NEWPORT rightly prides itself on good community relations, but I wonder how much longer this is likely to be the case as certain vociferous big voices in the majority population try to force debating chambers in independent countries to follow their own so-called “Western values”.

“Same-sex marriage” has just become legal, and no doubt a lot of registrars will lose their jobs because of it, but already the UK government is trying to blackmail other administrations to follow suit. President Obama and his assistants in London already demand that other administrations should allow them to abort their babies — as if pushing the same policy among minorities at home is not enough.

In fact, the politicians of the West, from the UN and EU down, seem to want the old empires back again.

By contrast, witness the Forty Days for Life people praying outside the abortion clinic in Cardiff throughout the weeks of Lent, and which many Newport people have supported. It is originally a US organisation but South Wales-based people actually run it. In my calculation, every continent except Antarctica, and very many different ethnic groups and languages, have been represented there, a kind of alternative United Nations of ordinary local people when the UN of the bigwigs seems to have lost its way.

Joseph Biddulph Ebenezer Street Pontypridd