Sir: Peter Lilley’s article on fracking (‘The only way is shale’, 11 May) is right to outline the role that shale can play in addressing Britain’s energy crisis, creating jobs, and generating tax revenues. But he is guilty of several errors and omissions.

First, he ignores the concerns of local communities in opposing drilling and extraction. Second, he fails to address questions around methane leakage which are concerning US legislators and executive agencies. Third, he does not set out a role for carbon capture and storage technology, which would reduce the carbon emissions of shale. Fourth, he fails to acknowledge the body of evidence which predicts that onshore wind will become cheaper than gas by 2020.

Fifth, he claims that ‘global temperatures have failed to rise for 16 years’ without acknowledging that the last decade was the hottest on record or that the Met Office claims the current pause is consistent with ‘a trend of continued long-term warming’. Sixth, he claims that China and the US will not decarbonise, when both have started piloting EU-style cap-and-trade schemes this year.

Finally, and perhaps most bizarrely, he claims that Cuadrilla were excluded from an inquiry on shale gas conducted by the select committee of which he is a member. In fact, Cuadrilla’s chief executive, Francis Egan, was a witness at a meeting which Mr Lilley attended. Mr Egan’s evidence was cited nine times in the committee’s report, which Mr Lilley signed off.

If Peter Lilley cannot even remember whose evidence he has heard, why should we trust a word he writes?
Will Straw
Institute for Public Policy Research,
London WC2
 
Sir: Peter Lilley is incorrect when he implies in his recent article that WWF-UK receives funding from the UK government for public lobbying — the funding we receive is used to undertake projects overseas. In addition, his claim that Whitehall is in the thrall of ‘Big Green’ is frankly ludicrous. In addition, for him to say that global temperatures are not rising and that China, India, the USA and others are doing nothing to address climate change is plain wrong.
 
On shale gas, WWF is raising legitimate concerns guided by scientific evidence on both the potential local environmental impact of fracking and the climate impact of chasing more fossil fuels. On the first point, most of the concerned residents are not green zealots but ordinary people. On the second point, the notion that a large proportion of fossil fuels need to stay in the ground for us to have any hope of tackling climate change is not a niche view: the International Energy Agency, the London School of Economics, HSBC and others are saying the same. Perhaps Mr Lilley thinks they’re in the thrall of ‘Big Green’, too?
David Nussbaum, CEO WWF-UK
Godalming, Surrey

Cameron’s ticking clock

Sir: Your main leader (11 May) stated: ‘All Cameron is doing is asking Brussels to make its best offer … Four years is a generous amount of time…’ And later: ‘If David Cameron is re-elected and sets off around Europe to begin his attempted renegotiation…’. The connotation is that David Cameron only has to kill four carefree years before offering the British people a final consultation on their destiny, with his midterm reappointment to do so more or less a foregone conclusion. Gentlemen, this is not prescience; this is cloud cuckoo land. In fact his next two years, with the vote-splitting menace of Ukip and the perpetual treachery of Clegg, will be a time of unremitting struggle. If you doubt the above, rescreen the film High Noon. It is all about a ticking clock.
Frederick Forsyth
Buckinghamshire

Cheese platform

Sir: Tanya Gold writes, ‘I know several people who want to stand for elected office on a platform of more cheese for everyone, funded by the state’ and challenges readers to write in if they can think of a rational objection (Food, 4 May). I should like to take up her challenge. Dairy products are unhealthy and unnatural. It is worse than irrational for humans to consume cheese; it is sheer madness. We bemoan the ever-increasing rise in obesity, especially in children, yet we encourage them to consume dairy products, even though these are very possibly the main cause of obesity.
Sandra Busell
Edinburgh

Half a name

Sir: Entirely through my own error, I left a word out of last week’s review of ‘The Springtime of the Renaissance’ at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. The artist I referred to as ‘Benedetto da’ is really called ‘Benedetto da Maiano’. My apologies.
Harry Mount
London NW5

Hove letter

Sir: William Cook (Arts, 4 May) is not the first to confuse Brighton and Hove. Until 1997 Hove was a separate borough with its own mayor, and it still has its own MP. Just because Kensington and Chelsea are one borough, we do not locate Holland Park in Chelsea. No more should Brunswick Terrace be located in Brighton. It is in Hove. Hove’s residents got so used to correcting those who thought they lived in Brighton that the saying ‘Hove actually’ became a catchphrase.
Timothy Sainsbury
Hove MP 1993-1997

Could deterrence fail?

Sir: Anthony Horowitz (Diary, 4 May) asks if a nation with nuclear weapons at its heart can be civilised. Prompted by David Cameron’s recent praise of Trident, and wishing to register a preference for long life over posthumous vengeance, I wrote to my MP about the other side of this coin; what if deterrence fails, and a radioactive cloud spreads across the UK — what am I to do? Back came the reply: ‘Pray.’
Iain Crawford
Monmouth

The post 18 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: When my late father, John McKee, stood as Conservative candidate for South Shields in the 1970 general election he gained 19,960 votes, more even than David Miliband in the same constituency 40 years later. In last week’s by-election in the South Shields constituency, the Conservative candidate attracted only 2,857 votes. Many things have changed since 1970 but one important thing that is different is that in those days the local Conservative party had a large number of working-class members helping in the campaign; there was even a flourishing Conservative Trade Union organisation in the constituency. Nor was South Shields unique in this respect. Conservative Members of Parliament were elected in several industrial areas including Glasgow, Newcastle upon Tyne and Sunderland.

Nearly all this working-class support has disappeared and the Conservative party appears to have given up on Scotland and most of northern England. If it wishes to reverse this trend, it needs to rediscover the ‘one-nation’ Toryism which served the party so well in the days before what is loosely termed Thatcherism polarised the nation.

