A right old mess
Sir: Although Andy Burnham seems to be turning to Old Labour, what he is really turning against is Thatcherism and the shift towards neoliberalism.
Your editorial (‘The return of Old Labour’, 3 October) rightly identifies low growth, ballooning government debt, high energy costs, low investment, inadequate preparation for technological change, uncontrolled migration and invertebrate defence as current concerns. All can be attributed to governments since 1980. It is no good saying that government itself is unequal to the task. Who has been responsible for this?
A winter is coming all right. What is less clear is whether the right has renounced its faith in false gods and has the ideas and people to solve the problems it has lumbered us with. Just parroting the ‘shrink the state’ and ‘unleash the market’ slogans doesn’t cut it any more.
Roger Steer
Sheffield
Long live the free market
Sir: Andy Burnham says he wants ‘public control’ of various services and utilities (‘Back to the future’, 3 October). But by ‘public’ he means ‘government’ and by government he means the small clique of busybodies now in power, i.e. himself and his friends. Real public control comes only through the free market, where every member of the public exercises a vote whenever he or she makes a choice as to how to spend their money. Public monopolies do not operate in a free market and it is the failure of the government regulators that has reduced them to their present disastrous state. It would, nonetheless, be good to hear more of the moral case for the free market from the Conservative party.
A.W. Harvey
Cheltenham, Glos
Take off the scales
Sir: It was disappointing to see the absurdities concerning the British fishing industry repeated in your review of The Full English: The Ways We Eat and Why (Books, 26 September). Its size was exaggerated by a factor of ten but you were still credulous enough to print the assertion that it is ‘less than the contribution to GDP by sales of sit-down lawnmowers or Peppa Pig merchandise’, which remains untrue even with the correct, smaller number for fishing.
It is similarly absurd to suggest that ‘our image of England as a proud fishing nation is… warped’, to conflate England with Britain in the use of statistics and then to use the industry’s size at the time of the Leave campaign in support of this assertion when Leave’s fundamental complaint was that the industry had been devastated by 40 years of European membership.
John Fishley
Maiden’s Green, Berkshire
Dashed hoops
Sir: Reading Douglas Murray’s piece (‘The game you are not allowed to win’, 3 October), which featured an anecdote about Roy Jenkins and a game of croquet, I was reminded of my own croquet parable.
As JCR president of St John’s College, Durham, I was charged with taking the then archbishop of York, John Sentamu, around our college grounds. When I showed him the croquet lawn, the archbishop stopped dead and fixed me with an earnest stare. ‘Terrible game,’ he opined. As a croquet fan, I enquired how this could be the case and he replied: ‘It is one of the very few games where you cannot only advantage yourself, but you win by disadvantaging your opponent. Tears families apart.’
James Lake
Former JCR president
St John’s College, Durham
Churchill’s winkle
Sir: Piers Morgan’s favourite Kelvin MacKenzie headline, ‘WARNING: DRINK’LL WRINKLE YOUR WINKLE’ (Diary, 3 October) reminded me of the Hastings Winkle Club, founded in 1900 by Hastings fishermen. ‘Winklers’, as members are known, are obliged to carry a winkle shell which should be produced when challenged by fellow members to ‘winkle up’. Failure to do so results in a fine that goes towards local charitable causes.
As a boy, I recall Winston Churchill, as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports and in the company of Lord Montgomery (himself a Winkler), coming to my home town to receive membership and a special solid gold winkle. At a subsequent London reception, he is known to have failed the ‘winkle up’ challenge of a member, Hastings’s chief constable: he cheerfully paid his fine to the fishermen’s charity.
Peter Saunders
Salisbury, Wiltshire
Bayeux schadenfreude
Sir: Apologies to readers who have queued for hours to see the Bayeux Tapestry, paid a fortune to do so or have been turned away. Some years ago I was leading a battlefield visit to the D-Day beaches and my wife and I were staying at a delightful little hotel in Bayeux. ‘Why don’t we go and take a look at the Tapestry, it’s only next door?’ she said. We strolled in for free, had the place to ourselves and spent hours studying this beautiful and fascinating artefact.
Roger Laing
Iver, Bucks
Novel thought
Sir: In response to Owen Matthews (‘The death of the author’, 3 October), the reason why AI will never write a great novel comes from the noun itself, as in ‘novel’ meaning new and fresh. All AI can do is plagiarise and synthesise. All great literature comes from a place of pain, whether it is Dickens’s child labour in a shoe-polish factory or Hemingway’s father committing suicide. As far as I am aware, Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT have not had unhappy childhoods.
Tim Adler
London E2
Bible study
Sir: In his recent letter (3 October), Peter Hitchens speaks of his late brother’s praise for ‘the power and beauty of scripture’. That comes as no great surprise. Even the supreme atheist Shelley lauded the Bible as a great product of the literary imagination, full of poetic imagery and dramatic power.
Derrick Gillingham
London EC1
Unbridled knowledge
Sir: In response to Sue Mason’s letter of 3 October, the expression is ‘A wigwam for a goose’s bridle’ and is a 17th-century saying meaning, in effect, ‘none of your business’ and directed to children when enquiring what was for dinner. (For Dot Wordsworth’s view, see her article in this issue.)
Robert Stephens
Bearsted, Kent
I want to be alone
Sir: Lloyd Evans is right to relish the cocoon of solitude on the London Tube (No life, 26 September). Yet it can be overdone. Some years ago at Tottenham Court Road a man took the empty seat next to me. I ignored him completely. At Shepherd’s Bush he startled me by saying: ‘Hello.
It was my brother.
Christopher Blauth
London E14
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