Letters

Quantitative ease Sir: Unlike Louise Cooper (‘The great savings robbery’, 30 March), I don’t have a problem with inflation or quantitative easing. It’s the perfect tax: painless, easy to collect and fair. It’s painless because after having been collected you still have the proverbial pound in your pocket. OK, it’s worth less — but as Louise points out, we don’t really notice. Easy to collect, just order a new batch of twenties from the printers and put the prices up in the shop. And everybody pays exactly the same percentage, and so the relative difference between rich and poor remains the same. Tom Roberts Derby   Sir: According to the legend, Fortunatus (he of the bottomless purse) was born in Famagusta. How times change!

Right to say NO Sir: Three cheers for the Spectator NO! (‘Why we aren’t signing’, 23 March). I would rather be informed by the slimiest of Fleet Street’s journalists or the rudest blogger than any one of Westminster’s incompetents. Dr A.E. Hanwell York   Sir: Perhaps our newsagents should split the papers they sell into sections marked ‘Free Press’ and ‘Other’. I know which one I’d choose. Leo Bajzert Sydney, Australia The house price problem Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 23 March) blames the astronomic rise in house prices on planning restrictions — a point of view endorsed by the Chancellor and by Nick Boles, the planning minister.

Joining the club Sir: As Robert Hardman notes (Royal notebook, 16 March), not only is the C back in FCO but these days there is a waiting list of countries interested in joining, or being more closely associated with, the Commonwealth. I have a list of at least half a dozen, and even some strong signals from Dublin that they, too, are now thinking about joining the club. How can this be so when we were told so firmly by foreign policy experts in the past century that we should break our ties with the Commonwealth and that our future prosperity and destiny lay in Europe?

Sir David must stand down Sir: Reading the reports of Sir David Nicholson’s evidence before the House of Commons Health Committee on 5 March 2013 (Leading article, 9 March), it seems to me inconceivable that he could remain in his post. We are informed by the Prime Minister that in the current circumstances the NHS is unable to do without him. But nobody is indispensable and in any case, to judge by Sir David’s recent performance, he is incompetent, a hopeless leader, has a very poor memory and is more interested in saving his skin than in the wellbeing of NHS patients.

Gove’s history lessons Sir: ‘The idea that there is a canonical body of knowledge that must be mastered,’ says Professor Jackie Eales, ‘but not questioned, is inconsistent with high standards of education in any age.’ This is not true. Primary education is, or should be, all about just such a body of knowledge. This gives children a foundation of fact, preferably facts learnt by heart. Without it, they cannot begin to reason, and develop valid ideas, in the secondary stage. It may be a tight squeeze to get them through English history up to 1700 by the age of 11, but it is better than not covering the ground at all. The bizarre result of 25 years of the national curriculum is that schoolchildren don’t know English history.

Healing the world Sir: We most warmly commend the courage of Professor Meirion Thomas (‘The next NHS scandal’, 23 February) in lifting the lid on the appalling abuse of the NHS by foreign visitors. It has been going on for years but has been covered up by the culture of fear that has pervaded that organisation. We stand ready to support the professor in parliament if that should prove necessary. Regrettably, the present position is even worse than he described. The relevant quango (the Primary Care Commissioning group) issued instructions last July that GPs must accept an application for registration from any foreign visitor who is here for more than 24 hours as well as from all illegal immigrants.

Benedictions Sir: John O’Sullivan’s summary of Pope Benedict XVI’s ‘extraordinary contribution’ to Catholic thought was masterful (‘Benedict’s reformation’, 16 February) — and how interesting that the Pontiff’s writings and speeches have helped create a new ‘Catholic atheist’ movement. It is a shame, however, that O’Sullivan didn’t mention another area in which Benedict has challenged western ideas: his repeated denunciation of ‘unregulated financial capitalism’ as a threat to world peace. Adam Smith would have agreed with him. I hope that O’Sullivan’s omission was not ideological blindness as to the nasty side of free markets.

Militant humanists Sir: Thank God for Douglas Murray (‘Call off the faith wars’, 9 February). It is possible that I have been counting myself an atheist for longer than Richard Dawkins — if only because I am almost a decade older than he is. It is only fairly recently, though, that I began subscribing to the Humanist Association, of which Professor Dawkins has long been vice-president. I confess that I joined largely in the hope that membership might one day reduce the likelihood of some well-intentioned priest spouting mumbo-jumbo over my coffin. Having signed up, I was faintly shocked by the ferocity of the humanist movement. I recognise, for example, that faith schools are intrinsically unfair, but I would be disinclined to deny parents their choice.

Respect the RSPCA Sir: You ask whether the RSPCA has ‘gone feral’ (‘The RSPCA’s secret war’, 2 February)? The answer is ‘no’. Since its founding, the society has promoted kindness to and respect for animals. We have done so through education, good science and campaigns to change the law to protect animals from cruelty. But laws only count if they are effectively enforced. Some of your readers may assert that the police should do this work. On many occasions they do so, often working closely with our trained inspectorate. However, operational realities and pressure on police resources mean that human welfare tends to rank higher than that of animals. Should those acting cruelly to animals ‘get away with it’?

Reforming criminal justice Sir: Crime continues to fall under this government and is now at its lowest level since the crime survey began in 1982. But we can’t be complacent. We still see too many of the same faces going round and round the criminal justice system, as Theodore Dalrymple notes in his article ‘The rehabilitation game’ (26 January). We are already addressing the problems Dalrymple describes. We are changing the law so every community sentence will include punishment and introducing satellite tagging to keep a much closer eye on persistent and high-risk offenders. I am looking at the use of cautions.

