Letter: Tories past and present assess John Major's 'guilt'
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir: Regarding your headline 'Major on probation for next 12 months' (1 June), it is customary for someone placed on probation firstly to accept responsibility for their offences and secondly to agree to work towards change and an offence-free existence.
The charges that can be laid at John Major's door for acts committed over a 14-year period could include, to name but a few: pillaging and bankrupting businesses; creating mass unemployment and then covering up by fiddling the figures; defrauding taxpayers by selling to them assets that they thought they owned; enslaving all 16-18-year-old school-leavers on forced work schemes; and conning people into buying their own homes and then, by creating the biggest and longest recession since the Second World War, leaving them with millions tied up in negative equity.
Now, having shuffled about a bit, denied responsibility and blamed someone else, he is masterminding a conspiracy to rob the poorest to protect the tax levels of the rich by dismantling what is left of the welfare state. Would anyone agree that the customary expectations exist? I think not.
There is no indication that he - or any of our leaders - accepts culpability, nor any indication that anything will change. Perhaps even the average JP would regard these offences as too serious for a community sentence. Should he be locked up in one of his Group 4 jails?
Placed in any other part of the penal system, he would have to be segregated for protection from the wrath of his fellow men. Or perhaps Mr Major would express as much surprise at these charges as he did at the May local election results and regard them as a similar aberration.
(I voted Tory once . . .)
Yours faithfully,
CELIA J. COTGREAVE
Appleton, Cheshire
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