Letters

Blood on our hands Sir: Paul Wood asks if anyone will be punished for the bloodbath in Syria (‘Massacre of the innocents’, 15 March). But where does one start? What we have seen most recently are the dreadful consequences – as also in Iraq and Afghanistan – of selfish western meddling in the Middle East for our own ends. I was on sabbatical in Syria at the end of 2010 interviewing Syrians of all religions and political persuasions. Well over 90 per cent and especially women saw the Assads as the only plausible bulwark against an Islamist theocratic nightmare. There was freedom of religion, freedom of association, the freedom for women to choose what to wear and be educated to university level.

Democracy rules Sir: I share the sentiments of both Rod Liddle (‘Trump displays weakness, not strength’, 8 March) and Douglas Murray (‘How MAGA turned on Ukraine’). I am one of those peculiar political animals who finds himself in agreement with certain elements of the right, including those represented by Donald Trump, on just about everything except Ukraine. Nevertheless, I see his election as an essential antidote to the poisonous ideology of the woke that has all but conquered the rest of the West in terms of the manner in which we live and are governed. Nor is the US immune.

Military farce Sir: Your leading article (‘The age of realism’, 1 March) argues that the government must invest in the UK’s ‘thinned-out infantry ranks’. This is certainly true, but it does pass over, in my view, the more fundamental issue of the broken recruitment system. My own application to join the Royal Air Force was rejected on the basis that my mother is Polish. Given that Poland is an ally, this seems a curious justification for disqualification. I was born and educated in London, my mother having moved to the UK with my English father 30 years ago. Clearly I am not a security threat, but because ‘computer says no’, I will never be able to enlist. It is, then, with amusement and some frustration that I often read of the ‘recruitment crisis’.

Rules Britannia Sir: Your rules for national survival in the realist world which we are now entering (‘Get real’, 22 February) make sense. However, they do not go far enough. Rule 1 (enhancing our military lethality) rightly identifies the need for better trained and equipped personnel, but it does not include the need to regain military mass in numbers of troops and battle-winning equipment. A fifth rule, covering the need to make durable alliances with friendly countries – essential for survival in a volatile multipolar world – could also usefully be added.

Wonderfully useless Sir: Michael Simmons overlooks some scandalous examples of frivolous funding right under his nose (‘Waste land’, 15 February). A few minutes from our offices, there are several vast buildings, all lavishly subsidised by the taxpayer, whose sole purpose is to allow hordes of strangers to stare at rectangular sheets of fabric on which are daubed various colours and shapes – most of which quite wastefully replicate things that we can already see with our own eyes in the real world.

Strength of service Sir: Matthew Lynn and Steven Bailey (Letters, 1 February) are quite wrong to deplore the decline of Britain as a manufacturing nation. Manufacturing – especially of the heavy sort – is best suited to a country with plenty of space, little regulation, cheap energy and cheap non-unionised labour. That was once the case for Britain but it is no longer; nor is it so for the majority of European countries. Germany epitomises the folly of mindlessly adhering to manufacturing, as is well explained in Wolfgang Munchau’s excellent book Kaput. Britain, on the other hand, has successfully diversified into services and is now the world’s second-largest exporter of this income earner.

Common ground Sir: Katy Balls asks ‘Lawyer or leader?’ (Politics, 25 January), but it became fairly clear which Keir Starmer is when he appointed as his Attorney General Lord Hermer, a human rights lawyer. As was mentioned, Lord Hermer has often represented those rejecting British values rather than standing up for them. Sir Keir and Lord Hermer show a clear preference for international law over Britain’s common law. They ignore the reality that common law has served the nation brilliantly over the centuries. It relies on the precise written word and precedent, being non-political, transparent, predictable and fair. British laws are enacted by our democratically elected parliament which can amend or repeal them.

Chains of command Sir: Matthew Lynn is correct to emphasise the economic dangers of deindustrialisation (‘Not made in Britain’, 25 January). But there are cultural dangers too. It’s now 40 years since Correlli Barnett and I made a television programme called Assembled in Britain, drawing attention to the alarming retreat of manufacturing. No recent government has respected, still less encouraged, manufacturing industry. The result is today’s mess. What can you say about a civilisation that cannot produce the goods it needs, other than that civilisation loses integrity and pride?

Forced Labour Sir: Matthew Parris wonders ‘Why was everyone fooled by Rachel Reeves?’(18 January) and goes on to include Sir Keir Starmer in this question. The former he concludes is ‘an empty vessel’ and the latter ‘bereft of ideas’. By ‘everyone’ he chiefly means the commentariat, although he claims he was not himself misled. They and many others were fed up with the failure of successive Conservative governments, and wanted so badly to believe in Labour’s ability to form an effective administration that they never seriously applied due diligence by questioning its credibility or competences. At no stage were any stones lifted to determine what ‘nasties’ lay underneath.

Nothing left Sir: Rod Liddle is right to ascribe the establishment’s desire to suppress the truth in relation to grooming gangs to its fundamentally anti-working class mindset (‘We demand a right to truth’, 11 January). But he’s characteristically wrong to attribute this to ‘liberalism’. The contemporary left’s identity-politics agenda is born from the opposite: the postmodernist-derived idea that reality can be radically reconstructed through control of what is, and is not, communicated. Its various fantasies – and the public-sector interests that depend upon them – necessarily involve suppressing our powers of rational cognition.

