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      The Guardian view on UK-US relations: rebuilding with Biden | Editorial

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      In British politics, everyone now loves President Joe Biden. That the UK opposition parties are foundation members of the Biden appreciation club is not surprising. Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all identify most naturally with the Democrats and thus with the new administration in Washington. But the changing of the guard at the White House this week has won strikingly broad support across the entire political spectrum too.Many Conservatives now take an enthusiastic view of Mr Biden as well. In some cases this is hard to believe – or forgive. Not long ago, many of the same Tory politicians who now enthuse about Mr Biden tried to bet the house on Donald Trump. Theresa May rushed to Washington to court him. Michael Gove conducted a gushing interview. Boris Johnson said he should get the Nobel peace prize. A US trade deal was obsessively talked up. Today, these same politicians are all friends of Joe and behave as if they barely knew Mr Trump.Even so, the resetting of the dial with America is welcome. But if it is not to be merely opportunistic, it must be accompanied by more honesty, humility and clarity. Mr Trump was never the ally that the last two prime ministers imagined. He was never going to agree a good trade deal. He was always an embarrassment. And he was always a threat to the democratic and liberal values that Britain and the United States once stood for and which went absent without leave after 2016.Over decades, British leaders have often tended to exaggerate Britain’s importance to the US. Mr Johnson, an inveterate truth stretcher, is the same. The necessary modesty about what is realistically possible in the post-Trump era will not come naturally to him. The security relationship undoubtedly remains strong and important. But the new starting point should be the recognition that, in different ways, Britain and America are emerging from unprecedentedly difficult eras internally and in their international relations, for which they themselves bear responsibility.In any event, there can and should be no instant return to some of the US-UK relationships of the recent past. The two countries are not cold war allies, because there is no cold war. They are not military interventionist allies either, because there is no appetite in either country for such projects after Afghanistan and Iraq. Neither Mr Biden nor Mr Johnson is proposing some new grand strategic project.This ought to be a phase of rebuilding in US-UK relations. After the past four years, neither country is in a position to preach to others about democratic institutions and values. The US has just survived a potential coup, supported by a significant proportion of its citizens, to overthrow an election result. Britain has just backed down from a threat to get its way in relations with Europe by breaking international law. It has needlessly damaged relations with Ireland, our nearest neighbour, from which Mr Biden proudly traces his origins. It has now started a petulant row over the EU’s diplomatic status.This is not the way to win friends and influence people. Britain needs allies in the wake of Brexit and amid the rise of Asia and the waning of American global hegemony. Values and interests such as democracy and the rule of law matter in those alliances. To that end, Britain must make more and better use of soft power assets like the BBC, its universities and the aid budget. Mr Biden’s arrival in office opens up new international possibilities on issues like Covid, climate and internet freedom. But we need to be realistic. Britain must treat partnership seriously, not pick fights we do not deserve to win or make claims we can never hope to fulfil without allies. More

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      The left is accused of authoritarianism – but it's the right that gets away with it | Andy Beckett

