Letters

Piggies in the middle Sir: Your feature ‘The strange death of the middle class’ (24 August) assumes that young people who do not attend fee-paying schools cannot have access to the same opportunities as those who do. I attended my local comprehensive in the first decade of this century. Despite the variable teaching quality, I did well in exams, went on to a good university, and now work for an aerospace company. I can afford to rent a flat, go on holiday and save a little, all on an income not much higher than the average starting salary for a graduate. I have not inherited any money, nor did I receive any from my parents during university.

Some doctors write Sir: Professor Meirion Thomas (‘Dangerous medicine’, 17 August) may be an excellent surgeon but he is uninformed about the nature of GPs’ work. For many older consultants in the NHS, it will have been decades since they last spent any time in a GP setting, if they have at all. He fails to realise that 95 per cent of the work of diagnosing, treating and caring for patients takes place within general practice. Common illnesses range from depression, to diabetes, asthma and hypertension, as well as many others. Dr Meirion Thomas’s idea that nurse specialists are the answer betrays his lack of understanding that most patients present to GP as a complex mix of interrelated symptoms and other factors.

Absent friends Sir: Alec Marsh (‘Welcome to Big Venice’, 10 August) accurately observes that Londoners are priced out of central London by largely foreign buyers of second homes. Wealthy foreigners not only buy, they also rent, often living in London for a few years, during which they frequently return to their first home for weeks or months at a time. In Marylebone, where I have lived for 43 years, an average earner can neither buy nor rent. Moreover, rentals are only short hold. This contributes to the death of communities: it is not their foreignness which makes the new residents bad neighbours, nor their love of the convenient transport and vastly expensive shops and restaurants, but their transience and consequent lack of interest in local people, history and customs.

In defence of bats Sir: I am saddened by the ‘us versus them’ stance taken by Melissa Kite (‘Bats vs people’, 3 August) when referring to bats. I might be better known for wielding a different sort of bat, but I am a strong supporter of the winged variety. These amazing creatures have lived alongside people for centuries but bats are often misunderstood and even persecuted. So let’s set the record straight; bats are a natural British pesticide, eating midges and other pests. But the last century hasn’t been good for bats. We have carelessly destroyed much of their habitat and, although, as Ms Kite noted, they are protected by law, with the challenges bats face they need all the help they can get.

IQ and social mobility Sir: It seems not to have occurred to our leaders that ability is not evenly distributed across the social classes. In a meritocratic society, employers will try to recruit the most able candidates into the top positions. There, they meet other bright people, pair off and have children. As Professor Plomin’s work clearly demonstrates (‘The Truth about Intelligence’, 27 July), these children inherit much of their intelligence from their parents, so like them, they succeed in the education system and end up getting top jobs. Middle-class kids therefore tend to outperform working-class kids, not because they are unfairly privileged, but because they are likely to be brighter.

Wild weather Sir: Weather and climate science is not an emotional or political issue — even though emotions and politics run high around it, as illustrated in Rupert Darwall’s article (‘Bad weather’, 13 July). However, it is important that opinions are rooted in evidence, and the article contains numerous errors and misrepresentations about the Met Office and its science. Here are a couple of points. The assertion of the Met Office’s ‘forecast failure’ is just wrong. The Met Office is beating all of its forecast accuracy targets. We are consistently recognised by the World Meteorological Organization as one of the top two most accurate operational forecasters in the world.

Tax breaks for families Sir: Hugo Rifkind is wrong to imply (6 July) that the current income tax system is indifferent to family structure, and thus the Conservative party’s attempt to give tax breaks to married couples is ‘a blatant attempt at social engineering’. Is it not social engineering when the current system demands more tax from a single-earner family than a dual-earner family, even if the total income is the same? Milton Friedman once said: ‘We tend to talk about an individualist society, but it really isn’t, it’s a family society.’ Hugo makes the mistake of seeing society as a collection of individuals, but in the real world most important financial decisions are taken by families or households.

Medical waste Sir: Susan Hill’s article (‘Patient, heal thyself’, 29 June) dealt only with the unnecessary visits to GPs for minor ailments. In Wales we have an extra incentive to waste GPs’ time — all prescriptions are free. There are many people who are prepared to make a GP appointment just to get routine medicines for free, and GPs are powerless to resist. Tim Johnson Aberystwyth, Ceredigion   Sir: Susan Hill’s article revived pleasant memories of my stint as a locum general practitioner in the early 1970s in Goring-by-Sea. As the registered patient number of the solo practice was the maximum allowable by the NHS at the time, I was puzzled to find that my workload ranged from half to one hour daily.

We’ve only just begun Sir: In Ross Clark’s article ‘Cuts, what cuts?’ (22 June), he suggested that I was boasting about saving the taxpayer £5.5 billion. It’s true: I’m proud of my department’s Efficiency and Reform Group and the work of civil servants across Whitehall who have sliced out wasteful spending. But the figures he used were 12 months out of date. Last year we saved the public purse £10 billion — 80 per cent up on the figure he quoted. That increase — which doesn’t include the savings from tackling fraud, error and uncollected debt — rather put pay to the Audit Office’s concern that our earlier savings might not have been sustainable.

