Sadiq Khan is worried about the far-right, but should not include Hungary on that list

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Mr Khan rightly links extremism with economic hardship and political uncertainty (PA)

In The west’s battle against the far right will define this century, Sadiq Khan’s well-founded concerns about political extremism and condemnation of political terror (focusing only on the far right) make reference to a number of countries normally cited as “model liberal democracies”. Hungary is not on that list, because such terror has no place here.

Nevertheless he attempts to shoehorn our country into his narrative, repeating long discredited tropes seeking to support the breathtakingly absurd claim of “the far right having unconstrained power in Hungary”. He thus fatally undermines his own argument. Here the far right has no power. The far-right party currently in Parliament gained under 6 per cent of the vote in this year’s election, compared with the centre-right Fidesz-KDNP alliance’s share of over 54 per cent. Furthermore, in the campaign left-wing parties entered into a cynical – but thankfully unsuccessful – alliance with the rump of the far-right Jobbik party.

Khan rightly links extremism with economic hardship and political uncertainty. In Hungary, stable governance and increasing prosperity over the past twelve years have reduced the potential for political violence to negligible levels. In the period leading up to 2010, however, left-liberal administrations presided over political instability and economic decline, erosion of the rule of law, the rise of far-right quasi-paramilitary groups, and heightened ethnic tensions. One result was a series of murders in 2008-09 targeting the Roma community. Since 2010 there have been continuous, concerted and exemplary efforts at government level to improve the situation of the Roma population and promote inter-ethnic harmony. The success of these have been internationally recognised by impartial observers.

Khan is welcome to be my guest in Hungary, where I am sure he will not only feel safe, but also unburdened from his misconceptions – if he truly wants to be.

Zoltán Kovács

Hungarian Secretary of State for International Communication and Relations

Hungary

Northern Ireland needs political reform

The present British Government is looking at Northern Ireland through the wrong end of a telescope.

Quite rightly, at the end of a period of conflict, the Good Friday Agreement provided for a cross-community veto government. Under this system, parliamentary parties at Stormont have to register as Unionist, Nationalist or Neither. The largest party in the Unionist and Nationalist camps then has a veto over the appointment of the presiding officer, the formation of the government and key legislation.

But that was 24 years ago. There is a whole generation that has grown up without thinking of itself as Unionist or Nationalist, as is shown by the large increase in support for the cross-community Alliance Party – now the second largest at Stormont.

It is now time to return Northern Ireland to a normal Parliamentary system. This would enable a government to be constituted as a “coalition of the willing”. This would reflect the majority within Northern Ireland which opposed Brexit; reluctantly accepts the principle of the Northern Ireland Protocol as the least bad solution to the inevitable problems caused by the present British government’s foolish choice of a “hard” Brexit (leaving both the Single Market and the Customs Union, which Boris Johnson during the Referendum campaign denied would be the outcome); and wants to have a functioning government.

It would also marginalise the baneful influence of the rump of Unionist bigots which would no longer have the power to hold everybody else to ransom; and the British government would no longer have an excuse to embark on the catastrophic path of breaking its treaty obligations and thereby hypocritically breaching the same international law which it presently rightly criticises Vladimir Putin for not upholding.

Philip Goldenberg

Woking

Cutting civil servants? On what criteria?

So Boris Johnson is considering cutting 91,000 civil service jobs and returning to 2016 levels. Oh the halcyon days of 2016. No Boris Johnson and no Brexit – yes please get me back there.

If there is a swathe of cuts in the civil service can I suggest that the redundancy criteria is based on party attendance and fixed penalty notice awards. So tick tick for Boris Johnson.   And as Mr Johnson seems to have stumbled across so many parties actually happening  –  the age-old criteria of “last in first out “ should also be applied to Mr Johnson. It’s only fair!

Gordon Ronald

Hertfordshire

Re: cutting civil servants, will the PM do the same as previous Tory governments?

Privatise government services, therefore the staff become contractors. Voila! Civil service head count reduces, but the little or no reduction in actual costs will ever be mentioned.

Alan Hutchinson

Details supplied

Cheap food or high profits?

Justin King, the former CEO of Sainsbury’s, has just declared that the “golden era” of cheap food is ending.

King’s announcement comes a month after Tesco announced pre-tax profits of £2.6bn and Sainsbury’s declared profits of £854m and was made in the week the Food Foundation think-tank found that more than 2 million adults in the UK go without food for a whole day in the month because they can’t afford to eat.

Actually, it’s high time the “golden era” of obscene supermarket profits came to end.

People should have access to food as a human right.

Sasha Simic

London

What does ‘over-interpreted’ mean?

I hope you’ve all clocked the exciting new word that the spooky Michael Gove has introduced into the English language. “Over-interpreted”. We await with excitement the OED definition when it eventually appears, but in the meantime, as it was Gove’s response to queries about Johnson’s statement in parliament that the chancellor would say “more about this (concerning help with the cost of living) in the days to come”, a possibility immediately denied by the Treasury.

We can make some guesses about its meaning. Johnson was in a spot of bother and had to say something; or he didn’t mean to say it, it slipped out by accident; or he did mean to say it but quickly realised his mistake, but thought no-one would notice or care; or he thought he’d heard Sunak say something like that, so accidentally misspoke; or it was a deliberate lie because it sounded good and it didn’t really matter if no-one believed him, because everyone is used to his lying and nobody can do anything about it. More suggestions on a postcard, preferably direct to Gove.

So the government continues to treat us as utterly bewildered fools. Utterly bewildered, yes, but definitely not fools.

David Buckton

Cambridge