Moore for less Sir: Niru Ratnam (Arts, 19 January) is wrong on a number of counts and omits much else. The sale of Henry Moore’s ‘Draped Seated Woman’ would be most unlikely to raise the £20 million he claims; £5 million is thought to be much nearer the market value — 0.3 per cent of Tower Hamlets’ annual expenditure of £1.53 billion, and scarcely likely to relieve the current financial pressure on its council. Moreover he neglects to mention that the Museum of London has offered to house and maintain the work on its Docklands site, giving it the public profile in London, and impact on daily lives, that Moore himself so desired. This matters today as much as it ever did.

Aid waste Sir: In Andrew Mitchell’s response to my article ‘The Great Aid Mystery’ (5 January), he asks ‘what about the 11 million children in school who wouldn’t be there’ if it weren’t for DFID’s aid efforts. It would be hard to come up with a more representative example of the dishonest marketing rhetoric that is the standard aid industry response to outside questioning. Not only is there the inevitable reference to children, there’s also a classic bogus statistic.

The aid argument Sir: ‘The great aid mystery’ (5 January) presents the development sceptics’ case — which in five years in opposition (2005-2010) the Conservative party set out to address head on. Although the huge changes in British development policy over the last two and half years appear to have eluded Messrs Foreman and Shaw, they are real and fundamental and genuinely provide grounds upon which most people on either side of the debate can camp. I learned in two-and-a-half years as Britain’s Development Secretary that both the extremes in this debate have deaf ears. The coalition government has reduced the number of aid recipient countries supported by Britain from 43 to 28.

Caught in the ratchet Sir: Melissa Kite (‘Hunting for Dave’, 29 December) wonders why the Prime Minister won’t reopen the question of hunting. Is it not just possible that the reason given is the real reason — he knows he could not win a vote on it? There is no point in leading the troops into a time-wasting and embarrassing defeat. I suspect that the hunting ban is an example of ‘ratchet politics’ — once one side has done something, the other side finds it impossible to undo it. (The opposite is ‘ping-pong politics’, where the parties take it in turns to undo the other side’s changes.

Distinguished Wardens Sir: Contrary to Dennis Sewell’s statement (‘Assault on the Ivory Tower’, 15/22 December), Wadham College did not ‘elect’ John Wilkins to be Warden in 1647 after Parliament’s victory in the Civil War. Rather, Parliamentary Commissioners sacked the royalist Warden and almost all the Fellows and Scholars and imposed Wilkins as the new Warden, followed by new Fellows and Scholars. Since Wilkins is by far the most distinguished Warden in the College’s history until the election of Maurice Bowra in 1938, his appointment is an uncomfortable example of state interference in university affairs actually doing good. Wilkins would, as Sewell suggests, have felt at home among the media-types of modern Oxford.

Courts to be proud of Sir: Nick Cohen’s article (‘Export-only justice’, 8 December) might leave the reader with the impression that the use of the High Court in London by overseas litigants is a) novel and b) detrimental to the taxpayer. I do not believe either to be the case. Law students have long had drummed into them the fact that in a large number of cases (commercial court cases in particular), it is the norm for neither party to be domiciled in the UK, and I have yet to be informed — when raising inquiry of the listing office — that litigation timescales are lengthening by dint of an influx of foreign litigants. Indeed, my sense is quite the opposite: timescales are shortening as the system becomes more efficient.

The North in need Sir: Neil O’Brien’s article on the North-South divide is welcome (‘The great divide’, 1 December). As a Geordie who spent much of his working life in the West Midlands before being immersed in the Westminster bubble for the last decade, London increasingly feels like a separate country. The wealth, the economic activity and the jobs are something that many communities only an hour and a half away on the train can only dream about. Many of the heavily industrialised towns and cities never recovered from the recession of the early 1980s. We have generational unemployment and significant pockets lacking any aspiration. There is a lack of successful role models for the young, and of private sector activity.

Too busy for terrorism Sir: The Islamisation of countries surrounding Israel may not necessarily constitute an increased threat to the Jewish state (‘Israel under siege’, 24 November).
The reluctance of Hezbollah to open a second front in Israel’s north in the past weeks may be due to the recent economic recovery of south Lebanon following massive infrastructure destruction extending up to south Beirut in the 2006 war with Israel, largely funded by Iran.
Similar economic growth and prosperity in the West Bank may well be responsible for the virtual absence of any recent anti-Israel violence. (A recent television report on West Bank high schools showed many kids wearing orthodontic braces — a sure contra-indication to becoming a suicide bomber.

For and against Petraeus Sir: The attack on General David Petraeus (17 November) by Kelley Beaucar Vlahos of Antiwar.com was mean-minded, trivial and wrong. After the overthrow of Saddam in 2003, Petraeus garrisoned Northern Iraq, where his determination to improve services as well as security diminished resistance to the US-led occupation. In 2007, Iraq was sliding into ever more horrible sectarian civil war. As the new commander in Iraq, Petraeus, with President Bush’s backing, devised and deployed a surge of 30,000 troops to stem to the horrific Sunni-Shia bloodletting. By stationing his troops in small units amongst the population he provided constant security from brutal intimidation by al-Qa’eda and other murderous groups.

What the result says Sir: John O’Sullivan (‘Obama’s hollow victory,’ 10 November) says that after President Obama’s re-election, ‘America looks a less naturally conservative country, more a centre-left one.’ But we ought to consider what John O’Sullivan thinks of as left and right, conservative and unconservative; what Americans think; and what most of us British readers think. For most of this year, Obama has been, as Michael Lind observed in an earlier edition of the Spectator (‘All Right Now’, 8 September), the sensible conservative choice. Where Mitt Romney aligned himself with the forces of ideological radicalism and Tea Party craziness, Obama stood for moderation and calm.