The Spectator

Schools for success From Barnaby Lenon Sir: Robert Yates rightly explains that grammar schools were the path to academic success and a good job for clever working-class children in the period 1935 to 1975 (‘Grammar schools are liberal, Mr Cameron’, 3 June). To these should be added the many direct-grant schools, independent schools that charged fees but took clever children from low-income homes on local authority grants. They were the most successful schools in Britain academically and of course had children from a wide range of social backgrounds. For example, in south London, a relatively low-income area, these included such schools as Dulwich College, Eltham College and the Whitgift Foundation schools.

Two kinds of don From Joseph PalleySir: Boris Johnson laments the declining quality of British universities, with growth in student numbers outpacing funding (‘Farewell to the Young Ones’, 27 May). The problem is not just financial but cultural. It has always been assumed that university lecturers, as good teachers, will automatically be good researchers. This false assumption was less damaging 50 years ago, when only a small, self-confident number of school-leavers, better prepared for self-study, went on to university. As staff-student ratios worsen and universities concentrate on research to attract funding, the trend is towards more teaching by postgraduate students, assistant lecturers and part-timers.

Europeans made the USAFrom Ronald FletcherSir: David Mayger (Letters, 20 May) seems to be unaware that the history of his country has been written many times, and that the salient fact to emerge is that the USA was largely the creation of Europeans, among whom the British were to the fore.It is deeply regrettable that in the 20th century one European power was so determined to impose itself on the rest of the world that it waged two aggressive wars in which America was reluctantly obliged to participate; but the notion that America could stand aloof from ‘foreign entanglements’ was exploded, I should have thought, at Pearl Harbor.

Blair’s cowardly invasion From J.G. Cluff Sir: In your leading article (13 May) you list a litany of Mr Blair’s failures without mentioning the Iraq war. How can you leave out his dismal role in committing the country to that illegal, incompetent, unnecessary and cowardly excursion? I say cowardly because I am so cynical about this meretricious and mendacious politician that I now believe it was precisely because there were no weapons of mass destruction that America and Britain invaded Iraq. There is a sinister symmetry between Hans Blix’s pronouncement and the invasion. Had he established the existence of weapons of mass destruction, I doubt whether Bush and Blair would have committed anything other than hot air. J.G.

In Competition No. 2440 you were invited to offer a poem which is a pastiche of one or all of the young left-wing poets of the early 1930s, MacNeice, Spender, Auden and Day Lewis. William Empson’s ‘Just a Smack at Auden’ is an affectionate send-up worth looking for. I have room only for one verse:What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend?No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end.Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend.Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end. Auden tended to dominate this comp, just as he tended to dominate his contemporaries. Among the non-prizewinning entries that paid impressive tribute to him, those by Ray Kelley and James Womack stood out.

Listing page content here Mosley is no EU heroFrom David MeikleSir: In his review of Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism by Stephen Dorril (Books, 6 May), David Pryce-Jones makes the disgusting suggestion that those who support the European Union, like Kenneth Clarke MP, are somehow continuing the work of the fascist Oswald Mosley. To try to make a link between the EU (and those who support the idea) and the ugly ideology of fascism is plain ridiculous. European nations came together, after the horrors of Nazism nearly conquered and destroyed Europe, to form an organisation that would ensure we would never go to war with one another again. Instead the great Western European nations would co-operate to ensure that the peoples of Europe lived in peace and prosperity.

Prepare for coalition From William MacDougall Sir: I hope Fraser Nelson is mistaken in his talk of a ‘Lib Dem Test’ for Tory policies (‘Cameron’s secret plan’, 29 April). Of course the party should not be frightened of coalition; after all, it has been in coalition for much of its history (with Irish parties, or Liberal and Labour splinter groups). But the way to prepare is to have stronger, not weaker, policies. If we are already voting to ban parental interviews, where would we compromise on education — on banning the remaining grammar schools? No, to prepare for coalition with the Lib Dems (or Labour) we should have more extreme policies, e.g., a grammar school in every town, so that we can compromise on a grammar school in every second town.

BNP is party of the Left From Lord Tebbit Sir: Oh dear! Oh dear! How can we expect the Guardian and the BBC to get it right when the Telegraph and even The Spectator (Leading article, 22 April) fall into the trap of calling the BNP an extreme right-wing party. In my book it is left-wing, not right-wing, to oppose both capitalism and free trade, and to promote a ‘significant direction of the commanding heights of the economy’ as well as workers’ co-operatives and programmes of nationalisation including, of all things, the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, all of which are part of the BNP manifesto.

Blair is no Thatcherite From Lord TebbitSir: I am not sure whether in his review of the programme Tory! Tory! Tory! (Arts, 25 March) Simon Hoggart is expressing his own view or that of Edwina Currie, that ‘by 1990, Thatcher had become the greatest obstacle to Thatcherism, which had to be rescued ... by Tony Blair’. Whoever’s view it is, it is clearly a most outrageous, patently untrue statement. The obstacles to Thatcherism were Heseltine and Howe, not Thatcher. I know of no Blair achievement of any kind which could be described as ‘Thatcherite’. She did not throw money at public services without achieving a commensurate improvement in public services.