Sir: Charles Moore’s insinuation (Spectator’s Notes, 7 July) that following Alan Johnston’s release the BBC would now report Hamas more sympathetically is baseless.
Beeb remains unbiased
Sir: Charles Moore’s insinuation (Spectator’s Notes, 7 July) that following Alan Johnston’s release the BBC would now report Hamas more sympathetically is baseless. If he needs evidence he should consider that during the time that Alan was in captivity the BBC continued to report Gaza objectively — despite the incarceration of one of our own. Thankfully Alan is now free and, as ever, the BBC will report the region with courage and integrity.
Adrian Van Klaveren, Deputy Director
BBC News & Controller, London W12
Arresting issue
Sir: Nobody wants The Spectator to be consistent, or to follow any party line. Its readers expect (and in my case hope) to disagree with many of the opinions expressed in its pages. But until your leading article of 7 July (‘Hearts and Minds’) The Spectator possessed two rare and valuable qualities. It was undeceived by conventional wisdom, and it could be assumed to be on the side of liberty against arbitrary power. Your support for 90-day detention, justified by the cult-like, ir-rational invocation of the events of 11 September 2001, means that it has lost those qualities. It is now just another magazine.
Peter Hitchens
London W8
Aspire to what?
Sir: Nowhere in Fraser Nelson’s article on James Purnell (‘Meet New New Labour’s Mr Aspirational’, 30 June) is there any mention of precisely which of the public’s aspirations Labour understands so well.
Could it be the aspiration, say, of a young teacher ever to afford a house? Of a farmer not to go bankrupt? Of parents to see their children become literate and numerate and thus employable in the global economy? The aspiration of a factory worker not to become permanently unemployed? Of workers to find employers offering final-salary pensions schemes? Of people to have more, rather than less, disposable income year on year?
Voters, after a long period of atrocious government, normally aspire to have the opportunity to vote for a real change. Only the absence of a confident, aggressive opposition to Brown might explain James Purnell’s otherwise smug and preposterous insinuation that Britain’s ‘aspirational classes’ actually want more of the mess Labour has created since 1997.
Stephen Harris
Bristol
Drugs work
Sir: So Hywel Williams via Dan Hind damns the efforts of some of the best and brightest life-scientists (‘The theft of the Enlightenment’, 7 July), who inter alia have done immense amounts to improve the lot of mankind, on the basis that he feels that SSRIs are somewhat over-prescribed to the poor and unhappy. I assume that when — heaven forbid — he is diagnosed with cancer or has a heart attack he will treat himself with reason and religion. But I strongly suggest he considers accepting modern pharmaceuticals even if someone (probably including his pension fund) is ‘making millions’ from them.
I could go on, but actually I would just like Hywel Williams to show respect to people who have probably done more good for more people than he or Dan Hind ever will.
David Lucas
Fulham, London
Further Moore
Sir: Charles Moore’s column last week achieved what I had thought was the impossible: it made me long to have been at the Concert for Diana (Spectator’s Notes, 7 July). Nelly Furtado I can take or leave, but I would have paid through the nose for a glimpse of the Moores, side by side, with their earplugs in, she buried in her pre-war Hungarian novel, he lost in a book about the Somme, oblivious to all the dancing teens. Perhaps they paused from time to time to snack on frozen mice.
Barry Sutherland
London W8
Sign them up
Sir: I have seldom read such a well articulated and disturbing article as Andrew Neil’s ‘Memo to Gordon’ (30 June). While it does not offer a solution, ‘a problem identified is a problem half solved’.
Grave problems demand grave solutions. While I know that what I suggest will not appeal to many in the Services, I can see no real remedy for such a fundamental social problem other than the reintroduction of National Service. The feral sickness Neil describes is founded in a rootlessness derived from no self-discipline, no respect for authority, no direction and no sense of belonging or comradeship — the very characteristics which the National Service experience addresses.
With the Services facing overstretch, it would be necessary to conclude our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan in order to be able to tackle the sickness at home. Unlike the last period of National Service, women would have to be involved in the programme. It should be founded on strict military discipline and team development, with service lasting some 18 months, involving a readiness to deploy to civil disaster areas, famine relief and UN peace-keeping-type operations.
Today’s young men and women would stand to gain a much needed sense of worth, and long-term benefits for themselves and subsequent employers. Then Britain would be on the road to being Great again.
Brig J.P. Maxwell, Retd
Gt Barton, Suffolk
War on error
Sir: We wish to correct an error we made in our article ‘For the Islamist doctor, terror is healing’ (7 July). Abdullah Azzam, the mentor of Osama bin Laden, was not a physician. Rather, he was a teacher of Islamic law. We regret the error, which does not, however, affect the essential arguments of our article or our study, ‘Scientific Training and Radical Islam’.
Stephen Schwartz and Irfan Al-Alawi
Centre for Islamic Pluralism, Washington and London
Comments