13 November 2014 Blinds

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left knee, but I manage to get round the park. A Very busy day Chesmist Co op, District nurse Blinds man

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down rabbit for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Raleigh Trevelyan – obituary

Raleigh Trevelyan was an author and historian who wrote an acclaimed biography of his kinsman Sir Walter Raleigh

The author and historian Raleigh Trevelyan

6:51PM GMT 11 Nov 2014

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Raleigh Trevelyan, who has died aged 91, was descended from two eminent West Country families, whose stories he drew on to become a well-known historian.

Trevelyan claimed only a “tenuous family connection” to Sir Walter Raleigh, after whom he was named. But from the early 1990s he spent 10 years retracing the Elizabethan adventurer’s footsteps for an acclaimed biography, published in 2002. Raleigh had been beheaded for treason in 1618, but not before he had founded the first English settlement in the New World; introduced potatoes to Ireland and tobacco to England; and led England’s defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Some historians had claimed that Raleigh had exaggerated, even lied about, the abundance of riches in the New World in the hope of securing financial backing. But Trevelyan’s first-hand observations frequently confirmed his relative’s accounts of American landscape, wildlife and native practices. Most crucial to Raleigh’s reputation was his verification of both silver workings and gold deposits close to where Raleigh claimed they were in Guiana.

Trevelyan had been born in India into a family whose connection with the country stretched back to the 18th century. Ten relatives had been killed in the massacre of Cawnpore in 1858 and his ancestors included C E Trevelyan, founder of the British Civil Service and later governor of Madras who, with his brother-in-law, Lord Macaulay, was responsible for the decision to base the Indian educational system on instruction in English. Other relatives included the historian G M Trevelyan and the poet R C Trevelyan.

In The Golden Oriole (1987) Trevelyan retraced his family’s presence in India, combining his own travels with family photographs, memoirs and interviews, to provide a compelling memoir of the British in India, and a journey into his own past.

Trevelyan became particularly known as a writer about Italy, a country which he came to love in the post-war years, but which he had first encountered under the grimmest of circumstances in March 1944 when, as a 20-year-old officer who had never before seen action, he and his battalion were sent as reinforcements to the beachhead at Anzio.

The resulting memoir, The Fortress, based on the diaries he kept at the time and published in 1956, was a vivid and harrowing account of one of the most brutal actions of the Second World War, in which Trevelyan himself earned a mention in despatches.

^{Raleigh Trevelyan}

His account was notable not only for its quirky detail – the inflated bodies of white oxen that had wandered on to a minefield, the nightingales that sang through the worst of the carnage – but also for his painfully honest account of how the individual responds to the terror of being under fire, an experience that weighed on him so heavily that, despite his love of Italy, he avoided going back to Anzio for many years.

In 1968 he did return and subsequently wrote an article for The Observer in which he described how the war had scarred him psychologically. He recalled, for example, how, in an act of bravado born out of fear of being thought afraid, he had randomly shot and killed a German soldier he had spotted 50 yards from the Allied position, combing his hair “as if he were a cat being stroked”. “Now I look back on the incident I realise I did it to show off in front of the men – and I was very aware afterwards that they had admired me for it,” he wrote. But when a friend greeted him with the words: “Hello, Killer, you’re in your element at last,” in a flash, Trevelyan recalled, “all my defences had been demolished”.

On May 23 1944, during the breakout from Anzio, the Green Howards battalion to which he was attached lost 230 men, some of whose deaths he blamed on himself. “Instead of plunging into the scrub and thus taking German machine-gun posts from the rear, in accordance with the basic rules drummed into me at Octu, I took a section of men along the outside perimeter,” he wrote. “A Spandau opened up… Everyone… in the section had been hit, either killed or badly wounded… The memory of what I had done to Corporal Peter, Lance Corporal Atkinson and the others stayed raw and ragged on my conscience for years.”

