Clever culling
Sir: As the chairman from 1995 to 2000 of the government’s biggest and most worthwhile quango, the Environment Agency for England and Wales, I would like to make two comments on Dennis Sewell’s article (‘Cameron must cull the quangos’, 5 September). Sewell seems to think that the Nolan Principles introduced by John Major’s Conservatives have banished cronyism in public appointments. I am afraid that exactly the opposite is the case. The shortlist review which is passed to the minister is so general that it positively invites the use of patronage and personal preference. When I and my independent colleagues tried to order our shortlist from one to three, we were told that wasn’t necessary. All that was needed was our assessment of the applicants. On the occasion in question, the minister chose his trade union crony, who in our view had come last.
Second, he suggests that the solution is a mass cull of quangos, which misses the point entirely. It is a mass cull of regulation that is needed first; only then will unnecessary quangos wither and die.
De Ramsey
House of Lords, London SW1
What Cameron can do
Sir: Trevor Kavanagh (‘The new politics of decline’, 12 September) hit many of the bull’s-eyes, but missed the overall target. When it comes to ‘pouring truckloads of taxpayers money into a giant bureaucracy with entrenched inefficiencies’, there is one that costs us £16 billion a year, every year. It is called the European Union, and it rules us. You can vote for whomever you like at the next election; the control of our country remains elsewhere.
John Ling
Old Colwall, Herefordshire
Sir: This may not be the time for spin, it is true, but David Cameron needs to convince people he means business. It cannot help his case that his party’s logo is an indeterminate and anachronistic tree conceived in a pre-recession era — remember the good old days? — when people were more concerned with saving the planet than their own jobs, or skin. That tree should be chopped down and replaced with something more pertinent to the age. Perhaps a knife and fork would do: the knife to slash the expenditure budgets, the fork to pick up the pieces of the wrecked economy. You could even add a spoon for good measure, to administer Mr Kavanagh’s ‘bitter medicine’.
Sean Quinn
Overton, Hampshire
The non-sectarian option
Sir: Paul Bew (‘Terrorism is back in Northern Ireland’, September 12) is quite right to argue that it is time for Northern Ireland to play its part in Westminster politics. It has always seemed absurd that Unionists should loudly assert their Britishness while at the same time rejecting Britain’s political culture. At a time when the divided administration in Belfast looks increasingly unstable, and the security situation perilous, there is surely an even greater need for a viable, non-sectarian alternative to local politics.
David Shiels
Peterhouse, Cambridge
The Poles at Bletchley
Sir: In an otherwise excellent article on Bletchley Park (‘The battle to save Bletchley Park’, 12 September) I looked in vain for a mention of the three Polish engineers who at great personal cost and danger sent the enigma machine to Britain. But for them, there may well have been no Enigma for this country to use.
There is a small memorial to these brave men, mostly funded by Polish exiles, but otherwise their effort goes unmarked. Surely I will not have been the only reader to be surprised that the Spectator did not mention who gave this country the invaluable machine?
Teresa N. Rubnikowicz
London SW14
Sir: Admiring the photo of the surviving members of the Bletchley Park team gathered to mark the 70th anniversary of Station X, I was left wondering if they were rightly described in the caption as ‘code-breakers’. The Enigma code-breaking methods were first developed before the war by three brilliant Polish mathematicians, who passed the baton to another elite team of beautiful minds, led by Turing and flanked by a larger ensemble of cryptographers.
The full story of that last group is still there to be fully revealed and appreciated without necessarily putting them on a par with Turing himself and turning them all into ‘code-breakers’. The Bletchley Park dossier is not ‘dodgy’; it does not have to be ‘sexed up’. The same way you do not have to make Harry Patch a general to see the significance of his passing.
Wojciech Lubowiecki
Brussels, Belgium
A real health service
Sir: Sarah Standing (Standing Room, 5 September) writes that, ‘A private GP who is willing to come out in the middle of the night to deal with an emergency is an undeniable luxury.’ I am old enough to remember when such provision was normal for any decent NHS practice, for which our family had reason to be grateful on two occasions. It is a sad reflection on the changed standards and priorities of the NHS that, in the words of Monty Python’s famous four Yorkshiremen sketch, ‘Try telling that to the young folk today and they wouldn’t believe you.’
Mike Venis
Faversham, Kent
No brainer
Sir: Toby Young’s statement (Status Anxiety, 12 September) that ‘What’s true of Holly-wood is also true of fashion: no one knows anything’ reminded me of a psychology lecture I attended as an undergraduate at UCL, in which an experiment was described involving a decorticated stickleback. Having no brain, the stickleback experiences no doubt or hesitation, and therefore becomes the undisputed leader of the stickleback pack.
Elizabeth Roberts
Biggar, Lanarkshire
Comments