When Harold Macmillan stated, back in 1957, ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, he was criticised for unseemly self-satisfaction but not for the veracity of the statement. In recent history there have been, no doubt, some who have never had it so good, but no politician today would attempt to make such an incendiary statement to the population at large. Conservatives will never regain full political power until the party represents again all geographical areas of the country and the needs and aspirations of a much broader swath of the British population.
(Dr) Ian McKee
Edinburgh

Tebbit’s view

Sir: I have been considering Norman Tebbit’s and others’ recently expressed views concerning the Conservative party’s need to shift Tory party policy rightward in view of the number of disaffected Tories voting for Ukip. This seems to me to betray a startling lack of consistency. When disaffected Conservatives were voting for the SDP/Liberal Alliance in much larger numbers in the early 1980s, I do not seem to remember Mr Tebbit and his friends urging a leftward shift in policy to respond to such loss of support. Very odd.
Dr John Hyder-Wilson
Worthing, West Sussex

Letters are best

Sir: Molly Guinness (‘Thanks but no thanks’, 4 May) is very wide of the mark if she thinks the use of email prevents cliché and banality. Her assertion that ‘Platitudes by post are not worth the stamp’ is nonsense. Perhaps if she had taken up a pencil and a sheet of paper to draft her short article instead of dashing it off on her computer, she may have avoided such nonsense as to suggest that a simple thank-you letter can invoke ‘anxiety and resentment on a scale sufficient to cause the sender to be psychologically crippled under the burden of his own gratitude’. What blather! A handwritten note of gratitude is a demonstration of thought given and trouble taken. Thanks by email? Just hit the delete button.
Christopher Andrews
Coulsdon, Surrey (by email)

Leave towpaths alone

Sir: Laura Raymond (Letters, 4 May) shows the usual arrogance and intolerance of the cycling lobby. How can it be ‘high-handed and elitist’ to want to preserve a pleasant grass path in the country rather than have it covered in tarmac? Melissa Kite is spot on. Another major way in which the cyclists are desecrating the countryside is by building roads for cyclists beside the canals. Towpaths, which were pleasant footpaths, are being converted into racetracks for commuting cyclists who have no interest in the waterways, and who contribute nothing to their upkeep, and are a far cry from ‘lock wheelers’ who were content to ride to the next lock along a bumpy track and risk a dip in the canal while doing so.

Sustrans is mainly responsible for this barbarism. I wonder if anyone else has noticed that anything termed ‘sustainable’ is out to destroy our precious environment?
Clive Brown
Chesterton, Cambridge

Hattersley and Chatsworth

Sir: Anne Somerset seemed put out by Roy Hattersley’s disapproval of the Devonshires (Books, 4 May). Those of us who were aware of Hattersley’s then dyed-in-the-wool left-wing sympathies when he was a member of Sheffield City Council in the late 1950s and early 1960s will not have been surprised. In 1960, Andrew Cavendish, 11th Duke of Devonshire, was drafted into the Conservative government by his uncle, Harold Macmillan, in what the Duke himself later described as ‘the greatest act of nepotism ever’.

A fellow socialist acolyte of Hattersley was a reporter on the now defunct Sheffield Telegraph newspaper, where I was a trainee reporter in the early 1960s. When told by the news editor to report on a Conservative party fundraising event at Chatsworth, he was heard to shout across the newsroom: ‘Not bloody likely. It’s time the whole fucking thing was turned into council flats.’
Nicholas Barrett
Hove, East Sussex

Doling out fines

Sir: Your editorial (4 May) exposed the unfairness of council enforcement ‘officers’ reaping rewards in proportion to the fines they dole out. Another financial penalty of which many are unaware is the absurd ‘victim surcharge’, which in instances of speeding offences is in reality often no more than an additional fine on top of the statutory fine for a given offence, along with points on a driving licence. For someone to be ‘surcharged’ in this way, when there is no victim, is as ridiculous as fining a Welsh pensioner for discarding a cigarette butt that had stuck to his shoe.
Anthony J. Burnet
East Saltoun, East Lothian

The post 11 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: In her interesting article on the rising equality in the female world (‘Sex and success, 27 April), Alison Wolf states that A*/top-stream girls stay virgins until 20 ‘because they have more important things on their minds’. I am not sure about this. I certainly remember that this was not the case when I was at Wellington in the late 1990s: the A* girls were usually the goers.
Nolan Walker
London EC1

Ms Kite’s elitism

Sir: We would like to take issue with Melissa Kite’s piece (‘Two-wheeled tyranny’, 27 April). I write on behalf of CTC, the national cycling charity. I was delighted to find two of our members are active cycle campaigners with firsthand knowledge of the Kenilworth Greenway, referred to in her article. One of them, George Riches, was even a member of the steering group during the planning stages of the route. He thought Ms Kite’s view high-handed and elitist. Mr Riches remembers the 1970s when he cycled along the disused railway line to Berkwell and says: ‘Now the track is open to all, it is tremendously well-used’. He added that the Kenilworth Greenway is busy at weekends, allowing families and wheelchair users to enjoy the countryside together on the smooth tarmacked surface that seems to offend Ms Kite so much. CTC understands the Greenway is enjoyed by a local ladies’ cycling group and is not, as Ms Kite sees it, the sole domain of the much-maligned Mamils (Middle-aged men in Lycra).

The Kenilworth Greenway is now providing happy childhood memories for a new generation of cyclists, horse riders and pedestrians alike. Warwickshire County Council quite rightly say this provides more opportunities for ‘all members of society’ to enjoy the countryside.

