Editor

Edmund Brown may consider I talk nonsense about our colonial responsibilities (Letters, 22 October), but victors’ lines in the Arabian sands 100 years ago have consequences in our times.

Was Edmund Brown one of over a million protesters at the 2003 anti-war march in London? I doubt it! Iraq was about oil in T E Lawrence’s time, and it was a central factor in 2003. Ask Alan Greenspan, past chairman of the US Federal Reserve, who had the political conceit to admit the Iraq war was largely about oil. Many of those refugees drowning at sea are fleeing the chaos caused by colonial greed, and the lack of humanity in our ruling class.

• Economists with a social conscience recognise that some public services are best financed by the state, and health and education top the list. John Moss clearly supports private provision, and reveals his contempt for the public sector when he ends his letter by saying the private sector’s taxes will ‘pay for all the public sector bodies whose job it was to protect us in the first place’.

John Moss appears to relish claiming I must be referring to the Welsh Labour Government, but it could be argued that both Jean Miles and myself were ambiguous, she referring to ‘country’ and me to ‘government’. However, Exercise Cygnus was initiated by Westminster, not Cardiff, and the lack of implementation of its recommendations lie at Westminster’s door, not Cardiff’s, both suggesting which government I referred to.

Cygnus was intended to simulate a flu pandemic, ‘imagining a worse case scenario’ of 400,000 deaths, and John Moss considers there is no parallel with Covid. Martin Green, CEO of Care England, said “It beggars belief” the government did not raise its concerns with his members, “Nobody has ever had that conversation with us”. Neither was that conversation held with any of the participating public bodies that John Moss is so ready to disparage.

Roger Louvet Porthmadog

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