Letters

The licence fee is good value Sir: Charles Moore has really talked himself into a corner this time with regard to his pathological dislike of the BBC (The Spectator’s Notes, 8 November). Like many other ‘BBC bashers’ on the Right he seems to gleefully welcome the Ross and Brand affair as a vindication of his views. If we accept his logic, and his analogy of being made to pay for something you dislike and did not order in a café, one would conclude that unless people like absolutely everything the BBC broadcasts on the TV and radio then they are justified in withholding the licence fee. Of course this would leave no one at all, no licence fee revenue, and therefore no BBC.

The MoD’s failure of duty Sir: Charles Moore berates Oxford deputy coroner Andrew Walker for upbraiding officialdom in the matter of the death of Para Corporal Mark Wright, deeming such criticism of the military establishment to be ‘outrageous’ (The Spectator’s Notes, 25 October). The fact is that Tony Blair launched our armed forces into five wars in six years. Of the two ongoing conflicts, Iraq has lasted longer than the second world war and Afghanistan is more ferocious than Korea. When any government does this it takes on a very serious duty of care. That duty involves an absolute obligation that the men sent out to fight will have equipment sufficient in both quality and quantity to enable them to do the job and stay alive if possible.

Poorer each day Sir: Patrick Macaskie (‘The market needs short-sellers’, 25 October) is indeed correct in suggesting that the problems caused by excessive borrowing could be solved by a round of inflation; in the same way the problem of a building having caught fire can be solved by allowing it to burn down. As Macaskie points out inflation transfers value from saver to borrower. In the aggressive inflation of the Seventies people who had borrowed money and had employers who were able to provide inflation-linked pay rises did very well as they were able to pay off their liabilities quickly with devalued money. This course may appeal to government, since both parties at times have presided over currency devaluations which have a similar effect on the national debt.

Both their houses Sir: In your leading article of 11 October (‘A necessary evil’) you state that ‘Many of those senators who opposed the bail-out initially but changed their minds when it was voted on a second time last week have turned out to be less than principled in their concerns for the taxpayers.’ The US Senate only voted once on the matter and in the affirmative, while the House of Representatives voted twice before accepting. Peter Schéle Gothenburg, Sweden Sneers before bedtime Sir: I was dismayed that The Spectator gave a platform to sneer-master general A.A. Gill (India Travel, 18 October) in the guise of a travel piece about Calcutta.

Our story Sir: Your political editor writes (‘Peter v. George is the key battle’, 11 October) that Peter Mandelson’s conversation on Corfu where he ‘dripped pure poison’ about Gordon Brown was leaked to the press within hours and only later became front-page news. In fact only one paper broke the story initially, the Sunday Times. This is an interesting example of what is known in the trade as the Watergate defence. Everyone ‘knew’ American presidents authorised bugging so Woodward and Bernstein’s stories were no stories at all. There may be a difference in the scale of the revelations but the same principle applies. A scoop is a scoop.

The blame game Sir: While I do not flinch from looking on the Clinton era as a disaster for its neglect of the threat to global security posed by bin Laden et al and the tacit encouragement of Enron-style corporate accounting, I think blaming the Democrats for the credit crunch may be going a little too far (‘Clinton is to blame’, 4 October). The politically correct housing agenda described in Dennis Sewell’s article was not conducted in secret, or if it was it would be difficult to imagine that the post-Watergate right-wing media in the US would have allowed it to be secret for long.

The Church is culpable too Sir: Will Rowan Williams start his call for ‘fresh scrutiny and regulation in the financial world’ (‘Face it: Marx was partly right about capitalism’, 27 September) by glancing at the institution he heads? I am told that the 2007 Church of England target for its investment arm was 6 per cent above Bank of England base rate. It should have been clear to the Archbishop that this could not be achieved without the Church getting involved in the murky world of City finance. The Church of England was made to look even more ridiculous when the Archbishop of York called short-sellers ‘bank robbers and asset strippers’.

Storing up more trouble Sir: Your leading article (20 September) calls for a ‘kick up the backside’ to the banking industry. That kick should be aimed elsewhere. The British and American governments have not merely permitted this crisis to happen, but positively created it by a deliberate relaxation of monetary controls. Worse still, they have now decided that instead of destroying excess credit by asset deflation, bankruptcies and share collapses, the monetary inflation is to be consolidated by absorption of bad debt into the public finances. I don’t see how this can end well.

Reports of my death Sir: I was astonished to read in John Michell’s review of Michael X: A Life in Black and White (13 September) that I died 35 years ago. Michell states that I went to Trinidad to investigate the murder, by henchmen of Michael X, of my sister Gale Benson, and that later I had died in an accident in California. In fact it was my younger brother Greville, Gale’s twin brother, who went to Trinidad at that time, and a year later died in a motor accident.  Greville’s accident took place in Morocco, where he is buried. I can hardly blame The Spectator for Williams’s slovenly research.

Taking care of Toby Sir: Kirsten Dunst never insisted that I ban Toby Young (Status anxiety, 6 September) from the set of How To Lose Friends & Alienate People. Toby’s piece stemmed from a recent article of mine in Empire magazine. In his opening paragraph, he says he learned from it that ‘the reason I was banned from the set of the film is because Kirsten Dunst insisted on it’. But Toby didn’t read my article before he wrote his. For the record, Kirsten told me on set that Toby had given her a performance note. (Toby says she overheard him give a note about her performance to a third party. The difference is negligible and entirely unacceptable behaviour either way.

