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Dignity amid grief
• I SHOULD like to thank the community in Finsbury Park for their excellent response to calls to co-operate with the police over the recent killing of Martin Dinnegan.
The universal support for the peace service and walk to Martin’s makeshift shrine was truly uniting and healing.
I should also like to salute the Dinnegan family for their dignity and concern for others at this difficult time.
Their presentation to the Government of the issues relating to knife crime was excellent, and well received by Downing Street.
In response to Councillor Marisha Ray (Knives: MP slow to act, July 20), I should say that we are all equally horrified by knife crime. Martin’s death was just as tragic as the deaths of the dozen or so other young people who have been killed in London this year in similar circumstances.
We need to take urgent action to impress on young people that carrying a knife brings no security, only death.
I call on the local authority to join with other agencies to ensure the borough’s youth and family provision is adequate over the summer and beyond.
I am more than happy to work with the council and police to ensure our young people have the facilities necessary to engage in positive and constructive activity.
JEREMY CORBYN
Labour MP, Islington North
• I WAS appalled to read Councillor Marisha Ray’s letter last week playing political games with the issue of knife crime to attack our MP Jeremy Corbyn.
He has played an important role, expressing the outrage we all felt at the stabbing of Martin Dinnegan and he has pressured the government and the council for the action we need.
Until last week I had been impressed by the way people of different parties and communities in Islington had come together to work for the benefit of young people and to try to stop another outrage occurring.
But Cllr Ray’s letter has sought to create divisions to win cheap political points.
She is supposed to be in charge of community safety for the borough and should be trying to build on the positive consensus in the wake of Martin’s tragic stabbing.
Councillors who spend their time trawling through old records of Parliamentary debates to try to create a story would do better to look at the real issues we face on the ground today, in Holloway and across the borough.
If this is all Cllr Ray has to offer us in terms of community safety then I think she should resign.
BEN FOLLEY
Benwell Road, N7
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