Letters

A history of persecution Sir: Colin Brown (Letters, 7 June) ignores some good reasons for keeping religion out of society. Small groups of believers are fine, but not totalitarian dictatorships. The early Christians were treated as heretics until 313 ad, when Constantine made what became the Roman Catholic Church the official religion of the Roman Empire. The church promptly started persecuting all other religious groups. In the Middle Ages the Church let loose the Inquisition and decimated civilised communities such as the Albigensians. As for his statement that ‘all religions have provided society with ethical and moral rules’, how ethical were the laws and morals that subjugated women and slaves and persecuted anyone who questioned the authority and dogma of the Church?

We need religion Sir: Roger Scruton (‘Sacred hunger’, 31 May) describes a reason, dare I say a ‘purpose’, for religion in society. Evolutionary biologists such as the evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins should accept the concept of evolution in the social behaviour of Homo sapiens. Archaeological and anthropological evidence suggest that some form of religion played a part in the earliest of primitive societies, going back tens of thousands of years. If religion is so toxic to society, how could it have developed into so many complex and varied forms around the world unless it had powerful social ‘survival’ value? Indeed in countries where religion was outlawed, such as the USSR and China, it made the need for it even stronger.

The American experiment Sir: One can test Nicholas Wade’s hypothesis that social and political life is genetically determined (‘The genome of history’, 17 May) by constituting a nation along European lines, admitting immigrants from all over the world, and measuring the extent to which these immigrants assimilate to the dominant culture. That experiment is called the USA, and the evidence from that country suggests that within a generation or two these immigrants hold social opinions more like those of other Americans than natives of their ancestral countries. Cultural inheritance therefore outweighs genetic inheritance in the political sphere, and historians may rest easy.

Why girls do better Sir: Isabel Hardman notes that girls now outperform boys at every level in education (‘The descent of man’, 3 May), implying that this is a symptom of a wider cultural malaise. In fact, boys lost their edge in 16+ exams in 1970, long before their advantages in other areas began to disappear. ‘Child-centred’ reforms were already well advanced when the infamous Plowden report was published in 1967, and informal practices such as ‘discovery learning’ and ‘whole language’ gave girls a decided edge. This was conclusively demonstrated in trials conducted between 1997 and 2005 by the Scottish Office.

Burchill’s flimsy faith Sir: It is funny that it now falls to the Julie Burchills of this world, the old rebels of the cultural left, to speak up for Christianity in Britain (‘For God’s Sake’, 26 April). Good for her, I say, especially since she identifies Protestantism as the greatest force for liberty in this country — her argument is all the more convincing for being so unfashionable these days. The trouble, however, is that to stand up for Christian values in a time of relativism and multi-faith confusion, it helps to at least have some faith in what you are saying.

Aids is still deadly Sir: Dr Pemberton (‘Life after Aids’, 19 April) subscribes to the now prevalent view that we have turned the corner on Aids. Well only up to a point, Lord Copper. There are now about 100,000 HIV carriers in the UK, and in London, where Dr Pemberton works, as in the rest of the UK, reports of new diagnoses of HIV infection are continuing at much the same rate as before. These diagnoses are too often of individuals who have been infected for years, and are liable to have passed HIV on to others. It is also estimated that as many as one fifth of all HIV-infected individuals in the UK remain undiagnosed. Dr Pemberton is right to say that anti-retroviral treatment has greatly extended survival with HIV infection.

When the wind blows Sir: Clare Oxford’s piece (‘Gone with the wind turbines’, 12 April) is both timely and sad. Those who applaud the use of these infernal machines are prone to eulogise their efficiency by saying (in the same annoying, dumbed-down way in which commentators always compare the size of something with the number of football pitches it equates to — presumably on the basis that a normal person is unable to conceive of anything larger) that the number of machines to be erected ‘could provide power for x thousand homes’.

In loving memory Sir: When Clarissa Tan covered last year’s Good Funeral Awards, it quickly became apparent that she was a woman facing her greatest fears with a gentle and courageous spirit. She left an enduring impression on all who met her. In her subsequent article for this magazine (‘The ideal death show’, 14 September 2013) she wrote of the hope she derived from her belief in God: ‘It is the hope not that I will live. It is the hope that I am loved.’ You were, Clarissa, and you are.

