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Letters

Wednesday, 6th February 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Terrorism is now global, mostly Islamic in origin. It is interesting that during the 1970s, whatever one’s views about his internal politics, President Vorster of South Africa said something like this, ‘If the Western Powers persist in their policy of defending terrorism when it occurs in countries like South Africa and Rhodesia, but only condemn it when practised by the IRA in Britain or by Gadaffi of Libya when targeted at America and Europe, the time will come when international terrorism will engulf the world.’ That time has sadly now come to pass!

R.L. O’Shaughnessy

Hadleigh, Ipswich

In my own defence

Sir: In last week’s editorial (2 February) about Derek Conway and ‘sleaze’, you conjured up the demons of ‘cash for questions, the Neil Hamilton saga and brown paper envelopes.’ In the mid-1990s, under Frank Johnson, The Spectator was one of the few publications which allowed me to defend myself against these false allegations. True, the Parliamentary Standards Commissioner, Sir Gordon Downey, later concluded I did take cash from Mr Fayed. But the media widely derided his inquiry as botched and a denial of natural justice to me. Ann Widdecombe resigned from the Standards Committee in protest at my treatment.

After I robustly defended myself in a live televised appearance before the Standards Committee, the Labour-dominated committee refused to endorse Downey’s conclusion that I had received cash in brown envelopes. They were right. The Inland Revenue later investigated too, demanding income tax on any cash payments and threatening a criminal prosecution for tax fraud. The burden of proof was on me to refute the allegations. The Revenue’s elite fraud-busters, the Special Compliance Office, crawled over my financial affairs for the years 1987–97 with a microscope. After a two-year investigation, they dismissed the allegations and asked for not a single penny in extra tax.

How many of my detractors could be confident of emerging unscathed from such exhaustive scrutiny of so many tax years?

Neil Hamilton

Hullavington, Wiltshire

Persuasion not coercion

Sir: I enjoyed reading James MacMillan’s passionate and provocative article (Arts, 2 February). His disquiet seems to be based around two related areas: modern liberalism’s ‘planned dismantling of the family’ and its ‘hatred of Christianity’. Although I share his Catholic faith I am unconvinced by his case.

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George Cselko

February 12th, 2008 3:20pm

I would like to invite Matthew Parris to amend his "conclusion that life does not exist". The sheer ubiquity of the life that both forms our very essence and surrounds us wherever we look seems to have dazzled Mr Parris. He immediately dismisses the possibility of "consciousness" as an essential characteristic of "life" on the basis that "bacterium are not conscious." Apart from being a somewhat speculative finding, this seems to be a rather narrow view of consciousness as "self-awareness". Human beings vary greatly in their experience of self-awareness but retain at all times the potential even when sleeping or day-dreaming (otherwise they could not be awoken). This seems to suggest that there are two aspects to consciousness (or "life"): the capacity for awareness and its fulfilment. Recent studies have shown that some animals such as elephants are able to recognise themselves in a mirror. My body as it types this letter forms part of my "self-awareness" though itself consisting of seemingly inanimate materials. All entities interact with their environment and therefore have the potential for change in their constituent parts and even ultimately to "awaken" or become self-aware. Might it possibly be more accurate to conclude that it is in fact ONLY life that exists?

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

New Labour has always preserved from the hard Left the Leninist idea that the party (or, in Blair/Brown theory, ‘the project’) is the only reality to be respected.

Diary

Rani Singh

I’ve just emerged from the gym, winding down after a day’s writing, when my son Sukhraj calls, alerting me to sudden news of explosions and fatalities in Mumbai.