Letters

9 May 2009

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Bad maths

Sir: Rod Liddle (Liddle Britain, 2 May) makes a convincing argument for the claim that Harriet Harman lacks an understanding of the differences between the sexes. However, her (and possibly his) understanding of maths is just as suspect. From the fact that men earn 20 per cent more than women it does not follow that women earn 20 per cent less. The correct figure is actually just under 17 per cent.

John Campbell
London SE3

In the hands of the Taleban

Sir: Brahma Chellaney rightly claims (‘India is in peril. Obama is making it worse’, 2 May) that the Taleban are Pakistan’s strategic partners, not enemies. The Swat peace agreement signed between Pakistan and the Taleban was meant to confine the latter to the Swat Valley, which would have provided them with much-needed strategic depth within Pakistan, resulting in enhancing their spatial manoeuvrability against the Nato forces. However, by stepping out of the Valley, the Taleban breached the agreement. The army will now act to make sure that they are pushed back to the Swat Valley. But no effort will be made to disarm or finish off the Taleban.

Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North West Frontier Province are controlled by the Taleban. No real progress on international terrorism can be made unless the West finds a way of liberating these areas from their control. As Pakistan has neither the intention nor the foresight to take on the Taleban, is it not time that the FATA and NWFP provinces were temporarily detached from Pakistan and placed under UN trusteeship?

Randhir Singh Bains
Gants Hill, Essex

Pollster power

Sir: Fraser Nelson tells us that ‘the pollsters... have all too great an influence in the shaping of Tory policy’. Up to a point, Lord Copper. For years the polls have revealed that a substantial majority of the public have a perfectly reasonable aversion not to the EU but to their country’s slavish obedience and relentless capitulation to Brussels. These poll findings are continually ignored or dismissed with contempt. Can the towering intellects grouped within your portals explain why this one single subject is to our entire ruling class, Tory leadership included, like a needleful of heroin?

Frederick Forsyth
Hertford