Party’s over
Sir: My departure from Your Party, described as ‘disputed’ by Douglas Murray (‘Where was my invitation to Your Party?’, 6 December), was in truth rather mundane: I had naively assumed that a party born to challenge the narrowing horizons of British politics might permit more than one world view at a time. This proved to be a radical proposition.
I had signed up to build a broad, pluralistic church; what I encountered instead was a dogmatic project. The boundaries of acceptable opinion narrowed by the week, policed with a zeal that would make a Victorian temperance society blush. To suggest that segments of the working class might hold views formed by family, faith or local tradition was treated not as an insight, but as a form of contamination. It became clear that diversity of background was welcome, provided diversity of thought did not tag along.
Certain values held by many of my constituents – family, faith, cultural inheritance – were not merely unfashionable but morally inadmissible. To suggest that social conservatism might coexist with economic justice was treated as heresy. And when heresy fails to yield, there is always the modern political equivalent of holy water: accusations of bigotry. I was duly sprinkled.
In the end, the problem was not disagreement but its prohibition. A movement that cannot tolerate internal plurality will not persuade a divided country. It will simply rehearse its purity rituals while the far right feasts on voters the left has forgotten how to speak to.
I wish Your Party well.
Adnan Hussain, MP
Blackburn
Sunny side up
Sir: Matt Ridley is right that the public is increasingly weary of climate alarmism (‘Climate climbdown’, 6 December). Unfortunately, this excessive focus on climate has become firmly entrenched in many governments and international institutions. While voters can more easily force their elected governments to become more climate realist, we must also push the global institutions that are now diverting enormous sums away from far more effective ways to help the world’s poor.
Multilateral development banks, funded largely by wealthy nations like the UK, now congratulate themselves for channelling vast amounts into ‘climate finance’. Last year alone they poured $59 billion into cutting emissions in poorer countries. This is despite the fact that poor countries are clearly telling us this is nowhere near their top priority. An Afrobarometer survey across 39 nations in Africa found climate change ranked almost at the bottom, 31 of 34 priorities. When families face hunger, poor schooling and children dying from curable diseases, their concerns do not centre on temperature change by the century’s end.
This climate spending forces poorer countries to adopt costlier and less reliable green energy, slowing their escape from poverty while delivering negligible climate benefits in 2100. And because much of it is diverted directly from development budgets, it leaves less for what would make a real difference today: tackling tuberculosis, improving maternal and child health and boosting education – interventions that can generate huge long-term gains.
Ridley is right about climate fatigue. We must spend smarter, not divert precious aid to satisfy virtue-signalling, rich world climate preferences.
Bjorn Lomborg, president of Copenhagen Consensus and visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution
Copenhagen
Paw relations
Sir: Rachel Johnson’s poignant article (‘Best Life’, 6 December) is a reminder of the often overlooked importance of dogs in our lives and memories. I recently came across a series of photographs from an unusual family outing from more than 40 years ago. There’s my older brother, perhaps eight or nine, and our mother and our golden retriever, a failed gun dog named Tessa, along with our geriatric cocker spaniel Crusty, both on the lead; there’s my late father with his then girlfriend (it was a very modern family) and his dog, a spirited border collie named Laddie, off the lead. As it happens I have no memory of the day in question, except for the faintest glimmer over the texture of the hat I wear in the pictures and my brother’s shirt, oddly. But I’ll never forget playing with Laddie, whom I got to know over the years; those licks on the face that dogs give children and are utterly disgusting to adults, nor my father’s often exasperated voice as Laddie tore this way and that, completely ignoring him, just as my own dog does to me now.
Alec Marsh
Manningtree, Essex
Wings of fortune
Sir: Reading William Atkinson’s Notes on Magpies (29 November) reassured me that I am not alone in my fastidious approach to magpie counting or indeed interpretation of numbers witnessed and impact on the fortunes of the day ahead.
To add to muffled greetings in public places, I chanced upon further advice in a handy little volume The Red Fortune Book (1924): if a single magpie flies from left to right, cross your fingers three times to neutralise the bad luck; if it flies from right to left – a happy day ahead.
I hope this will be a helpful addition to public space activities with regard to magpie presence.
Lucy Baines
Oakham, Rutland
Take two
Sir: Madeline Grant (‘Indecent proposal’, 29 November) may be right that wedlock has become unfashionable, but it has been so before. It is more than 140 years since R.L. Stevenson wrote: ‘The fact is, we are much more afraid of life than our ancestors, and cannot find it in our hearts either to marry or not to marry. Marriage is terrifying, but so is a cold and forlorn old age.’
