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Labour’s victory in Scottish council seat gives the lie to Corbyn’s ‘unelectable’ tag

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

Friday 23 September 2016 14:40 BST
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Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader
Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party leader

So Labour has gained a local council seat in Coatbridge North and Glenboig from the SNP. Congratulations guys, great work – though presumably the Tories or Westminster, or the UK, or Brexit, or Tesco's British strawberries are really responsible?

Martin Redfern

Edinburgh

Fisk is right about Saudi Arabia

Robert Fisk, as usual, brings us analysis that we can get nowhere else in the Western media. His note that the comment made by an Iranian Shia that Saudis “have plunged the world of Islam into civil war” may be exaggerated seems overly generous to them. The strategy they have employed to do exactly this, since 1944, is outlined by Adam Curtis in his film Bitter Lake. The interpretation of the creed the Saudis promote to the rest of the world is the inspiration and authority for Isis and every other fanatical band of Islamist murderers now operating.

CP Henson

Cambridgeshire

Can Mark Zuckerberg save the world?

While I applaud this initiative as deep data-driven, data-mining will undoubtedly help identify methods or processes to cure diseases, an investment of $3bn is hardly likely to do more than scratch the surface of a few disease processes, rather than to cure all diseases. I fear that the guys who have successfully run lucrative money making algorithms have become self-deluded into imagining they have now the ability to unravel the complexities of life itself, which is what would be required. It’s a good initiative but it will be counterproductive if the hype is over-believed.

David Hackett

Address supplied

Our education system needs real reform

We need to take an overall view of our education system, not merely a discussion about whether to create more grammar schools.

To operate the system on the best possible basis, what should be brought into the equation is the continuing problem of our private schools. To say that they distort the educational system is an understatement. For example, about 7 per cent of schoolchildren attend private schools yet their students comprise about 60 per cent of the Oxbridge intake. That sentiment was echoed by Michael Gove as Education Secretary, who said that “the great liberating education offered by our great public schools is overwhelmingly the preserve of the wealthy”. The dominance of the privately educated "in every single sphere of British influence” is “truly shocking” said Sir John Major. And it continues.

No other European country has an educational system that is similar to ours. In Finland, which has an admired system, education is completely state-funded. In France, private education forms a very insignificant proportion of the educational system, mainly via Catholic schools.

I accept there is no silver-bullet solution to this problem. But just to let the present set-up amble along cannot be right. If Ms May is genuine in wanting an improvement in this area, she must institute a real reform of the whole educational system.

David Ashton

Shipbourne

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