Heartbeats of delight Sir: Few would disagree with Paul Johnson’s view that prolonging the human lifespan is of little value if it merely gives us extra years of Alzheimer’s and debility (And another thing, 30 August). But we do not all live for the average span, and one reason for the increase in average age since the early 19th century has been the massive reduction in child mortality. It is difficult to believe that in his historical studies Johnson has not encountered the miseries caused by the death of beloved children. Numerous books, for example, describe the pain which Charles Darwin suffered as a result of the death of his favourite daughter Anne in 1851, and Thomas Huxley’s grief when his son Noel died of scarlet fever in 1860.

We did it, not the state Sir: I am not a social historian but surely Liam Byrne fatally undermines his whole argument when he praises the founding of various organisations and movements 150 years ago to deal with the ‘huge change which swept millions from the countryside to the cities’ (‘Give us back our Big Idea, Mr Cameron’, 16 August). Isn’t the whole point that the state did not do this — individuals and groups did? Less state interference allows individuals and groups to help their communities and Britain as a whole rather than being strangled by the red tape, form-filling and box-ticking so beloved by Liam Byrne and New Labour.

Spectator readers respond to recent articles Bombast in Beijing Sir: David Tang is right (Diary, 16 August) that Zhang Yimou, the choreographer of the Olympic ceremony, produced ‘maniacal... bombast...’. Mr Tang suggested Pyongyang as a model. But years ago Mr Zhang told me that he could get his films on screen in China, where they were hardly shown, if he made one like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will about the 1936 Nazi Olympics. Mr Tang mentions the ‘sleight of hand’ of the faked fireworks — which would have got a similarly faking athlete sent home. But that is only one example of the ceremonial Potemkin. The Chinese internet sites admitted everything, afterwards.

Credit where credit’s due Sir: I’m not sure if my colleague Bob Marshall-Andrews is happy to be seen as some kind of showbiz personality (‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour’, 9 August). However wrong Bob was, in my view, in strenuously opposing allied military action which ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, he has undoubtedly contributed a good deal on issues concerning the rights of individuals in this country. As for the proposed 90 days’ pre-charge detention, which the government wished to see introduced in 2005, it was in fact my amendment reducing the figure to 28 which the House fortunately agreed to. Hopefully the Lords will ensure that it remains at 28 and not 42 days.

Part-time heroes Sir: I noted with interest the article about ‘lazy firemen’ (‘Britain’s firefighters are underworked and inflexible’, 26 July). I am Lincolnshire’s Chief Fire Officer with more than 35 years’ service, and though there was much truth in what Leo McKinstry said, what he failed to address was the progress made by many fire authorities with part-time staff who are not represented in the unions castigated in your article. More than half of my fire stations employ part-time staff who respond to the most urgent medical emergencies either in a car or in a fire engine and provide immediate life-saving intervention while the professionally qualified paramedics are en route.

On Colombian ‘democracy’ Sir: Tristan Garel-Jones’s article misrepresents Justice for Colombia’s work by implying a common agenda with the Farc (‘The day I was kidnapped’, 12 July). JFC works to defend human rights in Colombia. We were the only British organisation to campaign for the release of Ingrid Betancourt. Last year we brought over Ingrid’s mother and relatives of other hostages, arranging events for them in Parliament, at the Law Society and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office — Lord Garel-Jones was invited but did not attend. He says Colombia is democratic, civilised and friendly, as we are sure it is if you are a visiting British dignitary.

Sensible scares Sir: To be fair to the scaremongers (Another Voice, 19 July), at least some of the scares mentioned by Matthew Parris (al-Qa’eda, HIV) seem less frightening in retrospect not because they were always insubstantial but because the threats were taken seriously and action was taken to counter them. If the fuss over the threat of Aids in Britain now seems excessive, might that not be because it changed people’s behaviour? In other words, there is some social value to scaremongering from the press and public agencies. Robert Bargery London E1 Saint Pius XII? Sir: Pope Pius XII was described by Golda Meir, the then Israeli foreign minister, as ‘a true friend of the Jewish people’ at the time of the Pontiff’s death in 1958.

Rod for our backs Sir: Each week, Rod Liddle’s column reminds me of the little girl of whom it was written that she hiked up her skirt to show she wasn’t wearing knickers. In the absence of a parent, or in Mr Liddle’s case an editor, one can only look away in embarrassment. So usually I have a quick look at the first paragraph and turn the page. Last week (Liddle Britain, 12 July) he compared a fat woman with ‘26 Ethiopians, if you put them in a blender, added some bleach’ etc… and her food with ‘an approximation of Shami Chakrabarti’s face’. I glanced at his last sentence in which Mr Liddle suggested fat people should be kicked. I suppose this includes Winston Churchill.

A pariah writes Sir: I dealt for 30 years with hundreds of Muslims, at first in Mr Doyle’s organisation, so I am not ‘ignorant’ of Islam (as he claims, Letters, 5 July), which seeks to conquer this world, not the next, politically. If he disagrees, he should consult Islam’s most ‘moderate’ authorities like Yusuf Qaradawi, all of whom boast that (as Doyle writes I noted), ‘Islam... is trying to take over the globe.’ As one could not be a Muslim absent this goal, the distinction Ms McCartney draws between ‘fundamentalist’ and moderate Muslims is absurd: history shows what all Muslims endorse. As I wrote: ‘After his [Mohammed’s] death in 632, Muslim armies poured out of the Arabian peninsula...

Cummins unstuck Sir: Rod Liddle (Liddle Britain, 28 June) is mistaken to suggest that only Guardian journalists objected to articles published in the Sunday Telegraph under the pseudonym Will Cummins. My Sunday Telegraph colleague Alasdair Palmer and I (both of whom have written frequently to attack Islamic fundamentalism and Islamist terrorism) protested strongly about them at the time, in the office and — in my own case — in print. The main reason for our disquiet was that Mr Cummins had not, as Mr Liddle argues, ‘made it clear that his beef was with the ideology, not the people’. In fact he did the opposite, energetically denigrating all Muslims as one identikit, menacing group.