Our successful railways
From Adrian Lyons
Sir: Your leading article (7 January) suggested that railway operators are a cartel bent on exploiting their customers, but this is grossly unfair. Fares have risen, but an overall increase of 3 per cent above inflation since 1995 hardly constitutes ‘steeply rising prices’. Furthermore, a tremendous range of fares and journey options is on offer. Your leader quoted one London–Manchester rail fare without giving the bigger picture. This morning I could have bought a return for travel today for less than £60.
Nor do I believe that railway operators would consider the industry to be risk-free. All the recent franchise competitions have resulted in the winners committing to pay hundreds of millions in premiums against very demanding performance targets.
A combination of factors — economic growth, increasing road congestion, better marketing — has driven patronage sharply upwards. We are now the fastest-growing railway in Europe, with 40 per cent passenger growth in 10 years. We have recently overtaken France in terms of total passenger numbers. Since 2002 we have outstripped the Chancellor, as rail growth has beaten economic growth hands down.
If you really want to contribute to the debate, you should be pressing the Conservatives to create policies that enable our increasingly successful railways to play a full part in sustaining Britain’s economic growth.
Adrian Lyons
Director General, The Railway Forum, London SW1
How to live
From Professor Robin Jacoby
Sir: As a psychiatrist who has written reports in more than 30 homicide cases, I can wholeheartedly confirm Theodore Dalrymple’s thesis that the majority of murderers are unfit for life (‘Murder mystery’, 7 January). But the picture he paints also illustrates their lack of self-restraint and predilection for instant gratification.
My experience led me to formulate my law of homicide which states that the victim nearly always ‘asks for it’. In other words, the victim needs to show self-restraint, too. A typical scenario is the following. A wife, often a bit smarter than her husband, has brought up the children and returns to work. She starts an affair with her manager. The husband suspects her of infidelity but can’t prove it and she denies it. Then one day he catches them in flagrante. When he confronts his wife, she says something like, ‘He’s better at it than you…’. I have always assumed that those who say ‘Let’s talk about it in the morning’ live to see another day.
Robin Jacoby
Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford
From Frances Spurrier
Sir: Many people who struggle with deprivation do not commit murder. But it is not only those who inhabit dark hallways who have forgotten how to live. In our society divorce is rampant, child abuse tolerated, and women subject to violent sexual attacks are expected to defend themselves against charges of complicity. Vulnerable early teens, failed by our education system, turn to computer games or other even more harmful addictions to alleviate their boredom, while their parents watch Big Brother — the 21st-century equivalent of knitting by the gallows.
Frances Spurrier
Twickenham, Middlesex
Misplaced generosity
From Philip Pullman
Sir: David Watkins (Letters, 7 January) invents an opinion that C.S. Lewis might have held about my books, if he’d been able to read them, and then chastises me for not being a little generous to Lewis in return. This is an odd manoeuvre, as well as an inaccurate one. As a matter of fact I’ve always spoken generously about Lewis’s critical work: ‘[Pullman] likes Lewis’s criticism and quotes it surprisingly often’ (The New Yorker, 26 December 2005). What I don’t like is his fiction, and why on earth shouldn’t I say so? Tolkien didn’t like the Narnia books either: why doesn’t Mr Watkins tell him off for not being ‘a little generous’?
Philip Pullman
Cumnor, Oxford
Wanted, subsidised housing
From Shaun Spiers
Sir: Simon Nixon has got it wrong. Scrapping the Green Belt and covering it in new homes won’t solve the nation’s housing problems (‘No bubble, no slump’, 31 December). All that a great splurge of sprawl would do is contribute to further urban decay, sucking jobs and money out of cities, while doing further environmental damage as traffic soars. The housing market is dominated by sales of existing, ‘second-hand’ homes; any conceivable increase in new housing can only make a minimal difference to house prices.
Both housebuilding and planning permissions granted for new homes have been rising briskly in recent years. If Nixon is right in forecasting house prices rising in line with inflation for the medium term, then housing will gradually become more affordable. As for comparisons between British and European housing, you’ll find more Britons living in family homes with gardens than in most of our apartment-dwelling neighbours. At the same time, we have usually done a better job of protecting our countryside from unplanned sprawl.
What is really needed is not new homes for sale on the Green Belt but a big increase in the building of subsidised housing for those families who have long been priced out of the market — and will continue to be even if there is a ‘step change’ in the provision of market housing.
Shaun Spiers
Chief executive, Campaign to Protect Rural England, London SE1
Alligator hunt
From Pamela de Putron
Sir: Dot Wordsworth will be pleased to know that the term ‘alligator pear’, the English substitution for the Aztec word ‘ahuacatl’ and Spanish ‘avocado’ (Mind your language, 31 December), is alive and well in Sri Lanka, where as recently as 2004 I was met initially with blank stares when looking for avocado in a Colombo market.
Pamela de Putron
Port of Spain, Trinidad, West Indies
Dactylic delights
From John Rattray
Sir: Further to Grey Gowrie’s review (Books, 31 December), while the ‘Higgledy Piggledy’ form of comic verse may be of recent invention, the double dactylic is by no means a recently invented poetic form, as will have been apparent to those singing ‘O Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness’ at Epiphany recently.
John Rattray
London SW12
Missing the buses
From Terry Muzzell
Sir: On the Buses may well have been an ‘appalling, witless comedy’ (‘Celebrity squares’, 7 January), but did Rod Liddle ever watch it? The part of Blakey was played by Stephen Lewis, not Deryck Guyler; Blakey’s catchphrase was ‘I ’ate you, Butler’, not ‘I’ll ’ave you, Butler’; and the comedy was first broadcast in 1969, not the 1980s.
Terry Muzzell
London E1
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