Chapter and verse on Islam Sir: Irshad Manji’s generally very sensible article on ‘Reclaiming Islam’ (29 March) suggests using the Qur’an sura 3:7 as a verse to challenge Islamists who claim a fundamentalist reading. She quotes the verse as saying that ‘God and God alone knows the full truth of how the Qu’ran ought to be interpreted’. I don’t speak Arabic, but unfortunately in my English translation this isn’t quite what the verse says. What it says is ‘only God and insightful people know their true meaning’.

Why we need a free press Sir: As bereaved parents and (to borrow from some signatories of last week’s advertisement) victims of public authority abuse we wholly oppose adoption of the politically endorsed Royal Charter of Press Regulation. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Christopher, our mentally ill son, had been denied his right to life as a result of failures by the prison service, the police and the NHS. Our experience was that, in the aftermath of our son’s death, the primary objective of the public authorities involved was to protect themselves from criticism because of those failures rather than to achieve justice for our son.

ME is real Sir: Rod Liddle may or may not be right that certain illnesses become fashionable once given a name and are illusory (‘Children with a severe case of the excuses’, 15 March). But ME — myalgic encephalomyelitis, alias post-viral fatigue syndrome or yuppie flu, is not one of them. It’s an unpleasant physical illness: it ruined seven years of my life. It probably takes a number of forms, but in my case it started with chicken pox, caught off my infant son. I seemed to make a complete recovery until a year later, when I began to experience unpleasant symptoms. These included abnormal sensitivity to sound and light, violently inflamed eyes and blisters around the head and upper body. There was also nominal aphasia (problems recalling words).

Slavery isn’t over Sir: I was alarmed to read Taki’s piece in this week’s High Life (8 March) which claimed that ‘slavery… has been over since 1865, except in Africa’. The Centre for Social Justice, whose board I chair, last year published its groundbreaking report It Happens Here, exposing the desperate plight of those in modern slavery in the UK.

Political best buys Sir: Fraser Nelson’s excellent article ‘Cameron’s Northern Alliance’ (1 March) made me wonder whether we, as voters, at the next election could benefit from a simple and independent chart (perhaps a Which?-style guide) comparing the policies offered by the parties, and the outcomes of the varying policies adopted across Europe. We all carry out research before purchasing insurance or booking a holiday by checking guides, so why not have something similar when choosing a government? It must be better than voters making a decision based on the superficial grounds of the party leaders’ secondary education or resemblance to a cartoon character.

Nuclear reaction Sir: Peter Atherton questions whether a new nuclear power station at Hinkley Point is a fair deal for the UK (‘Nuclear fallout’, 22 February). However, his conclusion is based on some unvalidated assumptions. In May 2012, he wrote that EDF would need £166 for each megawatt hour of electricity produced to get a ‘realistic return’. Now he says that an agreed price of £92.50 offers rewards which are ‘eyewateringly attractive’. Neither claim is justified. It is a balanced deal which will unlock £16 billion of investment at the lowest possible cost for consumers. He claims returns to investors of up to 35 per cent.

Caution over wind Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods crisis, it behoves Christopher Booker to provide a long overdue critical perspective of the Environmental Agency (‘Sunk!’, 15 February). The two main tenets of his article have been ignored by most, if not all, other journalists. With something approaching delicious irony we are then treated in the same issue to a self-serving missive from the Renewables UK boxwallah Jennifer Weber (Letters, 15 February).

Private pain Sir: A line in Alec Marsh’s article (‘Britain’s one-child policy’, 1 February) caught my eye; that school fees have ‘almost doubled in the past decade’. I recently found an 1823 bill for an ancestor’s attendance at dame school (broadly equivalent to a prep school) that was approximately £3 a term for full boarding. In the 1970s, seven generations later, my own prep school fees were just over £300 a term. Whilst this represents, in nominal terms, a little more than a doubling every generation; in real terms the growth in school fees over the 150 years averages less than 10 per cent a generation.

The battle over aid Sir: Why Nations Fail, the book rightly lauded in The Spectator (‘Why aid fails’, 25 January), is one of the inspirations for many of the changes this government has made in international development policy. Those changes can best be described as driving value for money through the system, tackling conflict and instability, and building prosperity. Bringing together defence, diplomacy and development — not least through the mechanism of the National Security Council — has made a significant difference to the success of British development policy. Buried in the article is the sentence: ‘We do not argue for its [the aid budget’s] reduction.