Letter to the Editor: Patrick Loxdale’s response to Patrick O’Brien’s opinion of Liz Truss simply overwhelms me (Frankly Speaking, Cambrian News, 26 October). Patrick is an unusual politician, who can be non-partisan one moment, virtually damning with faint praise, and then fervently partisan.

He praises Patrick O’Brien for admitting Gordon Brown increased the lower tax rate from 10 to 20 per cent, but both of them ignore the financial context of that increase. Gordon Brown defended the increase in the tax rate by explaining it funded the associated substantial increase in tax credits to the poor.

Anyone struggling to survive on benefits in Thatcher’s deindustrialised Britain, will remember what a Godsend those tax credits were. a benefit that applied to all poor citizens, in or out of work. The tax rate only applied in work.

As for “the people voting for the choices presented to them in the Brexit Referendum”, I suspect that the Cambridge Analytica scandal is not on Patrick Loxdale’s radar, or Vote Leave’s abuse of social media data to influence the ‘choice of the people’, or Boris Johnson’s involvement in such a corrupted referendum. All those factors, and several more, are just too much ‘context’ for the Brexiteers to handle.

His remark about Jeremy Corbyn’s “dubious moral values” are a similar slur to Thomas Paine’s portrayal as an atheist. Thomas Paine was not an atheist, he objected to organised religion because it was exploited and corrupted by the state, hence it was said the pulpit was “the best recruiting sergeant in World War One”.

Corbyn’s moral values are the Tories ‘dead cat’ response to their own ‘lack of a moral compass’.  Whilst the Tories have trousered the oligarch’s money, effectively endorsing Putinism, Corbyn has been constructively critical  of Putin for decades.

Robin Hood was killing Normans hundreds of years after the Conquest, why should the Irish be expected to be grateful for Oliver Cromwell, and his Protestant land grabbers? In the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Enclosure Acts resulted in an equally ‘ungrateful’ response from the English peasantry in the 1830 rebellion.

Thirty six Jewish members of Corbyn’s constituency wrote an open letter to the media, declaring that Corbyn did not have an antisemitic bone in his body, another bit of ‘context’ that the Tories choose to  ignore, as they ignore the chilling impact of the eleventh article of the IHRA definition of antisemitism. Read it, Patrick, you may then recognise why the Palestinian struggle gets scant media coverage these days, another unpalatable bit of ‘context’,

Roger Louvet,

Porthmadog