SIR – You have to admire Shipley’s MP Philip Davies’s latest stand on safety headgear, as he is never backward at coming forward to champion any perceived discrimination or inequality in life (T&A, May 16).

However, where the subject of ethnic or religious minorities being exempted from the laws or other rules and regulations set by Parliament that the majority population of this country must abide by, he is spitting, to put it politely, into the wind because that battle was lost many years ago.

Generations of both Conservative and Labour politicians have bent over backwards to allow constant derogations on religious or cultural grounds for everything under the sun.

The list is endless and yet another example of the shambles we are in today because, unlike most other democracies round the world, we do not have a formal written constitution, which if we had would probably say, “Freedom of religion allowed only if you abide by the laws applying to the majority”.

It’s never too late to correct this, it only takes political will, but where the minority vote seems more important than what is right and proper in a civilised society, I can’t see it changing in my lifetime or that of Mr Davies.

D S Boyes, Upper Rodley Lane, Leeds