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Your support makes all the difference.I can’t believe there’s a petition to sack MP Mark Field – all he did was violently assault a peaceful protester.
What if she had been an 8-foot tall, axe-wielding maniac? No one would be making a fuss would they? But, just because the person he slammed against a pillar and marched from the room by the neck was half his size and clearly part of a peaceful demonstration, Mark Field is being criticised instead of worshipped as the hero he clearly is.
It makes me sick. I mean, I’m sure he would’ve been just as brave were the protester a 16-stone meathead in combat gear.
That Field gave a speech to parliament, just weeks ago, asserting his pride at helping women “feel safe and protected in the work that they do so they are able to speak very freely, and to be part of the change that we all wish to see”, shows that his actions were motivated by his perceived “need to act decisively to close down the threat to the safety of those present” and had nothing to do with the personal frustration he feels towards climate change protesters. Frustrations which he expressed to Met police commissioner, Cressida Dick, when he wrote demanding that she “take a much firmer grip” on those “protesting in this antisocial way”. At least Mark Field was willing to heroically take that “firmer grip” of a protester’s neck, even if the police weren’t.
And the fact that the person he accosted was a female in a red dress with a sash identifying her as a climate change protester (not a group known for violence) shouldn’t make any difference. Give that man a knighthood I say.
Ieuan Jehu
Address supplied
So Mark Field would have us believe that he tackled a female protestor at the recent Mansion House dinner because he thought she might be armed.
What complete nonsense. I suspect he tackled her because he knew that she was a woman and he was bigger than her. I suspect he would not have done anything if she had been a man.
His were not the actions of a hero, but of a bully.
Richard Barlow
Wotton Under Edge, Gloucestershire
Bullingdon Club boys
On my 22nd birthday in 1972 we went to The Trout near Oxford for a candlelit dinner. When we arrived we found the dining room trashed. The barman apologised: “We had the Bullingdon Club in last night.” We were mystified. “Did you call the police?” He shrugged. “Who will pay for all the damage?” we asked. He sighed. “Their dads will be here on Monday morning with their cheque books.”
And now they’re trashing the country.
Jenny Willan
Devon
True democracy?
Very roughly, the Labour party now has 500,000 members, the Lib Dems 105,000, and the Greens 70,000. The opinions of the other 40-odd million of the electorate are unknown.
The Conservatives have 160,000 members. These self-selected few are about to choose our new prime minister. Both candidates have declared their willingness to bring the UK out of the EU at the end of October without a deal, in spite of their party's stating after the 2016 referendum that reaching a deal would be quick and easy.
Let us not insult banana republics by comparing ourselves to them.
Susan Alexander
South Gloucestershire
Not really a Northern Powerhouse
Why do ministers like Jake Berry always trumpet the fact that they are spending “the most ever in history” as some sort of achievement? Perhaps as a minister with his expense allowances, etc, he has never been shopping, bought petrol or lived in the real world; so it may come as a shock to him, but EVERYTHING has increased in price. To claim that more is being spent is to be expected. What I’d be more interested in is whether it is enough? Probably not.
Bearing in mind that London has spent £13bn and counting for 73 miles of underground, the £13bn for the north seems like a pittance.
On another note, can we start the HS2 in Newcastle or Berwick-upon-Tweed (the real north) rather than in London? That way it would guarantee being completed throughout the whole country, as ministers and government always seem to run out of cash for national projects around the Watford gap or, in this case, Birmingham.
Ken Twiss
Cleveland
No benefit of the doubt
Your Saturday editorial [on Trump making the right move to call off the airstrikes against Iran] strikes me as unbelievably naive. It is surely infinitely more likely that the whole scenario of public announcements was worked out before any public statements were made, to give the most threatening message with the least cost rather than the sequence of Trump changing his mind when he belatedly found out the estimated death toll being what actually happened.
Tony Baker
Address supplied
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