Trust funds
Sir: Your leading article’s diatribe against the public sector (13 February) rather missed the point. The categories of deficiency described are not sector specific. The common factor is the failure, in general, of some individuals, irrespective of their role, to set acceptable examples of judgment and probity. I would find it hard to choose between a ‘public sector’ MP and, for example, a ‘private sector’ banker, as a trusted custodian of anything, let alone money.
Indeed, it might also be argued, with some justification, that public sector rank and file have a better record of eschewing the practices of disreputable leaders than their private sector counterparts.
John Brown
Leyburn, North Yorkshire
Sir: Your leading article rightly hopes that Mr Cameron would cut back on the misappropriation of public money, such as the £1.1 million claimed by 390 MPs over the years. But such a sum seems relatively trivial — much less than one year’s plundering of shareholders’ and customers’ money exacted by so many private sector individuals — that clearly he must clean out those Augean stables even more promptly. This is going to be worth watching.
Ian Olson
Aberdeen
Home security
Sir: Andrew Gimson (‘The property bubble is waiting to burst’, 13 February) is surprised at the small fall in house prices in London. Why? Anybody who, for whatever reason, has needed to sell their home has sold and taken it on the chin; anybody who does not have to sell right now is simply sitting tight.
W.G. Sellwood
Stafford
Right-hand man
Sir: In his Politics column (13 February), James Forsyth describes Matthew Hancock as George Osborne’s ‘consigliore’. While it’s always nice to see the Conservatives likened to the mafia, I think the term that Don Corleone would recognise is ‘consigliere’ (adviser).
Arthur Barber
London W6
The Microwriter lives on
Sir: Tony Laithwaite should know that the 1980s text-entry device ‘Microwriter’ is still available (Letters, 13 February). It is now called ‘CyKey’. It is made and sold by Bellaire Electronics, of Barnstaple, Devon (www.bellaire.demon.co.uk).
Phil Jones
Slough
The age of science
Sir: In claiming that the greenhouse effect of gases is ‘centuries-old science’, Nick Reeves (Letters, 13 February) aligns himself firmly with the exaggerators. The word science, in his sense, is itself only a little over one century old — the concept, Bacon’s Novum Organum, has yet to attain 400. The thermometer, thus any measure of warming, was invented some 300 years ago.
Two hundred (but not 300) years ago, the study of gases had reached a state that some investigation of comparative thermal transmissivity would have been possible, had anyone thought to do it. In fact, the first observations had to wait some decades more, and yet longer before they were connected with climate. The greenhouse effect only became a common element of scientific debate about climate change in the 1970s, about the time the University of East Anglia changed the trivial detail of its ever-forecast apocalypse from new Ice Age (largely induced by aircraft emissions) to heating (largely induced by aircraft emissions).
Century-old science, just perhaps; centuries-old — indisputably not!
P.G. Urben
Kenilworth
Canadian myths
Sir: I am sorry to read that Leah McLaren is not feeling proud of her homeland or fellow Canadians these days (‘There’s nothing cute about a Canuck’, 6 February). I trust that she continues to find expatriate life a fulfilling substitute for these shores and will go on enjoying it.
Canada is a country soaked in pious myths. It is too bad McLaren chose not to identify and skewer them, preferring instead to jump in with the motley crew currently protesting a grab-bag of administrative trifles in Canada. The people agonising over the present government are in many cases those who once had the ear of power and peddled their myth of utopian Canada around the world. Many of us are pleased to see them on the outside at last, for however short a time. They will be back on top all too soon. Until then, their every moan and groan is sweet music.
McLaren is right about one thing, though. We Canadians are not a fit people. Let that be our people’s common ground.
Graham Barnes
Ottawa
Sir: I’m a Canadian too (and only a tad overweight). And here are some myths about Canada that Ms McLaren missed.
1. We care that the Prime Minister prorogued parliament. (Well, maybe some Toronto Liberal party supporters do; but for the rest of us, hey, it’s not like he prorogued a hockey game.) 2. We love freedom of speech. (Sure, but don’t question man-made climate change or some people will call for your imprisonment; and don’t question nanny state healthcare, or the same people will call you American.) 3. We have a consensus on abortion. (Yes, but that’s only because some people will shriek like aliens spotting humans in Invasion of the Body Snatchers at the softest suggestion that there be any limits on abortion at all.) 4. Conrad Black is guilty. (Yes, but only of being fool enough to trust the US justice system.) 5. Canadians play the best hockey in the world. (Well, yes… actually that’s true.)
Larry Hamelin
Toronto
Fidler and his roof
Sir: While it is doubtless stretching the rules for the enterprising Mr Fidler (Leading article, 13 February) to have built a structure without permission, it is perversely vindictive and utterly idiotic to rule that it must be destroyed. Such a move by the local ‘authority’ is akin to the lunacy of crushing the car of an individual who repeatedly flaunts motoring laws; why not levy a hefty fine rather than simply destroying something that has real value?
Anthony J. Burnet
East Lothian
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