Seeing the fulsome negative responses to the article that have already posted online, perhaps Ms Kite should get off her high horse — or her Louboutin heels — and on to a bike. We can even recommend some designer models and cycling accessories.
Laura Raymond
Senior communications and media co-ordinator, CTC, Guildford

Desecration by cycle path

Sir: Melissa Kite says ‘you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone’. A late Victorian photograph shows a leafy country lane winding through farmland which is now Verulamium Park in St Albans. Preserved in this form until last year, the council has now installed a two-lane arrangement for cyclists and pedestrians. Leading up to the wonderful ‘causeway’ next to the Roman wall, this footpath is now divided by kerbs and contrasting surfacing with signs and urban paraphernalia at regular intervals. Whatever your mode of transport, the simple experience of a passage through time is now constantly interrupted by modernity.
Peter Baker
St Albans, Hertfordshire

Another club

Sir: Buck’s was not the only club of which Lady T was a member (Letters, 27 April). When she became Tory leader in 1975, the then all-male Carlton was delighted to find that there was no bar on her becoming an honorary member, as all her predecessors had. She accepted with alacrity and visited the club frequently over the years for lunches, dinners and receptions, which were always packed with her admirers. In 1979 Harold Macmillan, the first person to be elected president of the club, unveiled a fine bust of her by Oscar Nemon. Shuffling towards it in his carefully practised manner, he said in a stage whisper heard by everyone, ‘Now I must remember I am unveiling a bust of Margaret Thatcher, not Margaret Thatcher’s bust.’

She strengthened the affection in which she was held by rushing round to St James’s Street in July 1990 to inspect the damage and comfort the injured among staff and members alike following an IRA bomb attack. In 2009 she became the club’s second president.
Lord Lexden
Carlton Club Historian, London SW1

Iran’s aggression

Sir: Peter Oborne (Diary, 27 April) says it is ‘nonsense’ to consider Iran an aggressive power. Iran’s leadership has called for Israel to be wiped off the map. If that isn’t threatening one’s neighbours in the region, what is? (Mr Oborne and some other apologists of the regime claim that this threat has been mistranslated from Farsi; but the alternative translation they offer amounts to the same thing.)

Reinforcing this threat with action, the Iranian regime has funded and armed organisations — Hezbollah and Hamas — which target Israeli civilians and which are publicly committed to Israel’s destruction. Why Mr Oborne doesn’t think that these are the words and deeds of an aggressive power is beyond reason.
Michael Grenfell
London NW11

The missing hobgoblins

Sir: I do not think, pace Peter Oborne, that ‘the cathedral authorities’ were guilty of ‘bowdlerisation’ or of consciously deciding ‘to cut out John Bunyan’s famous line about hobgoblins and foul fiends’ from the hymn ‘To Be a Pilgrim’ at Mrs Thatcher’s funeral. They simply reproduced Percy Dearmer’s version from The English Hymnal of 1906, down to its last comma and full stop, which with Vaughan Williams’s splendid setting of a folk tune, ‘Monks Gate’, made it a famous hymn in the first place. Later hymnals (Ancient and Modern from 1916) perhaps wisely reverted to Bunyan’s words, but the ‘bowdlerisation’, if such, is still in common use and is more than a century old.
Sheridan Gilley
Durham

The post 4 May 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: Charles Moore’s excellent paragraph (Notes, 20 April) on Baroness Thatcher’s life achievement in the context of much less social advantage than that of Sir Winston Churchill concludes on one mildly false assertion: ‘At the end, as at the beginning, she had no club.’ In fact, from 1978 until the end, she was the only female member of Buck’s Club (save for a period where she shared the distinction with the HM Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). She was a regular visitor, for a time with Sir Denis, a member himself over many decades. As it happens, Sir Winston was also a member, from 1920, and subsequently patron, from 1953 to his death in 1965, and he remained a frequent visitor throughout his life. So not only did she have a club at the end (and for many years before), but it was the same one as her only other 20th-century peer. We are modestly proud of that here.
Major Rupert Lendrum
Secretary, Buck’s Club
London W1

Loved more than loathed

Sir: Like Charles Moore, I have been perturbed by the BBC’s lamentable coverage following the passing of Baroness Thatcher and their continual emphasis on how she was loved and loathed ‘in equal measure’. This is demonstrably untrue. Lady Thatcher won three successive general elections, notably being the only leader in modern history to win more votes in her third election than in her first. Only last week, YouGov found that 52 per cent thought Thatcher was a good or great PM (just 30 per cent said she was not). ICM had very similar figures. Perhaps Nick Robinson suffers from a guilt complex, having served as chairman of the Young Conservatives in 1986, when Thatcherism was at its height.
Declan Lyons
Warrington, Cheshire

Patten, Clark and Thatcher

Sir, Apropos of Margaret Thatcher, Petronella Wyatt writes (Diary, 20 April) about Chris Patten, ‘whose vitriol towards her knew no bounds.’ Rubbish. Chris Patten worked for Thatcher from 1975 until 1979. He served in her government from 1983 until her fall in 1990. He voted for her in the first leadership ballot. Throughout those years, he was always independent-minded, sometimes privately critical, but never disloyal. He was also a highly effective minister, which is why she kept on promoting him, although he was never ‘one of us’. His vitriol towards her knew no beginning. In the same issue, James Delingpole refers to the ‘anti-Thatcher snobbery oozed by… the loathsome Alan Clark.’ Bunkum and balderdash. If Mr Delingpole reads the Clark diaries, he will find many expressions of admiration for and awe towards ‘The Lady’ but no snobbery. Perhaps he is confusing her with another blond, Michael Heseltine, the chap who had to buy his own furniture. As for ‘loathsome’, your TV critic should not try to redeem factual mistakes with vulgar abuse.
Bruce Anderson
London SW1

Bury your gold

Sir: Matthew Parris’s attraction to gold in the face of the ‘financial repression’ we are experiencing is understandable (‘Why I won’t be selling my gold or silver’, 20 April). However his hope for gold as ‘a plan-B pension that the politicians can’t touch’ does not, alas, take into account historical precedents. In 1933, under an executive order from President Roosevelt, all US persons had their gold holdings compulsorily purchased by the authorities. I suggest he takes his gold out of his bank and buries it in a field in Derbyshire.
Paul D. Rivers
London NW3