Growing problem Sir: The first leading article of the year (‘Growing apart’, 4 January) points to the gap in economic growth between the US and the UK, while the first cover piece (‘Shift key’) identifies a shift rightwards in values and voting intention, in reaction to the bigger state model of Keir Starmer’s government. Sandwiched between the two is ‘Reeves’s new year’s resolution’, in which James Heale tells us of the Labour Growth Group, a WhatsApp group with 99 MPs that is only marginally more credible than a Turkeys for Christmas cabal. Have these Labour MPs studied the research cited in Jon Moynihan’s excellent Return to Growth? Has Rachel Reeves?

Free thinking Sir: Your leading article (‘Article of faith’, 14 December) appears to have forgotten the connection between rationalism and natural rights. Liberals indeed think in utilitarian, Rousseauian and what they consider ‘rationalistic’ terms. But what about the logic of natural rights that come from John Rawls or Robert Nozick? The Declaration of Independence, the political culmination of Enlightenment-era thought on reason and rights, was in large part the product of irreligious minds. This document has been the model for a free society for centuries. And what about Milton Friedman’s argument for a free society?

Betting men Sir: The bet between Martin Rees and me that Matt Ridley recounts pits two kinds of scruples of disinterested rationality against each other (‘Wuhan wager’, 7 December). One is the scientific ethos that calls for factoring in all relevant information in updating one’s degree of credence in a hypothesis. The other is the logic of the epistemological tool of betting, which demands an agreed-upon fixed criterion and deadline for resolving the bet. My degree of credence has been influenced by Matt and Alina Chan for the lab leak hypothesis, but also by counter-arguments from Peter Miller for the zoonotic theory.

Vote of no confidence Sir: Rod Liddle is too harsh on those calling for another general election (‘I hope you didn’t sign that petition’, 30 November). You do not have to be a Trumpian denialist to believe the result in July raised serious concerns. Labour received just 33.7 per cent of the votes cast, yet won 411 of the 650 seats in the Commons. Labour’s total votes amounted to 23,622 per MP elected. The figure for Reform UK was 823,522. First past the post in individual constituencies works well with two major parties. But when support is significantly more divided, it is not fit for purpose. The petition was surely born out of signatories’ frustration that their votes were not fairly reflected in the new membership of the legislature.

Losing the plot Sir: Your leading article ‘Blight on the land’ (23 November) is right to call out the hypocrisy and vindictiveness of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Agricultural Property Relief cuts. Sadly, this is just one part of the Labour government’s multi-pronged attack on farmers, in sharp contrast to the promises they made before the general election. The 7 per cent rise in the minimum wage and the 9 per cent jump in employers’ national insurance contributions will hit all businesses, but given the 56 per cent slump in farm incomes over the past 12 months, farming is one of the sectors least able to cover such increases. The government also makes much play of the fact it is putting £5 billion into the agricultural budget over the next two years.

Life support Sir: If the Terminally Ill (End of Life) Bill is passed into law we will have crossed the Rubicon. As the second reading vote on 29 November approaches, it is astonishing that we are hearing less debate than on the loss of the winter fuel payment. There should be the mother of all debates. The issues surrounding assisted dying are immensely complicated and the arguments for and against are powerful. On the one hand it may shorten and ease a dreadful death and on the other it may put pressure on the dying and be deficient in its application. However, the trite adage that hard cases make bad law has great weight, especially if the law is made too quickly and without the fullest informed consideration.

Unhealthy debate Sir: Matthew Parris is absolutely right to say that the time has come for facing populists with honest argument (‘In defence of the liberal elite’, 9 November). This call would be all the more persuasive if it were not embedded within the rotten foundations of current lamentable public discourse. Honest argument presupposes the ability to engage with one’s opponents in terms that they would own and recognise: ‘steel-manning’ rather than erecting a flimsy straw man. What Mr Parris, and many others, fail to own is that the concerns of Trump voters, though unpalatably incarnated in Donald Trump himself, are in their essence not only legitimate but good.

Zero-sum game Sir: Though troubled by the impact of Budget measures on employers and economic growth, I am more baffled by the regressive nature of those measures on the most vulnerable sectors – retail, hospitality, social care and students (‘Tax, spend, borrow’, 2 November). While the employer of a full-time employee earning £50,000 a year will see a cost increase of 2 per cent, the comparable increases for a full-time adult, a half-time adult and a 16-hour-a-week student on the minimum wage are 10.4 per cent, 13.1 per cent and a staggering 23.2 per cent respectively – and retail and hospitality are also hit by a major reduction in business rates relief.

The survey says Sir: David Butterfield’s 21 years of experience of higher education (‘Decline and fall’, 26 October) chimes with my 35. But the decline in the rigour of university education which he so deftly describes has not been entirely self-willed. Successive governments have championed a consumerist understanding of higher education. Students have become consumers and academics have become service providers. The reduction in the intellectual demands of undergraduate courses and grade inflation are due to the annual National Student Survey. Universities are in thrall to this and make ever greater efforts ‘to enhance the student experience’. This includes pandering to the desire of most students to have fewer essays, slimmer reading lists, few exams and higher grades.

Pointless laws Sir: The leading article ‘Wrong problem, wrong law’ (19 October) makes cogent points about the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Bill, in particular pointing out that it would probably not have made any difference had it been in force at the time of the Manchester Arena bombing, and that if passed it will impose disproportionate and often unmanageable burdens on venues such as churches and village halls. There is, in truth, a wider point here: most legislation is either counterproductive, useless or both. All legislation has five aspects: (1) A real purpose. This may be to achieve the ostensible purpose of the legislation, but is often really to make it look as if the government is ‘doing something’. (2) An ostensible purpose.