Being good without God Sir: It is a rash person who tangles with the Chief Rabbi, but his piece on ‘Atheism and barbarism’ (15 June) shocked me. After championing until his last paragraph the old lie that religious belief is a necessary foundation for morality, he suddenly says he doesn’t believe ‘that you have to be religious to be moral’, which effectively contradicts his whole thesis. But there are several derailments before that. He questions the ability of society ‘to survive without the rituals, narratives and shared practices that create and sustain the social bond’.

Legal squabbles Sir: Harry Mount’s angry and unfocused polemic (‘Against the Law’, 8 June), demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of the British legal system. That is surprising from a former barrister, even if he never practised after pupillage. British justice is revered worldwide, and for good reason. Rather than deal with the disastrous effects the proposals will have, should they be implemented, Mount’s invective is preoccupied with what barristers wear, rather than what we say. Barristers prefer to focus on evidence. What could be a bigger display of Big Government than the state charging you with a criminal offence and then allocating you a lawyer, whether or not they are suitable? That is what the legal profession is fighting.

HS2 v broadband Sir: Rory Sutherland (The Wiki Man, 25 May) is rightly sceptical of HS2, but in limiting his remarks only to the transport of people, he is still too kind. Why spend 20 years building Victorian technology when the infrastructure of the future will be a broadband network of far greater capacity than exists now? The internet has revolutionised the distribution of most services and the production of some products. New technologies like 3D printing are on the cusp of transforming the location of industry and the distribution of manufactures, which could benefit depressed areas far more than HS2. These technologies require the downloading of vast amounts of data at speeds with which the existing UK broadband capacity cannot yet cope.

Stay Conservative Sir: Dr John Hyder-Wilson wrote (Letters, 11 May) of my calls to ‘shift Tory party policy rightward’ to meet a threat from Ukip, which he felt was inconsistent as he could not remember me advocating a leftward shift in response to a threat from the SDP/Alliance in the early 1980s. Of course he could not. I am afraid that he is in a muddle. I responded then to the SDP/Alliance, and would do so now to Ukip in exactly the same way, by advocating Conservative policies for the Conservative party. As Dr Hyder-Wilson may remember, Margaret Thatcher won her third election victory on Conservative policies after eight years in office governing on those policies. In that victory she secured more votes than at her first victory.

The other side of fracking Sir: Peter Lilley’s article on fracking (‘The only way is shale’, 11 May) is right to outline the role that shale can play in addressing Britain’s energy crisis, creating jobs, and generating tax revenues. But he is guilty of several errors and omissions. First, he ignores the concerns of local communities in opposing drilling and extraction. Second, he fails to address questions around methane leakage which are concerning US legislators and executive agencies. Third, he does not set out a role for carbon capture and storage technology, which would reduce the carbon emissions of shale. Fourth, he fails to acknowledge the body of evidence which predicts that onshore wind will become cheaper than gas by 2020.

One-nation Toryism Sir: When my late father, John McKee, stood as Conservative candidate for South Shields in the 1970 general election he gained 19,960 votes, more even than David Miliband in the same constituency 40 years later. In last week’s by-election in the South Shields constituency, the Conservative candidate attracted only 2,857 votes. Many things have changed since 1970 but one important thing that is different is that in those days the local Conservative party had a large number of working-class members helping in the campaign; there was even a flourishing Conservative Trade Union organisation in the constituency. Nor was South Shields unique in this respect.

Goers and go-getters Sir: In her interesting article on the rising equality in the female world (‘Sex and success, 27 April), Alison Wolf states that A*/top-stream girls stay virgins until 20 ‘because they have more important things on their minds’. I am not sure about this. I certainly remember that this was not the case when I was at Wellington in the late 1990s: the A* girls were usually the goers. Nolan Walker London EC1 Ms Kite’s elitism Sir: We would like to take issue with Melissa Kite’s piece (‘Two-wheeled tyranny’, 27 April). I write on behalf of CTC, the national cycling charity. I was delighted to find two of our members are active cycle campaigners with firsthand knowledge of the Kenilworth Greenway, referred to in her article.

Lady Thatcher’s club Sir: Charles Moore’s excellent paragraph (Notes, 20 April) on Baroness Thatcher’s life achievement in the context of much less social advantage than that of Sir Winston Churchill concludes on one mildly false assertion: ‘At the end, as at the beginning, she had no club.’ In fact, from 1978 until the end, she was the only female member of Buck’s Club (save for a period where she shared the distinction with the HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). She was a regular visitor, for a time with Sir Denis, a member himself over many decades. As it happens, Sir Winston was also a member, from 1920, and subsequently patron, from 1953 to his death in 1965, and he remained a frequent visitor throughout his life.

What to do about PMQs Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 6 April) is right to propose that Prime Minister’s Questions revert to the long-standing previous practice of two 15-minute sessions a week (on a Tuesday and Thursday) in place of the current 30-minute session. Tony Blair introduced the present arrangement at the beginning of his premiership for one of the reasons offered by Mr Moore: that it would reduce the time he would have to spend each week on preparation. Whether Tony’s intention was also, as Mr Moore suggests, to reduce his exposure to attack, I doubt; in any case it certainly did not achieve this. The vulnerability of the Prime Minister to the opposition leader’s questions rises exponentially in relation to the number of questions that can be asked in one go.