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Letters to the Editor

Letters

Wednesday, 31st October 2007

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Sir: According to Sir Malcolm Rifkind, it would be ‘silly and wrong’ for David Cameron to promise a referendum, if the Tories win the next election, after this Parliament has endorsed the European Treaty. Sir Malcolm writes, ‘If the Treaty is ratified by all 27 member states, it will come into force. That cannot be reversed by a subsequent referendum in Britain.’ But our part in it certainly can be. Mr Cameron need only pledge that any government he leads would call such a referendum, accept the result and — if the vote were negative — then take the necessary steps in Parliament to enforce the popular will. Once Parliament had done its duty, either the Treaty would be re-negotiated or, perhaps more likely, there would be a genuine re-negotiation of our whole relationship with the EU Treaty states. This may not be to Sir Malcolm’s taste, but it is nevertheless the case.

John Torode
London W1

The propaganda problem

Sir: What Philip Stevens calls in his letter last week ‘a vast amount of unimpeachable evidence’ [about the alleged Armenian genocides] was actually produced as part of the British government’s propaganda campaign during the first world war. And in being convinced ‘beyond a shadow of a doubt’ by the 2005 republication of Bryce and Toynbee’s 1916 Blue Book, The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915–1916, he seems totally unaware of the less than unimpeachable forces at play in it, just as they were in other products from the same Wellington House source, such as The German Terror in Belgium or the film Once a Hun, Always a Hun.

Mr Stevens might now consider reading British Propaganda During the First World War 1914–1918 by M.L. Sanders and P.M. Taylor. May I commend their general conclusion to all your readers: ‘The effect of British atrocity propaganda during the first world war and the failure to substantiate the stories in the years that followed led to a general disinclination in the 1930s and 1940s to believe atrocity stories about the Nazi treatment of the Jews. The distortions of the first world war therefore served to obscure the realities of the second.’

Osman Streater
London NW3

Sex scandals overlooked

Sir: Paul Bew’s generous and perceptive review of my Luck and the Irish (Books, 20 October) gently chides me for inaccurately stating that Vincent Twomey’s book The End of Irish Catholicism? never mentions sexual scandals. But the single passage Professor Bew quotes from page 33 refers specifically and solely to the abusive conditions in industrial schools run by religious orders. Rapist priests and the secret families fathered by leading Catholic churchmen go unmentioned in the book, despite its title and its recent date of publication (2003).

Roy Foster
Hertford College, Oxford

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A child of our time

From the economic and psychological bedlam of the global downturn has emerged a particularly dangerous false dichotomy: namely, that there is somehow a choice for ministers over the next few years between economic reconstruction and the repair of Britain’s broken society, and that the government (whether Labour or Conservative) must prioritise the former at the expense of the latter.

Diary

Anne Robinson

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

‘A money-financed tax cut is essentially equivalent to Milton Friedman’s famous “helicopter drop” of money.’ So said Ben Bernanke, now the chairman of the Fed, in a speech about how to ward off the ‘extremely small’ chance of deflation, which he delivered in 2002.