A failure of fairness
Sir: Rod Liddle’s defence of the BBC (Liddle Britain, 31 January) does not stack up. Of course people with close connections to Palestinians, those fully aware of their sufferings and traumas, were in the forefront of calling for the BBC to air the charity’s appeal. How could it be otherwise? Yet for good reason, the BBC’s decision united Fleet Street left and right, triggered criticism of the Corporation from Cabinet ministers as well as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and inspired probably the largest number of MPs in living memory to sign a motion regarding Palestine.
This appeal was not about being pro one side or the other. It was, and is, an issue of humanity — of helping people including destitute children, giving them food, medicines and blankets, literally helping them to survive.
This sacred grail of impartiality needs to be seriously challenged. Fairness and decency are values that should also be at the heart of any public service broadcaster’s remit if it is to carry public support.
Chris Doyle
Director, Council for Arab-British Understanding
London EC4
The deflation delusion
Sir: I put down the Economist in disgust and picked up The Spectator, hoping for more sense. I was not disappointed. Thank you, Ross Clark, for succinctly demolishing the delusion (‘A nation of savers and borrowers’, 31 January), repeated ad nauseam in the Economist (including in a piece written by the chief economist of the IMF) that deflation causes economic decline by driving people to delay purchases.
The only trouble with Clark’s article is his suggestion that reading a book on basic economics would be a useful antidote to the nonsense spouted so often at the moment. When the economics establishment is broadly united behind such bad economics, and when you can find more economic sense in a political journal than in the house magazine of neo-classical political economy, people should be very careful which economics book they read, if they are not to be led further astray.
Bruno Prior
Farnham, Buckinghamshire
Sir: While Ross Clark was reading the Socialist Worker I was reading the St James Place Annual Report. Since it contained an article written by Anatole Kaletsky, I wasn’t cheered up either. I really don’t want my savings managed by an investment committee that respects someone who writes an article entitled ‘Punish Savers’ in the Times.
Richard Creasey
Via email
Black box theory
Sir: Paul Johnson is at it again (And another thing, 31 January). He finishes his perfectly inoffensive paean to simplicity with the up-yours-Darwin corollary that we should be looking for a simpler explanation for the origins of the universe. In other words, that it was God that created it, rather than all this messy stuff with Big Bangs, superstrings, evolution and quantum foam.
This replaces testable cause-and-effect mechanisms with an unknowable black box (God) that can be given any attribute or power needed to achieve the outcome — one might as well say that the universe was created by ‘Science’. As a lover of language, he ought to appreciate the distinction between simple and simplistic.
Rupert Stubbs
Bath, Somerset
The material brain
Sir: Christopher Booker’s assertion (Books, 31 January) that the genome project has hit a dead end is like saying in 1914, ‘This relativity thing has gone a bit quiet.’ If he still doesn’t see why small genetic differences account for large morphological variance, he can find in Matt Ridley’s Nature via Nurture an explanation so simple that even a creationist might understand it.
Equally, a whirlwind of neuroscientific papers is advancing our understanding of the material brain very nicely, thank you; if Le Fanu didn’t enlighten him, he’s suffering not from an ‘illusion of knowledge’ but the reality of ignorance. There’s nothing cuddly about this appeal to spirituality in science. Its journey’s end is the obscurantism that, enforced by a political and clerical elite, gave us 1,500 extra years of poverty, disease and tyranny.
John Bunyard
Ashford, Kent
Rusty smile
Sir: Jeremy Clarke (Low Life, 31 January) should be aware that he already has non-ferrous fillings in his teeth if he has mercury amalgam fillings. Ferrous fillings would probably rust, which would not improve the appearance of his smile. I suspect he meant to ask for non-metallic replacements.
Graham Patrick
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
Some mistakes, surely?
Sir: Further to Brian Willis’s letter in your issue of 31 January, Paul Johnson’s magnificent memory does appear to be less reliable than it used to be. In Mr Johnson’s otherwise typically erudite article on Coleridge, there are three other errors in addition to the one pointed out by Mr Willis. Coleridge’s alias in the 15th Light Dragoons was Silas Tomkyn Comberbache, not Comberback. ‘In Köhn, the town of monks and bones’ should read ‘In Köhln, a town of monks and bones’. And those who practise pantisocracy are pantisocrats, not ‘Pantocrats’. Perhaps Mr Johnson’s Christian beliefs have got his pantisocracy muddled up with the noun ‘pantocrator’.
Stuart George
London SW8
Wire-cut
Sir: In one (mercifully) short column James Delingpole dismisses David Simon’s The Wire as boring (Television, 31 January) before lauding Jonathan Ross as the embodiment of British wit. Is it too much to hope for that he shares the fate of ‘Wossie’ and is suspended for his childish outburst?
Jim Donnet
Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire
An unlucky Barak
Sir: Referring to Dot Wordsworth’s musings (Mind your language, 31 January) about the American president’s name, how about Barak the Dyer in Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten? He was neither fortunate nor blessed, indeed the reverse.
Mary Rose Beaumont
London SW4
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