The Tories have been dragging the UK to the far right for years | Letters

Readers respond to an editorial on comparisons with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and the risk posed to core European ideals

Your editorial (The Guardian view on Giorgia Meloni: normalising the radical right, 23 April) correctly exposed the danger that Giorgia Meloni and her party with neofascist roots poses to core European ideals and values. But you are wrong in seeing Rishi Sunak’s flirtation as anything new for Britain’s Tories.

In 2019, after the European elections, Britain’s Tory MEPs were happy to leap into bed with the Brothers of Italy in their European Conservatives and Reformists Group. Sunak is demonstrating Tory continuity, not change.
Glyn Ford
Labour MEP (1984-2009); rapporteur for the European parliament’s Committee of Inquiry into Growth of Fascism and Racism in Europe (1985)