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      For a wearyingly long time now, one of the right’s favourite tactics against the left has been to accuse it of planning a police state. From Winston Churchill’s 1945 claim that a Labour government would need “some form of Gestapo” to last year’s warnings in the Tory press that Jeremy Corbyn would turn Britain into a version of Venezuela, rightwing journalists and politicians have used the spectre of authoritarianism to make the left seem sinister and foreign.The tactic is sometimes still effective. In this month’s US election, Donald Trump won the key state of Florida in part by persuading Hispanic immigrants that Joe Biden, a famously pragmatic Democrat, would instead form an intolerant leftwing government. “I voted for Trump to prevent the United States from resembling countries like Cuba,” Jose Edgardo Gomez told the Miami Herald. “We want the United States to continue being free and to continue having a true democracy … Many Americans don’t understand the threats that socialism poses.”The fact that no western democracy has ever been turned into a police state by the left hasn’t completely neutralised this argument. Because there have been so few elected socialist governments in the west, and even fewer that have enacted much of their programmes, the left hasn’t had many opportunities to prove that it’s not interested in ruling by authoritarian methods. Instead, the allegation has lingered.On rightwing websites such as Spiked and Guido Fawkes, which often provide anti-Labour attack lines to the Tory press and politicians, Keir Starmer is already being described as an authoritarian, despite his history as a human rights lawyer. No doubt tabloid picture researchers are scouring the archives for any photos of him wearing a Russian hat. Corbyn had to waste some of his leadership denying that his favourite cap was a tribute to Lenin’s; the Times told readers he rode a “Chairman Mao-style bicycle”. Besides smearing the left and putting it on the defensive, these red scares have another important but less noticed effect. They serve as a political distraction.Over the past 40 years, while the right has continued to warn about hypothetical leftwing dictatorships in the west, actual authoritarianism has become a growing feature of rightwing government in Britain and the US. The change has been incomplete and gradual. Authoritarianism is often a tendency, an official inclination, rather than an absolute political state. And this autocratic turn has gone largely undeclared: countries that won the second world war and the cold war like to think they have no time for despots. But the outcome has been a great strengthening of government against the governed.In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher politicised the police as strike-breakers, and demonised her opponents as “the enemy within”. In the 2000s, the George W Bush administration argued that the president’s powers should be almost unlimited, and established the brutal detention camp at Guantánamo. Both premiers were criticised for their draconian tendencies, but both were comfortably re-elected, unrepentant.Yet even Bush has been shocked by the Trump presidency. Donald Trump’s intolerance of press criticism and peaceful protest, threats to jail political opponents, and contempt for the electoral process have arguably made the United States more of an autocracy than a democracy. Meanwhile, similar impulses have been at work in Boris Johnson’s premiership, with its illegal suspension of parliament, illegal Brexit legislation and fury at the few remaining checks on its authority, such as “activist lawyers”.As with Bush and Thatcher, the breaking of democratic norms by Trump and Johnson has been accepted and sometimes welcomed by many voters. Over 10m more people chose Trump this month than at the 2016 election. Last year, Johnson won the first big Tory majority since 1987.In increasingly impatient, divided societies, frustration with the compromises and deadlocks produced by previous, more consensual governments has left voters open to more aggressive alternatives. Shortly before the 2019 election, a prophetic survey by the Hansard Society found that 54% of Britons felt the country “needs a strong ruler willing to break the rules”, and 42% believed that Britain’s problems could be dealt with better “if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in parliament”.Even people appalled by the transgressions of Trump and Johnson can be reluctant to consider their implications. For the first few days after this month’s US election, Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was widely seen as just a tantrum – rather than a rejection of democracy and, in effect, a demand to head a one-party state. If you’ve grown up with the idea that the US is a strong democracy, or that British prime ministers respect the law, it’s frightening to face up to the possibility that neither may be the case.It may also be frightening to realise that the Anglo-American right has a double standard on authoritarian governments. That double standard used to be applied mainly to other countries. During the 1980s, Jeane Kirkpatrick, an influential adviser to the Republican president Ronald Reagan, argued that rightwing police states were “less repressive” than leftwing, “totalitarian” ones, and should be supported by the US when there were, from a conservative perspective, no better alternatives. At the time, the consequences of her thinking were felt by people living under rightwing foreign dictatorships, from the Philippines to Argentina, that the US helped sustain in power. But with the Trump presidency you could say that a version of her doctrine has been applied at home.The US and Britain’s authoritarian experiments may now be coming to an end. The sacked Dominic Cummings was the source of much of the Johnson government’s autocratic thinking. Trump, for all his manoeuvring, will almost certainly have to step down when Joe Biden is inaugurated in January. The democratic and constitutional pressures against him staying on are probably too great.Yet the conditions remain that made the experiments possible. In the US, after Trump’s attacks on the election, many voters are disillusioned with democracy. And the ground has been prepared for his party to refuse to accept future electoral outcomes it doesn’t like – possibly starting with January’s crucial Senate races in Georgia. In Britain, the government still contains deeply illiberal figures, such as the home secretary, Priti Patel. And Johnson himself, like Trump, has a dislike of being held accountable that’s so strong, he’s arguably not a democratic politician in any sense beyond the winning of elections. As with Trump, the fact that he lacks the focus and diligence to be a dictator is not that reassuring. A more functional rightwing strongman could come along.And the scale of what has already happened during Trump and Johnson’s premierships shouldn’t be played down, as just another stage in conservatism’s evolution. In two of the world’s supposedly most stable political systems, the right have bent democracy out of shape. In future, it would be good to have a bit less self-righteous talk from them about dictatorships of the left.• Andy Beckett is a Guardian columnist More

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      Rudy Giuliani and Death in Venice | Brief letters

