Solidarity is missing

I was unsure when reading Bridget Phillipson MP (June 29) whether or not she was in favour of working people in Northern Ireland receiving extra Government funding for a variety of social improvements, especially deserving for a population that saw its infrastructure, (unlike other areas of the UK), badly destroyed by the men and women of violence over many years.

Certainly any semblance of socialist solidarity seemed to be sadly missing, plus a convenient memoryloss of recent political history when it became apparent that her own Labour Party had made overtures to the DUP after past General Election results. So, here, she was criticising the Conservative (and Unionist) Party for something her Labour comrades had attempted themselves.

Of course, any steps nearer power for Mr Corbyn and his clique with their active Irish republican sympathies is the stuff of nightmares for the DUP and their vast number of constituents in Northern Ireland. However, any controversy on this formal agreement was soon matched by Mr Corbyn calling himself a “Prime Minister in waiting” on one hand and at around the same time sacking three of his shadow ministers for their pro-EU stance during a vote in the House of Commons.

It is not without a massive hint of irony that the large audience at Corbyn’s Glastonbury gig during Armed Forces’ Days, will have been addressed by the Labour leader, a life-long euro-sceptic totally at odds with their pro-remain aspirations, who was busy sacking three shadow ministers with whom the festival revellers could most closely relate on the future of Europe.

I wonder too if Bridget Phillipson would have been commenting in the same negative way in her Echo column on any agreement/pact her own Labour Party would have inevitably sought with Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens, had the arithmetic of all their seats in the election been different, thus allowing the ultra-leftist and very dangerous John McDonnell loose on the country’s finances and Diane Abbott installed as a leading Minister.

Now that would have indeed really been, to quote Bridget, a “dodgy” deal. Coun Michael Dixon, Conservative, St Michael’s ward