Pollygarchy
Sir: It was with a rising sense of disbelief that I read Polly Toynbee’s review of Ferdinand Mount’s The New Few (Books, 5 May). There’s an oligarchy in this country all right, but what Ms Toynbee fails to realise is that she is a member. For every overpaid plutocrat, there are any number of privileged people like herself who find lucrative employment ‘representing the disadvantaged’. They remind me of nothing so much as the old squirearchy, who used to visit their cottagers to do good works.
I would not like to suggest that it is actually in the interest of the socialist elite to keep the masses in their place, though one does wonder why, if they truly care about the working class, they support benefits culture and uncontrolled immigration.
Moreover, at least the old squirearchy had the decency to fund their charity with their own money. People like Toynbee would rather support their ideals by heavily taxing people like my son, a hard-working electrician with a wife and a sick baby to support.
John-Paul Marney
Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh
Sir: Polly Toynbee signs off her review with this: ‘A Conservative government will always dismantle the few redistributive mechanisms that could act as some brake on the galloping inequalities.’ Does that include the current Conservative-led government’s dismantling of social mobility-wrecking comprehensive schools? Which are, of course, a legacy of Harold Wilson’s Labour government.
Currer Ball
Glasgow
Good faith
Sir: Your leading article ‘Science or starvation’ (5 May) makes a very sensible case for genetically modified food. However, you say that ‘opposition to GMOs has nothing to do with science and everything to do with a strain of elitist green fundamentalism more akin to religion than rationality’.
Is it therefore to be understood that theology and the spiritual are confined to those whose reasoning is deprived of sound judgment? Descartes, Pascal, Newton, Pasteur, Planck, C.S. Lewis, Chesterton and N.T. Wright are just a few who may well disagree.
Marlene Britz
South Africa
Hurrah for Herodotus
Sir: Peter Jones pays a welcome tribute to Herodotus in a stirring piece on television and the classics (‘Digging Deeper’, 5 May). He is quite right. Herodotus would be flattered by Mary Beard’s attention to historical sources and evidence in her brilliant series on the Romans. I applaud his kindness in quoting Cicero’s verdict on the great 5th-century bc historian (‘Father of History’) and not that of an unusually mean-spirited Plutarch (‘Father of Lies’).
Justin Marozzi
Norfolk
Not exactly Eden
Sir: I feel compelled to write after reading James Delingpole’s article lavishing praise on Melbourne (5 May) and even referring to it as Eden. I visited the city two months ago and had a dreadful time. I was left waiting 45 minutes on arrival by an oafish taxi driver who offered to shake my hand having sneezed on his a moment earlier, was wrongly accused of not paying the bill in a restaurant and scolded by an attendant for taking a photo in the National Gallery of Victoria. I advise Spectator readers to think carefully before going anywhere near the place.
Gerry Fad
Bristol
Spelling danger
Sir: The perils of misinterpretation (Letter, 5 May) are indeed compounded by the spellchecker. Many years ago, when preparing a piece regarding a local dignitary who had vigorously protested over the addition of fluoride to the public water supply, I included a report that she’d ‘turned off her taps and opened a borehole in her garden’. In the nick of time I managed to avoid her lawyers by overruling the suggested alternative — brothel!
Robert Vincent
Wildhern, Hampshire
Free cigarettes
Sir: Claire Fox’s vehement feminist defence of her right to smoke (‘Dead pretty’, 5 May) is oddly reminiscent of Edward Bernays’s famous attempt, in the 1920s, to sell Lucky Strikes to newly empowered women in the guise of ‘torches of freedom’. Who says advertising has no lasting effect?
Peter Popps
Dulwich
Is Badger bourgeois?
Sir: Simon Hoggart, in his TV review of Perspectives:The Wind in the Willows (5 May) says that Toad is rescued by the bourgeoisie. His social antennae need sharpening. Admittedly Mole is probably a worthy grammar-school product, seduced by the idle ways of his social superiors, but Badger is clearly of very old yeoman stock, probably despising the status of gentry. Certainly everybody tends to do as he says, until the Wild Wooders get uppity. Rat’s lifestyle is that of a rentier flâneur.
Canon John Fellows
West Wratting, Cambridgeshire
Wise old birds
Sir: I use back copies of The Spectator to line the trays in my chicken house. My hens appear to be quite discerning in their approach to the subject matter. Your 14 April edition on the divide between the capital and the country ruffled some feathers. Let’s just say they had plenty to contribute. Put a picture of Boris on the front, however, as you did on 28 April, and they turn broody.
Maggie Haddow
West Mersea, Essex
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