Letters: For your viewing pleasure

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The lucrative porn business, like the world’s drugs/alcohol business, capitalises on people’s perceived need for release from stress and for entertainment. Declaring anything a ‘public health hazard’

will not change the yearning, however amoral.

Mike Bor

London

London mayoral election

We can all agree it would be morally wrong to use the privileges of government office to slander someone. It would be doubly wrong to do this in order to influence what may be a close fought election. David Cameron, aiming to damage Sadiq Khan in the mayoral election, has said Khan has associated with Suliman Gani, who in turn “supports IS”.

Mr Gani vehemently denies this.

A spokesperson for Cameron said of Gani that “at an event previously, he called for an Islamic State…I think you can have a debate about what IS means”. There is no debate about what IS means. We all know what they are. You can have a debate about ‘an Islamic State’, a completely different matter. Some of our closest allies are Islamic states.

Mr Cameron needs to clear this up and he needs to do so before the election.

Brendan O’Brien

London

Not only has the House of Commons been brought into disrepute, but so has the London Mayoral Election Campaign, by the vicious racism, slander and innuendo of Zac Goldsmith and David Cameron. Seeking to divide communities along racial and religious lines is gutter politics at its worst and most lethal. Londoners, and indeed the country, deserve better.

Rachel McKenzie

London

Obama speaks out on Brexit

The majority of SMEs want Britain to remain in the EU. However, the controversial EU-US TTIP trade deal, which President Obama and David Cameron are due to discuss this weekend, may well have sown some seeds of doubt.

Campaign group Business Against TTIP have rightly raised alarm bells about how the deregulation and harmonisation aspects of TTIP could threaten EU rules on public health, workers’ rights and the environment and force UK businesses into unfair competition with US firms that have lower standards and costs. The European Commission itself predicts TTIP could result in the loss of at least 680,000 jobs. ​

Small businesses account for almost half the UKs turnover, providing jobs for over 12 million people. They help keep money circulating in the local economy and are also more likely to pay their fair share of taxes that many large corporations work to dodge.

Greens have long argued TTIP is little more than a ‘corporate charter’. We have been at the forefront of opposition in the European and UK Parliaments. However, the EU is definitely the right place to continue fighting against this toxic trade deal. If a majority of MEPs vote against it, we can stop it in its tracks. With the Tories and many Leave campaigners being cheerleaders for deregulation and unfettered free trade, Brexit would simply lead to alternative, possibly worse, trade deals.

There is huge momentum against TTIP across Europe and 3.5 million EU citizens have signed a petition calling for the deal to be abandoned. Brexit would weaken the Stop TTIP campaign as it would lose the vital contribution of UK campaigners.

​We call on Obama to leave a lasting legacy in this final months in office by ending the TTIP negotiations. This will demonstrate he is on the side of ordinary people, workers and small businesses in Europe, not just serving the interests of corporations.

Caroline Lucas MP, Green

Brighton Pavilion

Natalie Bennett, Leader, Green Party of England and Wales

Jean Lambert MEP, Green

London

Molly Scott Cato MEP, Green

South West England

Keith Taylor MEP, Green

South East England

It is intriguing to note the negative reaction by those backing Brexit to Barack Obama’s proclamations on the advantages to the US of the UK staying in the EU.

Individuals such as Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage have been highly critical of the line being taken by the President. This is of course rather odd, given that in the Scottish independence referendum many of those same individuals now pouring scorn on the President’s intervention welcomed it in that debate or said nothing.

It clearly smacks more than a little of hypocrisy and lacks credibility to be critical of this EU referendum intervention, but to have stayed silent when it came to the Scottish independence referendum.

Alex Orr

Edinburgh

President Obama will urge, on Friday, that the UK should remain in the EU. A group of former US Treasury Officials have publicly said that it will be damaging should we leave. Why is the USA afraid of Brexit? And what authority do they have to presume to ‘advise’ us how we should run our country? It may be beyond human memory, but I can remember Tony Blair being slapped down when he was told, by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, that “America does not have friends, only interests”. A regularly used quotation – but just what is the interest, held by the USA that we should remain in the EU?

D. M. Loxley

North Yorkshire

A national hat-trick

With remarkably bad taste on the eve of the Queen’s 90^th birthday, the head of the UK based Republic movement, Graham Smith, proposes that when the Queen’s reign comes to an end there should be a referendum to abolish the monarchy. This would give us a hat trick of constitutional questions considered in sequence, after Scottish independence, and EU membership.

Keith Howell

West Linton, Peeblesshire

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are pliable

Ben Chu's piece about how things are put (These are the psychological tricks both sides of the EU debate are playing on you - and how to recognise them, 20th April 2016) reminds me of the old story about statistics.

10% of all accidents are caused by drunk drivers. Therefore 90% are caused by sober drivers. Therefore it is safer drive when you're drunk than when you're sober!!!!!

Allan Lewis