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      Re your report (Proportion of students in England awarded first-class degrees soars, 19 November), I got my BA degree from Nottingham University in 1970. When we began our final year we were told that there would be no first-class degrees for politics students that year. “We mark on the bell curve,” they said. “And we get one first per 30 students. There are only 15 students each year for politics, and a student got a first last year. So none of you lot can get one.”Stephen ReesVancouver, Canada
      • To while away the time during this lockdown, we are going through over 40 years of photographic slides. To save space, we are digitising the slides and discarding the originals. We now have a large number of empty yellow plastic boxes. Suggestions, please, for alternative uses – like 35mm film canisters, they must be useful for something!Elizabeth and Les BrettWelling, London
      • “Unintentional” bullying surely implies a lack of empathy, compassion and self-awareness (Bullying inquiry ‘found evidence Priti Patel broke ministerial code’, 19 November). Strange characteristics for a British home secretary, especially in the aftermath of the Windrush fiasco.Sandy DerbyshireLondon
      • What a metaphor. Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye running down his face (Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan, 19 November) reminded me of the closing scenes of Death in Venice.Angela BogleBakewell, Derbyshire
      • Your editorial (18 November) rightly condemns the cronyism displayed by the Tories in their procurement of PPE, but let’s give it its proper name: looting.Deirdre BurrellMortimer, Berkshire More

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      The Guardian view on Dominic Cummings: voting to leave | Editorial

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      Boris Johnson should have asked his chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, to resign months ago when he broke the first coronavirus lockdown and showed no regret afterwards. Perhaps Mr Johnson thought he could not do without the architect of his election victory and his ally in pursuing a hardline Brexit. But the damage was done. Public confidence in the government’s handling of coronavirus fell and has not stopping falling since.Mr Cummings walked out of Downing Street, in an act of theatrical defiance, on Friday. It is a mark of the tragicomic nature of Mr Johnson’s government that a week of infighting within No 10 dominates the news at a time of national emergency when hundreds are dying every day from a dangerous disease. Mr Cummings gets to walk away while Britain is stuck with the damage he has wrought.He won the Brexit referendum by spreading lies, unconcerned about damaging public trust. He has snubbed parliament, weaponised populist sentiment against state institutions and played fast and loose with the constitution. He may say that unconventional times needed unconventional ideas. But he seemed to enjoy his war too much. He picked, and lost, too many fights for his own good. A swirling cast of characters was drawn in. Even Carrie Symonds, Mr Johnson’s fiancee, got involved.Mr Cummings was edged out of power before he could flounce out. This tawdry episode demonstrates two things. One is Mr Johnson’s palpable lack of leadership in a crisis. He encouraged his chief adviser to embrace his inner Leninism — where the end justifies the means. Second is the government’s well-deserved reputation for incompetence. The prime minister over-centralised Downing Street and let Mr Cummings ride roughshod over a weak cabinet that he had hand-picked but which lacked the confidence or foresight to predict problems.Mr Cummings’ plans have gone awry thanks to the unpredictability of politics. After the US election his ideas for a hard Brexit were going nowhere. A Biden White House would have little time for the UK if it turned its back on Europe. Mr Cummings’ departure is a clear indication that the prime minister is ready to make the compromises needed to strike a deal with the EU.Coronavirus required bigger government. Fiscal conservatives like the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, and many other Tory MPs worried that once voters understood that big spending would not bankrupt the economy they might get a taste for decent public services. Mr Sunak wanted to balance the books, Mr Cummings wanted to blow them up. He agitated for the un-Tory idea that state power could turbocharge the economy, making powerful enemies in No 11.Resentments have built like sediment on the river bed of Conservatism and threatened to choke the flow of government. Backbench MPs see Mr Cummings’ contempt for them as symptomatic of a high-handed Downing Street and have rebelled in such numbers that it threatens the stability of a government that, paradoxically, won a landslide largely thanks to Mr Cummings.Mr Johnson might think that, without his adviser, his ungovernable party becomes governable. But he might find that elections become unwinnable. Some of this is more about style than substance. Mr Johnson still has to make good on his promise to “level up” Britain, especially since north-south divisions have been dramatically exposed by coronavirus. The prime minister needs to up his game. Once gained, a reputation for incompetence is hard to shift. Too often with Mr Johnson the buck stops somewhere else and blame is dumped on someone else. With Mr Cummings out, there is no hiding place for Mr Johnson. More

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      The Guardian view on Johnson's Biden problem: not going away | Editorial

