Letter: England's shame

Sir: Michael Green (letter, 17 June) is on dangerous ground when he says "the British are generally more racially hesitant, and often more blatantly prejudiced, than their neighbours in Europe". He lives in France - a country where an extreme-right party regularly wins up to 20 per cent of the popular vote and in which racist and anti-Semitic attitudes are endemic, as illustrated by the furore over the right of Muslim women to wear the veil and attacks on Jewish cemeteries. Presumably he would not regard the bigots of the Front National as representative of the French nation as a whole: can it then be right to draw general conclusions about the British people from the disgraceful behaviour of a few hundred English thugs?

SIMON ROBSON

Brussels