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Letters: where is the anger over Boris Johnson’s lies?

<span>Photograph: Carl Recine/PA</span>
Photograph: Carl Recine/PA

I found Nick Cohen’s opinions on the lack of honesty in this government both moving and profound (“Lies come in all shapes and sizes. This government is familiar with them all”, Comment). The most worrying part of this state of affairs is where is the public anger? What have we become, when, to many, a prime minister and his crew being economical with the truth are seen as just a joke?

I fear for the future of our democracy, because the voting public tend to believe that all politicians are liars and in it for themselves; this government confirms their opinions, so they just shrug their shoulders and accept it.
Mrs A Sturton
Oakley, Basingstoke, Hampshire

Nick Cohen’s article was an impressive free verse tour de force. I can’t be the only one reminded of Adrian Mitchell’s To Whom It May Concern (Tell Me Lies About Vietnam). It’s too much to expect Cohen to give a reading at the Albert Hall but it would be good to see it on an Observer wallchart, with a copy on the walls of every classroom, hospital, foodbank and GP waiting room in the country.
Mike Hine
Kingston upon Thames, London

That parliamentary procedure forces the Speaker to dismiss Ian Blackford for correctly calling out the prime minister’s lies, while leaving him impotent to enforce either the truth or an apology from the PM, emphasises the anachronism and shamefully demeans the system.
Jan Mortimer
Lewes, East Sussex

Better recruits, better police

As a retired police officer with experience of recruiting, I agree with former chief officer Sue Fish’s analysis of the reform needed to outlaw bad behaviour in the Met and elsewhere (“Can the Met change?”, Focus). Structures that last and give best service use the best material available and continue to do so when properly maintained. She hits the nail on the head when she blames poor policing on the failure to identify decent, diligent and empathetic applicants and to continue monitoring performance using the same measures.

If these qualities are being subsumed by the requirement for purely technical skills, then it’s about time some deeper thought was given to the personal qualities of those whose function is to deal fairly with the public.
Tony Burnley
Brampton, Cambridgeshire

Racism is as racism does

Michael Crick misunderstands the question of who is a racist (“‘I don’t think Farage is a racist but he does pander to racists’”, the New Review). Racism is as racism does: a politician who mobilises racist sentiments to win support, as Crick’s book shows that Farage has made a career out of doing and as Boris Johnson has also done, is as much a racist as a person who thinks people of a different ethnicity are inferior – and a more dangerous one to boot.
Martin Shaw
Seaton, Devon

Megalomaniac Putin

The edge of war: what, exactly, does Putin want in Ukraine?” (News) hinted at the real cause of the artificial crisis in saying that Vladimir Putin regarded Ukraine “as an integral part of historical Russia”. Putin’s Russia has turned away from the Soviet recognition of a Ukrainian people and stagnated to a tsarist imperial definition of Ukraine (together with Russians and Belarusians) as one of the three branches of a pan-Russian nation. Russian media repeatedly deny the existence of Ukraine and Ukrainians.

Why is the crisis artificial? Nato has never intended to offer Ukraine membership, the US never had plans to instal missiles and Ukraine’s military cooperation with Nato is three decades old. The root cause is Putin’s obsession with Ukraine as a “Russian land” and his megalomaniac view of himself as the “gatherer of Russian lands”. We should not forget that contemporary pan-Russianism is as dangerous as was pan-Germanism in the 1930s.
Dr Taras Kuzio
London SW1

“What’s so terrible about neutrality for Ukraine?” asks Simon Tisdall (“Macron fights to halt slide to war”, World). The answer is because neutrality means nothing to the Russians. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania declared their neutrality. They were occupied by subterfuge and then annexed by the USSR in 1940. It took until 1990-91 for those countries to regain their independence. Knowing the nature of their eastern neighbour, they began negotiating for Nato and EU membership, finally achieved in 2004. The Ukrainians know the region’s history, unlike many western commentators. They know neutrality is not the answer.
Aleksas Vilcinskas
London SW20

So much for ECHR ‘threat’

David Murray is right to suggest that the low estimation of politicians for the prison service “could be addressed by giving prisoners the vote, as most of the rest of western Europe does” (Letters). In fact, the European court of human rights has ruled that Britain’s blanket ban on votes for convicted inmates is a breach of their human rights. The response in 2013 of the then prime minister, David Cameron, was that prisoners “damn well shouldn’t” be given the right to vote. His short-sighted refusal to implement the ruling has remained without consequence for the UK. So much, then, for the so-called threat of the ECHR to parliamentary sovereignty.
Professor Gwyneth Boswell
Norwich

Face the facts on flying

Johan Lundgren, easyJet CEO, says it’s “intellectually lazy” to argue that not flying is the best way to cut aviation emissions (Business profile). I wonder if he has seen the academic analysis from UK Fires on this issue. It’s not light reading. Having reviewed all low-carbon options for aviation between now and the 2050 net zero deadline, it concludes that Lundgren’s industry has left it too late to develop enough new aircraft, renewable energy, carbon capture and carbon capture storage facilities to balance the carbon books in time.

What is “intellectually lazy”, I’d argue, is to go straight from observing that aviation brings people benefits (of course it does) to concluding that we must, despite the climate emergency, carry on flying to get these benefits rather than, say, using video conferencing and taking domestic holidays to cut emissions from business travel and tourism.

Lundgren says “we’ve done our job at easyJet on this whole thing”. But there is not a single commercial aircraft in operation that doesn’t emit CO2, and no scalable zero-carbon technology is on the horizon. It’s hard to say whether this is because of laziness, complacency, lack of regulation, or simply the barriers of physics. But if we want to find solutions, we need to face the facts.
Cait Hewitt
London, SE1

Scotland, land of dreams

Can I advise Will Hutton that his imaginary country, supervised by a government that is gradually pulling its citizens together to create a new normal, actually exists and is not far away (“I relish life opening up. But this libertarian dash for the Covid exit is reckless”, Comment). It is Scotland, where, despite propaganda to the contrary, a largely contented population has been helped through this pandemic by a government that has acted on the whole in a careful and thoughtful way. Mistakes have been made, but generally admitted to, and it seems that the careful approach has been both popular and accepted.
Brian Bannatyne-Scott
Edinburgh