Letters | 10 December 2011

All at sea

Sir: The Spectator’s cover article last week was entitled ‘The Sea Level Scam’. You can rest assured that no such scam exists. Most claims of the author, Nils-Axel Mörner, have never been published in peer-reviewed articles so cannot be independently verified. However, he published on his research in the Maldives in the journal Global Planetary Change in 2004. His findings about a possible sea-level fall in the region and the geological coral record, and his interpretation of satellite measurements of sea-level change have all been subsequently refuted.

He is correct to point out that there is widespread geographic variability in patterns of sea-level rise. But his central claim, that the Maldives are not under threat from future sea-level rise, is both misleading and dangerous. In the late 1990s Dr Mörner published a prediction of 10cm global sea‑level rise for the year 2100. About half of this rise has already occurred.

Professor Roland Gehrels
President, INQUA Commission on Coastal and Marine Processes
Plymouth University

Sir: I very much enjoyed the article by Nils-Axel Mörner. One factor Mörner did not mention is fluctuation in ocean floor level. If the Maldives were to sink due to lowering of the ocean floor, this could hardly be blamed on western-generated pollution. I am not necessarily an anthropogenic climate change sceptic but I am always suspicious of causes where there is so much apparent agreement; the cause itself assumes the nature of a religion or cult; and data are apparently falsified for social engineering purposes.

Leon Le Leu
Googong, New South Wales, Australia

Treating truancy

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Sir: For all his empathy with pupils, Charlie Taylor (Diary, 3 December) has a strange penchant for putting truants’ parents in prison. Truanting is a rational decision made by children who have been utterly failed by their schools. One in five pupils qualifying for free school meals arrives in senior school with a reading age of a seven-year-old. No matter how much teachers ‘differentiate’ the curriculum, these children have very little chance of learning anything worthwhile. Dennis O’Keeffe, one of our leading truancy experts, found that by far the most common reason children truant is to avoid a class or a teacher they dislike. Imprisoning parents who have no legal means of coercing a truculent teenager is an affront to reason and justice.

There is a much better way. The ‘tough love’ dispensed by the London Boxing Academy has socialised young people from the most damaged backgrounds. Their experience will form the basis for the free school we are starting in Oldham. To find teachers whose expectations have not been contaminated by the child-centred mindset, we are recruiting our teachers exclusively from the armed forces. And surprisingly, the parents of Oldham — so often blamed by our professional classes — are responding enthusiastically.

Tom Burkard
Director, Phoenix Free School of Oldham

Right to strike

Sir: While I admire the heroic and saintly teachers who did not go on strike at Toby Young’s free school (Status Anxiety, 3 December), I should like to make a point. Wednesday’s day of action saw teachers — many of whom had not gone on strike before — give up a day’s pay as a legitimate protest. They are worried, frightened and insecure about what is being done to their pensions. They also have a right not to have their protest muted by supply cover. What would be the point of that? Just because Mr Young runs a free school and writes for The Spectator, surely he does not have to fall into the tired Conservative stereotype of seeing anyone who is in a trade union and intends to strike as an enemy of the state.

Tim Mann
Hampshire

Sir: Toby Young asks us to raise a glass to those public servants (like his non-striking ‘free school’ teachers) for whom ‘duty still trumps self-interest’. I prefer to raise a glass to those teachers who put a duty to support their unions before the self-interest of not losing their salaries (and keeping themselves in Toby Young’s good books).

John Kelly
Cardiff

Whig interpretation

Sir: Richard Ryder (Books, 3 December) claims that the heirs of Victorian tycoons ‘failed to carry their radical Whiggism across the trenches’ into the Conservative party. On the contrary, the Conservative party has been hoovering up Liberals, as Liberals, for a very long time: Liberal Unionists, Liberal Imperialists, National Liberals, Alfred Roberts’s daughter, those around the Institute of Economic Affairs (although its founders and its founding backer, like Roberts, never actually joined), and now the Liberal Democrats.

The Tory organisation has always replaced the Liberal one, but the Liberal ideology has always replaced the Tory one. The Conservative party is itself therefore two parties in one, which would be entirely separate in many other countries, competing hardly at all for the same votes and co-operating hardly at all on any issue of policy. The metropolitan, urban, capitalist, secular, libertarian, make-the-world-anew party has finally defeated and banished the provincial, rural, protectionist, church-based, conservative, mind-our-own-business party. The Whigs have finally defeated and banished the Tories.

David Lindsay
Lanchester, Co. Durham