Tories own issues on race

Sir, – The Conservative party and its supporters are loud in attacking the Labour party for the occasional wrong judgement and slowness of internal procedures in investigating allegations of anti-Semitism.

So it’s interesting to see how the Conservative party deals with the racist element inside its ranks. When London Tories tried in vain to prevent the election of Labour’s statesmanlike London Mayor Sadiq Khan, they ran a campaign soaked in racism and anti-Muslim prejudice.

In Brighton this month, Tories ran a council candidate who had written an article claiming Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech was correct. And in Lancashire when a Conservative Councillor in Pendle retweeted comments portraying Asian people as dogs, she was merely suspended for three months and then reinstated, turning up at the vote count of local elections this month wearing a blue rosette. That allowed the Conservatives the majority of one needed to take control of Pendle Council, and the chairman of the party nationally tweeted that it was victory for a great team.

It’s no coincidence that this happened in the party of a Prime Minister who refused to take action when a Caribbean man who came to Britain in 1974 to join his mother, an NHS nurse, was told he would not get radiotherapy for his prostate cancer unless he paid £54,000. Or that they then held a vote in the House of Commons allowing them to cover up documents showing Theresa May’s role in the unfair treatment of Windrush generation immigrants. Phil Tate. Craiglockhart Road, Edinburgh.

She accuses him of being a fan of land redistribution, as if this were unreasonable in a country where 50% of the land is owned by fewer than 500 people