Michael Upton
Edinburgh
King of the sea
Sir: David Profumo’s review of Rigby’s Encyclopedia of the Herring questioned the book’s confident – and correct – description of the herring as ‘King of Fishes’ (Books, 6 December). (As a fisherman remarked to me, what can you expect of an angler?)If anything, this title is too humble: it is the ‘Emperor of Fishes’ in Dr Neucratz’s 1654 treatise De Harengo.
But the herring is accustomed to falls in status: once the centrepiece of banquets, it became a poor man’s food – my grandmother once described someone’s house as ‘all curtains and kippers’, as if the only reason to eat the crown prince of breakfasts was that you’d blown your money on soft furnishings. Any book that tries to restore the crown to the herring deserves a hearing – and certainly not the treasonous assertion that salmon, the chicken of the sea, is a worthy claimant.
Andrew Watts
Newlyn, Cornwall
Steps to heaven
Sir: Melanie McDonagh (Books, 29 November) remarks on the unusual yet powerful illustrator-writer combination of Maurice Sendak and Stephen King, bridging the children’s/adult literature divide. I venture another: illustrator Edward Ardizzone and writer John Buchan.
One evening when I was a boy, my bedtime story was the first chapter of Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps in an edition illustrated by Ardizzone. Spoiler alert: a murder occurs. As the book was being shut, I saw Ardizzone’s drawing of the discovery of the body and was rapt. Once my parents were safely downstairs, I turned on my bedside lamp and continued reading excitedly. The Thirty-Nine Steps remains my favourite work of fiction and I treasure that edition.
George Richards
Cairo, Egypt
Nice work
Sir: Rory Sutherland’s piece on university degrees was most illuminating (The Wiki Man, 29 November). Tony Blair did great harm to young people by giving them unrealistic expectations that a degree in needlework from Bognor Regis university would lead to amazing careers not open to lesser mortals like me.
I left school in 1962 with six GCE O-levels. After a time in the army I was at a loss as to what to do, believing nobody would be interested. A friend suggested stockbroking and Cazenove. I knew nothing about the City but I took a deep breath and wrote. I had a pretty short interview at the end of which I was asked to join the firm. I thought those days were over but the Ogilvy ‘non-graduate’ recruitment scheme may well lead the way for other companies to give employment opportunities to young people and show them that there could be excellent prospects without being saddled with enormous debt and a useless degree. I was fortunate in that very few young people went to university in those days.
Jocelyn Penn-Bull
Hunton, Hampshire
Great minds
Sir: When I heard of the retirement of Robin Oakley (The Turf, 8 November), and having myself spent 35 years scratching a living on the turf, I put my thinking cap on for a replacement. Only temporarily though, as Charlie Brooks immediately sprang to mind. Retired jockey, retired trainer, part-time journalist, intimate knowledge of current fragile state of our sport, pricker of political pomposity, raconteur and bon viveur: voilà! Opening the Speccie a week later – pre-empted! You’ve got the man.
Tim Bulwer Long
Heydon, Norfolk
Hack history
Sir: The earliest hacks – the actuarii who wrote of all the gossip and scandal, as well as more important matters, in Ancient Rome’s newspaper, as described by Peter Jones (Ancient and Modern, 29 November) were given more latitude by the Caesars than were their descendants by later emperors and commanders of armies. Napoleon suppressed much of the press, except for Le Moniteur universel, the content of which he supervised with a gimlet eye. General Sherman, while marching through Georgia, would gladly have shot all journalists, whom he regarded as spies, saying: ‘If I killed them all there would be news from Hell before breakfast.’
Tom Stubbs
Surbiton, Surrey
First among equals?
Sir: I have just opened my copy of The Spectator and read that Jessica Mitford is the only Mitford worth taking seriously (Books, 29 November). This is ridiculous. Nancy Mitford wrote a number of very amusing novels which are in my opinion not far below Jane Austen. The contribution of Deborah, the late Duchess of Devonshire, to the Chatsworth estate is beyond words and she is rightly and widely acclaimed for it.
Nicholas Davie-Thornhill
Stanton in Peak, Derbyshire
Peasants’ revolt
Sir: It used to be said that only cabinet ministers wield real power, with constituency MPs merely giving them the numbers to get business through the Commons. When Labour returned to power, this changed. As Tim Shipman makes clear (‘Reeves’s road to ruin’, 29 November), effective political power now lies with rank-and-file Labour MPs, and not with a dithering and weakly led cabinet. These MPs appear utterly uninterested in legislation which would improve Britain’s global competitiveness, but highly enthusiastic about anything likely to further a Corbynist agenda. Unworldly, economically naive and ideologically driven, they now have their moment. They seem set to cause material damage to the UK until at least the next general election.
Jeff Green
Bath
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