Section:GDN 1J PaGe:6 Edition Date:190821 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 20/8/2019 18:32 cYanmaGentaYellowbla
- The Guardian Wednesday 21 Aug ust 2019
6 Letters
Your coverage of the 200th
anniversary commemorations
in Manchester of the Peterloo
massacre was superb ( Peterloo
protesters turn focus on modern
inequality and need for reform , 17
August). Can I add one thing? I wish
to suggest that the most eff ective
and completely unmissable way to
commemorate the event, crucial as
it is in any narration of democratic
progress in this country, would be
to change the name of Manchester
Piccadilly railway station to
Manchester Peterloo station. The
change would cost next to nothing.
But it would put the name Peterloo
on millions of train tickets and
timetables bought and carried by
millions of people every day , and
would have the name, hence the
event it commemorates, boomed
out across station platforms across
the whole country.
Michael Knowles
Congleton, CheshireEnd of free movement
is a disaster for families
We must never forget Peterloo
Graham F armelo’s review of a new
book by Frank Close about the atom
spy Klaus Fuchs ( Review , 17 August )
fails completely to understand the
motivation of Fuchs or comprehend
the historical context of his action.
He simplistically labels him the
“most cunning of traitors”.
Fuchs came from a deeply
religious family. He was the son of
a Lutheran pastor who became a
Quaker after the Lutheran church
began collaborating with the Hitler
regime. His whole family was
persecuted by the Nazis.
His father, brother and sister
were incarcerated for speaking out
against the regime. His sister and his
communist brother-in-law helped
organise the escape of Jews and
other opponents of the Hitler regime
from Germany. Both his mother
and sister would kill themselves as
a result of Nazi persecution. Fuchs
himself joined the CommunistAnti-war motivation
of atom spy Fuchs
A line in
the sand
‘A dune in the
Varzaneh desert,
central Iran’
ANDRZEJ NOWOJEWSKI/
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these pagesto provide a massive amount of
documentation to further prove his
right to remain here in the UK. Left
in limbo for far too long, and facing
the increasingly uncertain future
of a no-deal Brexit as espoused by
government ministers ( EU citizens
believe they are just bargaining
chips , 20 August), the settled
decision came too late to change
our decision to move to Denmark.
My entire family voted for Brexit
but now argue that they did not
know what they were voting for, and
given the choice would change their
votes. One of the many things they
did not foresee was that we, their
own family members, would have to
leave the country in order to secure a
future free from uncertainty and the
whims of government ministers.
Deborah Off en
Sidcup, Kent- You report that Priti Patel “wants
free movement to end on the dot of 31
October” ( Tory divisions over Brexit
deepen amid row over no-deal dossier
leak , 19 August). What form will this
take? How will overworked border
staff distinguish between resident
EU citizens eligible for settled status
but not yet registered and other EU
citizens? Let us remember that EU
citizens have until 31 December 2020
to register, and so far less than a third
have done so. The Federation of
Poles, in a letter to Boris Johnson this
month, pointed out that barely 17% of
resident Poles, the largest single EU
national group in this country, ha d
registered. This is simultaneously
an administrative disaster for border
who fell in Manchester”. They helped
us rise, as the leader concludes, and
should never be forgotten.
David Shannon
Ireland’s Cross, Shropshire- Many in Manchester suff ered at
the hands of a brutal administration
for demanding fair representation
at Peterloo. What representation do
16 million UK remain voters have
in today’s parliament that seeks
its own Westminsterloo with a
metaphorical sabre charge against
almost half of the UK population
and 56% and 62% respectively of
Northern Ireland and Scotland?
Austen Lynch
Garstang, Lancashire - Thanks, Arachne, for the crossword
commemorating Peterloo (16 August):
“Stand ye calm and resolute / Like a
forest close and mute ... / Then they
will return with shame / To the place
from which they came...”
Shelley could have been speaking
of the present government.
Brian Penney
Morecambe, Lancashire
The Guardian editorial (19 August)
on the cruelty of the impact of
Brexit on EU nationals’ rights in
Britain, and British nationals’ rights
in the EU, comes as close as I’ve
seen anywhere to explaining the
impact of having to apply for rights
you already thought you had.
