Care of children
Sir: At last people, namely Harriet Sergeant (‘The ghost children’, 25 March) and Rod Liddle (‘Childcare: an inconvenient truth’), are speaking up for the children. In so many areas of life today we sacrifice our children for the sake of our adult fetishes and fancies. The only people who have no political voice are our children. I am not suggesting that we lower the voting age to five; only that we try to do our best on their behalf. Why not spend the money that is going to provide 30 hours of childcare per week for babies over nine months old simply to pay the mothers to stay at home and look after them themselves? I can tell you which the babies would prefer.
Martin Down
Witney, Oxfordshire
Lesson plan
Sir: Harriet Sergeant’s article on children missing from education since the pandemic was sobering. However, to state that it was the Department for Education’s job to ‘ensure all schools provided a basic standard of education for all children’ is a gross misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the unprecedented situation at the time. With just a few days’ notice, schools large and small, urban and rural, state and independent, had to rip up the manual and start again. Even in the most favourable circumstances, the complexities of delivering any sort of education were quickly evident. I should know: that was my job in my school.
I would love her to outline how she would have gone about things. Equally, I would love to be able to explain to her the details of the appalling situation in which we all found ourselves, and the quite extraordinary efforts and successes of teachers and school leaders, when they themselves were often risking their own lives to help the children in their care.
David Edwards
Norton sub Hamdon, Somerset
Taki is mistaken
Sir: I agree with your columnist Taki’s self-assessment that he is not a fool (High Life, 25 March). He is, however, sadly mistaken if he thinks Putin’s support in Russia is based on democratic consent. Putin has total control of all media outlets in Russia, including TV, radio, social media and print publications. Is it any surprise that many Russians, especially those with limited access to the internet, believe the lies being propagated and know nothing about Russia’s savage atrocities in Ukraine?
Those Russians with access to other sources know otherwise but cannot speak out. They live in fear of long prison sentences if they do. Many educated Russians have fled the country. The UN, ICC and the world know, though, that President Putin is a consummate liar, a murderer and a war criminal. He has never won a democratic election in his life, except by ballot rigging. Taki should acknowledge that these attributes do not apply to President Zelensky. Ukraine is a sovereign democratic country fighting for its survival. There can be no peace in Europe, yet alone Ukraine, while Putin is in the Kremlin.
Dr Richard Ogilvy
Nottingham
World Service weaponry
Sir: Oscar Edmondson’s article on the history of BBC Russian language broadcasts and the career of Anatol Goldberg contains an important historical error (Arts, 25 March). In Goldberg’s time, and indeed until 2014, the World Service had nothing to do with the BBC licence fee. It was funded entirely by grants-in-aid from the FCO. ‘The BBC World Service has always been treated as… a weapon of foreign policy’ – because that’s what it was. By the same token, Goldberg’s eventual removal did not exemplify the ‘probing and penny-pinching’ of the present-day BBC as it juggles with competing claims on the licence fee. Rather, it reflected either pressure from the FO or else a certain establishment myopia which the BBC and the FO had in common.
Peter Oppenheimer
Christ Church, Oxford
Save us
Sir: Lionel Shriver’s excellent article ‘The high price of low interest rates’ (25 March) touched a highly sensitive nerve as a saver who has become more than a little tired of being insulted by all the hoops which we have had to pass through in the past decade, despite the historically low interest rates. I enquired relatively recently of a building society employee if she would like me to stand on one leg, blindfolded and singing the National Anthem in order to open a bond with a pathetically low interest rate. She explained that all the identity checks were made to prevent money laundering, to which my response was that they obviously didn’t prevent the financial institutions from committing daylight robbery.
Linda Willby
Thornton le Dale, North Yorkshire
Memories of Thesiger
Sir: When I stayed with Wilfred Thesiger 30 years ago in Maralal, northern Kenya, he had moved from the ‘shabby room above a garage’ where Aidan Hartley visited him (‘Wild life’, 18 March) to a modest house outside the town which he shared with a Samburu family. Every evening, over a dinner of goat stew and rice, Wilfred would talk fondly of his schooldays at Eton and the men whom he had admired most in his life. Among them was Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck who, Thesiger said, possessed ‘the quality of nobility’, and with whom he had served in North Africa during the second world war.
Thesiger wanted to die in Africa, but didn’t; Auchinleck did, in Morocco, where he spent his last years.
Simon Courtauld
Etchilhampton, Wiltshire
Red herring
Sir: Never mind the sherry (Letters, 25 March) – the young person at the counter of an upmarket café and deli recently asked me: ‘What’s a kipper, exactly?’ O tempora…
John Hedger
Shroton, Dorset
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