Power to the locals
Leo McKinstry takes a dim view of the new localism (‘Local schmocal’, 22 October), but most of the new intake of Conservative MPs have signed up to the localists’ ‘Direct Democracy’ charter. We have done so because we believe Britain’s centre-right needs a strategic rethink. Why? First, because we recognise the government has failed to improve public services because it has tried to micro-manage them from Whitehall. Second, because we realise that no matter who wins elections, power will still reside with unelected and unaccountable quangos, judges and Eurocrats.
Only by making the public services downwardly accountable to the people they are meant to serve, as opposed to upwardly accountable to remote elites, will we live in a Britain where the police go after criminals, the health service treats patients properly and schools educate children.
Mr McKinstry is quite correct to identify just how difficult it will be to achieve localism. The true localist — as opposed to the lip-service localist — recognises that there will indeed be instances of failure; an inevitability in a pluralist system. There will naturally be cries of a ‘postcode lottery’. Yet under our centralised system this is precisely what we have. With localism, those let down by local public services could do something about it.
Jeremy Hunt
House of Commons, London SW1
As a district and county councillor, I see examples every day of encroachment by Whitehall on areas of policy which should be in the remit of local authorities. Earlier this month the government announced that it was axing public inquiries; the Licensing Act of 2003 virtually excludes both parish and district councillors from acting as consultees and from representing the communities who elected them; rejections of planning applications for new housing estates or developments such as wind turbine ‘farms’ are reversed by an inspector who assumes he knows better than the people directly affected; there is a continuing attempt to impose controls on the budgets of local councils so that less and less is left to be decided by those elected locally. As the ultimate humiliation, district councils are obliged to devote some of their resources to acting as collectors of a stealth tax which goes under the guise of ‘council tax’.
There is a suspicion among local councillors that the contempt with which the Labour government treats the present system of local government is a preliminary to its virtual abolition to make way for regional authorities. These authorities will create a greater distance between the electors and the elected and will be more easily manipulated not only by London but also by Brussels (their ever-increasing source of finance). More and more powers are being passed to regional authorities in parallel with the reduction in the powers of parish, district and county councils, and the White Paper on local government expected next year is likely to mark a further move in that direction.
Reacting to these developments is hardly ‘a pious fraud’, as Leo McKinstry claims it is. They are serious limitations on our democratic rights and must be vigorously opposed.
Ron Forrest
Wells, Somerset
Rachel’s view
Far from ‘promoting a hate-filled and glaringly one-sided view of Israel’ as Tom Gross claims (‘Dead Jews aren’t news’, 22 October), the play My Name is Rachel Corrie is in fact focused on the personal journey of a young American woman from precocious pre-teen to political activist shocked by the human suffering she witnesses.
Rachel Corrie’s writing demanded to be dramatised because of its immediacy and undeniably high quality. Tom Gross effectively criticises us for not singling out an Israeli civilian victim of the past five years, but one might just as well criticise us for not singling out one of the greater number of Palestinian civilian victims.
My Name is Rachel Corrie is in fact entirely made up of Corrie’s own words. Her two months in the Palestinian territories certainly gave her a negative view of Israel’s occupation of Gaza, but that appears to have been shared by a majority of Israelis, who supported this summer’s unilateral withdrawal.
Katharine Viner
Co-editor, ‘My Name is Rachel Corrie’,
Royal Court Theatre, London SW1
I would like to thank and congratulate you on publishing Tom Gross’s article. In a one-sided UK press it takes independent thought and courage to put forward another voice on Israel. I do not believe we help the cause of peace by singlemindedly promoting a hate-filled Palestinian agenda (and there are other Palestinian agendas far more peace-inclined), and frankly wonder at the motives of Britons who so unthinkingly support that agenda without ever even trying to understand the Israeli point of view.
Leila Segal
By email
Paying for homeopathy
Mary Wakefield seems diffident about her intelligent conclusion that there is no objective evidence that homeopathy is effective beyond its undoubted placebo effect (‘Is homeopathy really hogwash?’, 22 October). Perhaps this is understandable in the light of her family’s lifelong belief in its value. The real issue, as Mary Wakefield suggests, is whether the taxpayer should be paying for it, particularly when NHS treatment of well-proven efficacy remains in short supply. Sheer madness surely, despite proponents like Peter Hain and Prince Charles, neither of whom are known for their scientific rigour.
The notion that ‘free’ homeopathy or other forms of complementary medicine divert patients from the more expensive NHS treatments is as flawed as Aneurin Bevan’s belief that the NHS would cost less every year because it would get rid of a backlog of disease.
