Letters to the Editor

Not going the extra miles
While I prefer to buy free range or organic meat and chickens from my local butcher, the reason is not just my concern about animal welfare. I know that what I buy has travelled very few miles to my basket. With all the talk regarding trade deals with the rest of the world post-Brexit, we must consider the food miles involved. Fare that cannot be produced locally is better sourced from our nearest neighbour, namely the EU.
Val Withstandley, Taunton

Beef with Botham
Sir Ian Botham plans to donate 10,000 pheasants shot on his estates to food banks (“Let them eat pheasant, says Beefy Botham”, News, last week). He states: “I fail to understand how there is an argument against it.” If these were wild-born free birds, he could have a point.

The truth is many estates buy the pheasants as day-old chicks, rear them in captivity, then later they are driven by beaters towards guns and shot for so-called “sport”. Barbarity is the argument against Botham’s scheme, to which cruelty and ignorance could be added.
Philip Sullivan, Lutterworth, Leicestershire

Production error
Factory farms dominate pig and poultry production in the UK, and Bryan Appleyard lets them off lightly (“Holy cow, is this really the end of meat?”, News Review, last week). Time after time, undercover investigators at such places have found squalor, pigs or poultry dying, corpses among the living, injuries, deformities and mutilations.

The victims of this outrage need, and get, cocktails of drugs — nearly half the nation’s use of antibiotics — to keep them alive till slaughter.
Mike Maas, Sheffield

Veganism’s heavy price
The current fashion for becoming vegan takes no account of the cost of the protein alternatives: mile after mile of monoculture almond orchards in California, for example, or the clearance of rainforest to produce soya. Become a vegan and kill a jaguar? Or an orangutan?
Gillian Herbert, Hareley Farm, Linley Green, Herefordshire

Creature discomfort
Is our treatment of animals an issue that we as a species have to put right? For our own moral wellbeing we need to move away from the cruelty we perpetuate on them.
Nitin Mehta, London

EDITORIAL FAILURE ON ANTI-SEMITISM
Kevin Myers’s column “Sorry ladies — equal pay has to be earned” in the Irish edition last week has caused great offence among advocates for fairness in the workplace, and especially among the Jewish community.

Myers has said he thought that he was paying Jews a compliment when he claimed we are good at negotiating higher pay than non-Jews, but the stereotypical linking of Jews with money is bigoted, not benign. Myers is not the first to tell Jews that we should be pleased to be considered so canny, perhaps without stopping to consider the centuries of persecution that have led society to adopt that stereotype.

Ever since Jews were blamed for accepting a bribe to betray Jesus (another Jew) and his loyal disciples (also Jews), the pernicious caricature of the grasping, greedy Jew has been imbibed by European society to the extent that even those with no animus against Jews sometimes repeat it.

The true scandal is that the editors and sub-editors whose task it is to keep such prejudiced nonsense out of the newspaper failed to do so. We welcome the fact that Sunday Times editor Martin Ivens and Irish editor Frank Fitzgibbon have removed Myers and apologised immediately, online and in print, but we are left asking how it happened.

The Sunday Times must review not only how its editorial process failed completely but also how a columnist whose previous work has treated serious topics such as Holocaust denial and the Aids epidemic in the most brash and offensive of manners came to be writing for the newspaper in the first place.
Gideon Falter, chairman, Campaign Against Antisemitism

UK ARMS WORSEN CRISIS IN YEMEN
I salute Orla Guerin, a reporter with her finger on the pulse (“Cholera kills one Yemeni every hour in a war the world ignores”, World News, last week). The situation in Yemen beggars belief; this is a man-made disaster caused by feuding factions and as usual its poor beleaguered people are the tragic collateral damage.

Irrespective of the High Court ruling that UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia were lawful, there is a moral deficit in our government for helping to facilitate this conflict by dealing arms to the Saudis that they are using in Yemen.

I have every sympathy with the comments of the Yemeni journalist Shaima Basayed who questions our complicity in this heinous situation. When we witness the pictures of this vast humanitarian crisis and the impact it is having on people, we are naturally horrified.

We will reap what we sow when Britain’s less enlightened stance about world affairs garners nothing but criticism and outrage from commentators and historians in the future.
Judith Daniels, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

VOICE OF REASON IN CHARLIE GARD CASE
Melanie Phillips’s article on the Charlie Gard case showed there are still people capable of reason over hysteria (“Cruel, ignorant and utterly misguided”, News Review, last week). I feel sorry for the expert staff at Great Ormond Street Hospital and all those other parents and children going through similar ordeals out of the glare of the media.

Our wonderful NHS staff, whose numbers include arguably the greatest authorities on infant care in the world, deserve our respect and trust. When we choose to defy those best placed to advise us, we seriously undermine our entire medical system.
Dr JE Cullen, by email

The big picture
While nobody can ever understand or take away the pain suffered by the parents of Charlie Gard, one should not doubt the care and compassion with which the doctors and nurses at the hospital tried all possible medical means to get him well. Phillips’s excellent dissection of the tragic case tells a moving story of the challenges that faced the team at Great Ormond Street under a barrage of ugly, ill-informed and unjustified protests.

