The Reader: Isolationist Britain simply won’t work

IT was interesting to see the second item in your leader column on March 7 about Labour’s problem with anti-Semitism [“Labour’s day of shame”] and next to it Baroness Warsi’s article on Islamophobia within Conservative circles [“British Muslims deserve better than a Tory party that’s deeply Islamophobic”].

I then thought about our continuing trouble with Brexit and how so much of the fuss is about trying to be more “British”, to the exclusion of any others.

One can’t help but wonder if they are in any way related, with a desire to cut ourselves off from contact with the rest of the world.

It won’t work as we are part of the wider world, however much we try to deny it.
Emlyn Williams

Dear Emlyn

Increasingly, politics in western democracies comes down to whether you support an open or closed society. Brexit, Corbyn, Trump and the Gilets Jaunes movement in France are manifestations of wanting to shut societies off from the world.

In its nastier and more extreme version, this nativism spills over into anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. The crisis over anti-Semitism in Labour is acute, with the far Left who run the party now struggling to shrug off the charge of institutional racism.

The Tory high command has acted more decisively over examples of Islamophobia, suspending guilty activists last week. But it cannot rest there. All allegations must be investigated by Tory HQ and a zero- tolerance attitude must prevail. Then the battle of making the Conservative Party a champion of the open society again must begin.

George Osborne, Editor

The Mayor of London says he is “deeply concerned” that the Holocaust Memorial may be scrapped, after expert bodies objected to its siting in Victoria Tower Gardens [“Khan voices fears over future of Holocaust tribute”, March 6].

What does he propose instead? That Historic England and the Environment Agency keep their opinions to themselves? Or that alternative locations for this project, such as the Imperial War Museum, are considered? Given the Mayor’s environment strategy, he should be proposing the latter.
Clare Annamalai

Ayesha Hazarika writes: “Different minority groups shouldn’t compete against each other and there shouldn’t be a hierarchy. This ... demonstrates how tough it can be when religion collides with educational policy and LGBT+ rights.” When religion collides with anything, there is trouble.

Inbuilt to just about every religion is the belief that each is the “one true faith”, so there is little room for any sense that any religion has the well-being of society at large at its heart. What a pity. For too many, what a tragedy.
Beryl Wall

Further to your report on the house price rise [March 7], it frustrates me the way the media uses only positive words to describe house price increases — “hope for market revival” — while using negative words such as “slump” to describe any reduction in prices. Constant price increases are the reason people such as me face the prospect of never owning a place I can call home.
Jess Bowers