Extinction Rebellion naysayers refuse to see the bigger picture when it comes to climate change

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Folk complaining about the recent inconvenience in London reminds me of the East German Berlin Wall guard. When the Berlin Wall came down, reporters asked an East German border guard what he thought about it. “A terrible thing,” he replied. “Now I’m out of work.”

Some folk really can’t grasp the bigger picture.

Barry Tighe
Woodford Green

Keep up the good work

The climate change protesters have taken a good deal of criticism because they have caused inconvenience.

Being delayed on your journey to or from work is certainly irritating. But if you want to get a sense of perspective, just look at the picture of the starving and disorientated polar bear in The Independent, which was scavenging desperately for food in a Russian village 400 miles away from where it should have been living.

As the Arctic ice recedes due to global warming, the polar bears cannot hunt and they starve to death. It is awful to even imagine their anguish. This is the reality the protesters are trying to highlight, a global catastrophe so potentially devastating that everything else pales into insignificance.

I thank and congratulate the protesters, and I also commend the police who were filmed dancing with and applauding them – it made a nice change from their usual hostility and unfriendliness towards those whose conscience drives them to make a stand.

Penny Little
Great Haseley

Right intention, wrong action

While the hearts of the climate change people are probably in the right place this protest is naive and counterproductive. Many potential rich donors will not wish to be associated with this move and, apart, from the millions it has cost in security, and the extra pollution from alternative bus routes, Emma Thompson jetting in from Los Angeles etc, it has probably set back serious activity by several years.

Matt Minshall​
Norfolk

Politically disenfranchised

As a black single parent on a fragile income with a history of left-wing activism, Labour should be my natural political home. And it was until Iraq.

It would be anathema to me to vote for any right-wing anti-public service or racist, xenophobic, anti-migrant or anti-Muslim party – so that excludes UKIP, Brexit party, Conservatives.

Nor – as the mother of three young women – would I ever vote for the Liberal party whose last leader in power, Nick Clegg, dumped a huge one on the youth of Britain before swanning off to work for Facebook.

The disaster of Brexit should now be obvious even to Jeremy (and that is before we get on to the failures over antisemitism). The idea that Jeremy Corbyn – remarkable by his absence from the Remain campaign and who flirted with anti-EU-migrant rhetoric in the guise of “protecting UK workers” afterwards (I wonder if he’s examined the list of exiting industries and companies since 23 June 2016) – would land in Downing St makes me feel a little ill.

But not voting is not an option and I’d want to vote in a party big enough to bring this battered nation together.

So, if the Tories play the game they are so good at and pull the wool over the electorate’s eyes long enough to seem electable – and if Jeremy gets his wish of having a general election – the only thing that seems to get him motivated – what on Earth do old black lefties like me do?

Amanda Baker
Edinburgh

Not so surprising

Your account of Lauren Cullen’s threatened deportation and separation from her children quotes lawyers’ and campaigners’ expressions of astonishment at the callousness and incompetence of the Home Office.

The only astonishing thing about the story is that anyone can still be astonished by anything the Home Office does in its continued implementation of the hostile environment it supposedly abandoned a year ago.

D Maughan Brown
York

More for less

I have every sympathy with teachers who spend their earnings on teaching and other resources so that their pupils don’t miss out. There has to be a shift in the national frame of mind towards providing tools for the job.

The British have always wanted champagne at beer prices. And, in education, the under-resourcing of activities goes beyond the primary and secondary sector. As a field scientist in the early decades of a career in tertiary education, I can recall being expected to run up thousands of miles a year in my own vehicles whilst carrying out fieldwork and receive only the costs of fuel; scavenging skips to secure materials to construct rigs for teaching and research; and – laughable in retrospect – being told that, after conducting three continuous weeks of field classes in various locations around the UK, the laundromat bill was an inadmissible expense.

To some extent the situation has now changed in higher education, with the extra funding derived from student fees. But, it is obvious that primary and secondary sectors are starved of finance, yet these pupils will provide our (near) future wealth. If, as a nation, we are only willing to pay for beer, that’s what we’ll get.

Ian Reid
Kilnwick