The US can’t call itself an ethical nation while it continues to sell arms to Saudi Arabia

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

Once again, US made weapons sold to our “great friend” Saudi Arabia are raining down on innocent men, women and children in Yemen. How can we call ourselves an ethical, law abiding nation when we continue to remain silent when such atrocities are being committed on a daily basis? We are complicit in the most heinous war crimes.

Donald Trump, his enablers in Congress and his supporters are guilty. I shudder to think how they will explain their silence when they come face to face with their creator. The feigned reverence for God and Jesus Christ is gross hypocrisy in light of our obsession for trade, profits and lack of concern for innocent lives.

At least 20 people died on Sunday when a Saudi-led coalition airstrike hit a wedding party in northern Yemen. Most of the dead were reportedly women and children who were gathered in one of the wedding party tents. The bride was among the dead. Medics and residents said more than 46 others –including 30 children – were also injured.

The attack on the Yemeni wedding party was one of at least three airstrikes over the weekend that killed Yemeni civilians. A family of five died in an airstrike in the province of Hajja. And 20 civilians died on Saturday when fighter jets bombed a bus near the city of Taiz. Please call the White House and demand an immediate halt to this madness.

Tejinder Uberoi
California, USA

Nicola Sturgeon should shift her focus from Scottish independence for a change

So while the Welsh government is poised to accept the latest Brexit compromise from Westminster, the SNP administration in Scotland is not. Why?

Easy. The Welsh government is headed by Labour and is not attempting to use Brexit to break up the UK.

If settlement is reached over powers being transferred from Brussels via Westminster to Holyrood, then Nicola Sturgeon loses one of her cherished indyref2 triggers. Let’s not forget that, for the nationalist leader, independence “transcends” everything: Brexit, the economy and oil.

A successful outcome for the UK from Brexit is not on her agenda.

Martin Redfern
Edinburgh

If the SNP’s Brexit minister Mike Russell thought the arguments over powers returning from the EU were about devolution, he might well have considered a compromised deal could be found with the UK government. He perhaps realised, as the Welsh government has, that the latest proposals properly respected devolution and could be considered fair in that regard.

Yet it seems Russell’s boss is not interested in fairness but rather is looking for an excuse to engineer a crisis. Throughout her time as first minister, Nicola Sturgeon has shown she is not prepared to accept no for an answer, and over Brexit and the EU this has been elevated to a new level, whereby nothing but getting her own way will ever be deemed good enough for the purposes of Scottish nationalism.

Keith Howell
West Linton

The Conservatives need to address their racism problem

Am I alone in feeling that while Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party are being accused of antisemitism, the Tory party is blatantly racist, particularly but not exclusively, towards people of colour?

Whilst the current Windrush crisis has brought the status of long term immigrants to the fore, over the last few years there have been many other instances of people who have received citizenship through marriage being deported or threatened with deportation or not allowed to return because they went back to their country of origin to care for a sick relative and were then denied re-entry.

Just because a person wants to live in Britain, that doesn’t mean they should give up all contact with “home” or that contact should deny them a right to return.

Pauline Edwards
Leicestershire

There is nothing honourable about honour killings

I wonder if I might ask you to change the way you report the murders of daughters in Asian communities who have apparently besmirched the good name of their family.

You currently refer to these murders as “honour killings”.

I am sure this is the label the murderers themselves prefer as it subliminally implies, by word association, that there is something honourable in killing your own daughter.

I would like to suggest that there is absolutely nothing honourable in killing your own daughter for what is actually just, in reality, a reaction to the slight of the ego of a misguided patriarch or sibling who perceives his standing in his community more important than a human life.

Instead of granting these murders some kind of legitimacy by using a positive word like “honour”, could you perhaps start referring to them as “dishonour murders”, or if you are afraid to go this far at least compromise on “dishonour killings”. I feel this would still describe the act but would hopefully imply that the killing itself was dishonourable.

Maurice Curran
Glasgow

Britain’s lean economic years are purely down to Tory de-regulation

Looking at the public sector current budget graph in Ben Chu’s piece I am struck not by any sense of relief or optimism but, rather, I lament the lost years that Thatcherite neoliberal policy have brought us.

The trend under Blair/Brown up until 2008 was favourable and the subsequent plunge is entirely attributable to the finance sector bailouts that were the foreseeable and foreseen consequences of Thatcher’s big bang deregulation and the repeal of glass steagall in the US.

The more or less return to trend we now see is not a testimony to Tory virtue – quite the reverse. The problem was wholly and solely authored by the Tories in the first place. Let’s have no plaudits or laurels for the Tories please, just perpetual condemnation.

Steve Ford
Haydon Bridge

Of course Windrush deportations are discriminatory

With reference to your headline in Monday’s edition,

“Home Office agencies at heart of Windrush scandal ‘rife with discrimination’” – no sh*t?!

Ron Mure
Mansfield