Society

Sir:  Sir James Dyson is right (Letters, 20 January). We need big farming; that is where our food comes from. But the elephant in the room is tax — inheritance tax and roll-over relief — which of course he conveniently skirts. Farming at this level needs subsidy precisely because land is too expensive for food production to give an economic return through income. And why is this? Because so much money chases land for tax reasons.  The massive distortion of the allocation of capital due to tax reliefs is one of the fundamental problems of the UK. The solution is not more tax, it is to reduce tax to a level

The latest challenge was to provide a poem about passports. While the news that British passports issued after October of next year will be navy blue rather than burgundy was heartily cheered in some quarters, others — like Nicola Sturgeon, who denounced it as ‘insular nonsense’ — weren’t so delighted. And others still wondered what all the fuss was about. The full spectrum of opinion was reflected in a small but punchy entry, and in the winning line-up. Commendations go to David Silverman’s ‘Jerusalem’-inspired verse, and to Frank Upton, Sylvia Fairley and Fiona Pitt-Kethley, who also shone. The winners printed below are rewarded with £25. Basil Ransome-Davies pockets the extra

This week, General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the General Staff, made it quite clear how he would like to fight the Russians should they invade Eastern Europe or start a war with NATO: We should identify Russian weaknesses and then manoeuvre asymmetrically against them. First and foremost, perhaps we should be in the business of building real institutional capacity in neighbouring states so that they have the strength and confidence to stand up to Russia and the internal resilience to withstand pressures designed to bring them down from within. Carter went on to say that we need to reduce our energy dependency on the East, better protect our critical

In the old days, the Financial Times didn’t do scoops. Indeed, it was so unkeen on being sensationalist, if it did happen to get a story it passed it on to some other paper, and then followed it up. So what, you ask, has come over Lionel Barber, editor of the FT, sending girls out on an undercover gig to discover sexist behaviour at the Presidents Club? Is it some late-life crisis? I mean, of all the editors in the trade, he, and the editor of the Economist, and obv this magazine, have least to worry about circulation, in that theirs are the papers people want to be seen reading.