Letters | 6 August 2011

Spectator readers respond to recent articles

REASONS TO DISLIKE THE WEALTHY

Sir: There is much good sense in what Tim Montgomerie writes (‘Afraid of being right’, 30 July), but if his views are to triumph, those who support them need to understand that the people of Great Britain do not hate the wealth-creators because they are rich, but because they are so often and so obviously greedy, selfish and unpleasant, and because they now experience so little pressure within their own circles to behave any better.

R.S. Foster
Sheffield


THE CASE FOR HANDBALL

Sir: Andrew Gilligan (‘A gold medal for idiocy’, 30 July) clearly has some strong views about the London Olympics, but his decision to pick handball as an example to mock was a poor one.

Handball is far from being a white elephant — in fact it is one of the fastest growing sports in the country at the moment, thanks largely to the government’s decision to include it as one of eight sports in its ‘Change 4 Life’ programme. Thanks to that scheme and the efforts of the home-nation associations, handball is now being played in hundreds of schools across the land. Many universities are also taking up the sport and new senior clubs are springing up all the time. The national cups and British university championships have seen record numbers of people of all ages competing in handball. All that makes for significantly more people than ‘could be fitted into the nearest convenient school gym’.

Gilligan also failed to mention that the handball arena is also being used to host elements of modern pentathlon as well as the paralympic sport of goalball, but I suppose he didn’t want to let the facts get in the way of a good rant.