Cricket snobbery

Sir: I enjoyed Mark Mason’s article on snobbery and snooker (‘Give snooker a break’, 20 April). Snooker isn’t the only sporting event that brings a snort of disdain from certain snooty types. To many ‘purists’, the Indian Premier League ‘simply isn’t cricket’. But it allows us to enjoy the likes of Rahul Dravid, Adam Gilchrist and Ricky Ponting after their Test playing days are ended. It places a premium on captaincy, has improved fielding skills, frequently produces thrilling finishes, and includes a ‘fair play’ league. Sport at its best.
Richard Stone
Barton under Needwood, Staffs

Chronic dithering

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s article (‘When the lights go out’, 20 April) accurately summarises the muddle of contradictions passing for UK energy policy. Contrast the government’s chronic dithering over the vital matter of energy with its compulsion to foist upon the nation the quite unnecessary HS2 project. Surely it’s time to get a grip and decide what is important?
Timothy Stockton
London NW5

The fate of the stag

Sir: I have no doubt that Alexander Chancellor is on the side of the angels (and the Countryside Alliance) in the hunting debate (20 April), but he should not give credence to the myth that at the end of a stag-hunt the quarry was torn apart by the hounds. The quarry at the end of this most selective form of hunting was shot. The entrails only were fed to the hounds.
Mrs A. Flores
London SW15

An irritant, yes

Sir: An appreciation of your review of Evelyn Waugh: A Biography, by Selina Hastings, depended on an interest in the reviewer, Russell Kane, as he spent the first three paragraphs of the review writing about himself. He referred to himself affectionately as ‘that spiky-haired comedian irritant’, which explains some of it, but I don’t know who he is, and don’t feel inclined to find out.
Jane Kelly
London W3

The post 27 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: Charles Moore (Notes, 6 April) is right to propose that Prime Minister’s Questions revert to the long-standing previous practice of two 15-minute sessions a week (on a Tuesday and Thursday) in place of the current 30-minute session. Tony Blair introduced the present arrangement at the beginning of his premiership for one of the reasons offered by Mr Moore: that it would reduce the time he would have to spend each week on preparation.

Whether Tony’s intention was also, as Mr Moore suggests, to reduce his exposure to attack, I doubt; in any case it certainly did not achieve this. The vulnerability of the Prime Minister to the opposition leader’s questions rises exponentially in relation to the number of questions that can be asked in one go. The six questions allowed in the single Wednesday sessions are potentially more dangerous than the two sets of three questions under the previous system. As a special adviser and then MP I’ve seen four prime ministers handle the two sessions a week; and I’ve witnessed the preparation that went into both Tony Blair’s and Gordon Brown’s single sessions. In my observation the single weekly session has not saved any preparation time at all. Ironically, neither has the new system enhanced Parliament’s role. It has turned PMQs into even more of a bear garden.

Bringing back the two sessions a week would have the added benefit of extending the parliamentary week and end the practice of the whips to try to pack members off to their constituencies on a Wednesday.

Tony was able to make the change because the rota for questions is in the hands of the PM, not the House of Commons. This may be an ancient arrangement but it is preposterous. When and how the prime minister answers to Parliament should be for the Commons to decide.
Rt Hon Jack Straw MP
House of Commons, London SW1

Racing certainty

Sir: Peter Oborne claims that my coverage of the Grand National in the Guardian was ‘deceitful’, since the death of Battlefront on 4 April had nothing to do with the fences at Aintree and my reports suggested otherwise. I can only think that Peter failed to notice the 800-word comment piece the same day, headlined ‘Battlefront death nothing to do with Grand National fences’.

He has my sympathy. I know how difficult it can be for a journalist to squeeze in basic research these days, and it must be even worse for Peter, juggling jobs and deadlines. I’ve just got the one job, which immerses me in the delights of National Hunt racing for four or five months in every 12. I’ve been doing it for many years, and I’ve been accused of many things, including pro-bookie bias, anti-bookie bias, having my snout in the trough and a ‘stupid egg head’ in my picture byline. But I’m not sure where to file your claim that I have an ‘anti-hunt racing bias’, so it will probably be interred with the green-biro letters under ‘too nutty to be worth a second thought’.
Greg Wood
The Guardian, London N1

Thatcher and the ivories

Sir: One unexpected role that the late Baroness Thatcher generously assumed in 1997 has not featured in recent coverage. That was to become the first patron of the Cobbe Collection Trust — a charity which owns the largest group of historical composer-owned keyboard instruments in the world, housed and shown to the public here at Hatchlands, Surrey. She was drawn to it not only by the collection, which comes from all around the world, but perhaps more potently by the fact that her uncle had been a piano-maker. When Lord (then Archie) and Lady Hamilton first brought her to Hatchlands, she was fascinated by the keyboards. She and Sir Denis exhibited an acutely intelligent curiosity in what they saw and heard, whether it was a 17th-century virginals that had been tuned weekly by Purcell or the Broadwood piano on which Chopin gave his last concert. Her timely support was and is very deeply appreciated.
Alec Cobbe
Hatchlands Park, Surrey

Politicians advising bankers

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer reports that Mrs Thatcher demanded of Barclays in 1982 that they needed to be bolder in lending; it seems that they took her at her word for the rest of that decade, hence the enormous bad-debt write-offs of the early 1990s and the bank’s first ever trading loss. The lesson is that politicians should avoid instructing bankers on lending policy; the latter are perfectly capable of making mistakes on their own initiative without further guidance.
David Todd
Feltham, Middlesex

