Sir, - I have become accustomed while reading your paper, particularly your Letters page, to finding the British accused of many an atrocity. Recently, it was the British who gave Hitler his evil ideas and murdered 30 millions in building their empire; it was the British who caused the present conflict in Sudan; and it was the British who betrayed the Jews of Europe by not fighting hard enough against the Germans. The list of our crimes is, it appears, endless.
But now, to cap it all, we are guilty of committing the deliberate slight of not referring to the tremendous and thoroughly newsworthy event of the Irish under18s' football team winning the European Championship! This apparently demonstrates that we (all 60 million of us) are "mean-spirited, self-centred and ungracious-in-defeat" (W.G.A. Scott, August 5th). Well, if it makes your correspondent feel any better, yes, I will admit it, we are. And, by the way, we also drink the blood of dead babies. - Yours, etc., A.P. Abbott,
Bartley Green, Birmingham.