The route to Westminster
Sir: Andrew Neil is admirably fair in his article on the over-representation of Oxbridge types and the privately educated in both the Labour and Conservative parties (‘The fall of the meritocracy’, 29 January). In my view, this even-handedness is a missed opportunity, as it is surely more to the discredit of the Labour party, which allegedly represents the common man. Yet the evidence suggests that for a state-educated person from a humble background, it would be very difficult to make a career as a Labour politician, whereas it would be by no means impossible in the Conservative party. While most of the ‘People’s Party’ may not actually have been to Eton, they are very solidly upper-middle-class and include a shadow cabinet minister who is directly related to aristocracy and an MP who employs his own butler. Labour activists have been very vociferous about Tory toffs. It is high time we heard a great deal more about Labour toffs.
J.P. Marney
Glasgow
Sir: Andrew Neil regards Westminster as the acme of attainment. But there is a substantial body of opinion which holds entry into politics an indicator of failure in the real world. Indeed, in my time at Oxford, PPE was regarded as a slacker’s course, to which those who failed in more demanding studies (including Geography) transferred.
Peter Urben (MA, D. Phil.)
Kenilworth
Rent-a-hacker
Sir: Any bright 17-year-old can intercept mobile phone voicemail, says Rory Sutherland (The Wiki man, 29 January) — and certainly any bright tabloid hack could. And yet, in many cases, they didn’t. They hired private detectives at some expense to do it for them; it is from the records of two such detectives that most public knowledge of the practice derives.
Phone-hacking required outside contractors for the same reason that it provokes outrage: not because it is particularly difficult or cunning, but because it is both shameful and illegal.
Benjamin Rockbird
London SE15
Shelf help
Sir: Regarding your article ‘Bookselling for illiterates’ (29 January), in Waterstone’s, Yeovil, I once asked a young assistant for a book on Gladstone and Disraeli. He disappeared, then returned with a travel guide. The urbane statesmen would surely have smiled.
David Pearn
Somerset
Sir: I wonder if Evelyn Waugh would have been as upset as Michael Henderson on learning that the staff at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly mistook him for a woman. Didn’t Waugh himself propound the theory that Marshal Tito was a woman? He kept this joke going for years, and when a friend asked him to stop this nonsense because everybody knew Tito was a man, and a good-looking one at that, Waugh replied, unruffled: ‘Her face is pretty, but her legs are very thick.’
Allard Hoogland
Langbroek, Netherlands
Warsaw drift
Sir: Anna Szlejter (‘Go east, young man’, 29 January) is wrong when she suggests ‘immigration is a new and exotic phenomenon’ for Poland. Around 30,000 Scots craftsmen, traders and soldiers of fortune settled in Poland in the late 16th and early 17th century. Many prospered and rose to high positions in civic life. One Alexander Chalmers was four times elected mayor of Warsaw. Several were granted titles of nobility by the Polish Crown. Some of their Scots surnames, phonetically changed into Polish, live on in Poland. My own Polish father’s mother descended from one of such 17th-century Scot, and then, as a soldier in 1940, he met my Scots mother in Perth.
Michael Olizar
By email
The trouble with tolerance
Sir: In Rod Liddle’s article of 29 January, he writes that it is an almost perfect expression of indigenous British tolerance that ‘non-Muslim Britons’ may say: ‘the family next door are Muslim but they’re not too bad’.
I would suggest that tolerance has become mixed up with the search for an accommodation (whatever that means) with Islam, perhaps lending the exercise a new relevance; and this requires us to look back, historically, at how tolerance emerged within a specifically western framework that simply can’t be transferred to Islam.
I’m not even sure that tolerance can be classified as a genuinely Christian ‘virtue’ at all, even if its emergence owes a lot to Christianity, and even if in practice it can be infused with a dollop of good old-fashioned Christian charity. Analogies and metaphors are always a little risky — but the media obsession with tolerance reminds me a little of a kind of cavity-wall insulation being carried out on a crumbling building. In other words, tolerance is being used as a second-rate substitute, an ersatz virtue almost, to fill in the gaps between the parts of an increasingly shaky moral edifice.
Revd David R. Cummins
Northumberland
China’s prison population
Sir: Jonathan Mirsky takes a cheap shot — presumably because he couldn’t resist the word play — when he says, apropos China’s ursine gifts, that ‘like so many mammals of interest to Beijing, the pandas will end up behind bars’ (Letters, 22 January). But the incarceration rates of China (120 per 100,000 population) are lower than in the UK (150), multiples lower than in the US (750), and even below the world average (145). Does he not see the beam in his own eye?
Peter Forsythe
Hong Kong
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