Missions impossible
Sir: I hesitate to challenge Sherard Cowper-Coles’s concerns about our military chiefs (‘Who’s in command?’, 11 June), but it seems to me that they have a good reason for overplaying their hand with the politicians. The reality is that our armed forces are at best a third of the size they need to be to do the things that the politicians ask of them, and they have been criminally underfunded for well over 30 years.
Sir Sherard no doubt has a point, but his efforts would be better directed towards exposing the gross political failure and cowardice that puts otherwise honourable men in such a completely impossible position — and, worse, puts us at real risk and lays us open to national humiliation on an epic scale by pretending to be able to do something that we patently cannot.
R.S. Foster
Sheffield
Our muscle in Brussels
Sir: James Forsyth is right that the EU’s need to resolve the Eurozone crisis will give David Cameron the opportunity to renegotiate our relationship with the EU (Politics, 11 June). Unfortunately we are grievously ill prepared. One reason is that Whitehall has long since ceded to Brussels most of its expertise in trade negotiation (as opposed to trade promotion).
We should seek reform and repatriation of powers within the EU. But to be credible we must have a fallback plan to withdraw from the EU altogether under Article 50 (Treaty on European Union). Without such a plan and the determination to follow it through, the peer pressure of 26 against one in the European Council and the predictable obstructionism of the European Commission would put Cameron in an embarrassingly weak negotiating position.
The ideal solution would be a bilateral customs union agreement with the EU with separate agreements to cover areas such as services, intellectual property, public procurement and competition. This would preserve free movement of goods, albeit at the cost of staying in the EU tariff band for most merchandise trade. The trade benefits of such an arrangement could include freeing the City from the dirigiste interventionism of the new European Supervisory Authorities, managing Single Farm Payment subsidies from Whitehall, and recovering control of social and employment and health and safety regulation from Brussels.
No doubt the Lib Dems would take some persuading. But Nick Clegg has changed his mind on the euro, and no close observer of the Brussels system can claim it has much to do with liberalism or democracy.
Ronald Stewart-Brown
Trade Policy Research Centre Charlbury, Oxon
Orwell’s God
Sir: Robert Gray (‘Orwell vs God’, 11 June) makes an impressively wide-ranging survey of Orwell’s attitudes to religion, but he does not cite the early novel A Clergyman’s Daughter, which is actually about loss of faith. The exchanges between the heroine Dorothy and the hedonistic atheist Warburton are as sharp and relevant today as they were in the 1930s. And at the story’s end, Dorothy reflects that ‘Life, if the grave really ends it, is monstrous and dreadful … either a preparation for something greater and more lasting, or it is meaningless.’
With his logical no-nonsense mind, Orwell probably realised that there are no wholly convincing arguments to either prove or disprove religion. As Gray points out, signs pointing one way or another are scattered throughout his writings and conversation. A memorable one is in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where Winston Smith dreams of O’Brien murmuring, ‘We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.’ This turns out to be a cell where the lights are never turned off. But at a deeper level — even if Orwell was not fully aware of it — there is a haunting, other-worldly resonance.
M.G. Sherlock
Colwyn Bay, North Wales
Picking pockets
Sir: I believe that I can help Denis Tracey (letters, 11 June). My father was a tailor. The small pocket inside the jacket, low on the left, was meant to be a ticket pocket. On receiving a bus or train ticket, one could place it, with the right hand, in the pocket and retrieve it easily if it had to be produced for inspection, without having to look for it or hunt through other objects in a larger pocket. I am left-handed, so mine were on the right.
Some customers preferred instead a small flapped pocket above one of the large side pockets of the jacket for the same purpose.
Chris Middleton
Rotherham
Paul Johnson is, as usual, correct in his assertion that a waistcoat should have six pockets (‘The power of the pocket’, 4 June). In my misspent youth loitering on the fringes of Soho, I learnt that pickpockets named the various pockets in a man’s suit after the harshness of prisons. The easier the pocket was to pick, the softer the prison. The hardest pocket of all to pick was a buttoned inside waistcoat pocket which had the dimensions of a white five-pound note — bookies and pimps invariably had two — these pockets were known as Newgates.
Charles Howard
Stroud, Gloucestershire
Old hat
Sir: The silk top hat (Notes, 11 June) has been passing away for some time. ‘Perhaps after the present war the top hat will never reappear,’ Max Beerbohm remarked in 1940. ‘Perhaps it will be used as a flower-pot in the home, filled with earth and nourishing the bulb of a hyacinth or other domestic flower.’ If Charles Moore manages to find a second-hand one in the right size, he should check the inside for compost.
Hugo Sabin
London W2
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