I share Andy Richards' relief that his Manhattan relatives are safe and his plea for no precipitate "eye for an eye" US-UK response to the terrorist assault on the US (Letters, September 18). My own spouse in Portland, where the suicidal hijackers were spotted, is safe too.

But I find it a bit rich coming from Mr Richards - Arthur Scargill's wrecking candidate against Ivor Caplin MP at the last election - who now gives lectures against extremism.

For years, the Socialist Labour Party and Socialist Workers' Party, whose voice Andy now is, have railed against all "aggressors", from the US to the European community, in their own authoritarian, isolationist brand of "socialism". It is nonsense for them to pose as the new, moderate internationalists. They are grossly fraudulent political opportunists.

Mr Richards, an esteemed trade union official, would do better to conduct his insular, ultra-left friends into the real, co-operative world of social, radical democracy rather than giving us holier-than-thou lectures in his regular bombardments of the letters columns of The Argus.

I cannot be alone in having had enough of these false, sermonising tones.

-Larry Isles, US/Canada Representative, UK Labour Party Movement for Europe Group