Letters: April 2025

Capturing the castle

I don’t accept the concepts of “Faragism” and “Starmerism” (“The fight for our future”, March) for the very reasons that Rafael Behr expounds. There are two new forces in western politics, more profound than left and right, better described as “builder-defenders” and “destroyer-attackers”. The former are the voters and politicians who believe themselves to be inside the castle, with something to lose. They want to build a better, more secure life and see those around them as part of a community helping achieve that. The “destroyer-attackers” believe they are outside the castle, with nothing to lose. The system is rigged against them. They want to tear the walls down, get what they’ve been denied, and punish those that kept them out.

When seen like this, certain dynamics and seeming contradictions make more sense. When defenders see a problem, they want to solve it to make the community a bit happier and safer. When the attackers see a problem, their instinct is to exploit it to get those castle walls breached. Furthermore, when attackers come to power they struggle to switch to building mode and, like Musk, Trump or Cummings, continue to want to tear things down. But attackers can be a lot more adaptable, given their chaotic fluidity, whereas defenders are reluctant to dismantle old ways, even when they know they are not working.

So how do the west’s builder-defenders improve the castles whenever more people feel angry and excluded? Threats from further afield can bring more people inside, but you also create common cause by genuinely investing in them and finding ways to bring them into shared communities.

Mike Galsworthy, chair of the European Movement

Rafael Behr rightly pointed out the immense struggle Keir Starmer will have in overcoming Nigel Farage. Farage has charisma, is an expert at playing on the public mood that distrusts mainstream politicians and uses immigration as a leitmotif. It chimes with people’s prejudices, but not with how citizens such as me are grateful for migrant carers’ work for elderly relatives.

Behr is right. Starmer and his colleagues must come out fighting. They need to stress that Farage and his motley crew have not governed yet. Starmer should also emphasise how the government is shortening NHS waiting lists and that putting VAT on private school fees demonstrates he is not just governing for the better off. If the UK is part of a European army that acts as a peacekeeping force in Ukraine, that will surely show Farage, who has professed admiration for Vladimir Putin, in his true light.

It will not be easy since, unlike Tony Blair in 1997, Labour has received a parlous economic inheritance.

David Rimmer, Hertford Heath, Hertfordshire

Democracy’s dark money

Interference in British politics by Elon Musk (“The modern Henry Ford”, March) is taking an increasingly ominous turn, with Tommy Robinson’s supporters claiming he has helped pay Robinson’s legal bills. But what is more ominous is Keir Starmer’s government failing to take action to stop Musk’s money flowing into British party politics. There is nothing to be done to stop him financing Robinson as an individual. But it is very different for political parties.

Musk’s offer of $100m to Reform UK seems to be on hold, but the loopholes which allow wealthy individuals to pump in huge financial resources to selected parties can be stopped by the law and by giving the Electoral Commission extra power. In 2024, Labour suggested it would take steps to guard the integrity of party politics, yet this defence mechanism is nowhere to be seen.

Trevor Fisher, Stafford

We need some form of direct democracy in the UK as political parties are heavily reliant on support from powerful corporations and financial conglomerates. These entities, however, are unlikely to fund parties that seek to radically reform or regulate them. This creates a paradox. A party focused on such reform would need to depend on small individual memberships and donations, but if the major parties did that now they wouldn’t survive. The current system is structured to ensure its own continuation, as the most influential sectors essentially decide which political parties succeed.

Louis Shawcross, County Down

For fact’s sake

Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to end Meta’s partnership with US fact checkers (“Fact-checking is imperfect but essential”, Prospect online, February), in response to what is clearly a very new political environment, has left fact checkers scratching our heads.

We’re proud of our collaboration with Meta’s third-party fact-checking programme in the UK. It enables organisations like Full Fact to add context and credible information directly to thousands of posts across Meta platforms. In our six years of collaboration, we’ve checked 2,596 cases that included misleading, faked or potentially harmful posts. It has been a valuable way to reach users directly and advise them about what they’re seeing in their feed. It’s been at the heart of our strategy for a more accurate online environment.

Until recently, Meta agreed. It applauded our success and recognised that users want to be able to trust what they see on Meta platforms. Its explanation of the changes is that it is merely shifting to a more trusted community notes model. But replacing experts trained to establish factual accuracy with a community notes model designed to reach consensus risks skewing information towards what some users think rather than what the evidence says.

This backwards step comes at a fateful moment. Technological developments, including generative AI, mean that it has never been easier to create fake content and spread it far and wide. At the same time, Zuckerberg’s charge of political bias has opened the door to equating fact-checking with censorship—a door which elected populists are now striding through.

At Full Fact, we believe everyone has the right to free speech based on good information. We’re first responders in the information space and our work prevents bad information from harming people—whether in the choices they make about their health or by defusing misinformation that could cause unrest on the streets. We’ve been proud to work with Meta for that goal—and we’ll keep going with or without them.

Chris Morris, chief executive of Full Fact

The scourge of asbestos

My thoughts are with Charlotte Bailey, whose moving article (“Suffocated by silence”, March) brought back memories of my dad’s demise from mesothelioma in 2014. He was also an accountant—for the South Eastern Electricity Board (Seeboard) from the 1950s to the 1990s—and had worked in buildings where renovations were taking place at the time (presumably with asbestos installation or destruction). Seeboard is no longer trading and, despite actions from his old union to sue, we had no firm proof of where he may have inhaled any toxic deadly asbestos particles. I sense the lawyers knew what to ask so that they could weasel out of settlement, as it is always difficult if not impossible to establish the exact place of inhalation.

