May’s tears should have been saved for the Windrush generation

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While the tears flowed from Theresa May today, we must remember those whose lives have been wrecked by her premiership and her inability to stand up to the far-right of her party.

Thousands of jobs are at risk at British Steel. Honda are closing a plant in Swindon and countless other people’s positions are being moved abroad because of Brexit.

She was in charge of the Home Office during Windrush. Her refusal to take our fair share of child refugees from Calais despite promises to do so also brought shame on this country.

Finally, she was a female home secretary and prime minister who presided over cuts to funding for women’s refuges. This is no record to be proud of.

Chris Key
Address supplied

May wrote her own political obituary

Theresa May does not deserve an ounce of sympathy. She has written her own political obituary herself. It has been an open secret that she was dragging this country towards the abyss and that her weeks in government were numbered. Yet, despite that she clung on power.

Sadly, she is leaving behind a country bloodied and bruised, riven with staggering levels of child poverty, homelessness and food banks, and divided on social, political and religious fault lines.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob
London NW2

No taxation without representation

Following on from Tom Batchelor’s piece on the large number of EU citizens who were not allowed to cast their vote in yesterday’s election, I want to point out that this frustration is not new. Since arriving in the UK in 1971 I have only been allowed to vote in local elections and in EU elections, as I chose to vote in my country of residence. I never had the vote in a parliamentary election or in the referendum in 2016.

Whatever happened to no taxation without representation?

Having made my married life in this country, studied and worked here, raised my children and paid my taxes here for 48 years, I have been very angry for many years, and am now very, very sad.

Birthe King
London N3 1TD

May accepted a poisoned chalice

Theresa May is receiving much criticism, much of it entirely justifiable.

However, in becoming prime minister after David Cameron’s departure she accepted a poisoned chalice.

I wonder whether her successor, Boris Johnson or whichever other Brexiteer, will find the poison to still be active?

Susan Alexander
Address supplied

The UK must face up to its shameful colonial past and return the Chagos Islands

Amid the furore of Brexit and the European parliamentary elections, a shameful blot on the UK’s colonial’s past was again highlighted with the UN passing a resolution demanding the UK return control of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius.

In the non-binding vote in the general assembly in New York, 116 states voted to return the islands and only six against in a major diplomatic blow to the UK. Shamefully, despite this vote, the UK has said that it will stand by an earlier commitment to hand over control of the islands to Mauritius only when they are no longer needed for defence purposes.

Mauritius was forced to give up the islands – now a British overseas territory – in 1965 in exchange for independence, which it gained in 1968.

Britain used brutal tactics to hive off the Chagos Islands from Mauritius so that they could remain colonised, leaving Britain free to do with the islands as it wanted. What Britain wanted, it turned out, was to remove the local population, amounting to some 2,000 people.

This left the territory available for the establishment of defence facilities, with the US invited in by the UK to deliver a base on the island of Diego Garcia.

At a time when the UK is looking to forge a positive impression on the world stage given the ongoing debacle that is Brexit, this situation is clearly not quite the image our leaders are trying to project just now.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

Options on the Brexit ballot paper

The people were asked to decide. They have to be asked to reaffirm their decision. However they can only be offered two choices: no deal or Remain. Two Leave options will split Leavers and will give Remain an advantage, which would make the outcome illegitimate. If the decision is no deal then so be it, the outcome is conclusive. A parliamentary fudge will never close the issue.

Rodney Lunn​
Addingham