I am British, my husband is
Danish and we have benefi t ed from
the right to freedom of movement
since the treaty of Maastricht made
it possible in 1992; we have been
able to live and work in each other’s
country of birth and travel freely
between them ever since. In fact we
were living in Denmark when the
Danes were forced to hold a second
referendum on signing off on that
treaty in 1993. Oh, the irony.
Our experience of negotiating
the requirements for my husband’s
continued right to remain in the UK
have been stressful; as a partner
in a global company, living and
working in London and fulfi lling all
the required criteria, he imagined
he would automatically be granted
“settled” status. He was not.
Dumbfounded, we were forced- A simple but eff ective way to
keep the memory of Peterloo alive
would be to rename St Peter’s Square
“Peterloo Square”. In addition,
removing the saint’s name from the
square would be a useful nod to our
multicultural city and its declining
Christian dominance.
Craig Wright
Stockport - Hamer Shawcross would be proud
of your leader ( Our ancestors were at
Peterloo. What does their story tell
us today? , 16 August). He, the central
character in Howard Spring’s 1940
novel Fame is the Spur, was inspired
by the sabre of “the Old Warrior”
that hung over the fi replace in his
humble home in Ancoats. It had been
dropped by a soldier that day in St
Peter’s Field – the Old Warrior had
broken the soldier’s elbow with his
“good solid oak” staff after the soldier
had slain his girl Emma with a single
blow. Emma was indeed one of “those
staff and passengers, and potentially
a gross betrayal of promises to
Polish and other EU residents
from Boris Johnson that their pre-
Brexit status will be respected.
Wiktor Moszczynski
Trustee, Federation of Poles in
Great Britain- Monday mark ed the 30th
anniversary of the fi rst breach
of the iron curtain ( How a cross-
border picnic paved the way for
the lifting of the iron curtain , 19
August). Broadcasters reminded
us of the joy and emotion as those
involved began to claim their right to
freedom. Doubl y chilling then that
the Johnson government proclaims
now its intention to close UK borders
to EU nationals with immediate
eff ect on 1 November. Shame on us.
Jane Lee
Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey - It is grotesque to hear Boris Johnson
referring to EU leaders as “friends
and partners” ( EU unconvinced as
Johnson sets out fresh bid to remove
Brexit backstop , 20 August). This
is a man who built his career on
fabricating stories about the meddling
of “Eurocrats”, who lied about Turkey
joining the EU and about Britain’s
fi nancial contribution to the union’s
budget, and who in 2016 compared
the union to Hitler. He also displayed
colossal ignorance in comparing
the Northern Irish border to that
between Camden and Islington. If
any normal person treated friends
and partners in this way, they would
soon be marooned in isolation. It
is worrying and utterly depressing
that almost half of voters, according
to YouGov, would prefer Johnson’s
no-deal Brexit than entertain a
Corbyn-led interim administration
designed to avoid that outcome.
Dr Simon Sweeney
University of York
party because he felt that the
communists were the only ones to
eff ectively oppose the Nazis. As a
brilliant physicist he worked on the
Manhattan Project, fearing like many
of his colleagues that if they did not
do so then Hitler would get there
fi rst. Once he became aware that
Britain and the US were not going to
share the new know how with the
Soviet Union, he was concerned that
they might use the bomb against
them once Hitler had been defeated.
Fuchs felt that if the Soviet Union
had the wherewithal to make its
own bomb, this would prevent its
misuse by one nation alone. One can
deprecate his clandestine leaking
of this information to what was at
the time an ally, but he was hardly
a traitor in the usual sense of the
word. He was deeply opposed to war
and acted on his conscience. Fuchs
should be viewed more as a victim
of burgeoning cold war politics than
as someone who “betrayed ... the
country that had welcomed him as
a refugee from nazism”.
John Green
LondonWe do not
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letters-termsThis is a betrayal of
promises to Polish and
other EU residents that
their pre-Brexit status
will be respectedWiktor MoszczynskiRELEASED BY "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws