Moore for less
Sir: Niru Ratnam (Arts, 19 January) is wrong on a number of counts and omits much else. The sale of Henry Moore’s ‘Draped Seated Woman’ would be most unlikely to raise the £20 million he claims; £5 million is thought to be much nearer the market value — 0.3 per cent of Tower Hamlets’ annual expenditure of £1.53 billion, and scarcely likely to relieve the current financial pressure on its council.
Moreover he neglects to mention that the Museum of London has offered to house and maintain the work on its Docklands site, giving it the public profile in London, and impact on daily lives, that Moore himself so desired.
This matters today as much as it ever did. The best public art inspires communities and nurtures souls, offering hope, integrity and beauty — standing proudly amid the cares and chaos of the world around. Old Flo should be allowed to do that job again for the people of east London, if only to offer a sound moral alternative to the shoddiness of local political philistinism.
Stephen Deuchar
Director of the Art Fund, London SW7
Funding corruption
Sir: Barbara Castle, who set up the Ministry of Overseas Development, and for whom I worked for many years, would turn in her grave if she knew how Andrew Mitchell had turned the ministry into an international welfare organisation shovelling out aid to corrupt and incompetent governments, to spendthrift NGOs, greedy consultants, and unaccountable, extravagant and inefficient international organisations. DFID managers have aid targets, promotion and bonuses uppermost in their minds, and DFID staff who dare to question the use of funds are sidelined.
Andrew Mitchell in his letter of 12 January claims that DFID has reduced unauditable budgetary aid (direct grants to governments) by 50 per cent, but all that it has done is to rename them sector aid or local government aid. Ethiopia now gets £330 million p.a., most ot it going to unaccountable local governments, allowing central government to use its funds for other purposes.
His claims that British funds have educated 11 million children, that 60 million get clean water and that a child’s life is ‘saved every two minutes’ is data which is uncollectable and comes from recipients who are happy to give DFID whatever figures they want.
In Barbara Castle’s day, direct grants to governments were stopped as they undermined local effort, were not auditable, and were likely to be diverted to other ends. As we know from aid scandals in Uganda, Nepal, Afghanistan, Rwanda, Kenya and Nigeria, most of this aid has been misused. DFID has not got the staff or expertise to monitor it. Please congratulate Foreman and Shaw on their articles — they were correct.
Gordon Bridger
Guildford
Don’t legalise drugs
Sir: I hope the endorsement of Danny Kushlick of Transform has caused Mary Wakefield to reconsider her call for drug liberalisation (‘Stop the drugs war’, 12 January). This lazy, ill-informed, defeatist and — worst of all — amoral policy is not in any way courageous or original. It is the dreary conventional wisdom of our governing class, as I show in my most recent book (The War We Never Fought). It is also much desired by powerful and well-funded lobbies which long to see dangerous drugs on legal sale, providing profits for greedy businesses and taxes for callous governments. The campaign for eviscerating the drug laws already has quite enough platforms in politics and the media. The whole point of The Spectator is surely that it does not swim with the stream.
Peter Hitchens
London W8
Wedding march
Sir: Oh how I agree with Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 19 January) concerning the 340,000-plus marchers in Paris protesting about the introduction of gay marriage: ‘If the march had been in favour of gay marriage … the coverage would have been wall-to-wall.’ Yes, it is their choice of what is newsworthy that most reveals the BBC bias.
Barbara Ray
Greenwich, London
Bad advice
Sir: Last week’s editorial ‘Just the tickets’ was right on cue. There are many local authorities and theatre trusts up and down the country who have been hoodwinked by the Arts Council into running theatres by their rules, leaving them in a disgraceful financial state and with no audiences to boot. In one case the endowment funds went missing. To quote one fellow producer, there will not be many tears shed when the redundancies are announced. We do need a source of government funding for the arts, but the current system is past its sell-by date.
Michael Wheatley-Ward
Ramsgate, Kent
Kick-start
Sir: I must take (modest) issue with Christopher Caldwell in his diary (19 January). In the UK at least, kick-start was the method (and device) used to start a motorcycle engine in the days before the fitment of electric starters became the norm. It certainly had nothing to do with going three rounds with a recalcitrant vending machine!
Nick Paterson-Morgan
by email
Blandings travesty
Sir: Olivia Glazebrook considers that Blandings was ‘a triumph’ (Television, 19 January) but I and many other Wodehouse aficionados thought it a travesty. Even the pig was miscast!
Bob Hands
Bridport, Dorset
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