Letters: When police turn against the victim

The following letters appear in the 23rd December edition of the Independent

Bijan Ebrahimi with PC Helen Harris in a police cell

I was haunted by your report on the death of Bijan Ebrahimi in 2013, and reading now about the behaviour of the police officers who treated him so cruelly, I feel furiously angry (“Man killed by lynch mob pleaded with police for help”, 22 December). Poor Mr Ebrahimi was comprehensively failed by individuals who are paid by the state to protect the vulnerable from harm.

How desperately hurt and afraid he must have been, and watching his attempts to get his desperation across, in what was for him a foreign language, and his valiant courtesy towards his uniformed tormentors, is piteous and touching.

I have some personal experience, to a much lesser extent, of how so-called law enforcers can behave to anyone they dislike. As a hunt monitor, I am regularly subjected to appalling treatment by hunt followers, while I am trying to gather evidence of illegal hunting.

I am now used to the hard-eyed hostility of police officers who occasionally attend when we request them to do so, their coldness to the monitors contrasting with their laughing chumminess towards the hunters who have treated us so abominably. Interestingly one of the many insults and taunts thrown at us at hunts is that we are “paedophiles”, which is obviously the insult of choice for the vicious and violent.

I would like to offer my deepest sympathy to the family of Mr Ebrahimi, and apologise to them, on behalf of the British public, for this outrage. In my opinion all officers involved in the tormenting of Mr Ebrahimi should be sacked forthwith.

Penny Little

Great Haseley, Oxfordshire

The news that the police officers did not do enough to help Bijan Ebrahimi before he tragically died is very shocking. Mr Ebrahimi was registered disabled. He was killed shortly afterwards. It makes me so sad and my thoughts are very much with his family at this time.

There is something in this horrible story that I can relate to. I have experienced people treating me differently just because I have a learning disability, although thankfully my experiences don’t compare to this outrageous story.

When I was 10 years old, I was told I had a learning disability; people told me I wouldn’t be able to do anything with my life. Yes I had challenges, but I have now proved that I can do the same things as anyone else. For example, I am married and have a good job at Mencap.

People with a learning disability face discrimination every day. Only 6 per cent of people with a learning disability are in paid employment, while 1,200 people with a learning disability are dying avoidably every in year in the NHS.

These are all part of the same problem. This is a failure to understand people with a disability. We are all people, with the same hopes and dreams, and that is the most important thing.

Ciara Lawrence

Mencap spokesperson

London EC1

Tories dream of a minimal society

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s impassioned article (21 December) on the abysmal pay and conditions in the retail sector highlights the reality of the Conservative agenda.

Party apologists regularly parrot the line about “the people’s mandate” as if their paltry 36.9 per cent of the vote at the last election justified the attempted theft of housing association assets, the reductio ad absurdum of our armed forces, emergency services and police, and the continued privatisation of the NHS.

No mention in any manifesto that Chris Grayling would rip up Justice and probation or that Amber Rudd would torch all that annoying environmental stuff vaunted by Dave in his pompous sermons to the rest of the world. It’s government by stealth and darksome George can pursue his dream where “minimum” becomes “minimal” and the sole arbiter is the profit margin.

The Government promotes a doctrine of minimal job security, minimal workplace protection, minimal social housing, and a minimal wage. With retail slavery and social polarisation achieved, any remaining business is then handed over to the highest bidder. Cabinet ministers can retreat to their mansions and duck-houses, job done.

Chris Dawes

London W11

The claim of bullying behaviour by Lucy Allan MP, following on from the allegations against Mark Clark, sums up the sort of people now running the country: arrogant, mean-spirited, cocky, driven by dogma, incompetent, playing fast and loose with the facts and intolerant of dissent or criticism.

At the last election, the Conservatives received less than 25 per cent of the eligible votes and yet they can behave like dictators because of a totally flawed voting system. They are the nastiest, most shambolic bunch I have seen in government in my 75 years and a real threat to democracy, accountability and social cohesion. With them in power until 2020, I really fear for our future.

A Davies

Burton on Trent

School fees buy discrimination

Neil Roskilly, CEO of the Independent Schools Association, writes that any applicant to university should be offered a place based on merit and not through positive discrimination (letter, 21 December). Who could disagree with this?

The trouble comes when you try to determine merit. He believes that examination results should be the only judge. At the same time the schools he represents advertise the fact that if you pay them large sums of money the education they give you will ensure that your child will have more “merit” than a child of similar ability educated in a state school, thus discriminating in favour of the wealthier in our society (who already have a lot of advantages).

There already is positive discrimination in our education system – it is just that it is in favour of the wealthy and the status quo. If Mr Roskilly doesn’t believe this he should stop promoting his fee-paying schools, as they are clearly not adding any value.

Dr Robert Sloss

Bury, Lancashire

How to keep the fizz

A few years ago I was involved in official research to discover exactly how long a bottle of opened champagne would stay fizzy. And the experiment was done both with and without a teaspoon in the bottle neck, to check if it made any difference, and at room and fridge temperatures.

Samuel Muston (On the menu, 16 December) is correct in saying that the defining factor is the fridge. The colder the bottle, the longer the fizz stays. A fridge at 5C will keep a bottle of sparkling wine fizzy for more than three days. And, as Samuel says, the spoon makes absolutely no difference.

What we never discovered though was how the spoon myth came about.

Michael O’Hare

New Scientist

London WC1

Fewer people, cooler planet

Janet Street-Porter discusses whether vegetarian or meat-eating diets are “the best” for saving the planet (19 December). The primary cause of climate change is neither; rather, it is a steadily rising human population on a tiny planet.

The solution is obvious. Whenever and wherever women have been granted the freedom of making their own decisions about their bodies and their own health, populations have begun to stabilise. Let it be.

Alan Bailey

Sandy, Bedfordshire

Tidings of great joy

Even in our world of immediacy where the news is concerned, I am still totally in awe of how the photo of Andy Murray winning the 2015 Sports Personality of the Year award appears on the front page of The Independent (and doubtless other papers) this morning (21 December).

We live in a small town around 12 miles off the M4 and yet that front page was printed after 11pm last night and the paper itself produced and transported to us to be received, via our excellent paper boy, at 07.30 this morning.

Thank you everyone. I relish newspapers, and no app could possibly imitate the delight of sitting down with a coffee, The Independent and the blasted cryptic crossword!

Happy Christmas to all who make our newspaper possible every morning.

Jan Huntingdon

Cricklade, Wiltshire

Stonehenge saved from fanatics

Andreas Whittam Smith (Voices, 17 December) drew some interesting parallels between the current situation in the Middle East and events in the civil war of the 17th century.

Another example, with reminders of Palmyra, is when the parliamentary army, marching to the West Country after the battle of Naseby, passed Stonehenge. The chaplain, Hugh Peter, urged the general, Thomas Fairfax, to demolish “the monuments of heathenism”. Fairfax fortunately had other priorities and left them alone.

Alan Langley

East Farndon, Northamptonshire