With hindsight, however, would it not have been better to allow Charlie’s parents to take him to America, as they wanted to, but “at their own risk”?
Dr Kusoom Vadgama, London NW11

A clear duty
Reading Phillips’s article reinforced my belief that the Charlie Gard saga could, and should, have been stopped in its tracks after the initial High Court hearing before Mr Justice Francis. Although he had an unenviable task, his clear duty was to refuse an appeal to any higher court. In the light of overwhelming medical evidence, he should have ruled that any further treatment would be futile.

Sadly, in the ensuing glare of publicity and amid the outrageous behaviour of pro-life groups, Charlie’s interests became confused with those of his parents, who were in no state to think rationally.
Howard C Bigg, Cambridge

Clarifying statement
At last, clear thinking with unfailing compassion about a very sad situation. Everyone seemed confused as the intricacies of the Charlie Gard case unfolded — our hearts pulled one way, then another — but what a superb clarifying article by Phillips.
Dorothy Wheatley, Chippenham, Wiltshire

POINTS
Have I got nudes for you
Michael Simkins is wrong to say that until the 1960s the Windmill Theatre was the only UK venue in which you could view the naked female form (“The aged audience saw my tackle and giggled”, News Review, last week). In the late 1940s and 1950s many second-rank touring theatres were kept open by weekly revues such as My Bare Lady in which, I recall, the central part of the entertainment was a succession of nude tableaux.
Dick Tuckey, Ipswich

Lisbon entreaty
Would it be possible for your travel writers when covering Lisbon just once not to mention custard tarts (“Europe’s best seaside cities”, Travel, last week)?
Dr Anthony Ingleton Sheffield

Burning indignation
I thought your cartoon of the man asking two burnt Riviera holidaymakers how their getaway had been was in poor taste (“Newman’s week”, News Review, last week). Thankfully, no one was killed in the fires but many people had their holidays ruined and may possibly not be covered by insurance for loss of property and their cars — hardly a laughing matter.
Joan Olivier, London SW19

Prime minister’s question
Adam Boulton says: “Only the prime minister can take responsibility for Britain’s woeful lack of preparedness for such vital negotiations,” but he does not say which prime minister (“What Theresa saw on her holidays: a cabinet crushing her vision of Brexit”, Comment, last week). We learn that Brussels set up a contingency unit to plan its strategy in case of a “leave” vote on the day parliament passed the legislation for the referendum. David Cameron’s frivolous and arrogant approach is exemplified by his failure to set our civil service a comparable task.
Nik Wood, London E9

Compromising position
Your editorial “The government starts to get real on Europe” (Comment, July 23) subscribes to the claim that a plain reduction in migrant numbers was not the prime concern of Brexiteers. The inconvenient fact is that the working-class Brexiteers of the Midlands and north of England whose ballots carried the day voted precisely for that reduction. Why otherwise would the prime minister have stuck through thick and thin to limitation — and a drastic one — in the teeth of heavyweight economic protests? Her “Brexit means Brexit” refrain was a coded reassurance to Brexiteers that their demand was being prioritised. What they must be asked to accept in place of limitation per se is sovereign control by way of compromise in the interests of the economy in which each of us has a stake.
Frederic Bradley, Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Punish election lies
Lord Sugar is right: to publish misleading manifestos in election campaigns should be a criminal offence (“Manifesto lies must mean jail, says Sugar”, News, last week). The appeal of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party to naive young voters has placed this country in grave danger by destabilising a government at such a critical time. The calls to end austerity seem to indicate that paying your way is a choice. Similarly, the extra money pledged to the NHS after a Brexit vote could never be expected to be upheld until the negotiations were clear. Democracy can only function if an informed electorate is given clear and definitive promises of intent.
Ronald Bullen, Chepstow, Monmouthshire

BIRTHDAYS
Sir Jonathan Baker, High Court judge, 62
Sir Chris Bonington, mountaineer, 83
Michael Deeley, film producer (The Italian Job, The Deer Hunter), 85
Romola Garai, actress (Suffragette), 35
Geri Horner, singer, 45
Mary Ann Sieghart, writer and broadcaster, 56
Robin van Persie, footballer, 34
Dame Barbara Windsor, actress (Carry On), 80
Michelle Yeoh, actress (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), 55

ANNIVERSARIES
1809 Poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born
1881 Alexander Fleming, discover of penicillin, born
1889 The Savoy Hotel opens in London
1911 Birth of comic actress Lucille Ball
1917 Actor Robert Mitchum born
1926 Gertrude Ederle becomes first woman to swim the Channel, beating the men’s record by 1hr 59min
1928 Artist Andy Warhol born
1932 Birth of the painter Sir Howard Hodgkin
1945 US drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima
1962 Jamaica becomes an independent nation, after more than three centuries as a British colony
2005 Death of Robin Cook, former foreign secretary