Losing the plot
Sir: Your leading article ‘Blight on the land’ (23 November) is right to call out the hypocrisy and vindictiveness of Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s Agricultural Property Relief cuts. Sadly, this is just one part of the Labour government’s multi-pronged attack on farmers, in sharp contrast to the promises they made before the general election. The 7 per cent rise in the minimum wage and the 9 per cent jump in employers’ national insurance contributions will hit all businesses, but given the 56 per cent slump in farm incomes over the past 12 months, farming is one of the sectors least able to cover such increases.
The government also makes much play of the fact it is putting £5 billion into the agricultural budget over the next two years. It fails to point out that, annually, this is pretty much the same as has been spent since 2013, during which time inflation has eroded 40 per cent off its spending value. Then, of course, there is the mean-spirited hike in taxes on double-cab pick-up trucks.
But it is the under-publicised yet savage cut in direct subsidies to English farmers contained in Reeves’s Budget that really hurts. These will be chopped by 76 per cent next year, yet the many millions of pounds that have already been recouped are still not finding their way back to farmers through environmental schemes.
Even more galling is the fact that no cuts have yet been applied in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, putting English farmers at a competitive disadvantage in their own market. No wonder they are angry.
Philip Clarke
News and opinion editor, Farmers Weekly
Sutton, Surrey
Strands of Labour
Sir: The split between Wes Streeting and Keir Starmer (‘Wild Wes’, 23 November) exposes the different strands of Labour. There are those who, like Streeting, find inspiration in Christianity, the belief in the sanctity of life and compassion for the most vulnerable. On the other side are those who look more to Marx, and a collectivism that favours the will of the strong over those considered weaker. That is a considerable difference, and I know which I prefer.
Christine Crossley
Chipping Norton
Send for the MP
Sir: Charles Moore rightly asks why doctors or nurses should be present when a patient takes a lethal cocktail of pills if the ‘assisted dying’ bill proceeds (Notes, 23 November). As this would not be a medical procedure, but rather one endorsed by parliament, would it not be more appropriate for the local MP to be required to be present to observe the direct results of their vote? That might focus their minds on the extremely serious implications of this profoundly unsatisfactory bill.
Professor Chris Harrison
Altrincham, Cheshire
AI tears
Sir: Matthew Parris (‘Am I alone in thinking?’, 23 November) misunderstands the way AI machines work. Trained by reading everything on the internet, the answer that ‘large language models’ (such as Claude or ChatGPT) give to any question is always what the algorithm finds to be most probably one that a well-informed, well-intentioned, intelligent human being would give. So if the training shows that such a human would appear to be sad in certain circumstances, the AI will give that appearance. It may look like sadness but it is merely a representation. Don’t be fooled!
George Everard
London SW1
Bureaucracy of abuse
Sir: I am surprised to learn from William Moore’s piece (‘Canterbury fails’, 16 November) that the most likely response by the C of E to the problem of abuse engulfing it is the solution proposed by Professor Alexis Jay: the creation of two independent bodies charged with the operational responsibility for safeguarding and scrutiny, whatever the latter might mean. It seems to me that this simply involves the creation of yet more bureaucratic bodies and the burdening of the Church with yet more cost.
We all know abuse of any sort is wrong and we don’t need more organisations to send out more safeguarding questionnaires. Those who look after children already have to complete one every three years and it is no more than a box-ticking exercise. It is the duty of every citizen, clergy or not, to alert the police if they have reason to suspect that abuse is going on and it is the duty of the police to investigate at speed. This process has failed, not only in the Church. We all have a role in seeing that perpetrators are brought to book and in stamping out abuse.
Peter Munro
Wincanton
Rock’n’roll visionaries
Sir: What is Rod Liddle on about, calling the MC5 ‘a slightly below average blues band’, with ‘energy and attitude but nothing else’ (The Listener, 16 November)? Hello? The MC5 were rock’n’roll visionaries who placed the blues on the centre spot and kicked them out of the park. They were the 1960s wellspring of a river of rock’n’roll which irrigated the late 20th-century American and western European cultural desert. Rod sees everything as political, and the MC5 as Marxists. But the band gave little thought to lyrics, revelling instead in the sheer joy of massive volume and reckless speed that has brought such comfort to us, the alienated masses.
Nick Allison
Chagford, Devon
Smells and bells
Sir: Given the significance of religion in Tudor England, is there any excuse for the inauthenticity of the depictions of worship and church buildings in the BBC’s Wolf Hall (Arts, 23 November)? A litter of candlesticks and the odd monstrance (although Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament was unknown at the time) appear to be sufficient to represent Catholic worship. Did they not think to consult Eamon Duffy?
Giles Proctor
Whixley, York
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