Theresa May has finally decided telling people to ‘go home’ is unacceptable. Is irony officially dead?

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So Theresa May has, quite rightly, asserted that Donald Trump’s racist tweets telling four female members of the US House of Congress to “go home” is “completely unacceptable”.

This is wholly justified, but it is more than a bit rich coming from the person originally responsible for our Home Office’s continuing “hostile environment” policy, whose most offensive piece of communication to date was vans that told immigrants to “go home”.

D. Maughan Brown
York

Virgin Holidays make a splash

Hats off to Virgin Holidays, which has made a big splash by scrapping all tours that go anywhere near captive whales and dolphins. In these parks, orcas – who belong in the ocean, where they swim up to 140 miles a day – are forced to spend their entire lives in cramped tanks, swimming in their own waste, deeply distressed, and robbed of a real life. Dolphins are forced to perform painful circus-style tricks for food until they die in captivity, far short of their natural life expectancy. No travel provider should profit from promoting these watery prisons.

Elisa Allen
London

We must ration air travel

To tackle the climate crisis, surely we have to ration flights, rather than just make them more expensive? This would be highly unpopular at first, but the more the government could bang in to people the words “Climate Change Emergency” – much more important than Brexit, though obviously connected – then I think people would realise the necessity for such a draconian measure.

There would of course have to be differing rations for business, work and pleasure. This might be hard to police, however, again, I think that common sense would prevail. There is already growing concern.

Rachel Greenwood
Bewdley

Trump should be proud of ‘the squad’

The first thing that struck me when I read about the story of the four congresswomen being bullied by a well-known racist and misogynist president of the United States, was not actually the amount of vile racism spouted from the president’s inflammatory Twitter account. I was mostly impressed by the fact that here were four minority-ethnic women, who hail from humble backgrounds, have managed to make it to the summit of the American democratic legislative system. That’s no mean feat by any standard.

But, most importantly, it shows that the American dream is alive. And that is what Trump should have capitalised on instead of pandering to his racist and juvenile instincts. As a president of the supposed leader of the free world (a highly arrogant and patronising term) he should have celebrated the openness of a sufficiently free system which enabled these women, from communities with historic inequality and lack of opportunity in the US, to make it to the top.

Ali Abbas
London

Is moon landing the original ‘fake news’?

The first man landing on the moon was undoubtedly an astonishing act of human ingenuity, a gigantic stride for humankind and a monumental watershed in history but if it were true. In an age riven with “fake news”, is it any wonder that the landing has always been viewed with suspicion?

We continue to witness human tragedies of colossal magnitudes: droughts, famine, gruelling starvation, conflicts, inter-communal struggles and rivalries, terrorism, environmental degradation, ethnic cleansing, genocide, economic breakdown, harrowing spectacles of mutilated bodies washed up on the shores of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas, capsized dinghies, refugees sewing their lips in protest at their mistreatment in confinement and entrapped behind razor wire fences. Isn’t it prudent to ask what did humanity benefit from the Apollo 11 moon landing, if it happened in the first place?

Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London

SNP have frustrated Brexit since day one

Scotland’s Brexit secretary Mike Russell continues to play politics with all our futures, as he seeks to heighten levels of concern over the potential impact of Brexit on the supply of medicines. The president of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society rightly pointed out the dangers of Russell’s scaremongering becoming a self-fulfilling prediction, as his words risk triggering panic buying amongst patients.

From the day the EU referendum result was announced back in 2016, the SNP leadership has done everything possible to try to undermine the Brexit process, and has peddled a narrative of doom and gloom without care for the impact on us all. Their objective is clearly to stir ill-feeling and division. Sadly, there is precious little evidence of any serious thought being given to how their preferred alternative of breaking up the UK will not further exacerbate current risks and uncertainties.

Keith Howell
Scottish Borders