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      The Irish question has played havoc with the best-laid plans of hardline Brexiters. Since 2016, successive Conservative governments have struggled to square the circle of keeping the United Kingdom intact, while avoiding the reimposition of a hard border on the island of Ireland. The border issue has been the achilles heel of Brexit, the thorn in the side of true believers in a “clean break” with the EU. So the prospect of an Irish-American politician on his way to the White House, just as Boris Johnson attempts to finagle his way round the problem, is an 11th-hour plot twist to savour.
      Joe Biden’s views on Brexit are well known. The president-elect judges it to be a damaging act of self-isolation; strategically unwise for Britain and unhelpful to American interests in Europe. But it is the impact of the UK’s departure from the EU on Ireland that concerns Mr Biden most. This autumn, he was forthright on the subject of the government’s controversial internal market bill, which was again debated on Monday in the House of Lords. The proposed legislation effectively reneges on a legally binding protocol signed with the EU, which would impose customs checks on goods travelling between Britain and Northern Ireland. In doing so, it summons up the spectre of a hard border on the island of Ireland, undermining the Good Friday agreement. Mr Biden is adamant that the GFA must not “become a casualty of Brexit”. He is expected to convey that message, in forceful terms, when his first telephone conversation with Mr Johnson eventually takes place.
      This is somewhat awkward for the prime minister. Mr Johnson badly needs to establish good relations with the new regime in Washington, ahead of crucial trade negotiations. In light of that, Mr Johnson may choose not to insist on the clauses relating to Northern Ireland when the bill goes back to the Commons. That would certainly be the wise move, although the noises coming from the government remain defiant. But the prime minister’s challenges in dealing with the coming regime change in Washington go well beyond Brexit.
      The personal dynamics between Mr Johnson and Mr Biden and his team are, to put it mildly, unpromising. The prime minister’s insulting remarks four years ago, about Barack Obama’s Kenyan ancestry, have not been forgotten. Mr Johnson seems to be viewed by many senior Democrats as a kind of pound-shop Donald Trump. There is also little regard for the consistency or sincerity with which Mr Johnson holds his views. At the weekend, when the prime minister instagrammed his congratulations to Mr Biden on his victory, a Biden ally witheringly referred to Mr Johnson as “this shape-shifting creep”.
      So in the race to make friends and influence people in the new Washington, Britain has the very opposite of a head start. The smart money is on Paris becoming the first European capital to receive President Biden. That reflects both good relations with Emmanuel Macron and a concern to rebuild diplomatic bridges, after four years in which Mr Trump rarely ceased to disparage and seek to undermine the EU. Mr Biden means to bring back a sense of diplomatic propriety and integrity to America’s relations with European friends and allies.
      Britain, having left the EU, cannot be a central player in this restoration project. But it can avoid making unforced errors. The government should urgently start to read the runes of new, more internationalist times. The politics of disruptive confrontation, as exemplified by the internal market bill, suddenly looks dangerously dated. When the Northern Ireland minister, Brandon Lewis, confirmed in September that the bill would break international law, senior Conservatives such as Sir Michael Howard and Theresa May expressed their dismay at the damage to Britain’s reputation that would result. They were ignored.
      But faced with an Irish-American president who is determined to rehabilitate relations with the EU, and is deeply suspicious of Mr Johnson’s Trumpian tendencies, to continue with the bill as it stands would be folly. With Mr Trump on his way out, Mr Johnson needs to sober up and start shifting some shapes on this and other matters. More

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      Donald Trump’s defeat is wonderful for the world and trouble for Boris Johnson | Andrew Rawnsley

