The task ahead
Sir: Am I alone in finding the Tories’ pre-election triumphalism nauseating (Finkelstein et al, 26 September)? When I last walked past my local constituency association, the grubby frontage still had the old logo. Tony Blair at least built a modern political party. David Cameron hasn’t even begun to build a dynamic political organisation. If I were still a Tory, my feeling would not be swaggering confidence but intense trepidation at the scale of the task ahead.
Brian Jenner
Bournemouth
Sir: David Selborne tells us that in 1997 Labour ‘gained office but lost its sense of direction’ (‘How can Labour save itself?’, 26 September). The Tories should learn from their example. The one nagging worry left with much of the electorate is that a Tory government will quickly revert to being the ‘nasty party’, blaming society’s ills on easy targets, and putting the interests of big business before those of ordinary people. David Cameron will remain vulnerable to attacks from Labour until he can absolutely prove that his party has changed. In 1997 the Tories attacked ‘New Labour — New Danger’. Labour will spend the next six months trying to show us that it’s the same old Tories.
William Burnaby
London SW1
Disabled anger
Sir: I read Andrew Gilligan’s article ‘Chucking millions down the Tube’ (19 September) with mounting despair. He is quite right, a crowded tube station is no place for a wheelchair and, given the choice, no wheelchair user is going to opt for the tube, even if it were accessible, over door-to-door transport. Unfortunately disabled people are rarely consulted and given a choice.
Having had a leg amputated, my husband was more or less wheelchair-bound for the last four years of his life. We rapidly discovered that most people, when confronted with someone in a wheelchair who is accompanied, will direct questions regarding their wishes and needs to the companion rather than to the disabled person. We lost count of the number of times we politely pointed out that my husband had lost a leg and not the power of speech. The same principle appears to apply to the provision of public amenities for the disabled: it is the able-bodied who arrogantly and erroneously consider themselves best qualified to make the decisions. Perhaps Richard Parry should be the first to try out the step-free access at Green Park — in a wheelchair. He might then truly understand the anger of the disabled, and it has little to do with being ‘excluded’ from the tube.
Lahitte Toupière,
France
Bin your social engineering
Sir: Roger Alton (Sport, 19 September) quotes the Arsenal fans’ racist chant about Adebeyor (‘Your father washes elephants, your mother is a whore’) and asks ‘How racist does it have to get before the police intervene?’ As a Scot, I put up with frequent ‘racist’ comments, a favourite being ‘och aye the noo’, but also jibes usually involving kilts, sporrans or haggis, which the English find endlessly amusing. You think the police should become involved? Don’t be ludicrous. Footballers get paid so much that surely they can put up with the insults that go with mildly deranged partisan football supporters.
The pervasive culture of political correctness has been created and encouraged by misguided social legislation involving concepts such as equal opportunities, racial equality, human rights and even ’elf and safety. Is it too much to hope that an incoming conservative government could consign all this lot, and the agencies that go with it, to the bin of repealed social engineering legislation?
Sir: You are being far too kind to this utterly awful government about the NHS (Leading article, 26 September). The NHS internal market did not work under the Tories, and works even less well under Labour. In its current form it is as smooth-running as a square tyre. It consumes time and money in administration and transaction costs, and makes no difference to the standard of service that patients receive or that practising doctors can deliver. It fragments what had previously been unified services, and then wonders why the overall costs rise, while efficiency falls. The new GP contract is a prime example of a change that has cost taxpayers money, while not providing any incentives to nudge doctors into providing the service patients actually want. In fact the new contract is actually a hindrance to provision of good medical care. New Labour deserves damning for many reasons. Its treatment of the NHS is one of them.
C.M. Macfie
Teignharvey, Devon
Labour and the NHS
I was interested to learn from Paul Johnson (Books, 26 September) that General Franco is ‘an absolutely safe target’ for the politically correct. I am sure I am not alone in feeling that I would by an Irish mile have preferred to live in Franco’s Spain than in (say) the Soviet Union, which was undoubtedly politically correct. Or indeed, under a regime such as that of New Labour, which is increasingly revealing some of the worst characteristics of fascism, such as that every action and attitude is held to be political and must be controlled, if not ‘correct’, but has few of the undoubted virtues of Franco’s regime, such as its respect for the religion and traditions of Spain.
Peter Davies
Halifax, West Yorkshire
Franco’s Spain: the upside
Sir: Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 26 September) on the fad for asking guests to specify what they can and cannot eat reminded me of the first time I encountered this, a few years ago. The secretary of my would-be host rang to ask me if I had any dietary requirements. A little nonplussed, I replied: ‘Yes, as it is a Friday evening, I shall be hungry.’
Charles Marsden-Smedley
London WC2
Comments