A bit rich

Sir: It is a bit rich for Mr Mitra (‘Health tourists must pay’, 13 April) to claim that the NHS ‘is fundamentally corrupt’ because it is one of the ‘collective institutions of the left’, seeing as it is run by private general practitioners and NHS-paid consultants liberally free to indulge in private work.
Dr Ian Olson
Aberdeen

House prices vs earnings

Sir: Ken Bishop (Letters, 13 April) says there is no relentless upward pressure on house prices in Liverpool. Land Registry and mortgage lender data shows that average house prices in Liverpool (and in the north-west generally) have doubled over the past 20 years. More significantly, average gross earnings in the north-west have only risen by around 67 per cent over the same period. I agree that the situation in the south of England is more extreme. In the south-east, south-west and East Anglia, earnings have risen by more or less the same factor as in the north-west, and house prices have risen by 200 per cent. Even so, it is difficult to argue that the housing market in Liverpool and the north-west has not been subject to the same kind of impulse as further south — the confusion in demand between houses as places to live, and houses as investment assets, to the huge detriment of the former.
Alan Doyle
Sunbury-on-Thames

The post 20 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: The extent of the use made by non-entitled patients from abroad (‘International Health Service’, 6 April) should come as no surprise. This increasing stream of information demonstrating the volume and variation will cause even louder gasps and shock.

The NHS is the standard-bearer of the politics of equality and, like all great collective institutions of the left, however altruistic, is fundamentally corrupt. The corruption is so insidious that only those inside gain insight after the collapse.

In the health service there are often concealed two or more levels of care with varying degrees of competence. When the ‘health tourist’ is forced into paying, they will seek out ‘the best’, which will now be found in the swelling private sector, leaving the NHS depleted, and open to increasing scrutiny by the public. What was once invisible now becomes visible.
Anthony Mitra FRCS
(Hospital consultant, retired)
By email

Wrong about the weather

Sir: Matt Ridley (Diary, 6 April) bemoans the Met Office’s lack of success in longer-term forecasting and puts the blame on a computer algorithm predicated on an assumption of global warming. I’d like to offer an alternative theory. Could it be that the Met Office has changed its recruitment policy to favour economists?
Brendan Keelan
London SW1

Affordable opera

Sir: Steerpike (6 April) claims that a couple of cheap seats for the current Royal Opera production of Die Zauberflöte would set Iain Duncan Smith back £220. Not so — he could have had two for as little as £6 each. While it would be of little relevance to a man on such a tight budget, there are over 300 seats priced at £20 or less for the performances referred to by Steerpike, and over 950 priced at £50 or less. Were he willing to join those who choose to stand, Mr Duncan Smith would find another 124 places, all for under a tenner.
Michael Brind
Woking, Surrey

Rock’s fall

Sir: Patrick Rock made a powerful contribution to his own defeat at the Portsmouth South by-election in 1984 (Politics, 30 March). In a radio discussion he managed to get the name of the constituency wrong and claimed credit for a hospital that had not been built. Rock is an extraordinary combination of the naive and the astute (as regards political tactics, not strategy). The last time I saw him he was wandering down Whitehall on the day of a civil service strike, his back covered in stickers proclaiming the merits of the strike. He is blessed with great redeeming charm.
Lord Lexden
London SWI

Council blunders

Sir: I read Harry Mount’s article ‘The home wreckers’ (30 March) with sympathy, but am surprised he places the blame on Russian oligarchs. Surely the planning departments of the borough councils, in this case the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, are responsible? The likes of Mr Abramovich would be unable to cause such damage if they had not been given permission. Cheyne Walk is far from being the only case in point. We have been horrified at the RBKC’s alacrity in sacrificing the one remaining original entrance to the Hillgate Village, mainly for budgetary reasons, I am told. The project will largely obliterate the view of — and from — the old stationmaster’s house on its threshold, which introduces the whole atmosphere of this charming hidden corner of London. Forget about knocking three terrace houses into one: here, two streets are to be joined together by a vile juggernaut of a building.

I see that councils need money. But as Harry Mount writes, this myopic approach will end by ruining London’s most picturesque districts. Who was it who said that planners have destroyed more of London than the Luftwaffe?
Odile Taliani
Vienna, Austria
 
Sir: ‘Toffs lived in terraced houses like everyone else,’ Harry Mount reminds us. Yes: I recall Julian Amery, when he was a housing minister in Ted Heath’s government, saying during a debate in the Commons: ‘There is nothing wrong with living in a terraced house. I have lived in one all my life.’ His house was in Eaton Square and its outstanding feature was a splendid dark green library.
David Woodhead
Leatherhead, Surrey

Where to find houses

Sir: Alan Doyle (Letters, 30 March) tells us that ‘Britain is, of course, a small island.’ There are in fact only eight larger islands on earth: we live on a large island. And the solution to the housing shortage is even simpler than the interest-rate adjustment he understandably recommends from his home in Sunbury-on-Thames. Here in Liverpool, he can buy a nice house for about £60,000 and find entire streets boarded up. There is no ‘relentless upward pressure on house prices’. The market would be balanced if a way could be found to distribute jobs away from the Home Counties.
Ken Bishop
Liverpool

Northern lights

Sir: I enjoyed Basil Ransome-Davies’ witty poem in praise of Canada (6 April), but Susan Sarandon was in fact born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York City. May I suggest that Marshall McLuhan take her place? He predicted the world wide web
30 years before it was invented.
John O’Byrne
Dublin

The post 13 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: Unlike Louise Cooper (‘The great savings robbery’, 30 March), I don’t have a problem with inflation or quantitative easing. It’s the perfect tax: painless, easy to collect and fair. It’s painless because after having been collected you still have the proverbial pound in your pocket. OK, it’s worth less — but as Louise points out, we don’t really notice. Easy to collect, just order a new batch of twenties from the printers and put the prices up in the shop. And everybody pays exactly the same percentage, and so the relative difference between rich and poor remains the same.
Tom Roberts
Derby
 