After the war Trevelyan had been goaded to write bitter articles about the generals and politicians who had planned the beachhead landings: “The men in my platoon had every reason to believe – as I did – that their leaders… were working to some sort of coordinated plan… I now know that we were all utterly mistaken.” But after revisiting the scene in 1968, he was inclined to be more charitable. “I, too, had done stupid, disastrous, dreadful things at Anzio. I had been frightened, exhausted, vain.” His return “was an exorcism. I was free of Anzio for ever”.

Walter Raleigh Trevelyan was born on July 6 1923 at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands, where his father was in charge of the garrison. He was six when his family and nanny trekked for three weeks on horseback to Gilgit, near the North West Frontier, the mountainous centre court of the “Great Game”, where hill rajas claimed descent from Alexander the Great, golden orioles sang and the air was thick with rumours of spies. There were just 19 Britons there to rule an area the size of Wales.

His two idyllic years in Gilgit came to an end when he was sent back to boarding school in England at the age of eight, after which he stayed with relatives and family friends during the holidays and rarely saw his parents. After Winchester, he began his wartime service in the Rifle Brigade and was sent first to Algiers, then, on attachment to the Green Howards, to Anzio.

Towards the end of 1944, back with the Rifle Brigade, Trevelyan got a job in the military mission in Rome, where he remained for two years, falling in love with central Italy. Later, with the help of German and Italian friends, he wrote Rome ’44: The Battle for the Eternal City (1981), which provided a vivid account of what it had been like for soldiers and civilians on the other side of the conflict too.

Back in England, he was employed first in a merchant bank, then at the publishers Collins. While continuing to occupy senior positions in various publishing houses, he embarked on his career as a writer.

A Hermit Disclosed (1960) was a sympathetic portrait of a recluse called Jimmy Manson who lived for half his life as a hermit at Great Canfield, Essex, from 1900 until his death in 1942, and whose diaries Trevelyan had found in an attic. His love of Italy was reflected in Princes under the Volcano (1972), an account of the Sicilian “Marsala” dynasty established by the Yorkshire businessman Benjamin Ingham, and The Shadow of Vesuvius (1976), an account of the discovery of the remains of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century and the effect that discovery had on artistic taste. A Pre-Raphaelite Circle (1978) was an accessible study of the artistic movement, while Grand Dukes and Diamonds (1991) told the story of the Wernhers of Luton Hoo.

A dapper, somewhat diffident man, Raleigh Trevelyan shared his later years with Raul Balin, a Spaniard whose extrovert volubility complemented his companion’s self effacing reticence. At their homes in Shepherd Market, London, and in Cornwall they entertained generously until Balin’s death in 2004.

Raleigh Trevelyan, born July 6 1923, died October 23 2014

Guardian:

Weekly letters illustration The US mission is unclear Photograph: Gillian Blease

US mission is unclear

Simon Jenkins’s article, Bombing Isis fails war’s key imperative (17 October), was a welcome critical comment on this, the latest phase in the Middle East war. However, I was perplexed by the apparent ambiguity he presented: the war “should be contained regionally” … “they may have to rampage themselves to exhaustion”, and war’s critical imperative, “that it be fought all out and ended quickly”.

Jenkins does not question the humanitarian rationale for the intervention, but US talk of saving Yazidis and Kurds quickly turned to disabling and destroying Isis, first in Iraq, and, then, in Syria.

The savagery of Isis and the need for humanitarian assistance are not in doubt, but the question that must surely be asked is what makes this humanitarian crisis worse than many others, and is Isis more brutal than the militias and jihadis on both sides of the Shia-Sunni divide?

In early August when the US progressed from air surveillance to bombing, when the vital Mosul dam and northern Iraqi oil fields were under threat, Barack Obama was broadcast on Australian public radio saying US national interests must be protected. He referred specifically to the many US personnel in Baghdad and those working in the oil industry in northern Iraq. Whether there is a wider goal to defeat Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad and weaken Iranian support of Iraq, it is difficult to know. However, it is clear enough that oil and armaments remain very much part of the picture.

Wherever the US marches, Australia will be sure to follow regardless of whatever their latest mission is really about, and without one question being raised.
Ally Fricker
Brady Creek, South Australia

Economic fairytales

Ha-Joon Chang does himself and his readers no favours by his partial explanation of the realities of the “Labour deficit” (24 October). He relates the balanced budget picture, 1997-2002, and notes that a 3.2% of GDP deficit, 2003-2007, was not connected to welfare spending. So what was it connected to? Chang does not tell us.

The answer that comes immediately to mind are the Bush-Blair wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is interesting in the context of the article by what follows – the deficit ballooned to 10.7% of GDP, 2009-2010. In other words, it was cheaper in terms of deficit spending, by 3.2% to 7.5%, to fight two wars than it was to bail out the financial sector that destroyed the economy in 2007. And the coalition government, like all governments around the world, still refuses to follow up that bailout with a regulatory environment that will prevent it from happening again or to prevent bankers from creating a financial system in which they actually benefit from economic distress, increasing their share of the total wealth enormously while the rest of us stagnate or lose ground.

That’s the real fairytale behind Tory claims of recovery. They are trying to convince us that averages that are being driven up by the disproportionate success of the very rich are improving the lives of the rest of us. They aren’t, and one just has to pay attention to personal pay packets and debt levels to realise it. It’s long past time to give up on fairytales and start understanding the real world. Then consign the purveyors of those fairytales to the opposition.
Keith Stotyn
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Is this the anthropocene?

At a climate change conference in 2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen was so devastated by the evidence of widespread destructive influence of humans on the Earth’s environment that he coined the word anthropocene to describe a new epoch, triggered by James Watt’s invention of the coal-fired steam engine in 1754, followed over the ensuing two centuries by the prodigious combustion of ancient solar capital stored in fossil fuels, with consequent unprecedented release of greenhouse gases and parallel global warming.

The validity of Crutzen’s neologism is being examined at a predictably glacial rate by a commission, chaired by a geologist (Will humans define Earth’s next epoch?, 31 October). On the other hand, damage to the biosphere is proceeding at breakneck speed.

A sustainable future will depend on leaving ancient polluting non-renewable fossilised solar capital underground where it was formed, while adapting to using clean, endlessly renewable solar currency, whose capture and widespread application is now economically competitive with fossil fuels.

The main obstacles to progress are not scientific, but political and vested interests in fossil fuels. The chief economist of the International Energy Agency at its annual conference in 2013 declared that fossil-fuel subsidies are public enemy number one to sustainable energy development. Australia, which is hosting the G20 summit this month, has excluded any segment on climate change for discussion.
Bryan Furnass
Canberra, Australia

• For the International Commission on Stratigraphy, it is surely a worthwhile task to consider whether anthropocene is an appropriate term for the time period we live in. However, the question implies that humans will continue to shape this planet’s fortunes for a very long time to come. This seems to me to be a bold assumption, given that our species is obviously engaged in an all-out global war against the natural foundations of our very existence.
Egbert von Steuber
Lingen, Germany

It’s an Orwellian world

I’m surprised that George Monbiot didn’t mention George Orwell in his excellent opinion piece on the manipulative use of language by “the small number of people” who have “captured public life” in the modern world (31 October). Surprised because what he says about the euphemistic language currently used by the powers-that-be in our society corresponds very closely to the use of Newspeak by the Big Brother state in the terrifying setting of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Whereas in the book people aren’t killed or assassinated but instead rendered “unpersons”, we now talk of “kinetic activity” (shooting and bombing) as a means of killing and maiming people.

In Orwell’s Big Brother state, language is reduced to its most prosaic, euphemistic essentials as a way of greatly limiting the capacity of ordinary citizens to think and act on dissenting thoughts, and corresponds to what is effectively the kind of mind control complained of by Monbiot

So, when it comes to language use (and in other respects) it’s an Orwellian world. In Newspeak: it is “doubleplusgood” that Monbiot has drawn our attention to the problem, and “doubleplusungood” that there seems to be very little we can do about it.
Terry Hewton
Adelaide, South Australia

Menopause and identity

To construe menopause primarily as a medical issue diminishes women (Left in the dark about menopause, 24 October). Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) is a reductionist answer to an intricate question. Does HRT simply assuage unnecessary suffering, or does it turn us into industrially mandated ageing Barbie dolls?

