Sir: What is this ‘Brown bounce?’ There would be no bounce at all if our media had not reverted to their favoured toecap-kissing mode.
Brown-nosing
Sir: What is this ‘Brown bounce?’ There would be no bounce at all if our media had not reverted to their favoured toecap-kissing mode.
When Tony Blair came to office ten years ago he was new and fresh and merited a honeymoon period, though seven years of it was outrageous. Ditto David Cameron 18 months ago, whose media honeymoon just ended in roadkill. But Gordon Brown has been co-premier for the past decade and is co-equally responsible for every shoddy aspect of the worst ten years of living his-tory. It is like saying in 1945: ‘Adolf’s gone at last so let us welcome the marvellous Mister Goering who knows nothing of the recent unpleasantness.’
Come, fellow reptiles, please forsake this stomach-turning idolatry and get back to serious investigative and analytical journalism.
Frederick Forsyth
Hertfordshire
Sir: Fraser Nelson seems to have fallen hook, line and sinker for the infantile attempt, over recent weeks, to present a new, sanitised Gordon Brown (‘The Tories have underestimated Gordon Brown’, 30 June). OK, so they’ve taught him to smile without gurning; they’ve told him about the Arctic Monkeys; he’s suddenly written a book about courage (another New Labour lie — it was ghosted), but none of this can change the fact that this is the man whose foul-mouthed, bullying temper tantrums have dominated Whitehall for a decade, who cannot abide even the smallest opposition without bearing a lifetime grudge, all so carefully documented in Tom Bower’s recent biography. The man who suffers some grievous psychic wound from deep within his childhood and whose baleful anger, festering like Achilles’ in his tent at the Treasury has, we are asked to believe, suddenly transformed on the Damascus road from No. 11 to No. 10.
If, as Fraser Nelson suggests, we are at a turning point in British politics, it is a change from the loquacious lies of Blair to the brooding, power-mad obsessions of Brown — and it will not take many months for the British people to realise it.
Derek Hawes
Epping, Essex
Sir: I suspect that Gordon Brown’s ‘obsession with Britishness’ is very welcome to all those who are fed up with the mean-spirited, petty vindictiveness of both English and Scottish nationalism. English, as well as Scottish, nationalism is exclusive and sectarian in spirit, defined by what it is against. British nationalism is inclusive in spirit, and defined by what it is for. Gordon Brown is appealing to the best, as opposed to the worst, instincts of the British people.
Clive Christie
Llanafan, Nr. Aberystwyth
Relative failure
Sir: Andrew Neil is right to identify the Broken Society (‘Memo to Brown’, 30 June) as a crucial area for politicians to address, but any success will depend upon an accurate analysis of its roots, which may not be initially popular in a country which has come to consider ‘progressive’ as the only acceptable direction of travel.
The reversal of our economic ills required the pioneering challenge of Milton Freidman to liberal Keynsian assumptions, and I fear that shifting the moral compass will take a similar Herculean effort and no little political courage.
We have to start by challenging the philosophy of moral relativism by which all choices are ‘equally valid’. If Oxford University no longer understands why Shakespeare is necessary to an understanding of English literature, why should the C stream in the bog-standard comprehensive?
Every one of the failures described by Andrew Neil still has its liberal apologists urging us further and faster down the same road to failure. Thus, more sex education, contraception, and easier earlier abortion are promoted as the answer to the teenage pregnancy problem which that very policy created. A more liberal drugs regime is urged in the face of the epidemic of drug use and the growing mental health problems among the young. The withdrawal of middle-class children from failing schools is ‘answered’ by a lottery for school admissions so that there shall be equality of failure rather than competition towards success.
You do not have to be that old to remember when poor people were not assumed to lack the ability to be industrious, honest, moral and socially responsible. Many of us are proud to have our roots in such communities, and given the respect and opportunities to make their own way, our families did so.
It was Revd Martin Luther King Snr who taught his more famous son that the way to self-respect was to get yourself an education, a mortgage and a vote. Too many liberals patronisingly offer a multiple-choice tick box, welfare dependency on a sink estate and texting Big Brother. In a morally relative universe, why not?
Martin Sewell
Gravesend, Kent
Palestine chose war
Sir: Mr. Blunt leaves the Conservative Middle East Council looking like it is chaired by a guy who — like his traitorous namesake — has defected from reality in favour of a pernicious and violent ‘revolutionary movement’ (Letters, 30 June). That is a very dangerous policy indeed. He decries Melanie Phillips’s description of Palestinians as a group ‘who have brutalised themselves’ and asks her to examine how the tragedy of Gaza and the West Bank have come about and why Palestinians voted for Hamas. Mr. Blunt might do better to think about it afresh himself.
