Quantitative ease
Sir: Unlike Louise Cooper (‘The great savings robbery’, 30 March), I don’t have a problem with inflation or quantitative easing. It’s the perfect tax: painless, easy to collect and fair. It’s painless because after having been collected you still have the proverbial pound in your pocket. OK, it’s worth less — but as Louise points out, we don’t really notice. Easy to collect, just order a new batch of twenties from the printers and put the prices up in the shop. And everybody pays exactly the same percentage, and so the relative difference between rich and poor remains the same.
Tom Roberts
Derby
Sir: According to the legend, Fortunatus (he of the bottomless purse) was born in Famagusta. How times change! And isn’t it appropriate that the Governor of the Bank of Cyprus is called Panicos?
Peter Kitson
Stoke Prior, Worcestershire
The meaning of Easter
Sir: It was disappointing it was to find that your leading article (30 March) was devoted to another lament for those who want to still ‘the moving hand of time’. When it comes to dealing with today’s issues, the old established churches are floundering. Before their Holinesses the Pope and the Archbishop embark on their missions to win back the apostate and recruit new adherents, they might be advised to rethink their message. What the people want are practical answers to the issues of today, and traditional Christianity doesn’t have them. If it did have, the populace would flock to them.
Tup. Clayton
Sedgefield, South Africa
Sir: Many thanks for your leading article on the meaning of Easter. How refreshing in a time when the media almost totally ignores the most radical and important event ever to come to earth — the death and resurrection of Christ. In an age of anxiety and despair, this message is needed.
David A. Littlewood
By email
Russian renovations
Sir: Hats off to Harry Mount from the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (increasingly known as Moscow-on-Thames) for his timely exposé of the antics of the Russian oligarchs (‘Trouble in the terraces’, 30 March). What makes the process so disturbing is the lack of official protest. The council’s hearing into Roman Abramovich’s grotesque scheme for the magnificent building once lived in by James Whistler only came about because of protest letters from nearby residents. Not a squeak has yet been heard from supposed guardians of London’s architectural heritage such as the Chelsea Society or the National Trust.
Christopher Walker
Chelsea SW3
History lessons
Sir: Pace Toby Young (Status anxiety, 23 March), my pupils come up from their state and independent primary schools having learnt about Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Viking Britain, the Tudors and 19th- or 20th-century England, but knowing nothing of ‘eduspeak’. And yes, they sometimes make spelling mistakes, but was it not ever thus? Currently all secondary schoolchildren do study the origins of the great English institutions of monarchy, church and parliament, but Mr Gove plans to scrap this: could someone have a word? And if Oxford undergraduates are ignorant, it is no fault of A-level exams, which offer a huge range of topics for teachers to choose from — two thirds of them pre-1900 in the history specification that I use.
As James Delingpole shows (16 March), it is what goes on in the classroom that really makes the difference.
Patrick Pender-Cudlip
Queen Camel, Somerset
Care and company
Sir: Ross Clark (‘Why I fear for my daughter’, 30 March) is absolutely right about the loneliness that ‘independent living’ brings to most people with learning disabilities. The difficulties of money, budgeting, buying and preparing food, keeping clothes and person clean and presentable are inadequately grasped mysteries to many learning-disabled people, who also need to be in a place where social life, cultural life and friendship are fostered. Independent living may, as Clark says, suit the most able learning-disabled people, but not the majority. I know because my adult son is lucky enough to live in a care facility that promotes independence as far as possible, but in the context of family-sized households with staff support.
Hilary Dickinson
Herne Hill
Currency affairs
Sir: Mr Rifkind (30 March) reveals an inquisitive mind on the subject of ‘Bitcoin’ and generously invites reader assistance to help him know what is going on. May I weigh in? First, I believe it to be the purest example of ‘Murphy’s Law’ — i.e., where there is a hole, someone will come along and fill it up. So when governments all around the world can’t finance ordinary business intercourse in a free market, they will encourage a different sort of market (apologies to Churchill).
But second, and far more important to realise, ‘Bitcoin’ is a currency without a country (euro, anyone?).
Leonard Toboroff
New York City
Still in business
Sir: A missing sentence in my piece on Auckland Castle (‘The art of philanthropy’, 30 March) left an implication that I was no longer involved in the financial world. I continue to spend half my week at Ruffer LLP.
Jonathan Ruffer
London SW1
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