Karen Bradley is utterly incompetent – she must resign as Northern Ireland secretary

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Splendid article by Patrick Cockburn, eruditely explaining among other things the “border “ issue which many people still do not grasp.

To make matters even worse, you only have to take a look at our secretary of state for Northern Ireland, one Karen Bradley. Not long after her appointment, she said that she did not realise that the good people of said province nearly always vote along sectarian divisions!

This woeful lack of knowledge – I knew this when I was at school – must not have crossed the mind of Ms May when she made the appointment. More worryingly, she may not have cared.

Bradley since went on to say: “Security-force killings during the troubles in Northern Ireland were not crimes.” Even if this was true – it is not – how on earth does she believe that such an inflammatory statement is at all helpful?

This must not be allowed to reach crisis-level: we need Article 50 cancelled, relations with Northern Ireland politicians returned to normal, and a decent secretary of state!

Robert Boston
Kingshill​

Don't take the money

Behind the miasma of Theresa May’s mayhem, Labour MPs are being picked off by a government bent on destruction. To force a passable pact, funding has been offered to "rejuvenate" hard hit, predominantly Leave-voting areas with Labour MPs.

Yes, everything is a mess, there is no leadership and anyone even trying to pay attention probably has a permanent migraine but surely it’s not too much to ask folk to cast minds back just a few months to the Nissan fiasco in Sunderland. We were told Nissan said they’d stay. There were surreptitious talks with this government. Some believe political inducements were made then. It doesn’t matter.

Nissan are going.

Amanda Baker
Edinburgh

Listen to the experts

We now have three current and former heads of the Metropolitan Police saying that a drastic reduction in police numbers is a major factor in the rise in knife crime. Three highly professional individuals who have risen to the top of their profession with an intimate knowledge of the problem. On the other hand we have the totally unqualified and incompetent Theresa May, who both as home secretary and prime minister has been responsible for the reduction in police numbers. I think I know who I’d tend to believe.

G Forward
Stirling

We can not be complacent on women's rights

International Women's Day offers us really exhilarating opportunity to shed light on the heartbreaking hurdles faced by women worldwide. Women and children are always on the receiving end of domestic violence, knife crimes, terrorism, human trafficking, climate change, illiteracy, gender inequality, the gender pay gap, forced displacement and armed conflicts. Such incidents do not only occur in developing countries.

Denmark prides itself on being a tolerant champion of gender equality; yet has an abysmal record of reporting, investigating and prosecuting cases of sexual harassment and rape towards women. Hasn't time come to free ourselves from the shackles of indignity and discrimination?

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London NW2

Putin is a threat

Jacob Rees-Mogg has recently stated that delaying Brexit will cause a surge of support for the right-wing extremism of Tommy Robinson. Next, he might propose expelling all Muslim British citizens, as the only way to tackle Robinson’s Islamophobia. As the people have spoken and their will cannot change, if you campaign for a People’s Vote you are branded as undemocratic, or a traitor. Does he not realise that it is this language that has fed into a hate campaign with death threats to MPs? There is a real threat to democracy, across Europe, from a network of extreme or populist movements. Putin’s Russia is often a model: it maintains a façade of democracy, but there is systematic intimidation of any opponents.

If Mr Rees-Mogg cared about counterbalancing political extremism, he would change his language and would come out in support for a big increase in police numbers. We need to fight hate crime as much as knife crime. And I hope he will support the recent proposals by President Macron: we desperately need agencies to fight the fake news and online violent language that underpin these extreme movements. And we need to stop Russian manipulation of election and referendum campaigns. The extreme Brexiteers’ reinvention of Stalin’s “enemy of the people” language is damaging our democracy.

Mr Giuseppe Enrico Bignardi
Durham

The Lakes are not what they seem

I’ve stood breathing deeply on a Lake District hill in late spring or early summer and looked down through tall foxgloves over a broad valley of small and walled lush green fields to a lake glistening in the distance. This is no doubt something like Will Gore’s sense of “perfection”. And yes, at the time, in the sun, with family near, deeply breathing the air, all seemed well on that hill on that day.

But that is not what I firstly remember when I think of the Lakes, sitting at home several years later. Now, the indelible image is of barrenness, enclosure, commercialisation and traffic chaos: the fundamental sense that the wild has been destroyed physically and had its consciousness replaced by an oppressive and pervasive sense of ownership and legalism.

7,000 years ago, most of the land was covered in forest; but in the late Bronze Age, the fellsides and valleys were cleared of trees to make way for grazing animals and growing crops.

A once bountiful landscape of huge forests, teeming wildlife and deep mystery was reduced to the naked orange and grey undulations of nothingness. Wolves, bears, lynx, beavers and aurochs were made extinct until eventually the saddening and solitary golden eagle gave up and died alone as the RSPB watched on. A symbolic last gasp for a dead landscape. Violent men had done their worst, killing plant and animal alike.

The walls of enclosure that stretch over every fellside and valley bottom tell us how violent oppressive lords stole the land, how they compelled backbreaking work at a pittance, how the workers returned home, angry, abused, violent themselves, to wives suffering the violence of poverty and gender oppression.

The hardy villages of the park are now depressingly commercialised traffic bottlenecks.

As well as all this, there are the ghosts of the absent but ever present owners of this "wild" land – the vicious sheep farmers and the bureaucrats who stand for the bellicose park law which constantly iterates ownership of the wild and which informs everything wherever you are.

Men have made the land unwild. Packaged it, ravaged it, stood over it with a writ and snarled in your face. Their ghosts are everywhere you look. Gore loves it. Perfection.

Nick Watson
Liverpool