‘Moderate’ (ha ha) PLO/Fatah/al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade leader, Yasser Arafat, walked away from every deal the Israelis ever offered. Arafat rejected the extraordinary overtures made by Ehud Barak at the Camp David–Taba talks in 2001 in favour of the launch of another intifada against Jewish civilians. Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud — not generally considered an ardent Zionist — described Arafat’s action as ‘a crime against the Palestinians — in fact against the entire region’.
Offered peace for his people, a state for him to run, and virtually everything asked for that could reasonably be given, the Palestinian leader chose war. He died a hero among his people, who rushed to show their own desire for peace and for reconciliation with the reality of a Jewish nation in the Middle East by electing the terrorist group Hamas who have sworn to destroy the state of Israel and drive all Jews from the region.
Corin Vestey
London W7
Explosive issue
Sir: You will be tempted to commission another exhibition of panicked paranoia from Melanie Phillips or another hysterical hackette (‘Gaza is another front in Iran’s war on the West’, 23 June).
Would it not be a more effective blow against terrorists to ridicule those who thought that the limo-bomb of petrol and gas cylinders could ever work? To believe it displays an understanding of the physical universe scarcely worthy even of a PPE undergraduate.
Petrol is not explosive and propane is not explosive; what is explosive is a mixture of these with air, within narrow composition limits (2–9 per cent by volume for propane, rather less for petrol vapour). Large volumes (the car ‘bombs’ specified hundreds of cubic metres) of such uniform mixture will not form spontaneously under any normal ventilation conditions.
Just as a flooded engine will not start, so an equilibrium mixture of petrol vapour and air, established in a closed car boot, will not ignite: it is too rich. A venting propane cylinder is still less promising, since it will rapidly sweep all air from the boot. In consequence, it was most probably smoke, as reported, that was seen in the Haymarket, because the igniter circuit had functioned flawlessly — bu t there was nothing flammable it could ignite. So too, I suspect, at Hyde Park.
P.G. Urben
Kenilworth, Warks
Sir: For the terrorists the events of 29–30 June have been an abject failure: two caught, five suspects arrested, no casualties, insufficient damage. What success there is for them is entirely self-inflicted by us: confusion, fear, new rules (no set-down at airports), resulting traffic jams. The ‘oxygen of publicity’ should be curbed ab initio, instead of building up the image of the terrorists. Journalists, please think ahead!
Arnold von Bohlen und Halbach
Horsham, West Sussex
No dissent
Sir: Jonathan Sumption, in his review of Andrew Marr’s A History of Modern Britain (Books, 30 June), identifies an important historical development when he points out that only a single off-the-shelf opinion is now tolerated on various social issues. But this is not a reversion to Victorian attitudes. As I read the Victorian age, most educated people embraced received views on religion, sexual behaviour and so forth because they sincerely believed that the considerable success of their society was based in part on these principles. Occasional individuals who disagreed do not seem to have been afraid to say so. Nowadays people avoid open dissent from the consensus, at least with respect to race and the roles of the sexes, because of well-founded fear of damaging their career prospects (or even brushing up against the law). The analogy is with 20th-century Eastern Europe, not Victorian England.
Geoffrey Sampson
University of Sussex, Brighton
Sir: Jonathan Sumption says ‘no one …has ever seriously studied the impact of national service on British social attitudes…’. Not quite. He might like to have a look at Roger Broad’s Conscription in Britain 1939-1964: the Militarisation of a Generation (Routledge, 2006).
Lisl Klein
London W2
Cross reference
Sir: Is it possible gently to demonstrate to your Mr Hugo Rifkind the difference between a cross and a crucifix (Shared opinion, 30 June)?
Roderick Adams
Eskbank, Midlothian
Wikipedically correct
Sir: Christopher Howse (Books, 23 June) is quite right in his conclusion about Wikipedia that it is a ‘useful tool, if used with judgment’. As a regular user of, and occasional contributor to, the website I can confirm its value, but would also say that it can be a huge source of irritation. One of the frustrations is that some entries are the jealously guarded preserve of the politically correct. To see what I mean go to the entry on the island of Ireland. Nowhere in this entry does it say that the island of Ireland is one of the ‘British Isles’ — notwithstanding the fact that this is self-evidently true. Your readers might amuse themselves by editing the entry so that its correct geographical descriptor is shown — and then see how long it takes for the ‘anti-all-things-British’ guardians of this entry to change it back again!
Patrick S. Briggs
Teddington, Middlesex
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