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      Only Americans have a vote in their presidential election, but the whole world has a stake. Never more so has that been the case than in 2020. The planet has been mesmerised by the compelling theatre of American democracy and nowhere more so than the UK. Some here – all right, me – have become as transfixed as any American psephological nerd by voting patterns in Clayton County, Georgia.Not only does the winner occupy one of the most potent seats on the planet, America’s choice of president can set, confirm or reverse global ideological trends. Because of a common language, historical ties and political classes that interact a lot, the cross-currents across the Atlantic can be highly influential.America turned decisively to the right when it chose Ronald Reagan in 1980, doing so 18 months after Britain had executed a similar shift by electing Margaret Thatcher. Mrs Thatcher, so unpopular at the time that there was talk among Tories about removing her, was fortified and emboldened by the arrival of an ideological soulmate in the Oval Office. By taking the White House for the “New Democrats” in 1992, Bill Clinton provided ideas and inspiration for Tony Blair’s New Labour. During that decade, and to the consternation of rivals to both left and right, their “Third Way” style of politics swept through progressive parties from Brazil to Germany.The Brexit vote here in June 2016, our stark break with postwar history, was a harbinger of another great rupture, Donald Trump’s victory that November. This, in turn, energised nationalist populists around the planet and encouraged them to think that the future belonged to them. It contributed to the febrile climate in which the Tory party decided that a punt on another reckless gambler with startling blond hair and a record of mendacity was not as outlandish as it had previously seemed.There is already much rune-reading of the long-term reverberations of this US election. A clutch of conservative commentators and politicians gleefully notes that the Democrats failed to sweep all before them and conclude that leftwing “identity politics” has been quashed. Yet the larger failure is that of rightwing “culture war” politics whose ultra-bellicose and previously most successful champion has lost the US presidency by the thumping margin of more than 4m votes. A set of leftwing commentators and politicians has a converse explanation for why a “blue wave” did not materialise in sufficient strength to achieve control of both houses of Congress for the Democrats. On an account that glides over the fact that Joe Biden has actually won the presidency, they argue that the Democrats ought to have put up a more radically leftish candidate. Conveniently for proponents of this thesis, it compares an election that did happen with one that did not. What we do have experience of, and very recently, is what happened when a leftwing populist was pitted against a rightwing populist in another English-speaking democracy. You may recall that Labour was crushed by a landslide.The Trump presidency so despoiled the office that smirking authoritarians pointed to its hideous dysfunctionality to justify their dictatorshipIn a country that rarely denies a second term to the incumbent, Mr Trump’s defeat is a feat as extraordinary as it is welcome. Mr Biden’s victory contradicts the notion that we live in an era where it is fatal to be “the establishment” candidate, disabling to be a seasoned, thoughtful and temperate person and hopeless to be a consensus-seeking moderate. This was Mr Biden’s third run at the presidency, having been at the heart of Washington for decades. He will be 78 when he moves in to the White House. He vanquished Mr Trump not by offering himself as the leftwing mirror image of the incumbent, but by personifying a contrasting kind of political character. By both reputation and demeanour, he is a pragmatist and a unifier. “We always do better as one America,” was one of the signature lines of his campaign. No presidential candidate in American history has won with as many votes as the man his rival ridiculed as “Sleepy Joe”. He represents a revival of a kind of politics that many told us was deceased in the opening decades of the 21st century. It is a triumph for the centrist grandad.The first and most important consequence of President Biden is that he means the eviction of President Trump. Theodore Roosevelt called the presidency “a bully pulpit”, a description that has taken on a much more sinister meaning over the four years when the presidency was occupied by a thug. The imperative to defeat him was underlined by the manner of his losing. His televised rants attempted to subvert American democracy itself by spraying baseless claims that the presidency was being “stolen”. Mr Trump will still be around after January, a bad loser raving conspiracy theories, but he will no longer have that White House pulpit to bully from. This matters to much more than America. The Trump presidency so despoiled the office and undermined his country’s claim to the world’s respect that smirking authoritarians pointed to its hideous dysfunctionality to justify their dictatorships while liberal democracies lost their faith in American leadership. Where Mr Trump stoked polarisation at home and division abroad, Mr Biden will seek to build bridges, not walls.Barack Obama commended his vice-president to the American people on the grounds that they would no longer have to worry that their president would say or do something “crazy”. That is not a small point and it has relevance beyond America. The planet will no longer have to twitch over the US president’s Twitter feed.Mr Biden will seek to restore his country’s reputation as a trustworthy and predictable ally and recommit to international agreements that have been shredded by his predecessor. Most importantly, the US will re-engage with tackling a climate crisis that Mr Trump dismissed as a “hoax”. This reversion to an internationalist presidency will be broadly in our country’s interests. As a liberal democracy and an upper-middling power, the UK is best served by a rules-based global order rather than living in a rogue world where smaller countries are trampled underfoot by competing authoritarians.British officials predict that it will be much easier to work with Mr Biden, but the vanquishing of Mr Trump is unnerving for Boris Johnson. As I remarked a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of this result, it renders him more marginalised on the world stage. A president who yelled for Brexit will be replaced by a president who regards Mr Johnson’s defining policy as a feckless act of British self-harm that jeopardises the Good Friday agreement. The Tory leader, who has never met the next American president, has a lot of skilful diplomacy to perform if he is to convince the new administration that he is not a mini-Trump. Even if he can manage that, he will struggle to make the UK seem particularly relevant to a US administration that will prioritise reviving America’s relationships with the EU.Another peril for Mr Johnson is that he looks like the vendor of an ideological style that has been rejected in its largest market. Mr Trump will no longer be the most famous example of what some took to be an irresistible global trend of nationalist populism. It will become more common to see him as a shaming aberration in America’s modern history. John Quincy Adams, the sixth man to hold the office, observed: “There is nothing more pathetic than a former president.” Except – Mr Johnson might take note – the imitator of a rejected president.The Republican party is already beginning to debate how Trumpian its future should be and that argument will be reflected this side of the Atlantic. For more traditional Tories, the US election result demonstrates that entrusting their future to rightwing populism not only debases institutions and values that conservatives ought to hold precious, but also leads to an electoral dead end. Others on the right can be heard contending that, while Trump may have been defeated, Trumpism is far from exhausted as a force and a technique. While they start wrestling with what will be a long contention, some liberals are already fretting over whether Mr Biden will be able to achieve all that much when America is so deeply polarised and hyper-partisan.There will be time enough for angst. Today doesn’t have to be over-complicated. A complex election has delivered an unequivocal cause for pure and simple celebration. On 20 January next year, the current resident will be evicted from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, under armed escort if he insists on that kind of exit, and we will no longer have to put Donald Trump in the same sentence as White House.• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer More

