It’s time to show Brussels your mettle, Mrs May

I can’t help but admire the Prime Minister. Through all the self-serving criticism and sniping from her own benches, Theresa May has remained professional and polite. What I would like to see now is her in attack mode.

Remind Macron that france is a mess and will be asking for part of our £39billion very soon, and remind the rest of the Eu that Italy is also in a mess, and will be holding out the begging bowl, just as Greece and other countries have done in the past.

If they want our money, they need to stop being difficult and sign up to her terms, or no deal and no £39billion. John Mcgill, dumfries. MUCH as I admire Theresa May’s stamina, she is entirely to blame for the situation she is in.

The Prime Minister has had well over a year to discuss her Brexit plan with her party and include input from opposition parties.

The public have been kept in the dark until last week on the details of her backstop plan for Ireland and this was wrong, irresponsible and disrespectful.

It must be obvious to her that the Brussels mob have set out from the very beginning to frustrate our Brexit plans and they continue to do so as a lesson to any other country attempting to follow. She is being bullied. Thomas Forsyth, Wishaw, Lanarkshire. ALWAYS quick to condemn abuse ‘from all sides’, nicola Sturgeon seems to think it’s acceptable to call Mrs May a coward. When the first Minister stoops so low, no wonder lesser politicians take it as a green light to be abusive.

a. pearson, glasgow If the SNP are ‘shaking with rage’ (Letters) over losing the Brexit vote, then it’s a taste of how the public feel over the ongoing chaos in our schools.

JIM BREWER, Edinburgh.

Give it a rest, Gary

If Pseudo-intellectual celebrities such as Gary Lineker love the Eu so much, they should move to Brussels. Perhaps they should become Eu politicians.

The reasons why many people voted to leave the Eu don’t directly affect mega-rich celebrities. If they get fed up with Britain, they can escape to their other homes abroad.

They also have interests outside Britain, which is the real reason why the wealthy are so worried by Brexit, not the socialist garbage they keep spouting about immigrants and refugees.

Celebrities should shut up and leave British politics to those who live in the real world and have to suffer the consequences of every government policy every day. Stefan Badham,

Portsmouth.

Christian celebration

IT’S only right that Christians should be allowed to celebrate the true meaning of Christmas in their own, peaceful way – as other faiths celebrate their holy days.

non-believers would then be free to have their own pagan festival.

The red-suited gent, his elves, red-nosed reindeer, grottos and all the other mythical trappings of American commercialism could then be moved to another date – perhaps to that great American shrine of greed, Black friday.

They could call it Xcessmas – and get the whole nasty business over in one fell swoop!

J FERRIER, arbroath, angus.

Rudolph’s relatives

I HAVE to disagree with Simon Barnes (Mail), who says reindeer and caribou are the same animal.

I lived alongside both breeds in the Mackenzie river delta in Canada in the early fifties and they’re quite different. You can herd reindeer, but caribou run wild. If they had been the same, the u.S. government need not have imported a herd of reindeer from Lapland in the Thirties, along with Lapps to teach the local natives how to herd them, and Canada would not have had to buy a surplus herd from Alaska in the forties. In both cases, there were caribou in abundance.

COLIN MACISAAC, Bexhill-on-Sea, E. Sussex.

Fuelling the debate

In Louise Atkinson’S piece on the trials and tribulations of having an electric car (Mail), she states that she feels miserable every time she fills up with poison personally, ous fossil fuels. Later in the article, however, her concern for the planet takes a backward step as she then drives from the Cotswolds to Gatwick to, I assume, board a plane.

The pollution from the plane will be considerably more than from her original car. A Boeing 747 burns about 11 tons an hour of those nasty, poisonous fossil fuels.

I hope, by the way, that the firm that fixed her charging point came in an electric vehicle.

JOHN WILLIAMS, Flintshire.

First-class folly

An ITEM in Money Mail advises prudent readers to send Christmas cards by second-class post, as this would save £4.50 on stamps for 50 cards compared with first-class.

More to the point, people posting cards first class in the weeks before Christmas are, at best, risking the price/speed differential not being honoured and, at worst, just throwing their money away.

At this time of year, first-class and second-class cards and letters are often jumbled together in sorting offices with no prioritisation.

I have witnessed this as both a former casual and staff employee of Royal Mail, even though the company has officially denied it.

F. HARVEY, hotwells, Bristol.