POOR Comrade Metcalfe has not only lost the argument but has now lost the plot.

His rather ill judged letter last week seemed to rant against everything including socialism in its various incarnations.

If the millions who have died as a direct consequence of socialist state terror, or as the result of socialist policies, were merely victims of experiments that went wrong then I dread to think of the consequences when they eventually get it right.

However the most damning phrase in his letter was the Segals and Beamans of the world are going to have to learn these realities one way or another'. It is eerily reminiscent of the phraseology used by totalitarian dictators about those who opposed them.

It, more than anything else, points to the dark and sinister recesses of a philosophy despised by those who were forced to live under it but so admired by armchair revolutionaries living in the comfort of a free (capitalist) society with all the benefits that flow from it.

Gregg Beaman, Carnforth.