Being rebuffed by Trump is the perfect start to Corbyn’s election campaign

Oh good, Jeremy Corbyn has just received a great endorsement. Donald Trump has said publicly that he is terrible and would be disastrous for Britain.

That should boost Mr Corbyn’s poll ratings considerably.

Penny Little
Great Haseley​

Independent columnist Mary Dejevsky has put her finger on one of the most depressing facts about British public life: the widespread belief that our ways of doing things are invariably much better than other nation’s ways (an attitude incidentally that lies at the heart of the Brexit movement). This arrogance in our national character has deep roots in our history.

During the 20th century, as our long slow decline as a dominant economic and political power played out globally, we missed so many opportunities to learn from others. Of course we do still have important traditional strengths and notable successes, but in some aspects of our political, commercial and social life our unwillingness to learn from others has sometimes seriously hampered our ability to modernise this country.

One important area of social policy not on Mary Dejevsky’s list of shortcomings is penal policy. We have the largest prison population in western Europe and rising; housed often in massive, crumbling, drug-ridden, degrading Victorian conditions. Rather than replacing these retributive institutions with smaller, more humane prisons where rehabilitation would be the keynote policy for the majority of inmates, the Tories want more prison-building, not as a way to create a radically reconfigured new system with far fewer inmates overall, but simply to increase numbers in a prison population that is already far too large.

Across Europe and Scandinavia there are plenty of examples of how to reduce prisoner numbers through more enlightened social policies and better more rehabilitative offender management. In the longer term this could achieve a significant reduction in the costs of policing and managing the prison estate. Do we have the political humility to look at these alternatives?

Gavin Turner
Norfolk

Despite your valid criticisms of John Bercow, he resolutely stood up for the rights of parliament against a domineering executive, applying creative solutions where necessary to achieve the right outcome. In this he reminds me of the outstanding law reformer Lord Denning.

Ordinarily the speaker is elevated to the House of Lords on retirement. Bercow certainly deserves this on merit never mind tradition.

If Boris is PM on 13 December can we assume he will not display the same petulance he showed to the retiring Father of the House, but will recommend a peerage in the normal way?

John Harrison
Guildford

It would good to see more high-profile people snubbing those politicians with whose policies they disagreed, even if it were criticised as rude.

Javid comes up, yet again, with the tired old trope bleating about his father driving buses. So what? He seems incapable of opening his mouth without mentioning it.

My wife’s father was a bricklayer and she became a professor at a Russell Group university but never trots this out to show how clever she is... unlike our dear chancellor.

Anthony Ingleton​
Sheffield

Boris Johnson is preparing his oven-ready Brexit deal for the microwave.

But you can’t cook a goose in a microwave.

Dr John Doherty
Stratford-upon-Avon

The Independent has published two letters from Liberal Democrat members who would prefer a second referendum to the party’s Revoke Article 50 policy. As a Lib Dem member myself, my question to them (and the one which would be posed by every interviewer to every Lib Dem candidate) is what option would be on your referendum ballot paper alongside remaining in the EU? If it was the PM’s latest “deal”, and the result went the wrong way, how could a pro EU Lib Dem government possibly implement it? The Labour Party’s strategy on this is to say that they would negotiate a new deal and then campaign against it. I think the Lib Dem policy is more honest, more practical and more succinct on the doorstep and in the television studio.

William Barnes
Glastonbury