If Tories insist Big Ben bongs on Brexit day, Remainers can find a symbolic gesture of their own

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Some Conservatives are very concerned about Big Ben and its ability to ‘bong’ us out of the EU (EPA)

Leave-backing Tory MPs have called for Big Ben to chime on the day the UK leaves the European Union.

I propose an equally symbolic counter protest. At a designated time, let’s say 10pm, all those – here and across Europe – who remain opposed to Brexit, switch their lights off for a full hour. That’s if Brexit ever happens, of course.

Patrick Cosgrove
Bucknell

Orwell predicted the future well

Life in the western world today differs markedly from what George Orwell suggested it might be like in 1984 but there are also many ominous similarities and we should remember that his model for the lying Ministry of Truth was Winston Churchill’s wartime Ministry of Information.

Deceptive “newspeak” terms are in widely used in our media; his “hate-sessions” replaced by an endless array of hyper-emotional propaganda; “unacceptable” views suppressed, not in the crude, heavy-handed way described in 1984, but much more subtly and insidiously.

Today in fields such as climate change there is an orthodoxy which the bien pensant accept without question and while it’s not actually forbidden to be sceptical, any real challenge is effectively silenced and no highbrow periodical or university campus gives it a fair hearing.

The Charlottesville riot exposed an Orwellian “history scrubbing” of the great Confederate general Robert E Lee and I was pleased to see former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice denounce this “wiping out of our history; sanitising it to make some people feel better”.

She said: “I believe we must keep our history before us. I don’t want to rename things that were named for slave owners. I want us to have to look at those names, and realise what they did, and tell our kids what they did and for them to have a sense of their own history.”

Rev Dr John Cameron
St Andrews

Socialism is continuously misinterpreted

The essence of socialism is democracy within the workplace. That’s each employee having an equal say in the production and distribution of products, sourcing of raw materials, and everything else relevant to the business. Equating socialism with the former Soviet Union and countries with centrally-planned economies is just asinine and deliberately misleading. It’s the old chestnut of “Socialism has been tried and it has failed.” What country ever had a majority of businesses where there was a democratic say for all the employees?

It’s not about storming the Winter Palace either. The state will always prevail over those sort of tactics. Transitioning from our present economic system run by private tyrannies to one where democracy was extended into the workplace would be a real revolution. What we think of revolution is really a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” type of conjuring trick. Democracy within the workplace is what the establishment fears most and for good reason.

Louis Shawcross
Northern Ireland

Do shops think women only carry lipstick in their bag?

I recently tried to buy a laptop bag in the ladies section of a large department store. Had I been after a small bag for my phone and lipstick, or a large tote bag for my shopping, I’d have been in luck. However, nothing for a laptop.

So I took myself downstairs to the men’s department where there was a choice of 12 different laptop bags. Is it coz us gurls dont no nuffink and cant werk compooters?

Annabelle Curran
Northampton

We need to fight against neoliberalism

Mythology teaches us that humankind has been in a similar position before. Today the insatiable satanic dragon that demands its daily sacrifice of all that is most fair and good in society is insidious neoliberalism: a human invention of a market economy as a way of reordering social reality and of rethinking our status as individuals.

Neoliberalism shackles our minds to consumeristic self-interest and competition for scarce rewards, and away from humanistic values such as public spiritedness, conscience and the longing for justice.

Knowledge of this may be the trusty steed that takes us to the place of battle but it is up to the people themselves to emulate St George.

Geoff Naylor
Winchester

Robert Fisk’s piece says it all about Brexit

Please send Theresa May and her cabinet a copy of Robert Fisk’s article (What the death of an Irishman who lost his life fighting for Britain can tell us about the stupidity of Brexit). It says it all.

Noelle Murphy – Irish immigrant, living in Scotland, European and Internationalist (not a little Englander)