VLADIMIR Putin said recently ‘Liberalism is now dead’.

I have to agree with him. Classical Liberalism only really existed from 1945 until 1980.

Neo-Liberalism currently rules our lives. It includes policies of privatisation, austerity, deregulation and a reduction in government spending to increase the role of the private sector.

These are a paradigm shift from those few relatively good post-war decades.

The current excesses of individual and corporate wealth are mostly made by sacrificing the mental and physical health, food needs, education, housing and social mobility of the lower classes of society. Climate change is another price all but the vacuous mega-rich will pay for in some cases, with their lives.

I have this image in my mind of Richard Branson and various other pillars of society like Sir Philip Green living on islands inside huge air-conditioned glass domes with a slot or two at their perimeters allowing them to bathe in the sea. These will be netted of course to keep out rotting corpses and vengeful survivors.

A friend of mine said the other day that he feared what might happen when people really understand how they have been abused by the ravages of unfettered capitalism promoted by politicians like Boris Johnson without a vestige of empathy.

On the subject of slavery, Ann Widdecombe describes us as ‘slaves to Europe’. I suppose her perks as an MEP mean she is a -willing masochist and dons manacles whenever she goes there. She and Arron Banks who said “The British led the world on abolishing slavery, we have nothing to be ashamed of…..” need to read Kenan Malik in the Guardian.

“The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act abolished, as the name suggests, slavery itself. A Treasury so loose with its facts might explain something about the state of the British economy. Worse, however, was the claim that British taxpayers helped “buy freedom for slaves”.

The government certainly shelled out £20m (about £16bn today) in 1833. Not to free slaves but to line the pockets of 46,000 British slave owners as “recompense” for losing their “property”. Having grown rich on the profits of an obscene trade, slave owners grew richer still from its ending. That, scandalously, was what the taxpayer was paying for until 2015.”

Incidentally, it was the USA in 1807 which prohibited the importation of slaves (not slavery itself) and it wasn’t sympathy for the plight of slaves which caused slavery’s decline in the 1830’s but beckoning alternative economic activities.

The more I research the false claims of Brexiteers and their ‘Rule Britannia’ outlook, the more ashamed I am of the truths that ‘under-lie’ their myths.

MIKE JOSLIN

Dorchester