Letters | 13 July 2017

Technical education

Sir: I am grateful to Robert Tombs for highlighting the baleful use of ‘declinism’ as part of the anti-Brexit campaign and the persistent underestimation of the United Kingdom’s strengths (‘Down with declinism’, 8 July). It is ironic that the heirs of the old 19th-century Liberal party, the Liberal Democrats, are among its principal proponents, for declinism goes back even further than the 1880s cited in his article. Fearful of the advances demonstrated at the Paris International Exposition of 1867 by continental countries in engineering (e.g. the giant Krupp cannon) and the sciences generally, the Liberal minister Robert Lowe in 1870 opened the debate on the Education Bill — the first to introduce more or less universal primary education — by lamenting the backward character of British education, especially technical education, compared with France and Prussia. If one thread runs through a long-running debate it is that of concern that the United Kingdom was backward in technical education compared with its major rival. How much more ironic, then, that one of the positive proposals emerging from the wreckage of the Conservative manifesto was the biggest boost to technical education for generations.
John Stevenson

Crediton, Devon

Rod’s wrong this time

Sir: I am a rabid admirer of Rod Liddle and think he is the most sensible person on the planet. But his attitude to smoking has made him slip back a notch (‘Being anti-smoking damages your mental health’, 8 July). I loathe smoking — not for any ideological reason, not because I am a Nazi, not because of beliefs about health risks, but simply because tobacco smoke stinks.
Brian Willis

Bicton, Australia

The new news

Sir: Ian Katz says that the public increasingly doesn’t believe the news (‘Media culpa’, 8 July) but he fails to acknowledge the difference between traditional media and social media and the increasing impact of the latter on news.