It’s an awful disease to see someone go through, and also knowing that they will die in such a short space of time.

Martin Banham, via the website

Can’t buy me happiness

Happiness (Philosopher-at-large, March) certainly doesn’t come through acquiring ever more and ever more expensive possessions—though having “enough” of them (whatever that may mean in practice) undoubtedly helps. But Sasha Mudd’s message is what anyone given a Christian upbringing will have been taught almost since birth: love your neighbour as yourself. Easier said than done of course, and not all try very hard in the first place, and not all who do try succeed. But it is a message well worth repeating.

Richard Burnett-Hall, via the website

Xi’s silent war on Russia

Trump’s belief that China is to be feared as the rising power goes hand-in-hand with an incomprehension of how China controls its proxies. The most lumbering of these is Russia (“Putin’s war without end”, Prospect online, February). It is in China’s interest to keep conflict going between Russia and Ukraine, and Xi will keep Putin supplied with just enough military hardware and other support to keep his attention on the west.

China and Russia see divisions between European countries as beneficial, and Trump fleeing from Nato commitments there leaves China as the most powerful influencer in Europe through massive investment and cheap imports. Watch for the growth of Chinese language schools over the coming decades!

Trump with his tariffs is losing South America (Brazil’s biggest trading partner is China), Africa (Chinese infrastructure investment there greatly exceeds anything from the US) and now Europe, to Xi. If Trump is right about China threatening to become the most dominant power in the second half of the 21st century, he is doing everything he can to ensure that it does, starting with his flight from Ukraine. Russians here in Cyprus (who are not necessarily great Putin supporters) view Trump as a classic bully to his weaker neighbours and a coward when it comes to facing China.

Sheherezade, via the website

It seems clear that America is now as unreliable a negotiator as Putin. There is little evidence that Trump actually understands any of the major issues in Europe or cares much about them. Europe has to divest itself of the conviction that American support for Ukraine is essential for Putin to lose. In fact, Europe can generate a lot of help for Ukraine and is a vastly better repository of military understanding than Russia, which has proven to be singularly inept. I think Europe, including the UK, has no choice but to commit to the defence of Ukraine regardless of the attitudes in an increasingly unreliable and unpredictable Washington. The frozen $300bn of Russian assets should be accessed to benefit Ukraine and ensure Europe has a reliable bulwark against Putin and Russia.

Robert Graham, via the website

Slavery’s legacy is real

Nigel Biggar’s anti-reparations argument (“The case for slavery reparations doesn’t add up”, Prospect online, January) draws on a populist post-9/11 anti-Islam trope about early modern Mediterranean -slavery that is breathtaking in its sophistry. The bromide around “Barbary” slavery—the term is an enduring racial pejorative—was initiated by US and British authors keen to serve a ready market for popular titles framing history through a white lens (see Giles Milton’s White Gold) and announcing Mediterranean piracy as a precursor to 21st-century Islamist terrorism (Robert C Davis, Muslim Masters, Christian Slaves). Reducing complex and violent geopolitical phenomena involving competing blocs, then and now, to simple matters of race and faith is ahistorical and anti-intellectual, of course, yet it is essential to both the precursor trope and the equivalence Biggar moots between North African and transatlantic slavery.

It follows that, since 95 per cent of the victims of North African slavery were Subsaharan, black Africans were overwhelmingly the victims of both Atlantic and Mediterranean slavery. North African states today are attempting to deal in their own ways with the 21st-century anti-black racism that is the legacy of slavery there; reparations discourse, multi-sided as it is at its best, is part of our response (see Not so Black and White by Kenan Malik; Britain’s Slavery Debt by Michael Banner). Such discourse revolves primarily around the modern consequences of slavery, rather than the historical fact of slavery itself. And while it is perfectly true that the 19th-century efforts of the Royal Navy mitigated the modern consequences of slavery, the latter exist for many black people today nonetheless.

Eric Joyce, Darwin College, University of Cambridge

Feline blue

Kiran Sidhu (Rural life, March) must never let any farmer—or any non-farmer—make her feel that being broken-hearted by the absence of a deceased or missing cat is in any way strange, silly or irrational. “Don’t break your heart, not over a cat” might be useful advice in the short term (being a practical and welcome alternative to those mawkish offerings that are guaranteed to make the inconsolable feel even worse) but it is ultimately pointless advice; it would only be heeded by someone who themselves only tolerated cats as long as they kept the rats and the mice at bay.

I’m sometimes tempted to envy people who don’t like cats, or the unsentimental farm-dwelling types, because they are free of the unavoidable worry and stress that is a part of truly caring about them; they are never burdened with the inevitable heartache that follows when a feline friend dies or disappears. Once you’ve been made aware of the beguiling inscrutability and admirable self-sufficiency of cats you can never not care about them. But you can also be reassured by their remarkable survival skills—the latter being how I know that Kiran Sidhu very likely hasn’t seen the last of her wandering companion.

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth