Pick of the week’s correspondence

Black lives in full colour To The Times

Further to “The real story behind Bridgerton’s black star”, black people in Britain during the long 18th century were not “almost all living in abject poverty”. For my doctoral thesis I compiled a database that now has 5,000 entries:

I am still using primary sources to discover what was actually happening, rather than what too many academics have assumed from published works.

Most of the black people in England and Wales were, like the white population, getting by. The poor came to the attention of the authorities because they needed help, but literally thousands of black people did not: they simply disappeared into hard-working obscurity as shopkeepers, estate managers, ministers of religion and parish officials, etc. Their stories need to be remembered as well as the more sensational ones.

Dr Kathleen Chater, author, Untold Histories

Rwanda: too crowded... To the Financial Times

If the UK is supposedly too full to accept immigrants, why send them instead to a country with almost twice our population density? According to UN estimates, Rwanda has some 538 people per sq km, while the UK has 282.

Ian Thompson, London

...and too corrupt To The Times

Britain says it trusts Rwanda to treat refugees humanely. As a Rwandan with decades of political and diplomatic experience, my view is that such trust is unfounded. Notwithstanding Rwanda’s history, the world must be under no illusion as to the truth of President Kagame’s regime. Rwanda is hostage to his dictatorship and is more akin to a detention camp than a state where the people are sovereign. So egregious are rights abuses there that Britain last year joined international criticism of unlawful killings, torture and other violence. Months later, it seems all this has been forgotten.

Writing now as a refugee, rootless yet constantly under threat of retaliation by a spiteful regime, I feel for outsiders who battle to reach Britain only to face rendition to the Kagame state. For those poor souls it will be a case of out of the frying pan...

Dr Theogene Rudasingwa, former ambassador of Rwanda to the US, Washington DC

Britain: too crowded? To The Times

James Kirkup (“The good migration news ministers try to hide”) overlooks the wider, non-economic consequences of high levels of population growth. The issuing last year of the 240,000 work-related visas that he mentions requires the building of a city the size of Wolverhampton to accommodate those people.

If, as he claims, people are “relaxed” about “immigration” per se, they are certainly not relaxed about the consequences of rapid population growth for our countryside, food security, social services and social cohesion – witness the impact of proposals for house building on the Chesham and Amersham by-election.

Polling in January by Focaldata that I commissioned suggests that 71% are concerned about these future population increases. To answer these concerns there is an urgent need for a transparent, evidence-based debate on the inevitable tradeoffs resulting from expected changes in our population. Lord Hodgson of

Astley Abbotts

Tennis’s unforced error To The Guardian

Russian and Belarusian tennis players are private individuals, no more responsible for the Russian government’s illegal invasion of Ukraine than

I was responsible for our government’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. Many Russian oligarchs are deeply complicit in Vladimir Putin’s regime and are, like national sports teams, liable to being sanctioned. But the recent action of the All England Lawn Tennis Club smacks of blind populism at best, and racism at worst. Peter Nicklin, Newcastle upon Tyne, House of Lords

A question of trust To The Times

Roger Jobson suggests that the Prime Minister and his staff were enjoying a deserved glass of wine after working so hard, and that the subsequent investigations and debate are a waste of parliamentary time. If this were the case, then the PM should have argued the point from the dispatch box. Instead he repeatedly denied that the events took place.

Where strong evidence exists that the PM has misled the Commons it must be investigated, because the assumption that ministers are telling the truth to the House underpins our democracy. To suggest efforts to uncover the truth are a waste of time is to miss the point: it is the lack of truthfulness at the dispatch box that wastes both our time and our trust.

David Jefferies, Worthing, West Sussex

A Perfect match To The Daily Telegraph

My wife’s surname was Perfect. We’ve often been told we missed an opportunity when we married in 1970 – but what a name to live up to as the years passed by.

Phil Boddy, Falmouth, Cornwall