Self-destructive policies
Sir: Congratulations to Melanie Phillips (‘The clash of uncivilisations’, 24 October) for exposing the hypocrisy and appeasement at the heart of the out-of-touch, politically correct liberal establishment, particularly among the media and mainstream politicians. New Labour’s self-destructive policies of open borders and multiculturalism are an explosive cocktail, which seem designed to undermine British culture, and have driven frustrated voters into the arms of parties such as Ukip and the odious BNP. Having recently retired from 20 years working in the Middle East, I can verify that the liberal Muslim governments are much more vigorous in pursuing Islamic extremists and are baffled by our weakness.
What is the point in our boys fighting in Afghanistan when the same extremists are being indulged in the UK, as we saw in the Luton demos? The objective truth is that the core values of Islamic fundamentalism are incompatible with Western liberal democracy: refusal of separation of powers, equal rights for women, human rights for gays and minorities; sanctioning of the death penalty, polygamy and the whole concept of infidels, ad infinitum. Therefore fundamentalists are not suitable immigrants, unless your aim is to destroy British society and culture.
Rodney G. James
Brasschaat, Belgium
MPs’ ethnicity
Sir: I wonder whether Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob (Letters, 24 October) has noticed high-profile figures like Baroness Scotland, Baroness Amos, Diane Abbott (who has a weekly opportunity to air her views on television) or Lord Darzi. Or is it that he believes that the UK government should be evenly divided in its proportions of whites, ethnic minorities, muslims and non-muslims?
Paul Geddes
Birmingham
Delusions of disaster
Sir: Rod Liddle wonders where our ‘yearning for catastrophe’ (‘The bee holocaust myth’, 31 October) comes from: I suggest that the answer is our unquenchable human vanity. What the global-warming evangelists and other yearners for catastrophe have in common with Rod’s mother-in-law and the multi-farious religious sects that believe in any of the variations of apocalypse, Armageddon, endtime or whatever, is that these events will take place in the believer’s lifetime. No TV evangelist ever got rich by forecasting the advent of the Antichrist on 6.6.6666 because who cares? The driver behind all these beliefs is the same: ‘I am here and therefore the purpose of creation is accomplished.’ The humbling truth that they cannot accept is that we are living at the dawn of human history on a planet that has all the significance in the universe of one grain of sand in the Sahara desert. Global warming is perfectly suited for the secular age: it is an imminent catastrophe that demands the same suspension of rational thought, the same repentance and self-abasement and the same demonisation of its opponents as any classic millenarian sect. It will run and run.
Simon Ollivant
By email
Don’t blame Bermuda
Sir: I am surprised at the Spectator and Neil Collins following Gordon Brown in blaming tax havens for the UK’s financial problems (‘tolls mean tax-free profits’, 24 October).
The M6 Toll company pays no tax, not because it is owned by a Bermudan company but because it isn’t profitable. Its £50 million annual income is only 5.5 per cent of the £900 million cost of building the road — probably not enough to pay its debt interest. Even its 2006 dividend was not generated by making a profit but by remortgaging its assets (as many households were doing then). And it would still have been tax-free if the parent company had been in the UK rather than Bermuda — UK companies are not taxed on dividends or capital gains from their British subsidiaries.
You could have examined whether Brown’s public-private partnerships are suitable models for the future, or if the UK tax system is fit for purpose, or even why a road costs £20,000 per yard. But don’t blame Bermuda for what is a purely British problem.
Richard Teather
Senior lecturer in Tax Law, Bournemouth University
Pronounced dislikes
Sir: Toby Young raises an interesting point (Status anxiety, 31 October). Why do some foreign words, like his example ‘paella’, become anglicised in pronunciation, others not? Only a terrible snob, for instance, would order a bottle of ‘shom-pan-ye’; only an ignoramus, on the other hand, would call for a bottle of ‘bew-jo-laze’. We put ‘mayo-naze’ on our salad, not ‘my-o-nez’. We used to travel to ‘Lions’, but now it is to ‘Lee-õ’; but still nobody goes to ‘Paree’, or ‘Moskva’ or ‘Yerushalayim’. Why is this?
Michael Grosvenor Myer
Cambridge
Limits to growth
Sir: I salute James Delingpole’s support for Christopher Booker’s long campaign against ‘warmism’ (You know it makes sense, 31 October). Booker’s writings in the Sunday Telegraph have helped to convince me, a one-time ecofreak, that ‘warmism’ — the idea that the world’s temperature is rising dangerously and that ‘we are all to blame’ — is wholly misguided and mostly to do with politics, not science. I recommend anyone who hopes to be properly politically educated to read his newly published The Real Global Warming Disaster. However, when the public comes to understand how much economic pain is resulting from our politicians’ obsession with a fashionable but unscientific theory, I hope there will not be an overreaction. Much of the ecofreak case, despite the nonsense which my ex-tribe often talks, is true. There really are limits to growth. Production, consumption, pollution and, above all, population cannot go on growing indefinitely. In the natural world what grows, after all, eventually dies.
Michael Denny
Liskeard, Cornwall
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