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Letters

Wednesday, 13th August 2008

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

Credit where credit’s due

Sir: I’m not sure if my colleague Bob Marshall-Andrews is happy to be seen as some kind of showbiz personality (‘I’m not an ambassador for New Labour’, 9 August). However wrong Bob was, in my view, in strenuously opposing allied military action which ended ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, he has undoubtedly contributed a good deal on issues concerning the rights of individuals in this country.

As for the proposed 90 days’ pre-charge detention, which the government wished to see introduced in 2005, it was in fact my amendment reducing the figure to 28 which the House fortunately agreed to. Hopefully the Lords will ensure that it remains at 28 and not 42 days.

David Winnick MP
House of Commons, London SW1

Don’t blame Pakistan

Sir: Why does Fraser Nelson want to call it an Afghan-Pakistan war when it is not? (‘Don’t mention the Afghan-Pakistan war’, 26 July). Such labels are not only dangerous but could irretrievably harm the cause by diverting the focus from the real issue and further enabling the enemy to exploit the situation by fanning dissent and creating a conflict of interests among the coalition partners.

Pakistan has done more and suffered more than all the other allies combined. More than 1,000 soldiers have lost their lives in the war against terror. Pakistan has deployed 90,000 troops along the Pakistan-Afghan border; 700 al-Qa’eda operators have been arrested and handed over. For countries unwilling to comprehend the realities on the grounds, blaming Pakistan for playing a double game has become a convenient way of evading their own weaknesses and failures. Pakistan has time and again explained the difficulties in the area. It is a daunting task for it effectively to man a 2,200km border in the absence of the necessary resources. To compound the problem, the enemy takes full advantage of the difficult, hilly, unexplored terrain, and the security surveillance on the Afghan side is not adequate.

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Letters

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

This battle has just begun

‘I was excited and delighted by it in that first Bombay minute,’ says the narrator in Gregory David Roberts’s great novel Shantaram.

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.

Politics

Fraser Nelson

Fraser Nelson reviews the week in politics

The Spectator's Notes

Charles Moore

In his speech announcing his Pre-Budget Report, Alistair Darling said that he was going to put up the top rate of income tax to 45 per cent from 2011, because he wanted the burden to be borne by ‘those who have done best out of the growth of the past decade’.