Letters: sheep pay for themselves

Why Ukip aren’t extremists

Sir: I don’t wish to be rude to Matthew Parris (‘Why Ukip is a party of extremists’, 1 June), but he should think carefully before labelling civilised citizens as extremists. It’s a silly word to use given what real extremists get up to these days, but the important point is that a growing majority of perfectly sane voters see current UK politics as baby steps meandering around a leftward-curving path to decline; and long for some good old-fashioned radicalism to wake everyone up.

For many ordinary people, the real lunacy lies not in the Ukip manifesto but rather in our courts’ slavish submission to the ECHR, in the government’s ludicrous ring-fencing of health and foreign aid budgets, the bonkers taxing of workers earning less than the minimum wage, and our masochistic refusal as a nation to make a stand against the nonsense that emerges from Brussels. Ukip supporters, prospective (like me) and actual, feel muzzled by the smug certainty of the bien pensants. That is why they are driven to use words like tyranny. It’s nothing of the sort, of course, merely the liberal ‘consensus’ that now dominates our politics; and the one-eyed refusal of those who believe they know what is good for us to see the debate from any viewpoint other than their own.
Paul Cunningham
Salisbury, Wiltshire

Sheep pay for themselves

Sir: Hill farmers are not paid to farm sheep; the opposite is true: the Single Farm Payment can be paid with no ownership of livestock, and agri-environment support is paid in the uplands for farmers to reduce their sheep numbers (‘Woolly maggots’, 1 June). Monbiot in his book is seeking a wilderness, but for the 40 million people who visit England’s National Parks annually, our man-made pastoral countryside is the main attraction. Rather than hill farmers being overpaid, I would argue that they are underpaid for their work in providing these visitors with the backdrop to their holiday.