Politics of anger

SIR – Tim Stanley (Comment, August 29) notes the current obsession with identity politics, which makes debate difficult if not impossible because the political sphere has become so personal.

Too often in today’s climate, emotions have taken over from reason. “Victim” communities are “weaponised”, their plight hurled at political enemies accused of a failure to care enough.

Anger, as Dr Stanley says, has always been present in British politics, but increasingly it is the emotion of choice for the comfortably off who are angry on someone else’s behalf, usually without their knowledge or consent.

Suffering people want answers to their problems, not righteous anger expended by political groupings chiefly to wrong-foot other political groupings. Ann Farmer

Woodford Green, Essex