Labour’s carrot and stick
Sir: The Spectator is right (Leading article, 13 December) to call not just for ‘benefit claimants actually to do something for their handouts’, but for a significant increase in the income tax threshold. There is little sense — or fairness — in trying to push people off benefits and into work if they are worse off in work than on benefits. In any case, there is something absurd in telling a man (or a single mother) that they are simultaneously poor enough to need benefits and rich enough to pay income tax.
The government’s proposed measures to alleviate the economic mess they have helped to create will have a significant future cost in the burden of debt they will incur. It would surely make sense if they were tailored to end the vicious nonsense by which low-wage earners (making as little as £105 a week) suffer the loss of 20p tax, 11p National Insurance contributions and as much as 50p benefit on every extra pound they earn. Taking into account the costs of going to work, such people are worse off working than unemployed.
Quite rightly, higher earners resent paying 40p today and 45p in future on every extra pound they earn. Surely not even a New Labour socialist can justify taking 80p in the pound from some of our poorest workers.
Spraying money into the economy by way of a 2.5 per cent cut in VAT (bound to benefit the rich rather than the poor) is probably an inefficient way to stimulate the economy. Tax cuts for the poor would be better and if those cuts released people from the poverty trap they would bring a substantial collateral benefit. As ever, when this Labour government uses a carrot-and-stick approach it applies it to the wrong end of the unfortunate donkey.
Lord Tebbit
House of Lords, London SW1
Stick with the simple
Sir: I read Paul Johnson’s admirably simple explanation of the origins of the universe (And another thing, 13 December) on the 6.46 Chiltern Railways train from Marylebone to Saunderton. His argument, that the creation of the universe by a single god is simpler than any other explanation and hence true, opened my eyes to a deeper truth about the world around me. Simplicity can sometimes be stunning.
I realised that I had been looking at the universe in the wrong way. Take that train for example. I have little understanding of the way in which it worked. I have heard terms such as rolling stock and the like, but I am a simple man and they baffle me.
I have, as a result of this commute, become familiar with the works of another of our philosophical authors, J.K. Rowling, from the north of Britain. She offers simple explanations for many of the things that I find so hard to understand in this modern world: the ability to fly and to travel and communicate over long distances.
Paul Johnson’s logic is inexorable. These things work by operation of magic. Nothing more is needed, other than maybe a brain.
Nicholas Grandage
Via email
Sir: In supporting the view that God is the simplest explanation of the universe, Paul Johnson confuses, wilfully or otherwise, belief (this view) with hypothesis. At one time it was believed that the sun orbited the earth, until Galileo, from astronomical observations, proved otherwise, the efforts of the Inquisition notwithstanding.
By regarding the constant revision of scientific hypotheses — the willingness to be proved wrong — as a weakness rather than a great strength, Johnson displays a total lack of understanding of the scientific method. Since he professes to be a disciple of Karl Popper, I would be interested to know what ‘easily verifiable’ (or, more importantly, falsifiable) predictions he would make to test his creationist views.
Mike Venis
Faversham, Kent
Homer’s home town
Sir: On the popularity of modern poetry (Ancient and modern, 13 December) G.K. Chesterton, as so often, had the last word. Different critics will have different views about new poems, he says in his essay ‘The Middleman in Poetry’, but none will claim that ‘if a blind man with a dog will go about singing them in Surbiton and Streatham, it is at all probable that ten suburbs will contend for the honour of being his birthplace’, as happened with Homer.
Tim Hudson
Chichester, West Sussex
Not from Nottingham
Sir: Robert Beaumont (City life, 6 December), whomsoever he may be, didn’t do his research when he visited Nottingham. Its heritage is manufacturing, not mining, and so the city was unaffected by the pit closures in the 1980s and 1990s, as it didn’t have any. The ‘melancholy’ and ‘bitter legacy’ which apparently hung over the city when Mr Beaumont visited must have been one of those awful ‘northern’ fogs which had perhaps journeyed down to the city long known as the Queen of the Midlands. That can be the only explanation for the clouded vision that allowed him to make a truly remarkable journey from the Victoria Centre to Broadmarsh simply by walking down Clumber Street. Clumber Street actually takes you to Gustafson Porter’s award-winning Market Square, which Mr Beaumont must have missed while he was busy lamenting the lack of a plaque commemorating Jesse Boot. It is on the art nouveau building directly behind this ‘lack of imaginative regeneration’.
Incidentally, Boots ‘magnificent modern industrial architecture’ is indeed ‘curiously detached’ from Nottingham. It is in Beeston. The greatest sadness about Nottingham is that Boots sold off its high-street optician business. Mr Beaumont would have found it immensely useful. ‘Liverpool-type embarrassment’ looms, I’m afraid.
Richard Baker
Ravenshead, Nottingham
The wrong dates
Sir: If, as William Leith says (Books, 13 December), Shakespeare was born in 1516 and died in 1564, who was it who wrote the plays attributed to him which were first performed between 1590 and 1616? I think we should be told.
David Harcourt
Wellington, New Zealand
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