Letters

6 June 2009

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

As for financial regulation, last year’s Financial Services Action Plan, and now the proposals to hobble hedge funds and private equity, show that the EU’s political aim is to undermine the Anglo-Saxon economic model and capture for Frankfurt and Paris a share of the City’s market dominance. That regulators in Brussels, with little knowledge of wholesale markets, should be awarded a raft of new rules to enforce over an industry located exclusively in London reflects both contempt for the subsidiarity principle and a depressingly retrograde ideology.

Finally, Mr Miliband asserts that further EU ‘institutional tinkering’ is precluded by ‘a self-denying ordinance’ agreed with Gordon Brown in 2007. So that’s all right then — just as it was all right when Maastricht guaranteed us independence over foreign policy, social policy and criminal justice; or when Mrs Thatcher won our rebate; or when Britain was exempted from the fisheries policy; or when we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution. Mr Miliband is too young to remember every hope betrayed, but he cannot expect the rest of us to forget so easily.

Lord Leach of Fairford
Chairman, Open Europe, London SW1

Unorthodox behaviour

Sir: Surely, the Daily Mail and Hugo Rifkind (Shared Opinion, 30 May) notwithstanding, it will have been the Greek Orthodox Church, not the Catholic Church, which was offended by lame-brained, ill-habited, bare-buttocked British caperers prancing around as nuns in Crete.

Tom Aitken
Via email

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JohnAnt

June 5th, 2009 10:06pm Report this comment

Yes, I too thought that the Highway Code rule is that a motorist must never stop or swerve for an animal in the way, if such action might conceiveably cause an accident to other road users. That's my memory of it, anyway.

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