In denial about abortion
Sir: Mary Wakefield (‘Who cares about abortion?’, 10 September) bravely argues that Britain needs a rational and reasoned debate about our abortion laws. Since 1967 there have been seven million abortions in Great Britain: in the past 12 months there were 189,574, with 48,348 women having had one before and, according to a parliamentary reply, some as many as eight during their lifetime. Lord Steel, the author of the 1967 Act, has rightly described this as ‘horrific’ and has said there are ‘too many’. About that, at least, we should all agree.
A more profound debate would consider the status of the unborn child. An unborn baby with a disability — from Down’s syndrome to a cleft palate — may be aborted up to birth (so much for anti-discrimination laws, human rights and equality). Others may be aborted up to 24 weeks in barbaric procedures.
It has been said that a nation that kills its own children is a nation without hope, and Mary Wakefield is right: we are a nation in total denial. Worse still, we grow more and more comfortable with it every passing day.
Lord Alton
House of Lords, London SW1
Sir: Congratulations to Mary Wakefield on a well-argued and perceptive article about our attitudes to abortion. Her observation about the link between the abortionist lobby and those who advocate ‘animal rights’ was particularly shrewd. Their attitude might be summed up by the extraordinary assertion that ‘meat is murder but abortion is choice’.
Andrew Macdonald
London W3
Unfortunate developments
Sir: As an alternative to the government’s policy of simplifying the planning system and returning decisions to local control, your leading article (10 September) suggests that aspiring homeowners should be confined, as John Prescott is supposed to have proposed, to four centrally planned, Whitehall-selected settlement zones. The idea that the previous government’s diktats were limited to four areas will come as a surprise to councils up and down the country, all of whom were subject to Labour’s regional spatial strategies. They imposed, from the top down, mandatory housing targets on every council. This government is abolishing those targets and returning control to democratically elected councillors. It is only through local decision-making that we can reconcile our responsibility to provide homes for the next generation with that of protecting the natural environment.
Greg Clark MP Department for Communities and Local Government, London SW1
Sir: By now, the government will have realised that its attempt to rewrite the planning regime has done what its previous plans to sell off England’s forests did: unite people of the political right, left and centre against a proposal that will trump environmental interests in favour of profit. Planning is in need of overhaul. But a default position of agreement to build undermines the ability of planning to safeguard the public. It is neither good policy-making nor smart politics. And it sets aside the fundamental question: haven’t we reached the limits to growth and the capacity of the land to support more of it?
Nick Reeves
Executive Director, Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management London WC1
Sir: There is a simple way to dispose of many objections to the government’s planning proposals: to say that no means no. I live in an area of London in which many of the freeholds are owned by a very powerful property company. They, under the banner of ‘improvement’, are destroying places that could be restored and occupied by local people, and replacing them with tasteless, luxurious apartments in which the senior staff of multi-national companies are housed at rents of £100,000 a year or more. The local authority may initially refuse permission, but the company comes back with an appeal, armed with expensive QCs, and the authority — feeling unable to risk losing its case — buckles. If localism is to mean anything, local people must be given the right to make definitive decisions against which there is no appeal.
Bill Halson
London W1
The mark of Keynes
Sir: Tim Price (‘The doom boom’, 10 September) does Keynes a disservice when he says: ‘The followers of Keynes would throw money at the bust, just as our own authorities have done, even when those governments are grotesquely overdrawn.’
What our own authorities have done and are doing is dropping helicopter money on the economy; hardly a Keynesian prescription. It hasn’t worked, and it won’t, until the ‘animal spirits’ in the economy recover from their deep-seated depression. The Keynesian recommendation would be to mobilise the idle savings balances in the economy through the issuance of government debt. But this option is not available, the problem being, as Tim Price correctly says, that ‘governments are grotesquely overdrawn’. The numbing truth is that there is almost nothing left in the financial authorities’ arsenal. And for that you can’t blame Keynes. Blame Gordon.
Alan Doyle
Sunbury on Thames
Not my vault
Sir: In his article about the Westminster Cathedral mosaics (Arts, 20 August) Mark Greaves refers to me as ‘a businessman who wants to pay to get the project off the ground’. Heaven knows where he learned this. In fact I am a rather junior member of the Cathedral Art and Architecture Committee and otherwise until recently a psychotherapist in Dublin. Sadly, I lack the means to finance much more than a rug-sized patch of the 10,000 square yards of Bentley’s vaults and domes.
John Hughes
Dublin
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