Letters to the editor | 3 March 2007

Don’t blame the website

From Malcolm Gooderham

Sir: Your leading article of 24 February misses a fundamental point. Notably, the e-petition initiative has helped to breathe new life into the body politic, and has put No. 10 at the heart of key debates and in touch with millions of voters. The fact that ministers and officials at the Department of Transport were unprepared for such a response is also worth noting, but does not undermine the thinking behind the website.  Rather, it highlights a failure on behalf of the ministry adequately to manage — and pre-empt — such a public reaction. For MPs, or anyone else, to blame a website really misses the point.

Malcolm Gooderham
Political adviser to No. 10, 1995–97
London W11

Raised in the USSR

From Jana Edmunds

Sir: Your leading article ‘A nation of babysitters’ (17 February) hinted at a truth behind the problem faced by Britain in relation to childcare. I was a teenage mum, and became a single parent aged 22, living on benefit in the 1990s while bringing up two children.

Yet in spite of a crippling financial burden, an unsympathetic welfare state and unrelenting social prejudice, I raised my children with love, instilling in them at a young age a thirst for knowledge and a strong family bond. How did I do it? Or more pertinently, why am I different from the statistical norm?

The answered lies in culture. Britain is still suffering from the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ syndrome. I was brought up in the 1960s Soviet Union by two women, my mother and grandmother. They worked, procured scarce food and shared childcare responsibilities. This was done lovingly and willingly. Most children were brought up that way. The cultural norm in Soviet Russia was to love, idolise, cherish and educate one’s children in the finer cultural pursuits: literature, ballet, classical music, art — a blueprint I carried with me into my life as a single mother in England.