Sir: According to the legend, Fortunatus (he of the bottomless purse) was born in Famagusta. How times change! And isn’t it appropriate that the Governor of the Bank of Cyprus is called Panicos?
Peter Kitson
Stoke Prior, Worcestershire

The meaning of Easter

Sir: It was disappointing it was to find that your leading article (30 March) was devoted to another lament for those who want to still ‘the moving hand of time’. When it comes to dealing with today’s issues, the old established churches are floundering. Before their Holinesses the Pope and the Archbishop embark on their missions to win back the apostate and recruit new adherents, they might be advised to rethink their message. What the people want are practical answers to the issues of today, and traditional Christianity doesn’t have them. If it did have, the populace would flock to them.
Tup. Clayton
Sedgefield, South Africa
 
Sir: Many thanks for your leading article on the meaning of Easter. How refreshing in a time when the media almost totally ignores the most radical and important event ever to come to earth — the death and resurrection of Christ. In an age of anxiety and despair, this message is needed.
David A. Littlewood
By email

Russian renovations

Sir: Hats off to Harry Mount from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (increasingly known as Moscow-on-Thames) for his timely exposé of the antics of the Russian oligarchs (‘Trouble in the terraces’, 30 March). What makes the process so disturbing is the lack of official protest. The council’s hearing into Roman Abramovich’s grotesque scheme for the magnificent building once lived in by James Whistler only came about because of protest letters from nearby residents. Not a squeak has yet been heard from supposed guardians of London’s architectural heritage such as the Chelsea Society or the National Trust.
Christopher Walker
Chelsea SW3

History lessons

Sir: Pace Toby Young (Status anxiety, 23 March), my pupils come up from their state and independent primary schools having learnt about Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Britain, the Tudors and 19th- or 20th-century England, but knowing nothing of ‘eduspeak’. And yes, they sometimes make spelling mistakes, but was it not ever thus? Currently all secondary schoolchildren do study the origins of the great English institutions of monarchy, church and parliament, but Mr Gove plans to scrap this: could someone have a word? And if Oxford undergraduates are ignorant, it is no fault of A-level exams, which offer a huge range of topics for teachers to choose from — two thirds of them pre-1900 in the history specification that I use.
As James Delingpole shows (16 March), it is what goes on in the classroom that really makes the difference.
Patrick Pender-Cudlip
Queen Camel, Somerset

Care and company

Sir: Ross Clark (‘Why I fear for my daughter’, 30 March) is absolutely right about the loneliness that ‘independent living’ brings to most people with learning disabilities. The difficulties of money, budgeting, buying and preparing food, keeping clothes and person clean and presentable are inadequately grasped mysteries to many learning-disabled people, who also need to be in a place where social life, cultural life and friendship are fostered. Independent living may, as Clark says, suit the most able learning-disabled people, but not the majority. I know because my adult son is lucky enough to live in a care facility that promotes independence as far as possible, but in the context of family-sized households with staff support.
Hilary Dickinson
Herne Hill

Currency affairs

Sir: Mr Rifkind (30 March) reveals an inquisitive mind on the subject of ‘Bitcoin’ and generously invites reader assistance to help him know what is going on. May I weigh in? First, I believe it to be the purest example of ‘Murphy’s Law’ — i.e., where there is a hole, someone will come along and fill it up. So when governments all around the world can’t finance ordinary business intercourse in a free market, they will encourage a different sort of market (apologies to Churchill).
But second, and far more important to realise, ‘Bitcoin’ is a currency without a country (euro, anyone?).
Leonard Toboroff
New York City

Still in business

Sir: A missing sentence in my piece on Auckland Castle (‘The art of philanthropy’, 30 March) left an implication that I was no longer involved in the financial world.  I continue to spend half my week at Ruffer LLP.
Jonathan Ruffer
London SW1

The post 6 April 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: Three cheers for the Spectator NO! (‘Why we aren’t signing’, 23 March). I would rather be informed by the slimiest of Fleet Street’s journalists or the rudest blogger than any one of Westminster’s incompetents.
Dr A.E. Hanwell
York
 
Sir: Perhaps our newsagents should split the papers they sell into sections marked ‘Free Press’ and ‘Other’. I know which one I’d choose.
Leo Bajzert
Sydney, Australia

The house price problem

Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 23 March) blames the astronomic rise in house prices on planning restrictions — a point of view endorsed by the Chancellor and by Nick Boles, the planning minister.

Britain is, of course, a small island with a fixed land area, some of it protected until now by planning laws. But that restriction on supply is only a small part of the relentless upward pressure on house prices. The major impetus has come through the relentless promotion of demand through cheap mortgage credit over the past 30 years and, after that pack of cards came tumbling down in 2008, quantitative easing, which has done precious little to promote economic growth but has leaked almost in its entirety into the asset markets.

You could pave over the remaining open spaces to your heart’s content, but downward pressure on house prices will be minimal so long as real interest rates (measured against the expected future price of houses) stay negative.
Alan Doyle
Sunbury on Thames, Surrey

Enthusiastic amateurs

Sir: Matthew Parris (‘Why do amateur performers still flourish?’ 23 March) entirely misses the point. The motivation of any amateur is the creation of beauty, its sharing with others, and the love of the art.

Music is integral to all our lives. Professional musicians do wonderful things, as do amateurs. As a teenager, I decided not to attempt to earn a living with my music, as I loved my music far too much (and still do). We all need and are grateful for the informed listeners who support our work. Amateur musicians just love what they do.
David Taylor
Allington, Lincolnshire

Not worth it

Sir: Despite Lady Nicholson’s concern about the plight of ordinary Iraqis that she expressed at the start of her argument (‘Was Iraq worth it?, 16 March), she fails to explain how the list of developments she cites would actually help any of them.

