Gangster paradise
Sir: Owen Matthews’s article (‘Something rotten in the state of Russia’, 9 January) brilliantly encapsulates and explains the condition of Russia today. But he omits to mention that the subversion of the judicial system and pervasive corruption have been in evidence for a long time, which does raise the question of whether Hermitage capital should have been in this European country at all. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 and the refusal of the Russians to extradite the chief suspect constituted — unless you are wilfully blind — a good reason to suspect that Russia is run by crooks. The 2005 mock trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the CEO of Yukos Oil, and his punishment with an eight-year prison sentence for trying to engage in politics, was another clear warning. There are blatant and numerous cases of illegality, such as the bombing of civilians and the razing of Grozny carried out by the Russian military in Chechnya under orders from Putin. The 1999 apartment building explosions, never properly investigated but attributed to agents of the FSB, could also be taken as grounds for supposing that Russia is not exactly a safe country. Considering the volume of available evidence establishing the real nature of Russia today, the question must be: how can it be ethical for foreigners to invest in Russia? The death in prison of Sergei Magnitsky, Hermitage’s lawyer, was surely a consequence of pursuing the profit motive beyond proper bounds.
Jeremy Putley
Harrogate, Yorkshire
Can’t count on Cameron
Sir: Years ago I wrote an article in the Sunday Telegraph championing Mrs Thatcher on the grounds that at least we could always rely on her to protect us from the trade unions and inflation. If only we could be equally certain that David Cameron would do the same.
Peregrine Worsthorne
Buckinghamshire
Licence to caution
Sir: In his account of the recent visit he received from two of our enquiry officers (The Spectator’s Notes, 9 January), Charles Moore incorrectly claims that they are not empowered to administer a caution regarding his refusal to pay the TV Licence fee.
Capita is an agent contracted by the Licensing Authority (the BBC) to administer collection of licence fees and enforcement of the television licensing system. The Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 (PACE) requires persons other than police officers who are charged with the duty to investigate offences to comply with the relevant PACE Codes of Practice. One of the requirements is that anyone suspected of committing an offence is cautioned before they are questioned if their answers may be given in evidence. Everyone has a right of silence and the purpose of the caution is to remind them of that right.
Pauline Gillingham
TV Licensing Press Office, London
Sir: Charles Moore quite rightly points to the iniquity of a visit by Messrs Spriddel and Clayden, men employed by ‘a commercial company’ (in this case Capita), inquiring after his missing television licence.
Mr Moore may like to reflect that it was his heroine Lady Thatcher who, when Prime Minister, did so much to encourage the ghastly contracting-out culture and needless privatisation of public services that today forms the shabby bedrock of unaccountability that defines modern Britain.
Michael Hanlon
London SE5
Montaigne’s religion
Philip Hensher, in his review of Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne (Books, 9 January) observes that the Frenchman ‘has surprisingly little to say about religion’. Yet not only did Montaigne translate Raymond Sebond’s Natural Theology, which runs to a thousand pages; when this work encountered criticism, not least from Pope Paul IV, who placed the Prologue on the Index, he devoted by far the longest of his essays to its defence.
Essentially Montaigne’s purpose in his Apology was to explore the boundaries between reason and faith. And because he admits that reason does not suffice for the apprehension of Christian doctrine, he is frequently taken to be a sceptic. On the contrary, though, he strongly defended Sebond’s doctrine of illumination through faith. And in his own practice he positively embraced superstition, making a pilgrimage to the House of the Virgin which had supposedly been transported from the Holy Land to Loreto. Indeed, he paid for a votive tablet to be displayed in the Church of Santa Maria de Loreto.
Francis Church
London W14
The history of the history
Sir: Mr Peter Oborne (Letter from Zimbabwe, 19/26 December) wondered why my brother, Robert Blake, wrote The History of Rhodesia. The idea came from Mr Harry St J. Grenfell of Charter Consolidated, the London end of the Anglo-American Corporation of South Africa. Originally the book was to have been a history of the company but it developed into a history of Southern Rhodesia.
Jill Ivy
By email
True grit
Sir: I am bemused by a government that orders several million doses of vaccine for a swine flu pandemic that doesn’t happen, but can’t ensure there is sufficient road salt in readiness for a winter that happens every year.
Paul Samways
Norfolk
Yemen of strife
Sir: Either Melanie Phillips (‘Al-Qa’eda has relocated to Africa’, 2 January) really doesn’t know that Yemen is in the Middle East (‘African countries such as Yemen…’) or she is wilfully distorting geography to support her argument. Either way, credibility is lost and the substance of her article evaporates.
Roger Clark
Doha, Qatar
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