Letters | 23 February 2017

Seeing off the Speaker

Sir: If senior Tories in Buckingham had had their way, John Bercow’s career as Speaker could have been over long before he had a chance to make any ‘spectacularly ill-judged’ remarks (Politics, 18 February). At the 2010 election, an impressive local Tory was keen to prevent the new Labour-supported Speaker retaining the seat where the party had had an 18,000 majority in 2005. Conservative headquarters insisted that Buckingham must abide by the long-standing convention that the Speaker is returned unopposed. The local Tories should have gone ahead; there is no such convention. All ten Speakers since the war have faced opposition. Six, including Bercow, have faced independents or minor parties. Four, all from the Tory ranks, had official Labour and/or Liberal candidates against them. If the Conservatives had taken a leaf out of their opponents’ book, they could have dislodged a Speaker who had moved sharply to the left in order to get his high office.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords

House room

Sir: Your correspondent Anne-Marie Baxter (Letters, 18 February) opines that Britain has plenty of room for more housing. Perhaps she would have a few housing estates on the underdeveloped wilderness of Exmoor near her home? Here in rural Staffordshire it is two years since I saw a hedgehog, five since I saw a toad, and eight since I saw a frog. Sparrows here are down to one small flock, and I have seen none in London — not a single ‘cockney sparrer’ — for many years.

The question, with unlimited fecundity and technologies which have made humans as near as dammit immortal, is not ‘How many houses can we crowbar in here?’, but ‘What sort of world do we want?’ Having created, with blithe indifference, an ecology which will no longer support frogs, toads and hedgehogs, perhaps we should begin to wonder if the ecology we are creating will, one day, not support humans.