This, to my mind, undermines her argument, and inclines me at least to think that no, it was not worth it.
Susan Peak
Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancs

Levelling the landscape

Sir: James Delingpole (‘What I learned from my week as a teacher’, 16 March) wrote about how the uncritical concern for fairness in education has warped our common sense. When I was a maths PGCE student at the West Sussex Institute of Higher Education in 1988, I was told by one of our lecturers that what she wanted most for children in schools was equality.

When I asked her if she meant equality of opportunity or of outcome, she said both. I pointed out that for equality of outcome, it would be necessary to lower standards to a level achievable by students with the least natural ability. She agreed, and said that for that reason she wanted to lower standards.

This came from a woman in a position of influence over new teachers, and we see the results today. Isn’t it amazing how otherwise intelligent people can be blinded by ideology? This would be a useful field for psychological study.
Chris Price
Minehead, Somerset

A snippy review?

Sir: Quentin Letts (Diary, 16 March) describes my review of Our Church by Roger Scruton as ‘snippy’, ignoring that I also wrote that Scruton should be listened to ‘with respect, appreciation and enjoyment’. I agree that much modern liturgical writing is anaemic, but not all; and there are many excellent translations of the Bible. It is to be regretted that those who rightly value 16th- and 17th-century prose too often champion its virtues by disparaging all modern attempts to use contemporary language.
Richard Harries
Pentegarth  

Summer of 1704

Sir: In his Notes of 2 March, Charles Moore confesses that he is a sucker for stories in which one can get back to the distant past in very few generations. Recently I came across an interesting specimen. The German author Oskar Maria Graf, who died in 1967, writes in Das Leben meiner Mutter that his grandfather told him that as a small boy, he had heard from his grandfather about how he had carried the statue of Maria from their local Bavarian village church to the Augustinerkirche in Munich in the summer of 1704.
Allard Hoogland
Langbroek, The Netherlands

Not me, guv

Sir: Sam Leith (Books, 23 March) has the drinks correspondent of The Spectator wearing his drink as a hat, shouting ‘Free Pinochet! Jail Hobsbawm!’ at Eric Hobsbawm. For the avoidance of doubt: not me, the other one. I appear, apolitically, on page 57 of this issue.
Simon Hoggart
Twickenham

The post 30 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: As Robert Hardman notes (Royal notebook, 16 March), not only is the C back in FCO but these days there is a waiting list of countries interested in joining, or being more closely associated with, the Commonwealth. I have a list of at least half a dozen, and even some strong signals from Dublin that they, too, are now thinking about joining the club. How can this be so when we were told so firmly by foreign policy experts in the past century that we should break our ties with the Commonwealth and that our future prosperity and destiny lay in Europe?

One reason is certainly that the Queen has kept the Commonwealth idea alive through years of British disinterest, remarking — with a prescience lacking in some of her then ministers — that it was becoming in many ways the platform of the future, as well as being the ideal soft-power network of the 21st century.

But an even stronger reason may be in the numbers rather than in the words. The Commonwealth network embraces some of the world’s strongest and most vigorous wealth-generating economies, with the new resource-rich economies of Africa, west and east, coming up fast. UK trade (in goods and especially services) with the Commonwealth expanded by 149 per cent between 2001 and 2011. Getting relevant Commonwealth figures out of the national statistics these days is hard (perhaps they were airbrushed out after 1972) but totting up, it looks as though inward investment from rich Commonwealth countries is climbing fast, and our earnings from UK investment in Commonwealth countries is second only to America.

So while we of course must remain on the best possible terms with our European neighbours, for the next few decades it is the Commonwealth that is going to provide one of the best gateways to the giant new consumer markets of Asia, Africa and Latin America in which we must succeed to survive. No wonder new applicants are queuing up to join this increasingly attractive club. The wind of change is blowing in new directions, and as a seafaring nation we need to trim our sails accordingly.
Lord Howell of Guildford
Chairman of the Council of Commonwealth Societies

Come to my comp

Sir: James Delingpole (16 March) rightly acknowledges the hectic nature of school life: the eclectic array of activities, copious bureaucratic diktat and the need to control unruly behaviour are all part of the life of a teacher. It is encouraging to read this in the Speccie as the general public usually associate teachers with union nonsense about pay and conditions.

As a teacher in an inner-city comprehensive, I would like to offer Delingpole the opportunity to tackle a few of my classes for a morning and see if his views on such schools are open to change.
Tim Williams
Andrew Marvell College, Hull

Post apocalypse?

Sir: Royal Mail had always prided itself on delivering far better quality of service than its European counterparts, so last week’s Royal Mail correspondent rather gives the game away (Letters, 16 March). The facts are that service standards have fallen: cessation of Sunday collections, loss of the second delivery and ‘stealth’ cuts (such as the advancement of the ‘late restricted’ last collection in central London from 7p.m. to 6.30p.m. or earlier) are just a few examples.

Royal Mail would not be in such a financial pickle if it tackled the issue of how to reduce delivery costs, which account for 70 per cent of its operational cost base, in the face of falling mail volumes.

In the early 1990s, Royal Mail was generating annual profits of up to £400 million, yet its highest sub-board level bonus was 25 per cent of base salary. Now its Long-Term Incentive Plan (LTIP) provides for bonuses ten times that amount, for mediocre performance.
Peter Forrest (Royal Mail 1969-2000) London N6

Sir: Shane O’Riordain from the Royal Mail says that ‘stamp price increases last year were necessary to sustain the one-price-goes-anywhere, six-days-a-week Universal Service in Britain.’ Is he suggesting there are no first and second class stamps? I was under the impression that Royal Mail regularly increases its prices in order to try to recoup its losses due to email etc. He continues: ‘This year we’ve frozen stamp prices…’. Can he then explain the two letters I’ve had sent to me by Royal Mail warning of increases to come in April?
Flora Selwyn
St Andrews, Fife

Caring for dementia

Sir: Cressida Connolly is absolutely right (Bookends, 16 March). Oliver James’s excellent book Contented Dementia is the gold standard. He describes Penny Garner’s work on dementia at Burford, for which she deserves a Nobel prize.

