when she argues that because three of the leading advocates of the assisted dying bill – Baronesses Jay, Hayter and Blackstone – come from London and have similar political views, they are less representative of British public opinion than three of the leading opponents of the bill, namely Baronesses Finlay, O’Loan and Grey-Thompson, who come from Wales, Ulster and Stockton-on-Tees respectively. In fact, it is the last three peeresses who are unrepresentative, because the bill is supported by 63 per cent of people in Wales, 67 per cent in Ulster and 66 per cent in England. Only 13 to 15 per cent of Britons overall are opposed to changing the law.
Lord Roberts of Belgravia
London SW1
The last straw
Sir: The many thousands of European farmers protesting in their traditional way – riots and roadblocks – in response to recent EU policies (‘Serious beef’, 24 January) have led to total silence from the once vocal and deeply patronising Remainer farming lobby. We Brexiteer farmers have put up with tractor-bucket loads of abuse for voting Leave, especially those of us who argued our case publicly and in print. My thanks for travelling to north Norfolk a couple of years ago to speak at a farmers’ dinner was a furious rant, full of personal abuse, from the senior National Farmers’ Union man.
I’m enjoying this mute period from the farming establishment. Yes, Britain’s farm policies are as imbecilic and sinister as the EU’s, but at least we can vote against the policymakers in a few years – an option not available to our EU farmer cousins.
Charlie Flindt
Hinton Ampner, Hampshire
Locked out
Sir: Regarding Michael Simmons’s piece on Britain’s unsustainable state pension scheme (‘The long goodbye’, 24 January), it’s worth remembering that when Bismarck introduced the world’s first old-age pension in 1889, the qualifying age was 70 and German life expectancy was 41. Fewer than one in five Germans lived long enough to claim the benefit. In that context, Britain’s triple lock is symbolic of the control that my fortunate generation has on choice property, on comfortable idleness and (ironically, since we won’t be around to witness it) on the nation’s economic future.
Unfashionable though it is to say, work is underrated in this era of generous benefits and abundant excuses, but it is the only way we can afford the longer lives we now enjoy.
J. John Dyer
Poole, Dorset
Familiar cycle
Sir: Max Jeffery’s article about Oldham’s toxic politics certainly makes for a depressing read (‘Mob rule’, 17 January). My grandfather was born in 1896 in the Werneth area of Oldham. The town was then the cotton-spinning capital of the world, at the height of its global power and responsible for 12 per cent of the world’s cotton-spinning capacity.
By the 1960s, the years of ‘King Cotton’ were over and many mills were closing. To try to keep competitive, the remaining mills introduced night shifts. The unions objected to this 24-hour work pattern, so workers were recruited from the Indian subcontinent. By the time these migrants’ children grew up, they were often unemployed because of more mill closures. Instead of training the inactive with new skills, England’s answer was to abandon them and bring in yet more workers from overseas, creating the cycle we are all too familiar with.
Keith McLardy
Bristol
Guest work
Sir: Dear Mary (24 January) advises an overworked dinner hostess to get the washing up done by her guests before pudding is served. But this would interrupt lively conversation and quite possibly result in everything being put away in the wrong place. The idea of my guests invading my kitchen fills me with horror. One of the worst dinner parties I ever went to involved not only washing up but also polishing the dining table, before a compulsory game of croquet. If I had ever thought of getting my guests to help, I was put off the idea for ever.
Marian Waters
Pebworth, Worcestershire
Sweet deal
Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s item about soaring silver prices (Any other business, 24 January) brought to mind a friend who took various silver items to a dealer for sale, including a large sugar caster. The dealers showed no interest in the items per se, but merely weighed them. The resultant price paid was much increased by the fact that the caster was full of crystallised sugar.
Peter Fineman
Mere, Wiltshire
Time in exile
Sir: In Tim Shipman and James Heale’s interview (‘“It takes a sort of balls to defect”’, 24 January), Robert Jenrick compares Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet to ‘Charles II’s court sitting in lodgings in Paris or the Hague, arguing over who is in charge’. His analogy is misleading. In the years before the Restoration, Charles lodged in the Hotel Casselbergh in Bruges in preparation for his return. In 1656, he raised the Grenadier Guards and in 1658 the Lifeguards. Indeed, a plaque explaining that Casselbergh was the Royal Palace of England, Scotland and Ireland was placed there in 2016. (I was present as a member of the Company of Pikemen and Musketeers of the Honourable Artillery Company.)
That time in exile was not a backward glance at the past. It was to get ready for coming back to England as monarch, which he did very successfully in 1660. More of a Farage than a Badenoch, surely?
Christopher Chanter
Taunton, Somerset
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