Letters to the Canary: Just Stop Oil, BBC coverage of Gaza, and a Christmas poem

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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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