David L. Crosby
Cardiff
In her charming article on homeopathy, Mary Wakefield describes me as ‘Dr’ Treuherz. I am not a doctor. I am registered with the Society of Homeopaths, and therefore styled ‘RSHom’.
Francis Treuherz
London NW2
No need for men to marry
The only reason men ever married (‘The trouble with men’ by Molly Watson, 15 October) was so that they could have regular sex whenever they wanted it, enshrined within marriage as ‘conjugal rights’. In the past, sex outside marriage was not easy or simple to come by and involved risk and social disapproval. Children were a by-product of marriage, but men were not expected to care for them except financially, and certainly never changed a nappy. With the sexual revolution and the Pill, all has changed. Men can have unlimited sex with no responsibility and no danger of children. Why would they want or need to marry?
Nina Calder
Plymouth, Devon
Jaundiced view of Oz
Douglas Davis (Diary, 15 October) touched lightly on the antipodes before fleeing back to the wretched huddled masses of his beloved London, where his hint of a book about bonking would cause feeble tittering among the poor pale remnants of a once-proud empire. How the tables are turned! Supplicants come to plead for our troops to fight the battles and win the wars that the wretched northern governments have started but cannot finish. New Zealand’s Helen Clark, far from being Stalinesque, leads an unlikely and unruly coalition with the tact and determination that should be a model for Angela Merkel. Refugees from the stink and turmoil of Europe line up to be allowed to stay in our lovely lands, and not sent home to a life of misery and deprivation and insecurity. Poor Mr Davis must have been dazzled by the sun and confused by the richness of the antipodean societies.
Tony Hill
Bundanoon, New South Wales, Australia
Oz seems to have done a good snow job on Douglas Davis. I’d say he’s ready for
transportation to one of Sydney’s nastier inner suburbs. Redfern would be a good choice. If he should ever have the nerve to show his face in New Zealand again — perhaps disguised as an Australian spin bowler? — he’ll be dog tucker.
Morgan Jones
Queenstown, New Zealand
Hero to turncoat
I made a silly mistake in my column last week in calling Monty Woodhouse, the former Tory MP for Oxford, Monty Woodward. My brain may have been short-circuited by my mentioning a few lines earlier Shaun Woodward, the so-called ‘Tory Turncoat’, who is coming to live in Oxford. I am particularly sorry because Monty Woodhouse — soldier, writer, classicist and politician — is one of my heroes.
Stephen Glover
Oxford
Cooking for Dorothy
It was a delight to read Gary Dexter on The Recipe Book of the Mustard Club (Books, 15 October) and to see his praise for Dorothy L. Sayers. However, it was disappointing that no credit was given to her husband, Mac Fleming, who wrote the recipes under his professional name, ‘Gourmet’ — he is credited as such in the booklet together with the illustrator John Gilroy, who later drew the Guinness Toucan for which DLS wrote the rhyme. Several of the recipes are repeated in Mac Fleming’s Gourmet’s Book of Food and Drink. The Dorothy L. Sayers Society hopes to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the Mustard Club at one of its meetings in 2006.
Christopher Dean
Chairman, The Dorothy L. Sayers Society,
Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex
Not in the north
Mark Steyn is quite right that Wallace and Gromit does not accurately reflect modern northern England (Arts, 22 October). In the whole of the north of England there is probably not a single person who runs a business with their dog or turns into a giant rabbit at the full moon. Why would anyone want to watch something so obviously made up?
Helen Johns
London SE1
Chat-up lines
I take issue with Michael Heath when, in his diary, he repeats the old music-hall gag about eyes coming out at night.
I seem to recall in adolescence, when staring into the eyes of a girl with a robust sense of humour, we recited with a cod French accent, ‘Your lips, zey are like petals — bicycle pedals; your cheeks zey are like peaches — football pitches; your ears, zey are like flowers — cauliflowers; your eyes zey are like pools — cesspools; your teeth zey are like ze stars — zey come out at night.’
I’ve never been much good at chatting up girls.
David Turner
Much Wenlock, Shropshire
Wrong belfry
Paul Johnson (‘And Another Thing’, 22 October) reports that Maurice Bowra’s indecent satirical verses were recently published in the TLS. Not so. What appeared there was just one poem of 50, a taster for the book of the satires, New Bats in Old Belfries (edited by myself and Jennifer Holmes), recently published by Robert Dugdale.
Henry Hardy
Wolfson College, Oxford
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