The Spectator

We had no choice Sir: ‘Britain remains an expeditionary nation keen on shaping the world,’ says James Forsyth (Politics, 27 August). Come off it, James. We weren’t consulted about Libya any more than we were about Iraq (a referendum would have been nice), but if ‘the nation’ means ‘the people’ then I’m sure that if we’d been told how many hundreds of millions of pounds would be involved, we’d have been considerably keener to spend them on job creation in our own country than on killing people and trashing the infrastructure in someone else’s. We elected Dave and Nick to make prudent cuts in public spending, not to make things worse by splurging our scarce resources on regime change in foreign parts.

The taxes of sin Bonn has introduced a flat-rate tax of €6 a night for prostitutes working in the city, payable at a ticket machine. Attempts to tax prostitution have been made since at least Roman times: a receipt from Roman Egypt suggested that a male prostitute paid four drachmas in tax for a two-month period.     — Sweden has taxed prostitutes since 1982 at the normal rate; workers qualify for sick leave pay and a pension.     — The Netherlands imposes a sales tax of 19 per cent on each act.    — Nevada has proposed a tax at a flat rate of $5 for every sex act.