Spectator letters: Wind and bias, and the Scots at war

Caution over wind

Sir: While the broadcast media have assailed their audiences with simplistic yet blanket coverage of the floods crisis, it behoves Christopher Booker to provide a long overdue critical perspective of the Environmental Agency (‘Sunk!’, 15 February). The two main tenets of his article have been ignored by most, if not all, other journalists.

With something approaching delicious irony we are then treated in the same issue to a self-serving missive from the Renewables UK boxwallah Jennifer Weber (Letters, 15 February). Replete (as one would expect from an organisation that previously went under the name British Wind Energy Association) with dismissive assertions and bogus statistics, Weber’s letter exemplifies the absolute intolerance that green ideologues show to any legitimate criticism that runs counter to their orthodoxy.

To say that ‘two thirds of the public support the deployment of wind energy’ is risible, when study after study has demonstrated the financial and practical unsuitability of such alternative sources of energy. It was no surprise that those bastions of impartiality the BBC and the RSPB were name-checked as witnesses to support her assertions.
Alexander McKibbin
Ringwood, Hants

Scots in the Great War

Sir: Charles Moore states in his Notes (8 February) that ‘by the end of the Great War, 1,157 Etonians had died, the largest number lost by any school in the British Empire’. Raasay lies between Skye and Wester Ross; the 1891 census gives 489 inhabitants, diminished to 377 by 1931. When I visited the island a few years ago I noted that, of 26 men who went to the Great War, only eight returned. I am well aware that members of the upper class died disproportionately in the Great War and do not wish to get into arguments as to whether Mr Moore is talking about absolute or relative numbers for any particular school.