Godiva pets ban is good news for dogs

WHAT great news on the front page of the Telegraph (Jul 20). So pleased for the dogs.

Having seen a long-haired German Shepherd stood in the sun with no shade and no water, panting its heart and lungs up while the owner stood laughing and joking with a drink in his hand, this has got to be the right decision for all the dogs.

I just hope these people don’t take the dogs and leave them in the car because they’re not allowed in. Name and address supplied

Bring debate back to factual certainty

“THE whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts,” said the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Russell was writing some 80 years or so ago, and yet what he says seems to apply with a piercing and uncomfortable accuracy to much that we have seen, heard and read since the referendum was called for. The pro-Brexiteers, many of whom have contributed to this page, have been so contaminated with this sense of certainty that open-minded discussions have to be silenced. Some of the so-called free press have egged them on by going so far as to call the proponents reasoned debate ‘traitors’. (Mind you, this might give us a clue as to who they want take control when we get it back from the dreaded EU).

Will Hutton, writing in The Observer (Jul 8), suggested that “one of the reasons for our current disastrous plight is that politicians, especially but not only on the Thatcherite Eurosceptic right, have come to feel that what is true is what they believe”.

Belief, according to Wikipedia, is the state of mind in which a person thinks something to be the case with or without there being empirical evidence to prove that something is the case with factual certainty.

But to them, “what matters” writes Hutton, “is an intent to be truthful to their beliefs, even if the gap between what they say and what is true is so yawning anyone else would regard their utterances as bare-faced lies”.

If, like me, you wish to engage in a debate with either pro- or antiBrexiteers of this ilk, you realise that there is little to debate beyond the size of certainty.

“My certainty is bigger than yours because more people share it” is what they appear to be saying.

Well, that argument certainly puts the lid on all others and should makes all feel better.

It also makes me ever so glad that I live in an age in which dogma no longer has the sway it once had. Kevin Cryan Radford

No surprise Brexit secretary resigned

I AM not surprised that the Brexit Secretary David Davis resigned.

Theresa May is a Remainer by instinct and will be more pro-Europe than pro-Brexit. A woman who can’t be trusted. Ian Harris Radford