The Spectator

In defence of Catholicism Sir: Michael Gove gives an excellent defence of Christianity (4 April), but his embarrassment about the Roman Catholic part of the story is unnecessary. He writes of his discomfort as, declaring oneself to be a Christian, ‘You stand in the tradition of the Inquisition, the Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits who made South America safe for colonisation … the Christian Brothers who presided over forced adoptions’. The Inquisitions (Papal, Spanish and Portuguese) were indeed shameful, but were often as ineffective as the governments that supported them. The Counter-Reformation was a great movement of spiritual and cultural renewal that altered and improved western civilisation.

The Scottish way of death Nicola Sturgeon said the SNP would block a rise in the state pension age on the grounds that it would be unfair to Scots, who don’t live as long as the English. — The idea that the Scots die early was fuelled by a study by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health in 2006, which found male life expectancy in the Calton area of Glasgow to be 54: less than in many developing countries. — The figure, derived from statistics collected between 1998 and 2002, was exaggerated by the presence of a large number of hostels in the Calton taking in drug addicts from other areas. Life expectancy in Glasgow as whole last year was 73 for men and 78.5 for women, the lowest for any council area in Britain but not by much. In Blackpool it is 74.3 for males.