My wife had dementia. She was nursed at home and died there, contentedly and with dignity and almost no medication, ten years after diagnosis. I closely followed Penny Garner’s teaching. The main lesson was that laughter is better than medication. Caring for a spouse is of course very tiring, but it is also very rewarding.
Julian Taylor
Appleby-in-Westmorland, Cumbria

Brand’s struggle

Sir: I have never liked Russell Brand. But I was very moved by his article on dealing with addiction (‘Fixing a hole’, 9 March). The concept of abstinence-based recovery seems obvious, but as he points out so clearly, it depends for its success on the existence of reliable support mechanisms. I wish him every success with his battle against addiction, and with the admirable Give it Up fund which he has established.
Richard Hoare
East Lavant, West Sussex

The post 23 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.

Sir: Reading the reports of Sir David Nicholson’s evidence before the House of Commons Health Committee on 5 March 2013 (Leading article, 9 March), it seems to me inconceivable that he could remain in his post.

We are informed by the Prime Minister that in the current circumstances the NHS is unable to do without him. But nobody is indispensable and in any case, to judge by Sir David’s recent performance, he is incompetent, a hopeless leader, has a very poor memory and is more interested in saving his skin than in the wellbeing of NHS patients. While he remains in his post, the anger of the relatives of those people who died in appalling conditions at Stafford NHS Trust will only increase, along with that of others like myself; the morale of NHS staff will continue to deteriorate; and confidence in the NHS as a whole will erode further. This travesty must not be allowed to continue.
Brian Thornton
Malvern

Sir: Occasionally the Speccie really hits the jackpot: ‘Jeremy Hunt could have responded to the Mid Staffs crisis, but instead both he and David Cameron have chosen to stand by Sir David Nicholson, chief executive at Doncaster Royal Infirmary’. Never in the field of human endeavour have three people made such fools of themselves.
Bruce Shaxson
Hindhead, Surrey

Unskilled insults

Sir: With regard to Gerald Warner’s article (‘Grow up, girls’, 9 March), I was present at the final at Glasgow University Union on Saturday and saw two fantastic debaters from Edinburgh and Cambridge who debated superbly despite any heckling.

Heckling based on gender, race or sexuality has no place in any debate. Such heckling is an insult to the GUU’s proud debating history. It takes no skill to shout offence at someone else.

Mr Warner’s views bear no relation to the GUU in which I debate, where there are many skilled and confident female debaters who have regularly destroyed many of my arguments. As I am sure you know, debating brings many great benefits to students, and it is a shame that there are not more female debaters. Sadly, Mr Warner’s attitude will no doubt put off more of them.
Callum MacMaster
Glasgow University Union Parliamentary Club Champion, 2010-11

Practising mercy

Sir: You wouldn’t expect a God-believing, liturgy-loving Catholic priest to side with Matthew Parris (9 March), but he was a bundle of tolerant wisdom on the subject of Cardinal Keith O’Brien. Not only are we dealing with a fallible human being who is tempted in various ways, along with the rest of us, but we also need to practise the Gospel of mercy. He has fallen from high and has given up public office, but he now needs consideration as a Christian man.

What the details are of his misconduct are not yet clear and I am not interested in speculation, but he must have had an inner struggle for many years, trying to hold together opposing aspects of himself. Parris was very good at understanding all of this rather than going for him as an ‘enemy’.

Much of the former Cardinal’s language about gay marriage was joltingly intemperate and many of us felt uneasy with the tone even if we agreed with the principles. We need to speak kindly. However, Parris is bang on when he moans about the vapid niceness of much contemporary church-speak.

We need to hear honesty, clarity and conviction, rather than a lot of hand-wringing. There is also a long tradition of those on opposing sides having a grudging respect for each other’s dedication and purpose. Thus Richard and Saladin could confer, first world war aces would salute each other, and Kipling spoke of ‘When two strong men meet’. Amen to that.
Fr Kevin O’Donnell
Peacehaven, East Sussex

Sir: I have no problem with Matthew Parris’s view on the former cardinal, but his condemnation of church music does make me wonder whether he is deaf.
Bob Hands
Bridport, Dorset

Model mail

Sir: Martin Vander Weyer’s account of Royal Mail (Any other business, 23 February) is very much at odds with the positive transformation the company is undergoing. Royal Mail has the highest service specification of any major European country.  In most categories, our delivery exceeds the required standard. There has been a very significant turnaround in our financial performance. Just a few years ago we were loss-making; now we are profitable.

Stamp price increases last year were necessary to sustain the one-price-goes-anywhere, six-days-a-week Universal Service in Britain. Ofcom, our regulator, publicly acknowledged the point. This year we’ve frozen stamp prices and in five of the six weight steps for First Class and Second Class mail, the cost of UK stamps is below the EU average.
Shane O’Riordain
Royal Mail, London EC4

War of words

Sir: I have just listened to the debate between Peter Hitchens and Damian Thompson on your ‘View from 22’ podcast (spectator.co.uk/podcast). Strong stuff! I have to say that it seems to me that these arguments about whether drug addiction is a sickness or not (Thompson says it isn’t), or whether there is no such thing as addiction and it is just another way of describing a weak will (Hitchens’s view of things) are about semantics. As Russell Brand writes in his article (9 March), some people can use drugs and alcohol without harming themselves or others much. Others cannot. In the end, sick or addicted or not, they can probably only help themselves.
Kate Henricks
London N1

The post 16 March 2013 appeared first on The Spectator.