Motor Racing And Gallery Motor

Short and to the point. (from Friday's Guardian).

You couldn't make it up: private and public sector workers paying the price for inept regulation of a corrupt financial services sector, with no difference between the parties. Revolution anyone?

Ian Parsons
Bradford

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This week's winner, from W.H. Doe of Arnold, Notts, appears in today's Daily Mail.

"It shows how bright most of our MPs are- no one put in a claim for a shredder, except Tony Blair."

ps Tony's shredder really did exist, unlike Saddam Hussein's which, like Iraq's WMDs, was a neocon conspiracy theory.

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This brilliant letter by Mark Holt of Liverpool was 'Letter of the Day' in last Monday's Daily Express.

Out of the Iraqi frying pan and into Afghan fire

So, British troops have finally left Iraq after six agonising years.

The government assures us our troops did a wonderful job and that Iraq is a better place.

But since the 2003 invasion, one million Iraqi civilians have died, the country's infrastructure has been looted or destroyed and most Iraqis say that life was better under Saddam Hussein.

Will Gordon Brown hold an official inquiry into the outlandish lies that led to the war? Or will we be offered another whitewash? Will lessons be learned? And how in future will we be able to restrain an arrogant government hellbent on pursuing similar courses of action?

Sadly, we're involved in other conflicts just as morally repugnant, such as Afghanistan and America's de facto war on Pakistan that has so destabilised the country that the Taliban may take over a nuclear-armed state.

On the subject of the 'outlandish lies that led to the (Iraq) war', a little bird tells me that the pro-war writer David Aaronovitch has got a new book out on conspiracy theories. I wonder if he has included in it the conspiracy theory that Iraq possessed WMDs- a 'theory' that led to the deaths of 1m people?

Something tells me that he probably hasn't.

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Once again, it's a dead-heat. There's this cracker from Bob Parsons in Friday's Daily Express which caught my eye.

Labour isn't to blame for all the country's ills. Many years ago, before Tony Blair came to power, officialdom advised my adult daughter to get pregnant to become eligible for a whole raft of benefits. And this was under a Conservative government.

The Daily Express tells us 'They' have ruined Britain, but who are 'They'? Have we so quickly forgotten the financiers and bankers given free rein in the Thatcher era who have brought the capitalist financial system to its knees.

Many people, myself included, would have preferred to see these privately owned bastions of capitalism collapse under the greed of their owners and shareholders instead of being bailed out by the taxpayer.

So a Labour government has once again saved capitalism, thanks to money that ordinary people have provided, while the perpetrators enjoy gold-plated pay-offs for failing.

Bob Parsons,
Trawden, Lancs.

And then there's this short, but very sweet one from Andrew Shaw from The Daily Telegraph.

SIR – I am not surprised at Tony Blair's despair over the new higher rate of income tax (report, April 25).
It will cost him a fortune.

Andrew Shaw
Corby, Northants

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We're a couple of weeks behind with this feature due to Easter, so I'll be posting another very shortly.

From the week before last, this brilliant letter from the New Statesman caught my eye:

Summers of love

Both Dominic Sandbrook’s essay on football in the Seventies (30 March) and the Red Riding series recently on TV paint a bleak and frankly inaccurate picture of life for most of us in that glorious decade.

With higher wages for the working classes, access to affordable housing, free health care, free higher education and low levels of crime, all in a much less unequal society, life then was superior to life as experienced by most of us today.

In 1976, I was a fully funded sociology undergraduate on a new parkland campus. I had a lovely girlfriend, a motorbike, hair down to my armpits, Neil Young on the stereo. And it was a glorious summer. Bleak? It was bloody marvellous!

John Robertson
Ayr, Ayrshire

I've written before of the way neoliberal ideologues have tried to rewrite history in regards to life in Britain in the 1970s- and Dominic Sandbrook is a prime culprit.

Sandbrook was the man who wrote:

"When he (Harold Wilson) retired in 1976, Britain was a dingy, miserable place"

Age of Dominic Sandbrook in 1976: Two. Wilson's Britain must have looked very 'dingy and miserable' from his pram.

He also famously wrote:

"Without Thatcher's controversial reforms, Britain might look a lot more like France today "

In other words it would look like a country which had a world class, affordable and publicly-owned public transport system, and which still maintained a manufacturing base.

What a terrible place Britain would be without 'Thatcher's reforms'!

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Well, for me, it's a dead heat between these two gems, both published in the Daily Telegraph. If there's any good ones that have caught your eye this week, please send them in.

SIR – How uplifting it would be to see Lord Mandelson’s job outsourced, under the banner of “EU free movement of labour”, to a nice Polish gentleman with less arrogance and a modicum of interpersonal skills.
Ian Johnson
Chelford, Cheshire

SIR – Since the snow probably prevented a few bankers from getting to their desks, perhaps we ought to be counting the net benefit to the taxpayer, rather than dwelling on the costs.
Chris Rowley
London NW8

It's a sign of the massive shift in public opinion against globalisation and neoliberalism that the Daily Telegraph's letters page increasingly resembles that of the Morning Star. We are living in very exciting times.

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Well, for the first time ever we have a three-way dead heat. Three excellent letters on the glaring hypocrisy we've seen over the Karadzic affair, published in The Observer and Guardian. Liz Milanovich, Cathal Rabbitte and Peter McKenna (writing on our dear friend Richard Holbrooke, pictured above with members of that charming group of terrorists-oops sorry, 'freedom fighters', the KLA), come on down!

Death of a war criminal (From The Observer)
Though Ed Vulliamy is on a rampage with the Karadzic arrest story ('I am waiting. No one has ever said sorry', Focus, last week), The Observer has overlooked that notorious Croatian Nazi war criminal Dinko Sakic (who died on 21 July) was buried in full Nazi regalia and that his funeral was conducted by a Croatian Roman Catholic priest. Interestingly, 'no one [on the Croatian side] has ever said sorry'. No outrage at The Observer.
Liz Milanovich



(Letters published in Guardian 05/08/08)
Karadzic: an everyday sort of monster

What does Slavenka Drakulic (Comment, August 2) mean when she talks about "our belief that [Karadzic] is different, that he is a monster and nothing like us." He looks no different to any western political leader. Is the massive difference in income levels between OECD countries and the rest of the world a natural phenomenon?

Does it ever require the application of state violence?

Shouldn't Karadzic say he was just doing as the others do?

He could even have been a Des Browne or a Donald Rumsfeld, overseeing mass murder and ethnic cleansing in Iraq. Karadzic is no different to them, except that he lost. Had he won, perhaps he could have become a special Middle East peace envoy?

Cathal Rabbitte, Mumbai, India


"It's an invented story and no one ought to believe it," Richard Holbrooke says of the alleged secret deal with Karadzic (No chance of a fair trial, Karadzic says in first statement, August 2).

In his June 1980 testimony before a House subcommittee, Holbrooke said much the same thing about refugees' accounts of death and devastation in East Timor, and the liquidation of a significant proportion of its population. He hailed Indonesia as "one of the greatest nations in the world".

As the State Department's man in Pacific Asia, Holbrooke channelled covert aid to the Indonesian army in 1975 as it embarked upon invasion and genocide in East Timor.Should we really listen to him when he talks about war criminals?

Peter McKenna
Liverpool

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