Democracy but from whose viewpoint?

MIKE Butterfield is correct. I recognise that we have left the EU and the concern is for the terms of our future trade with the EU.

But I do wonder what is his definition of democracy when he compares the Brexit vote favourably with the aspirations of the Lib Dems for a voting system that equates the number of MPs elected with the votes for each party.

At the 2019 election, the SNP had 1.2 million votes which were converted to 48 MPs, the Lib Dems had 3.7 million votes that were converted to just 11 MPs.

Does Mike Butterfield consider this to be democratic?

Brexit is over and done with. Suffice it to say the central claim of the Leave campaign was that we would no longer send £350 million a week to the EU – but we have never sent £350 million a week to the EU. Norman Bathurst

Tiverton

We are fighting a war, not messing about

I DEPLORE the inhuman fatalism expressed in Elizabeth Smith’s letter of October 1, recommending that we allow Covid-19 to let rip because it is going to win anyway.

If she had her way, the global effort of the past seven or eight months would have been a total waste of hope, money and time because Nature will do her worst, whatever humanity does to reduce the death toll and the suffering of those who survive the infection, sometimes with disabling symptoms she would probably euthanise to save having to bother with halfbroken people.

The more work we do monitoring the various effects of the virus, the more such suffering will be reduced and lives saved.

I suspect there are several variants of Covid-19 confusing the issue, suggesting twhat it may not be entirely the work of Mother Nature.

Ms Smith appears to me to be the sort of person who would let wild fires burn themselves out and might not bother trying to rescue victims from a burning building because they are going to die, anyway, sooner or later.

She probably wants to let global warming do its worst without trying to prevent the extinction of a million species, while every climatic belt moves towards the poles where there is a lot less light, because of human ignorance, carelessness and an addiction to luxury living with minimum physical and mental effort.

Instead of buying lasting value we are still spending our spare cash on the passive appreciation of music, entertainment, sport, travel, drugs, gambling, politics, television and social media, hypnotising the population of our increasingly unnatural so-called human beings when, instead of evolving towards government of the people, by the people, for the people (which only happens in Switzerland) democracy is sliding downhill towards huge competing dictatorships with self-perpetuating ‘presidents’ like China, Russia, Belarus and Brazil, soon to be followed by the USA, the EU, India and the ever-subversive Islamic Empire.

I was born during the Battle of Britain and watched daytime dogfights and night air raids with searchlight cones and the sound of ak-ak from the age of three, like millions of fellow boys and girls we still believe that life and freedom are worth fighting for, and that humanity must control its politicians and not the other way around, because most of them cheat us when they can by, for example, the imposition of a drinking curfew on the population but not on Parliament.

Actually, as a former heavy drinker, I think, if alcohol does affect the spread of the virus, alcohol, tobacco and recreational drugs should all be banned, saving us a lot of money until we all get back in control of our own lives.

We are fighting a war, not messing about for the sake of it.

Perhaps we should mobilise everyone who is unemployed and deploy them on reinforcing the police, guarding our shores, building long awaited infrastructure and working on thousands of new inshore fishing boats and farms, producing enough food so we won’t have to buy anything from the EU which will try to use tariffs on food to do what U-boats tried to do between 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945, especially when Germany produces the European Empire’s first lifetime president.