If Priti Patel comes for the Black Lives Matter protesters in court, she comes for all of us

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

I’ve been listening to Priti Patel and Boris Johnson’s pathetic comments about the toppling of the statue in Bristol. If they proceed with their threat to prosecute then my name will go on the charge sheet. I may not have been there in person but it is done in my name just as surely as if I was there. Perhaps someone should start a list of all who would like to join me in court.

Susan Lammin
Dumfries

Racist language

Thug – noun: “A member of an organisation of robbers and assassins in India. Devotees of the goddess Kali, the Thugs waylaid and strangled their victims, usually travellers, in a ritually prescribed manner. They were suppressed by the British in the 1830s.”

I have always understood this word to be based in racist colonial origins and is used as a racist slur in modern language to imply a person of non-white, non-British and ethnically criminal origin.

I am surprised newspapers have even repeated the prime minister’s and home secretary’s comments without mentioning what the word actually means.

Is it yet another example where racist language is so embedded in our culture that no one notices it?

Mark Warner
Address supplied

Complex characters

I disagree with Sean O’Grady’s consignment of Oliver Cromwell to a kind of devils’ museum.

Thanks to Cromwell and his colleagues, Britain has been for centuries free of absolute monarchs.

Cole Davis
Norwich

Age gap

Sean O’Grady is mistaken when he describes William Wilberforce as one of Edward Colston’s “contemporaries”. Colston died in 1721; Wilberforce was not born until 1759, some 38 years later.

Yours in lockdown,

Meic Goodyear
Lewes

School of confusion

I am completely baffled by the current policy for schoolchildren.

Statistics show the virus is a major problem for the elderly, while the risk for those below 50 is hugely reduced. Children have a tiny risk of suffering badly from the illness. It is also strongly suspected that they don’t spread it. So why make kids social distance when really the teachers are the ones who should maintain full protection?

Why doesn’t the government use its “world-class” test and trace to validate the data and at least let children behave normally? It would appear they are at greater risk from getting in a car to go to school.

Jim
Maidenhead

Compare New Zealand to us

How refreshing to see a government, and people, committed to the eradication of Covid-19.

The positive, early and well-executed actions of New Zealand’s government, led by Jacinda Ardern, really ought to have shown other countries how to organise brave methods to control crisis. While our miserable bunch of know-nothings simply played round the edges of our pandemic, people were dying.

New Zealand ought to be very proud of their prime minister for being brave and resolute in ridding them of this scourge.

Thousands of people have unnecessarily died though the incompetence of our “leaders”. Millions of families have and will continue to suffer from the failure of ministers to reduce and eliminate Covid-19. Our government ought to hang its collective head in shame. Bravo New Zealand and Ardern!

Keith Poole
Basingstoke