We don’t need second-rate buffoonery
From: Ian Richardson, Railway Street, Beverley.
PRIME Minister’s Questions has become compulsive viewing for me each Wednesday lunchtime, certainly since Sir Keir Starmer became Leader of the Opposition (The Yorkshire Post, July 16).
Last week, in the unrehearsed manner of a really intelligent politician, he destroyed the Prime Minister’s almost every utterance with “this is just such rhetorical nonsense”.
We are facing two deep crises – the existential damage being done by the pandemic, interwoven with the self-inflicted chaos likely to result from Brexit.
When we need a statesman to lead and unite we get a clown, seeking to play to the gallery with mechanical, over-rehearsed responses that at best deceive and divide or poor gags such as Starmer having “more briefs than Calvin Klein”.
Of course, neither the virus nor the huge consequences of a no-deal Brexit will respond to such cheap, meaningless, second-rate buffoonery, more befitting a student common room than the House of Commons.
I have to accept that the Conservatives have a clear democratic right to govern, yet each week PMQs is brutally exposing the painful truth that Boris Johnson is not the answer for these troubled times.
From: John Van der Gucht, Clayton Hall Road, Cross Hills, Bradford.
AT last Wednesday’s PMQs the PM again provided more proof, if any more was needed, of his unfitness for his high office, joking about briefs – underpants – in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic in response to Sir Keir Starmer.
Then joking about Starmer’s legal background with further mention of briefs.
Gosh! His back-up team must have chortled when they thought those up!
Of course, Boris Johnson was never a lawyer, let alone a barrister.
He would have been quickly given the shove due to his unfamiliarity with the truth and his inability to command his brief, let alone his “briefs”!
From: Paul Rouse, Main Street, Sutton upon Derwent.
IT was a misguided political decision to entrust major elements of our communications infrastructure to a Chinese company, namely Huawei.
Having said that, I believe it would also be wrong to allow any American-owned organisation to become too deeply enmeshed in any of our sensitive systems.
We all know how companies like Apple and Microsoft can be with users and customers.
Once someone is hooked on to their product, usually by buying it, they are constantly bullied into accepting “updates” and software reorganisations designed to give a little in exchange for a lot more personal data.
Most young people accept that as the way of the world, as they happily expose their lives on social media.
I wonder how many people, young and old, realise that there is now a file on everyone.
So, who can we trust to provide our essential infrastructure?
The answer seems to be no one but ourselves. So between now and 2027, we had better develop the capability to do it.