Doctor’s note
Sir: Your leading article ‘Labour vs labour’ (21 September) follows a recent theme that I have noticed in The Spectator, in which the government is criticised for allowing public pay rises without implementing changes to working practices to increase productivity. I cannot comment on other sectors but I work in the NHS, working closely with junior doctors as colleagues and am involved in training them.
Your article appears to imply that if they worked harder or differently, productivity would improve. While I accept that NHS productivity may not have improved (or may have worsened over recent years), my experience as a GP and trainer is that my productivity and that of juniors is limited by structures and barriers to the efficient provision of care imposed by changes imposed from above. These changes have come from the last government, the Department of Health, NHS England and the wider society, and are completely beyond the control of frontline clinicians, who are as frustrated as the public about the situation. This is not in any way relevant to pay awards, which reflect the length and level of training (and responsibility carried) by junior doctors. In my experience, they are extremely diligent and hardworking (not to mention bright and motivated) members of the workforce.
Dr Jonathan Cleary
Gloucestershire
Migratory patterns
Sir: ‘The Swedish model’ (14 September) makes some very important points about illegal immigration – notably that withdrawing from the ECHR is in itself unlikely to be a silver bullet. But your leading article also implies that the fundamental problem is that we are admitting too many people to be able to provide them with the basic needs of housing, public services and the maintenance of social cohesion. In that case the issue is not so much illegal migration, which only accounts for a few tens of thousands, but also legal migration, which can be measured in hundreds of thousands. This is driven both by British industry’s tendency to treat overseas recruitment as the ‘default option’ and by British higher education’s decision to base its business model on overseas student recruitment – many of whom (some sources suggest as high as 40 per cent) morph into the domestic workforce before their visa expires. By contrast, ask students from the settled population who graduated this summer about their search for a job and they will likely say how very difficult it is.
The truth is that the system is running out of control. In reply to my parliamentary question on 17 September, the Department for Work and Pensions revealed that in the 12 months to 30 June, 940,039 new national insurance numbers were issued. Of these, 544,241 were to people from Asia and 119,220 from Europe. Where are they all working? Further, it makes the unrealistic suggestion that immigration can be reduced to 300,000 per annum – though that is a very high number by historic standards.
Robin Hodgson
House of Lords, London SW1
Reasons to be depressed
Sir: My work and social contemporaries are in our seventies and eighties and have never knowingly suffered from ADHD (‘The adult ADHD trap’, 21 September). However, increasingly we experience mild depression. Our worries include the new government, the failing NHS that is driving more of us to private healthcare, the Arts Council’s restrictions to opera by ENO, WNO and Glyndebourne, limitations on free speech particularly in education, and, further from home, US politics, the Middle East and Ukraine. In 1979 Ian Dury and the Blockheads sang a long list of ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’. I’m hard pressed to think of a list for 2024. Can readers help?
Catherine M.S. Alexander
Stratford upon Avon, Warwickshire
Ambrosial fruit
Sir: Milton did not ‘retrofit the Bible’ to make the fruit of the Forbidden Tree an apple (Letters, 21 September). He read the Bible in Hebrew, not Latin: that he regarded Jerome’s translation as misleading is clearly shown in Paradise Lost. The ‘ambrosial fruit’ is only twice called an apple: and in each case Satan, the ‘father of lies’, is the speaker. In the first instance, he is simply lying to Eve; in the second, boastfully jeering to an audience of devils.
Caroline Moore
Etchingham, East Sussex
Baldwin’s phrase
Sir: Visitors to Hughenden would be misled if they were told Disraeli invented ‘One Nation’ (Notes, 21 September). The famous words were first used by Stanley Baldwin after the Tories’ greatest ever election victory a century ago. Speaking in the Royal Albert Hall on 4 December 1924, Baldwin called on the party to show that it was ‘Unionist in the sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world.’
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
Civilised hours
Sir: As a serving civil servant I want to correct Charles Moore’s incorrect understanding of the situation regarding flexible working in the civil service (Notes, 21 September). Civil servants are required to attend their office for at least 60 per cent of their contracted hours, where this is practical for their role. Teams within the service have adapted well to these arrangements and the flexibility is extremely helpful for those who have to balance the demands of childcare and so on.
After years of salary erosion, the service is struggling more than ever to attract staff. In today’s workplaces staff expect the flexibility technology affords. In his ardour for more rigid employment conditions for civil servants, Charles Moore would make it harder to recruit and would increase the financial burden on already struggling employees, leading to more vacancies and, I’m sure, less efficient public servants.
Name and address supplied
Moot point
Sir: Dot Wordsworth writes of the word ‘moot’ as a kind of meeting enjoyed by the Anglo Saxons (Mind your language, 21 September). Twenty years ago, I was briefly a member of a Dark Ages re-enactment society. It was organised by area, and I fell into that of ‘Suddrighe’, or Surrey. I was informed that monthly ‘moots’ would take place in the local pub; Dermot, the leader, told me when I met him for a pint that he was the leader, or Ealdorman, of the whole county, as if he had legions at his back ready to face down William the Conqueror. In fact during the whole year our group was only him and me, and as he turned his ankle in the first event, he issued instructions to me from the sidelines thereafter. I exchanged my shield and spear for a Civil War musket the following spring.
Tom Stubbs
Surbiton, Surrey
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