Letters: Stop cringing in front of the Saudis

The following letters appear in the 16 October edition of the Independent

With allies like Saudi Arabia, who needs enemies? (“Is it really naive to think we shouldn’t be in bed with the Saudis?”, 13 October) We have shamefully tolerated its playing of the destructive sectarian card against “apostate” Shiites. The merciless attacks on Shiite worshippers by Sunni jihadis occur with sickening regularity in Iraq and Pakistan. Now they are happening in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Kuwait.

The Saudis were even allowed to facilitate the emergence of Isis in Syria and Iraq. Despite our policy of appeasement, terrorists continue to attack westerners and the perpetrators are invariably Sunni. In the meantime, the Saudis are bombing not Isis but Yemen’s Houthis. We, needless to say, approve of the carnage.

Our policy of trying to topple Assad’s secular regime plays well in Riyadh but risks triggering a refugee exodus of Biblical proportions from government-controlled areas and the end of Syria’s ancient Christian community.

It’s time that we stopped cringing before the Saudis. Our weapon makers as well as those who live off Saudi largesse will protest, but they should be ignored.

Yugo Kovach

Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

Russia is condemned for attacking rebels other than Isis in Syria, but Isis are not the only extremist rebels. One other major militia, al-Nusra, are designated terrorists by the West. Turkey and Saudi Arabia are supporting al-Nusra, with no objection from America or Britain.

Saudi Arabia has declared that Assad will go, either voluntarily or by force. The latter process it says may be “prolonged and destructive” (for the people of Syria mainly of course). Our government is de facto backing Saudi Arabia, and America supplies it with TOW missiles which can destroy tanks.

Saudi Arabia in turn gives them to Syrian rebels who have used them to inflict heavy losses on the Syrian army. There is talk of Saudi Arabia beefing up military supplies to the rebels.

The West has pursued an uncompromising hardline policy in Syria ever since Barack Obama declared that Assad had to go when the conflict was only a few months old. It is time for Obama and Cameron to admit that their stand on Assad is making a peace process for Syria impossible. They must drop preconditions and get started on serious talks with Putin (whose involvement Philip Hammond recently said was vital) on a peace process aimed at bringing this human catastrophe to an end.

Dr Brendan O’Brien

London N21

Saddam Hussein is a brutal dictator who oppresses his people. So we take him out and Iraq ceases to exist as a stable nation state and falls back into tribal conflicts. The west ceases to have an interlocutor for the former nation state of Iraq.

Gaddafi is a brutal dictator who oppresses his people. So we take him out and Libya ceases to exist as a nation state and falls back into tribal conflicts. The west ceases to have an interlocutor for the former nation state of Libya.

Bashar al-Assad is a brutal dictator who oppresses his people....

Is there anything to be learnt from our first two interventions in the Middle East ?

Alan Stedall

Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

Grammar schools block social mobility

The claim that new grammar schools will be an engine for social mobility is exposed as entirely fallacious by a recent data-harvesting exercise in fully selective Buckinghamshire.

Figures show that children from private schools are over two and a half times more likely to pass the 11-plus than children from state primary schools. The gap in pass rates between poorer and wealthier areas of the county is 25 percentage points. Shockingly, the pass rate for children on free school meals in 2014 was less than 3 per cent compared with the overall pass rate of 30 per cent.

Where grammar schools are situated close to disadvantaged communities, they fail abjectly to serve children from those communities. In High Wycombe, there are three grammar schools together admitting over 500 children each year – but at the 13 state primary schools in High Wycombe, only one in 11 children passed the 11-plus exam this year.

It is absurd to maintain that grammar schools offer a route out of poverty when they routinely fail to offer places to children from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Government needs to face up to the fact that grammar schools do not open doors – they shut them, and most often in the face of the least well-off children.

Rebecca Hickman

High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

Corbyn out of context

You have very helpfully informed us that the word “contextomy” means “the practice, or act, of quoting people out of context in order to persuade” (“Have a word”, 15 October).

This could not be more timely, when virtually all commentators are engaged in exactly that practice when speaking of Jeremy Corbyn. Having a single word for this will save us all no end of time.

Penny Little

Great Haseley, Oxfordshire

The Conservatives squirming with glee at Labour’s disarray under Corbyn do so at least in part because they know that their party under Cameron is not so very different.

Our Prime Minister, far from exhibiting the Blairite cunning he professes to admire, is in reality morally adrift and devoid of the strategic sense needed to save the NHS, protect the BBC, keep us in Europe and ultimately preserve the unity of the UK itself.

He is a man who promises almost six impossible things before breakfast, and worse still appears to believe them, at least until supper time, when Messrs Osborne, Hunt, Grayling et al are unleashed, howling, to rend and tear.

The two wings of the Conservative Party are as extreme in their differences as any group within Labour, but don’t expect quite the same excitable in-depth media coverage from the bulk of our gloriously independent press.

Christopher Dawes

London W11

Matthew Norman characterises Jeremy Corbyn as an anti-austerity Cavalier and the Labour MPs who disagree with him as puritanical Roundheads. It is worth remembering that, according to 1066 and All That, the Cavaliers were “wrong but wromantic” whereas the Roundheads were “right but repulsive”.

Gordon Elliot

Burford, Oxfordshire

Michael Gove listens to complaints and changes policy direction on prisons – plaudits and approval. John McDonnell listens to complaints and changes policy direction on economy – opprobrium.

Nic Siddle

Chester

War made to seem a noble thing

In no way does the Remembrance poppy support or glorify war, claims Matt Harrison (letter, 12 October). What prevents him from seeing that when our society’s major official ceremony around war is pre-eminently structured by our military and our state church, and always represents war in terms of courage and self-sacrifice and never of inhumanity and barbarity as well, war is thereby upheld as being “naturally” a morally noble thing?

The very poem which inspired the Poppy, which the Royal British Legion promulgates in its literature without the least irony, exhorts us as the war-dead’s successors to take up their “quarrel with the foe” – absolutely never to ask, as Owen and Sassoon did, why we and the “foe” need to see ourselves as enemies in the first place, or whose interests are really served by our continuing to do so. And then we’re told these matters aren’t political!

As for no evidence of “triumphalism”: walking through Newcastle upon Tyne in recent years I’ve been greatly concerned by what appears to be the increasing militarisation of Remembrance Day events. These now incorporate large numbers of uniformed military personnel and generate large crowds, giving me an uncomfortable if vague feeling that, in not being “on side”, I’m in some way suspect.

Michael Ayton

Durham

Welcome to the new East Germany

I have recently had the honour of the company of a lady over from Bavaria, to look at buying a stud farm in the area, she having previously been in Ireland.

Over the past 10 days, she has witnessed me remonstrating with a mobile telephone shop, whose phone failed to function after three days, a building society, over mistakes, incompetence and indolence, and the security and desk staff of the local county court over lack of information, help, and, not least, manners.

On each and every occasion, instead of making any progress with my complaints, the response has been: “Leave the premises, or we’ll call the police.”

My Bavarian friend was absolutely dumbfounded, and after the last incident her observation was: “England is turning into the GDR under Erich Honecker!”

Nicky Samengo-Turner

Hundon, Suffolk