WITH his undisputed customary eloquence, including impressive alliteration, John Green (June 24) begins by arguing, respectably enough, against John Tanner’s: “trite and triumphalist tosh”, implicitly in favour of some form of proportioned representation in city and council elections.

In his fourth paragraph, however, he proceeds to describe each of these areas as a “one-party state” (sic), not just numerically, but literally.

This may be his genuine or contrived perception, but it is hardly factual, as he would appreciate if he had ever lived under a totalitarian regime, as I did, albeit in its moribund, diluted, almost farcical form, not that its successor, on balance, turned out, typically, all that more desirable.

(In such set-ups, John, alternative parties are actually seriously “illegal” and are not usually dealt with in the most civilised manner).

As for his labelling local Labour “positively Stalinist”, the expression itself is somewhat unfortunate, though debatably less so than the subsequent allegation that several local councillors “covet Andrew Smith’s seat”.

Moving swiftly on and much more importantly, though, I feel we are some way away from the execution of the first person, to cease applauding after one of Bob Price’s speeches, the mass indiscriminate slaughter of the denizens of allegedly predominantly dissident zones, the likelihood of Comrade Tanner being appointed gulag tsar, to coin a phrase and so on.

More gravely still, there are surprisingly victims of the Stalin era, not to mention their descendants, who are still alive, in some cases no doubt resident in the geographical – and nowadays broader, I understand – region covered by the Oxford Mail.

What must they feel on reading such hyperbolic tosh?

DAVID DIMENT
Riverside Court
Oxford

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