The Canary is excited to share the latest edition of our letters page. This is where we publish people’s responses to the news and politics, or anything else they want to get off their chest. We’ve now opened the letters page up so anyone can submit a contribution. As always, if you’d like to subscribe to the Canary – starting from just £1 a month – to support truly radical and independent media, then you can do that here:
This week’s letters
This week we have people’s thoughts on Just Stop Oil carol singing outside Starmer’s house, a poem for Christmas, and an open letter to the BBC over its coverage of Gaza.
Should Just Stop Oil have carol-sung outside Starmer’s house?
I don’t have anything against sit-ins, lock-ins, traffic bocks or even painting buildings with orange paint. What I do have a disagreement with is staging any type of protest at the private home of a public figure.
We are all entitled to a private life and there were people, incuding children, in there who were not of the Christian faith and so this action was inappropriate.
TBH I’d have been annoyed if carol singers had been outside my home, and I’m not religious at all; it would have just been an unwelcome noise during the hours of darkness.
Not impressed.
Paula, via email
The Week before Christmas: a reader’s poem
‘Twas the week before Christmas
The presents were wrapped
But all of a sudden
It seems something has snapped.
After 13 long years
Of Tory mis-rule
Everyone’s asking
Just who is the fool?
They push on with Rwanda
Like a dog with a bone
And then we all hear
From Baroness Mone.
She thinks she’s the victim
But it’s masses of lies
And then we all hear
MPs have a rise.
That’s 7% or 6,000 pounds.
I think that all workers
Now have good grounds
To carry on calling
For negotiations
On pay and conditions
And new valuations.
As we approach
A day to remember
The birth of a child
In late December
We ask all of those
In positions of power
To think more of others
And that this is the hour
To follow that baby
All meek and mild
Who taught us to care
For adult and child.
That love is the answer
To all the world’s woes.
Just try it and watch it
And see how it grows.
Compassion and kindness
That is the key
And that’s what we saw
In that young refugee.
Sue Wood, via email
Another open letter to the BBC re. its coverage of Israel/Gaza
Tim Davie and BBC reporters,
Last night at 22.50 on Radio 4, we heard a Labour MP speak of her daily anguish and nightly tears on hearing of Gaza and her Christian friends. The few Christians there are holed up in the chancel of their church in Gaza City, unable to leave, not even for the toilet. Earlier, she had learnt of their deaths, two of them murdered and one wounded – by an IDF sniper.
Her horrific news was duly sanitised by your presenter who rounded off the programme with your routine mantra of 7 October and how Hamas is deemed a terrorist grouping.
On TV last night BBC News spoke of the death of the three hostages, saying that the IDF feared their appearance may have been a Hamas attack. To your great shame, you again failed to say that the three hostages had taken the precaution of emerging from captivity – under a white flag!
I spoke of that flag of surrender in the earlier email shown below. Again I ask, how many atrocities and war crimes does Israel need to commit before the BBC withdraws its protection – and report their flouting of the Geneva Conventions and all conventional rules of war.
Ted, via email
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