Routinely arming our police officers will only encourage terrorism

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Arming police will simply encourage villains, madmen and terrorists to be even better prepared to use weapons (PA)

No, no, no! Please don’t allow our police force to be armed to prevent terrorism – it will simply encourage villains, madmen and terrorists to be even better prepared to use weapons. We are falling into the mindset of the no-nothing, laughing stock President Trump. We all scoffed when he said that arming teachers in the US would prevent more bloodshed in schools. So why routinely arm our police officers, especially in “rural” areas? Spend time and money on prevention instead, because arming police is no cure or deterrent to Isis martyrs.

There are many illustrations in the world where the use of force has provided only a temporary respite to a warring situation, only for the hostilities to be inflamed when the occupying troops depart.

Northern Ireland has had a chance of peace since the Good Friday Agreement was signed. After several generations of the Troubles there has been peace between the IRA and Britain. The peace was negotiated over several years with all the interested parties and therefore holds fast – just.

We have experienced terrorist acts in Britain because of our involvement and support for action against a foreign country. If we considered our response to hostilities in foreign countries differently we probably would not have to endure the carnage we have experienced.

Keith Poole
Basingstoke

Know your history on the Israel-Palestine conflict

To make progress on the Israel-Palestine dispute, we need to put the claim that Hamas is a terrorist organisation into some sort of context. Hamas was founded in Gaza to oppose the Israeli government and also to oppose the Palestinian Authority, who at that time ran Gaza and the West Bank under the Israeli occupation. Every group that has opposed the Israeli government has been described as a terrorist organisation, from the Palestine Liberation Organisation – Yasser Arafat in particular – the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah and so on.

Israel is no stranger to terrorism of course. The reason Clement Attlee’s Labour government gave the Palestine mandate back to the UN in 1947 was the ongoing civil war between Arabs and Jews, going back 20 years or so. In 1946, the militant, right-wing Zionist underground terrorist group Irgun blew up the King David hotel, the British administrative HQ in Palestine, killing 91 people including 60 British servicemen. One of the leaders of Irgun, Menachem Begin, became Prime Minister of Israel in 1977. The father of Tzipi Livni, former Israeli foreign minister and now co-leader of the Zionist Union party, was another of the leaders.

Nelson Mandela was also of course described as a terrorist by the leaders of apartheid South Africa. It is unfortunate that one of the leaders of the Palestinians, Marwan Barghouti, who could be as influential in this dispute as Mandela was, is languishing in an Israeli jail, for what was also described as terrorism. Closer to home, we must of course not forget the IRA, where Martin McGuinness eventually joined with Rev Ian Paisley to become the chuckle brothers.

It is time to drop the terrorist label from Hamas; history shows this is clearly counterproductive. It was elected to represent the people of Gaza as the least-bad option. Instead it is time to recognise that the people of Gaza are living in an open prison with few of life’s necessities, and the world should come together to end this suffering.

Phil Tate
Edinburgh

British Rail wasn’t half bad, actually

The Independent editorial reads: “the bad old ways of British Rail – never a byword for financial success, operational efficiency or pleasurable travel”. That was certainly the British Rail story in the 1950s through to the 1970s. But after the abolition of the old regions and the setting up of business sectors, it became a very efficient organisation – many think that in the 1980s it had become the most efficient railway in Europe. And for the passenger it wasn’t all bad. With Chris Green heading up InterCity, on the whole it was both pleasurable and punctual. And its engineering was well run: compare how British Rail electrified the East Coast Main Line with how Network Rail is doing now with the main line to Bristol.

It really is time to stop perpetrating the myth of “the bad old ways of British Rail”: that’s the way that ignorant and/or ideologically motivated people like Chris Grayling talk. One should also remember that one of the main motives of the John Major government in privatising the railways was to save money, and from that consideration privatisation has been a great failure. Splitting up British Rail into over 100 separate companies was a crazy idea. We should have followed the German, Dutch and Scandinavian models of privatisation: keeping a state-owned company that has to compete with private companies. But those countries are not driven by ideology.

Ian Watson
Carlisle

Blue, white, red or other?

Simon Calder speculates what the next East Coast train livery will be. But be careful – a couple more coats of paint and the trains won’t fit through the tunnels.

David Watson
Goring Heath, South Oxfordshire

I’m not being funny, but…

At the risk of offending the sisterhood, I would like to say that I was not at all offended by Bank of England deputy governor Ben Broadbent’s reference to the menopause (in an interview about the economy). What, after all, is so abnormal or insulting about being past one’s “productive peak”? Do women truly think their sole purpose is to produce? For some it’s a joy; for some it’s a sentence; for some it’s an unfulfilled dream; for some it’s completely undesirable. There will be others for whom I haven’t found the words. But, at some point, we women all pass our productive peak. We do not then cease to be people and many of us are fortunate to have careers way after our notional childbearing years. Men, of course, are a different kettle of fish.

Beryl Wall
London, W4

Parliamentary ping-pong

If the House of Lords is abolished for having the temerity to defeat the government 15 times on its Brexit bill, would it go down in history as being peerless in life as in death?

Roger Hinds
Surrey

Carillion’s auditing scandal sounds boring but it has big consequences

It is so often trotted out that auditors are “independent”. How can they be when they are hired and fired by the very organisation or persons whom they are supposed to be holding to account?

Likewise, it is often wrongly asserted that directors’ duties are to the shareholders. They are not. Their legal duty is to the very company employing them. It is only that company which can legally hold them to account. Are directors really going to sue themselves?

Yes, company law is tedious and invokes glazed eyes but, as said elsewhere in The Independent, it is this bone dry tinder which sparks the greatest conflagration.

So, if your columnist James Moore really wants to see change, please attack our company law which enshrines this idiocy.

Christopher Yaxley
Shrewsbury