In your obituary of Gerald Kaufman (28 February), you refer to his support for the Palestinians. When I first met him, more than 30 years ago, he was a supporter of the Labour Friends of Israel and Poale Zion. It was the horror and brutality of Israel’s occupation and its refusal to concede a Palestinian state that led him to speak out, as a Jewish MP, against Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. On 15 January 2009, at the time of Israel’s Cast Lead bombardment of Gaza, when 1,400 Palestinians were killed, Kaufman referred, in a speech in the House of Commons, to the death of his grandmother, who was killed by the Nazis in the Polish town of Staszów. In a powerful and memorable speech, he said: “My grandmother did not die to provide cover for Israeli soldiers murdering Palestinian grandmothers in Gaza.”

Tony Greenstein

Brighton

• I was disappointed that your obituary of Gerald Kaufman made no mention of his being, with John Smith, a sponsored MP of the Boilermakers Society before that union amalgamated with the GMWU in 1982. It was a position he was proud of, as was shown in the speech he made in the Commons when John Smith died in 1994. There was ribald laughter in the Commons when he made the speech in what was a Tory-dominated chamber. Sadly, today’s politicians do not have his gift.

Harry Ripkey

London

• Your obituary of Gerald Kaufman recalls his memorable phraseology, but I remember a time when he was totally lost for words.

While Kaufman’s specialism chairing the national heritage and subsequently culture, media and sports select committee was undoubtedly theatre, film and the arts, during early 1995 he was persuaded by a number of us rugby-league supporting MPs and peers to undertake an inquiry into the difficult relationship at the time between league and union. A key issue was union’s continuing ban on league players.

His inquiry heard numerous examples of shamateurism within union and even evidence from the Inland Revenue that “amateur” union players were paying income tax on their earnings from the game. At the final session of the inquiry, having heard the secretary of the Rugby Football Union, Dudley Wood, attempt to defend an amateurism he was at a loss to define, Kaufman declared: “I never thought the day would arrive when I was rendered speechless.” The committee’s subsequent report roundly condemned rugby union’s treatment of rugby league players and was a key factor in forcing union to go open later that same year.

David Hinchliffe

Labour MP for Wakefield 1987-2005, Holmfirth, West Yorkshire

• In the mid-1950s, I worked during one summer at the Fabian Society bookshop when Gerald Kaufman was the society’s assistant secretary (Bill Rodgers was secretary). Gerald inspired more respect than friendship, though he was a pleasant enough colleague. Rather later I attended a Fabian lecture at which I dared to suggest that poverty still existed in Britain, though the official Labour party claimed that it had been abolished by its then recent reforms. Gerald mercilessly denounced me and my point of view. It was a classic case of a sledgehammer cracking a nut. I have never lost my feelings of humiliation – and resentment.

Much later, however, I grew to admire his denunciations of the land-grabbing policies of successive Israeli governments. His articulately voiced criticisms showed a courage and independence of mind which were above praise.

David Rubinstein

York

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