Letters

After the bombs Words of condemnation are not enough. Here are a couple of suggestions about how to act after the bombings of last week. First, we must fight back by stepping up the war in Iraq. If the insurgents win, it will embolden terrorists throughout the Middle East, since it will demonstrate that the

The war will be won It is nonsense to suggest, as Michael Wolff tried last week (‘The nation wobbles’, 2 July), that the war in Iraq is almost lost. Terrorists are certainly doing their best to destroy the hopes of Iraq. But the resistance to them is strong. Mr Wolff dismisses the fact that eight

Second-hand smoke Rod Liddle makes a living out of being controversial, but to do so with effect he should also be accurate with his facts (‘My right to cough up blood’, 25 June). His article suggests that people who complain about passive smoking are being melodramatic. But there is an absolute proven link between second-hand

Sixth sense Anthony Seldon is quite right about exams (‘More exams, less education’, 18 June). A-levels since 2000 have encouraged hoop-jumping, no more so than in his own subject, history. But he is wrong to be so resigned about AS-levels; contrary to assumptions made by leaders in the overwhelming majority of schools, there is no

Let them smoke dope Eric Ellis is way way off in his piece (‘The whingers of Oz’, 11 June). Why are the Australians angry? I would think it’s because the 20-year sentence passed on Schapelle Corby for smuggling marijuana is savage. No doubt Eric Ellis has never smoked any marijuana, but it is a harmless

Good value Ross Clark says that NHS Trusts are ‘stuffed with local worthies drawing generous salaries and pensions’. I object. Like all other non-executive directors of NHS Trusts, I received last year just over £6,500, and no pension whatever, for my part-time work (‘The worst of both worlds’, 4 June). As a daily rate this

ID charade You seem to believe that Conservatives have spent the last four years ‘standing up for local and national democracy, and against the tendency of the government to centralise power’ (Leading article, 28 May). But thanks to the efforts of both main parties there is little now left of local government to defend. The

More prisoners, less crime Douglas Hurd pointed out that the prison population increased from 44,000 in the 1980s to over 75,000 today (‘Does prison really work?’, 14 May). If ‘“prison works” in reducing crime,’ he says, ‘then obviously a sensational increase in the number of prisoners should produce a sensational reduction in crime. But it

Tories must be less strident Simon Heffer tells us that what the Conservative party now needs, above all, is ‘stability’ (‘The way ahead for Conservatives’, 7 May). But it cannot have escaped his notice that the level of success we have enjoyed in the last decade has been all too ‘stable’, and that this is

Made in Britain ‘Today, the Mother of Parliaments has lost half its power, with Brussels making half of British laws,’ says Anthony Browne (‘Parliament of eunuchs’, 30 April). My Conservative opponent in Rotherham goes further. His election address says that 70 per cent of UK law is now made in Brussels. The truth is more

China is still a tyranny As usual Mark Steyn makes some good points, this time in his piece on globalisation (‘The sovereign individual’, 16 April). But he is mistaken in his praise of China, ‘the dynamic, advanced, first-world economy’. The Telegraph, for which Mr Steyn also writes, summed up China’s rulers in its leader of

A Liddle simplistic I read Rod Liddle’s article (‘A question of breeding’, 12 March) with dismay. It appears that my son has autism because I found my husband’s company congenial and we married and had a child. As an explanation for a complex neurological disorder this seems slightly simplistic. In fact it seems only just

ADHD is an illness I am the mother of a daughter who has Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). For the past 23 years I have protected her and defended myself against the sort of opinionated, didactic comments made on this disorder by people such as your writer Leo McKinstry (‘Not ill — just naughty’, 26

Lay off the Tory tabloids Douglas Hurd advises us to ignore the campaigns of the popular press — and, by implication, the people whose concerns they ably articulate (‘Time to fight back’, 26 February). Hurd has spent his professional patrician lifetime disdaining the opinions of ordinary people. That is why the party he and his

Miller’s genius Attention must be paid’ to Arthur Miller (Mark Steyn, ‘Death of a salesman’, 19 February) quite simply because he was the greatest dramatist of our lifetime. Briefly to answer Steyn, it was hardly Miller’s fault that his biographer failed to locate Norwich accurately; and having survived the McCarthy witch-hunt, it seems a little

RSPCA isn’t ‘anti-pets’ Jeremy Clarke’s article (‘Animals don’t have human rights’, 22 January) contains so many inaccuracies that it is virtually a fact-free zone. It is absurd to suggest that the RSPCA has an ‘anti-pet agenda’. Caring for unwanted pet animals and re-homing them as pets is the principal work of the RSPCA’s 52 animal

Slobs and snobs Simon Heffer’s article (‘The slob culture’, 15 January) identifies a long-standing decline. I live in Bangkok, Thailand, and on Christmas Eve I was in the lobby of a five-star hotel where milling around were representatives from the Caucasian world dressed in subfuscous clothing, ancient jeans and T-shirts — the uniform of the