Sonia Sodha presumes that Labour’s activists and members are two separate entities (“Starmer was right to exile Corbyn. Labour has a duty to voters, not rebellious members”, Comment). She ignores the fact that under Jeremy Corbyn thousands of previously non-active voters became both party members and activists, many, including myself, for the first time. Before Corbyn, I was neither a voter, nor a member, nor an activist.
Sodha writes about ejecting Corbyn as if it were a sign of democracy, yet what could be less democratic than denying the voters of Islington North their choice of Labour MP – the much respected and hard-working Corbyn, who has served that constituency very well for decades?
Keir Starmer clearly feels threatened by the mere presence of Corbyn on the backbenches. Why? Corbyn is correct to point to the one thing that, according to Starmer, we aren’t supposed to talk about: Palestine. But it’s more than that. Starmer represents preservation of the status quo, whereas Corbyn represents change. Some of us are more than ready for change and Sodha cannot ignore the fact that 12 million of us voted for that.
Zoe Zero
London
Less is more
Stephen Smith implies that the human environmental impact on the planet is a product of the number of humans (“Fewer births, better planet”, Letters). Curbing consumption, not population, is what really matters when it comes to protecting the environment. It is we, from smaller families in the developed world, who consume most and so must consume less.
David Murray
Wallington, Surrey
Pointless electric cars?
Your article about the difficulty of finding electric charge points comes as no surprise (“If you’re taking the Tesla to Truro this summer, you’d better plan ahead”, News). In 2016, the government announced that it would make electric car production part of its long-term industrial strategy. Two years later, my wife and I set out to drive round England’s edges in our electric car to see what the EV infrastructure was like.
The results of our 1,900-mile odyssey form the basis of my book, Charging Around, to be published in April. We were saddened by the poverty and “left-behind” aspect of many of the coastal communities we visited and appalled by the lack of EV charge points. There were few signs of any of the promised strategic planning. We often had to wait two, sometimes three hours queueing or downloading software to charge our car; when the charge point was out of order – a frequent occurrence – we were forced to seek alternative points many miles away when our battery was already low. “Range anxiety” clouded every day.
Even then, it was clear that England’s edges were “at the end of the line” for charge points. Five years on, it seems that nothing has changed, whether you are using a Tesla or a Leaf. There is no evidence of the “massive forward planning” the article calls for to provide the necessary infrastructure to support this revolutionary change in motor transport.
Clive Wilkinson
Rothbury, Northumberland
Chicken supreme?
In “Ten birds that changed the world for ever” (News), Stephen Moss forgot to mention domestic chickens in his brief anthology of birds and stories. Farmed chickens, along with domesticated animals (and humans), are now pushing out all other wild species of birds and animals into unwanted corners of human landscape and unsustainable refuges grudgingly set aside. They are now the most numerous bird species on Earth, artificially sustained by damaging infrastructures. Is this an example of not being able to see what is right at the front of what passes for our “natural environment”?
Dr Frances Robertson
Glasgow
Gender dysphoria and autism
I write in response to Rachel Cooke’s review of Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children by Hannah Barnes (“What went wrong at Gids?”, the New Review). Cooke highlights the fact that “less than 2% of children in the UK have an autism spectrum disorder; at Gids, more than a third of referrals presented with autistic traits” and says that the statistics are “horrifying”. I would suggest that, rather than being horrifying, they simply reflect the higher rate of gender non-conformity within the autistic community.
The National Autistic Society, on its website, states that “there is some evidence to show a link between gender dysphoria and autism and that autistic people may be more likely than other people to have gender dysphoria”. As part of its Stories from the Spectrum series, the NAS interviewed autistic people about their gender identity. Madge Woollard, an autistic pianist, said the following: “Although we are not transgender ourselves, my wife and I both identify as non-binary. We find we get on particularly well with transgender people and those of different genders. I think there is a huge overlap with autistic people and transgender people.”
As the parent of a 23-year-old who is both autistic and trans, this rings true – most of his friendship group are autistic and few of them are cisgender.
Kerry Merriam
York
Fossilised football
At a stroke we could cure most of the Premier League’s ills by banning bids to run any of our great football clubs from individuals and groups whose source funding is from fossil fuels (“Manchester Utd fans and rights groups raise fears over Qatar-led ownership bid”, News).
Dr Helen Lewis
Epsom, Surrey
So much for common sense
I always enjoy William Keegan’s articles and I sympathise with his views about the European Research Group of Tory MPs and their failure actually to carry out any research (“Nurses’ pay squeeze and Tory tax cut plans – are they related?”, Business). Could I suggest that in future he makes use of inverted commas and calls it the European “Research” Group, which would accurately convey his scepticism.
This could be extended to similar sub-groups of the Conservative parliamentary party: the Net Zero “Scrutiny” Group, the “Common Sense” Group and so on.
Augustine Kennedy
Barnsley, South Yorkshire