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      A political populism far removed from Donald Trump | Letters

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      Andy Beckett presents an entirely negative picture of populism (This is a moment of truth for rightwing populists – but don’t celebrate yet, 23 October). There are many unfortunate examples in our present age of how destructive populist movements can be. However, he appears unaware of earlier and more positive episodes of populism, in particular the founding of the People’s party in 1891 in the US. This became a significant political party, gaining 8% of the popular vote when it fielded a candidate in the 1892 presidential election.The origins of the People’s party, also known as the Populist party, lay in the exploitation of sharecroppers and tenant farmers by business monopolies and the banking elite. These agrarian workers had been plunged into debt, after taking on loans to fund investments in new farming equipment, when they were hit by droughts and falling crop prices, together with extortionate loan terms and interest rates.The Populist party agitated for massive political reforms, which included the recognition of unions, regulation of the railway industry, the direct election of senators, progressive income tax, and women’s suffrage. These ideas were considered radical at the time, and still are!The current problem with populism is that most of it is not genuine, but is either generated by cynical groups with a hidden interest, or is hijacked by unscrupulous politicians for ulterior purposes. However, there still are populist movements that serve a higher purpose. Be careful not to diss populism per se, as it has a distinguished pedigree. It is the pseudo-populists who need to be challenged and brought to heel.Dr Stephen BlomfieldSheffield• Andy Beckett’s piece on populism was a brilliant discussion of one of the most pressing questions of our time. I only have one small quibble. He says we should remember that populists do sometimes “get re-elected”.But that’s not the point. Populism is democracy’s ugly sister. It flourishes when the primordial democratic promise of political equality is negated by a dysfunctional political system. The answer is the maximum possible diffusion of power. It’s not an accident that federal systems are less likely to be infected by the populist virus than centralised ones. A radical overhaul of our dysfunctional political system is the only way out of the populist trap.David MarquandPenarth, South Glamorgan• I disagree that the “predictable and cautious politics” of the 1990s and 2000s provoked an outburst of populism. It was because these political periods were unstable that there was a backlash. The administrations of John Major and Tony Blair produced boom and bust, two massive recessions with widespread unemployment and widening inequality.The Blair government was still essentially Thatcherite even though it tried to fiddle around the edges to make things a bit better for the least affluent. The inevitable crunch came in 2007 precisely because banking and housing remained unreformed. Then came David Cameron, George Osborne and austerity. Populism is the muddled reaction against 40 years of Thatcherism.David RedshawGravesend, Kent• David Runciman highlights the need for politicians with experience and judgment when faced with a crisis like the Covid-19 pandemic (Boris Johnson is learning that in politics you cannot simply ‘follow the science’, 24 October). The problem is that our pluralist democratic system is not designed to produce politicians with the wisdom and practical experience to use facts in a relevant way, but only ones that can gain resonance at the ballot box. Both Boris Johnson and Donald Trump exemplify the deficiency.Derek HeptinstallWestgate-on-Sea, Kent More