Serena Williams may be right about sexism, but she should have set a better example

Serena Williams may be the greatest women’s tennis player in the world but her behaviour during the US Open was profoundly disappointing. She may well be right in reminding us that male tennis players receive a little more slack for court transgressions, but Williams’ tantrums were over the top.

Character is defined how we respond to pressure. Her behaviour also brought out the worst in the spectators who started booing Naomi Osaka, who maintained her composure under intense pressure and was clearly the winner. Bravo, Naomi.

Jagjit Singh

Los Altos, California

If it is “realistic” to expect a deal by November, as Michel Barnier is reported to have said, the plethora of politicians, organisations and influential individuals who want to block Brexit (whether they admit to it or not) had better stop fannying around, join up their acts and do something effective pretty damn quickly. Or else, “end of”, as Brexit supporters often say in their endearing way.

Patrick Cosgrove

Bucknell

Figures on the left are apparently outraged that Chuka Umunna used the phrase “call off the dogs” in his plea to Jeremy Corbyn to try to halt the Militant (or Momentum, as they call themselves these days) takeover of the Labour Party.

“We are not dogs!” they protest in unison. Oh, do grow up: “Call off the dogs” is a common figure of speech (unlike, to pick out a contemporary example entirely at random, “strap on a suicide vest”), and pretending to be ignorant of this fact in an effort to manufacture faux outrage is childish and rather pathetic – presumably intended to draw attention away from the fact that the hard left is going out of its way to pre-emptively lose the next election through their insistence on what they see as the political purity of all candidates.

For a party trying to distance itself from allegations of racism, this insistence on ideological purity is probably unwise at best. Labour should be wiping the floor with the Tories right now but, instead, they are choosing to wipe the floor with themselves.

Some of us want nothing more than to get the current Tory administration out: it is both incompetent and uncaring, and is destroying the very fabric of our country in its hell-bent pursuit of free market economics and Brexit-at-any-cost. Faced with this massively open goal, the Labour Party is nonetheless too busy consuming itself with in-fighting to even present a coordinated opposition.

If Jeremy Corbyn is content for this state of affairs to continue – and it seems that he is – then we must acknowledge that being leader of the opposition (and an ineffective one at that) is the limit of his ambition. It is time for him to go, for the sake of his party and for the sake of the country.

Julian Self

Milton Keynes

There has been something troubling me about the case of Mohamed Bangoura, the six-year-old boy who was stranded in Belgium. The Home Office stated that Mohamed’s passport was revoked in March. When Theresa May was head of the Home Office she implemented an anti-trafficking strategy. I quote: “Border staff are trained in child protection issues and human trafficking; multi-agency child safeguarding and investigation teams are in place at the UK’s major ports.” (From page 17 of that report.)

It seems, then, we are only trying to stop trafficking inward. Otherwise, how was a small child on a revoked passport allowed to leave the UK without a challenge at the border? As his mother has no passport, presumably he was not travelling with his parent.

A troubling question remains in my mind: does the government care about trafficking out of the country, or just inward? This was a failure in security and child protection – either that or Mohamed’s passport was in order.

Helen Rawden

Address supplied

To correct Will Gore (11 September edition), there is nothing contradictory about the TUC arguing in favour of a four-day week when many sectors, such as the police, are underresourced. In fact, more people would want to join the police, and hence more staff would be available to the public, if they were paid full-time for four days’ work.

Angelos Sepos

Devon

Too many barriers are being put in the way of foreign students coming to the UK to pursue their studies at universities or schools. The benefits of welcoming them are numerous, and never more so at a time when opportunities for our own students to interact with other nationalities are under threat as Brexit makes Britain less and less attractive. They make a significant contribution to our economy. Crucially, after years of working with students from overseas, I know from first-hand experience that if they are educated here they are far more likely to form friendships, build partnerships and trade and work with our country in the future.

Our education system is one of the best in the world. It provides outstanding opportunities for us as a nation, financially and socially. While we battle to attract students, government policy seems determined to drive these students elsewhere in the world, to the detriment of us all.

Will Phelan, principal, Stamford Endowed Schools

Exeter