Letters | 21 February 2019

The breakaway seven

Sir: ‘In both parties there are fools at one end and crackpots at the other, but the great body in the middle is sound and wise.’ One of the magnificent seven speaking this week? Well, the sentiment is surely present day, but rather they are the words of Churchill in 1913 trying to engineer a centrist national movement from ‘a fusion of the two parties’.

In those days, it was the Conservative and the Liberal parties, but the history of the middle ground since then augurs poorly not just for the breakaway seven, but for those of us who feel disenfranchised by politics. We can argue who currently represents the devil and who the deep blue sea, but right now neither seems an attractive or palatable home.
John Smith

Chesham Bois, Bucks

An afternoon’s reprieve

Sir: Toby Young has done a great deal of good work to challenge the educational establishment. I admire him for that, but on striking school pupils (No sacred cows, 16 February) he needs to cool, man.

Subtlety tends not to be in the nature of the adolescent. It is all or nothing. Sixteen-year-old Greta Thunberg talks with passion about a matter of global significance. Yes, she may have overstated and exaggerated, but that is what 16-year-olds do. Some of her followers in this country are equally passionate; some probably just fancied an afternoon off. How was your behaviour when you were 16, Toby?

Toby says that youngsters who walk out of class cause their teachers real problems in terms of planning lessons. Maybe so, but in my experience most teachers are human. For every teacher who baulked at rearranging their lesson about Boyle’s Law or rescheduling that stunning presentation about the past perfect tense in French reflexive verbs, there were probably ten who privately sighed with relief that they didn’t have that restless bunch of terminally bored, hormonal adolescents to motivate and manage during Friday afternoon.