Calling time on legislation
From Christopher W. Robson
Sir: In your leading article ‘To govern is not to legislate’ (18 November), you quote the late Ralph Harris as arguing that there should be a department for repealing laws. May I suggest that the creation of new laws has now reached a pitch where it would be wise to introduce a rule that all legislation should automatically lapse after a prescribed period unless an express resolution by Parliament calls for its continuance?
Only in this way can the vast volume of legislation be controlled and the very important thrust of your article be delivered. Remember â” Ignorantia juris neminem excusat. Too much legislation makes a mockery of the citizen’s duty to know it all.
Christopher W. Robson
Richmond, North Yorkshire
Vote Ukip to leave the EU
From Robert McWhirter
Sir: Matthew Parris (Another voice, 18 November) quotes Yeats: ‘The worst [in politics] are full of passionate intensity’. He then goes on to imply that that refers to Ukip, whereas the Lib Dems, by contrast, are ‘moderate’. It was Lord Jenkins who once said [of the EU] that ‘You can’t be half pregnant. You must be either totally in, or totally out.’
Far from being ‘the worst’, therefore, Ukip is one of only two mainstream parties facing up to political reality. Further, we espouse low taxation, once core Tory doctrine. We will decline to stand against currently serving Better Off Out MPs (of whatever party). We have the only workable solution to sorting out the mess our fishermen are in, and regaining control of our borders â” repealing the Treaty of Rome.
The British public has, post-Maastricht, consistently shown a majority in favour of leaving the EU; the three main parties â” LibLabCon â” refuse to grant them any such thing. It was the Tories who signed the treaties of Rome, Maastricht, and the Single European Act. Labour signed Nice and Amsterdam. By all means label these as extreme, Mr Parris, but please don’t tar the Eurorealists with the same brush.
Floreat Britannia!
R.A. McWhirter
Frankfurt, Germany
Vidal statistics
From Paul Warwick
Sir: In his review of Gore Vidal’s Point to Point Navigation (Books, 18 November), Nicholas Haslam asks, ‘Who, in 1973, but Vidal was talking of a “world dying of overpopulation and the poisoning of the environment”?’ Well, quite a lot of people actually. Paul Ehrlich had written The Population Bomb in 1968, the same year that he established the Zero Population Growth organisation. Coincidentally, this was also the year that the Club of Rome was formed, whose The Limits of Growth (warning of environmental disaster) was published in 1972. Both books sold fairly well, I believe. Their subject matter was certainly widely discussed.
Rather than reading Mr Vidal writing about the 1970s, your reviewer might have been better advised to go back and read some of Mr Vidal’s essays from the 1970s (or 1980s and 1990s for that matter) and count how many times his predictions were wrong. I can assure you that it is an instructive and frequently hilarious exercise.
Paul Warwick
Ferny Hills, Queensland, Australia
Noblest of Romans
From John Jenkins
Sir: I cannot allow Paul Johnson’s assertions about the poverty of Latin literature to remain unanswered (And another thing, 11 November). It is true that Latin literature produced no one like Homer or Plato. Indeed the Greeks produced only one of each. But it produced Virgil, whom Dante certainly regarded highly (as do I, unlike Johnson). Virgil has influenced many subsequent authors from Milton to Philip Pullman. As for others, I seem to recall W.H. Auden once saying that in his old age he had turned to Horace. That is good testimony. Ovid is magnificent â” and the model of a poet for 1,500 years. The Tristia and Ex Ponto are, I think, the first poems of artistic resistance to power in the European tradition. True, Thucydides wrote of the tragedy of Athens, but Tacitus gives us the brutal reality of imperial Rome. Both work for me. Petronius and Apuleius produced far better proto-novels than the sentimental Greeks. And if Aristotle was the great systematiser of the ancient world, Aquinas was so for the high Middle Ages.
Incidentally, I doubt very much that St Paul quoted Cicero. Paul was a Greek-speaking Jew. He is unlikely to have been familiar with 1st-century BC Latin rhetoricians, even one as distinguished as Cicero. And he would by choice have spoken Greek or Aramaic.
John Jenkins
HM Consul General, Jerusalem, Israel
Hoodwinked
From Ian Rumfitt
Sir: The Warden of All Souls puts the best possible gloss on Dr John Hood’s plan to change the way Oxford University is governed (Letters, 18 November). But his argument comes down to this: the members of Congregation should surrender control of the University to a council dominated by outsiders because, if they do so, the University can hope to receive more money than it does at present. Normally, however, when people surrender valuable rights they receive in return some definite benefit, not just the hope of more jam tomorrow. Dr Hood has been a businessman. He cannot be surprised that many members of Congregation regard his proposal as a poor deal.
Ian Rumfitt
Professor of Philosophy
University of London, WC1
ABC of JSB
From Peter Smaill
Sir: I’m afraid J.S. Bach wouldn’t last long in court (Rod Liddle, 18 November) suing Procol Harum for, er, ‘adapting’ the ‘Air on a G String’ to become a ‘Whiter Shade of Pale’. That’s because he himself ripped off Vivaldi, copied Handel and even reset the popish ‘Stabat Mater’ by Pergolesi.
However, conscious of the need to fingerprint several significant works, his putatively final masterpiece, the ‘Art of Fugue’, is signed in German musical notation,
BACH. Less well known is that his very first cantata, BWV 150, has a BACH verbal acronymn in the final four lines. If it is accepted that there is a code in which B=1, A=2, C =3 and H=8, then a whole host of works are signed with the magical gematric 14, including the ‘Mass in B Minor’ and ‘St John Passion’, not to mention the 14 sharps in the penitential ‘Advent Chorale’, ‘Nun komm der Heiden Heiland’ (the latter chosen by Prince Charles as suitable for his marriage to the Duchess of Cornwall, by the way).
Peter Smaill
Borthwick, Midlothian
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