Storing up more trouble
Sir: Your leading article (20 September) calls for a ‘kick up the backside’ to the banking industry. That kick should be aimed elsewhere. The British and American governments have not merely permitted this crisis to happen, but positively created it by a deliberate relaxation of monetary controls. Worse still, they have now decided that instead of destroying excess credit by asset deflation, bankruptcies and share collapses, the monetary inflation is to be consolidated by absorption of bad debt into the public finances.
I don’t see how this can end well. Some commentators are already saying that, if passed unaltered, the proposed American financial legislation could, once properly understood, trigger a major crash in US financial shares, possibly before this letter is published.
I think The Spectator and its economically savvy readers should put on fresh pairs of winkle-pickers, and gather in Whitehall and Washington for some kicking practice.
Rolf Norfolk
Birmingham
Impeach Brown
Sir: If the problem with removing Brown is that Labour’s front bench don’t want the responsibility (Politics, 20 September), and if the scale of Brown’s financial duplicity is as great as you say it is in your article (‘The great debt deceit’, 20 September), surely a parliamentary motion to have Brown impeached would find overwhelming support on both sides. As with Richard Nixon, it doesn’t actually have to take place to have the desired effect, and above all it will allow free and full discussion of why we are in this mess, and the scale of the clean-up necessary.
Richard Roberts
Littleport, Cambridgeshire
Kremlin methods
Sir: Tom Parfitt’s article (‘Moscow’s secret war in Ingushetia’, 13 September) is a grim yet wholly accurate description of the techniques used by the Russian leadership to terrorise its own citizens. The sad truth is that Mr Parfitt could have simply substituted the word ‘Ingushetia’ for — among others — ‘Chechnya’ in the title of his piece without sacrificing any accuracy.
The Moscow-imposed president Ramzan Kadyrov claims that Chechnya is the ‘most peaceful place in Russia’. Yet despite claims that the war is over, human rights campaigners and journalists have shown this so-called ‘peace’ to be a total charade: disappearances, torture, rape and extra-judicial killings remain rampant.
These methods, deployed by the Kremlin to prop up their puppet regimes of fear and oppression, constitute the ugly truth behind the glossy backdrops carefully choreographed for the Western press. No one should be fooled. The Russian leadership is killing its own citizens, and they are getting away with it.
Ivar Amundsen
Director, Chechnya Peace Forum, London W1
Canada’s example
Sir: John Kampfner (Diary, 20 September) relates an anecdote suggesting the Labour party might suffer the same fate as Canada’s Conservatives in the early 1980s, which dropped in one election from ruling the nation to holding just two seats. The sentiment’s right, but the date wrong. The election took place in 1993; the Tories (our colonial fetishes even extend to your political diminutives) lost all but two of 151 seats. Today the Conservatives are back in power in Canada. It took just over a decade. So it goes.
Linsey McGoey
Oxford
‘Too modest’ Toby
Sir: Toby Young’s piece on how he came to be admitted to Brasenose is, like most of his writings, a beautifully elegant piece of fiction (Status anxiety, 20 September). He was in fact admitted, not as the result of a mistake, but because the PPE tutors judged that his A-level results were not a true reflection of his abilities. We were clearly right, since he went on to secure a First, something he is too modest to mention. Toby was, in fact, one of the nicest and ablest students whom I have taught — almost as nice and able, indeed, as David Cameron.
Vernon Bogdanor
Brasenose College, Oxford
Dot’s warning
Sir: I am besotted by Dot Wordsworth, but you and she have let me down. Does nobody in your office check the copy that is sent in? You allowed her to open her piece (Mind your language, 20 September) with: ‘“Not really,” replied my husband when I asked if he thought it would be nice…’ She should, of course, have written not if but whether; her sentence requires a determiner not a conditional. Please tell her that if she ever commits such a solecism again our affair is over.
Michael Lynch
School of Historical Studies, University of Leicester
Mysterious whale?
Sir: It was refreshing to read Adam Nicolson’s review of Philip Hoare’s book Leviathan (Books, 20 September). Of course, the whale is no more gentle or mysterious than any other large animal. The minke whale (which you’ll find attractively packaged in any Norwegian supermarket) is no more intelligent — but far more numerous — than, say, the moose, and we shoot about 40,000 moose a year in Norway alone. As a famous Norwegian whaler (and MP) once put it: ‘Who’s to say that whales sing? Maybe they swear.’
Torvald Kambestad
Oslo, Norway
The speed of lava
Sir: In his review of Mary Beard’s Pompeii (Books, 20 September), Raymond Carr is incorrect to describe ‘a burning lava, flowing at great speed’. To the best of my knowledge, this would in fact have been a pyroclastic flow, derived from the Greek, which literally translates to ‘broken fire’. This is a cloud of superheated toxic gas and small rocks — the temperature can reach 1,000˚C. Lava does not travel in such a manner.
Andrew Stibbard
London SW9
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