It is no wonder that the same Blair who once condemned Livingstone as a potential disaster for London should now welcome and support him: the authoritarian mindset is their common ground.This also shows why, as Robert Fisk reports on another page, exporting our "democracy" to Iraq is doomed to failure.Please keep up your defence of our fragile rights, local and national.ROGER PAYNELONDON NW3Sir: Your leading article (13 October) is both timely and necessary.In his History of England Macaulay wrote: "As we cannot, without the risk of evils from which the imagination recoils, employ physical force as a check on misgovernment, it is evidently our wisdom to keep all the constitutional checks on misgovernment in the highest state of efficiency, to watch with jealousy the first beginnings of encroachment, and never to suffer irregularities, even when harmless in themselves, to pass unchallenged, lest they acquire the force of precedents."As true now as it was then, if government by fiat is not to replace parliamentary democracy.IAN PARTRIDGEBRADFORDSir: If I were to make phone calls or e-mails to my friends about setting up demonstrations for, say, a pro-hunt protest, anti-arms sales, a New Labour meeting, anti-vivisection, pro-abortion,

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or arrest of Blair for war crimes, all of which may or may not be preliminary to acts of violence, at what point are these conversations (or even the tone of this letter to you) deemed by the police to be grounds for the dawn raid with dogs and machine guns? Are my friends also implicated?Unfortunately readers of the tabloids love the frisson of summary arrests and the identification of racial or religious scapegoats for the Iraq war, bombs in the underground and tortures at Guantanamo Bay; and readers of the old broadsheets just want to enjoy their rich lifestyle in peace. Heather Brooke's article (13 October) referring to the trend towards Orwellian controls, along with Adrian Hamilton's article about the growing authoritarian rule of Ken Livingstone over Londoners, as well as your own leader on the illiberal proposed legislation on terrorism, show us all too alarmingly the growing trend towards governmental control.Livingstone has ignored the wishes of a very large majority of people and businesses in west London and is pressing ahead with his money-raising scheme to tax Londoners even further with an unwanted extension of his Congestion Zone - where there is no congestion. Our guiding principles must be the defence of human rights, managing globalisation in a changing world, reducing poverty and promoting peace and security rather than simply defending the status quo.STEPHEN TWIGGDIRECTOR, THE FOREIGN POLICY CENTRE LONDON NW1 Alarming trend of authoritarian control Sir: Thank goodness for The Independent. Britain has always had a strong relationship with Israel, but is also one of the biggest givers of financial aid to the Palestinian Authority. The key objective is to create a framework in which to normalise the relationship between Israel and Palestine.The nature of foreign policy has changed in the 21st century. It is not enough to say that a successful international approach is achieved by simply defending the British interest at the expense of all else. There must be room for some compromise if multilateral organisations are to function.

Britain has an opportunity as a third party that is not seen by either party to be either too pro-Palestinian or too pro-Israeli. Harold Pinter, 75, the most distinguished living British playwright and a walking embodiment of the combative political conscience, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I believe, as the Foreign Policy Centre has argued (such as in a pamphlet authored by John Bercow MP), that there is a moral imperative for the international community to intervene in cases of genocide and the systematic abuse of human rights.I do agree, however, that Britain is well placed to play a key role in the Israel-Palestinian crisis. While Malcolm Rifkind and his cabinet colleagues dithered over ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, the Labour government sent a strong message to dictators by repelling Slobodan Milosevic's brutal invasion of Kosovo. We cannot achieve reform of the CAP, a stronger budget, and reform of the political institutions of the EU by having a "looser relationship" as he suggests. He mentions the stance that John Major took on Bosnia. Last week, the UK negotiated a framework document for the accession of Turkey in the face of considerable opposition. The UK has developed the EU agenda to work on climate change and Africa.

"Pinter," said the Academy's chairman, Horace Engdahl, "restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles." More from John Walsh. Defence of human rights must be our main foreign policy principle Sir: "Foreign Policy can be a delicate subject" wrote Sir Malcolm Rifkind (Opinion, 7 October). I agree: and what it doesn't need is the hyperbole that often grips politicians talking on this subject Sir Malcolm is wrong to say the UK has no policy on Europe. The prize - worth 10m kr?(£735,000) and the highest honour available to any writer in the world - was announced by the Swedish Academy yesterday. Couldn't the Tate help by taking it off the label - or has this bit of graffiti become irremovable? More from Thomas Sutcliffe. It's also about how you can't be sure - from the outside - what an interior contains.And then someone comes along and calls it The Rape, destroying that shimmer of uncertainty with one crude stroke.