One of the problems is the word itself: menopause only encompasses ending, yet it’s a threshold as transformative as adolescence or childbirth. It’s a dying to one cycle in order to be reborn into the next, a becoming pregnant – at last – with one’s self. How do we re-constellate when sexuality is no longer the primary driver; when children – and the identity, community, belonging and purpose they embody – have left home; when employment falls away; when sexism is compounded by ageism?

Fifteen years ago, beset by hot flashes brutal as seizures, rabid anxiety and panic attacks, insomnia and exhaustion, I couldn’t have conceived of the woman who would eventually crawl out of that bruising chrysalis. Since I no longer have a positive cultural definition, I’m free to create my own, acutely aware that this is an opportunity granted neither to my foremothers nor to most of my living sisters.

Once I mourned the loss of hormonal ebb and flow; now I celebrate the equilibrium that’s replaced it. Tiredness hones and focuses my choices, as does mortality; in the light of death, what truly matters?

The in-loveness of becoming a grandmother commits me fiercely to the long view: to bequeathing to all the children of all species a future grounded in biospheric health and justice. The further I travel, the more fecund the path becomes.
Annie March
West Hobart, Tasmania, Australia

• I appreciated your piece about menopause, which calls attention to the pathetic lack of understanding in the conventional medical world regarding the physiology of menopausal women. I am a primary care physician whose principal clientele is menopausal women.

The Women’s Health Initiative Study was poorly designed and executed and misinterpretation of the results continue to promulgate. The severe hot flashes and insomnia common in these patients can be debilitating. But copious data delineates the risks of hormone depletion in menopausal women: sudden cardiac death, cognitive impairment, cancer, osteoporosis. Copious data also points to the safe and life saving solution – bio-identical hormone replacement.

It’s not rocket science. Physicians simply need to decide that providing life-saving treatment to menopausal women is important enough to take a few hours to educate themselves, rather than forcing the dangerous half-measures of antidepressants and prescription sleep meds on this very vulnerable population.
Joanne M Hillary
Spokane, Washington, US

Briefly

• Entry into a highly capital-intensive business like farming has always been difficult (Britain’s farmers keep their faith in the land, 24 October). While studying agriculture in the 60s we learned that the three routes of entry were patrimony, matrimony and parsimony. For me, patrimony was out, I couldn’t find a farmer’s daughter to marry and by the time parsimony would have worked the only plot of land I would need would be in the local churchyard.

So like many other young Britons over the centuries I emigrated to what were once called “the Colonies”.
Chris Kennedy
Stella, Ontario, Canada

• The final sentence in the piece on MI5’s surveillance of British historians (31 October), that Eric Hobsbawm was considered unsuitable for the Intelligence Corps, tells reams about the paranoia of post-war Britain. Numbers of social history authors and academics still owe so much to a well-thumbed copy of the Penguin edition of his Industry and Empire.
E Slack
L’Isle Jourdain, France

• With regard to Britain in Europe, David Cameron tells us he wants to do “what’s right for Britain” (24 October). That’s “Right” with a capital “R”, of course.
Peter Hoare
Ashwicken, UK

Queen Elizabeth at the 2014 Remembrance Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph in London Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Yes, it was poignant that the two anniversaries fell on Sunday, the one containing the seeds of what led indirectly to the other (A pause to recall an age of extremes, 10 November). But a third anniversary seems to have been forgotten, though the mass attacks on people and property because of race seems of the three the most likely to recur. It was of course Kristallnacht, when part of a nation were told that all their problems were caused by a minority group and stood by or joined in while Jewish homes, schools and hospitals were destroyed, over 1,000 synagogues were burned, 30,000 people put into concentration camps and many massacred that night alone. I saw no mention of it in the Guardian. Not much here in Germany either.
Brian Smith
Berlin, Germany

• Jonathan Freedland recalls 9 November 1989, and that Berlin’s “wall held no more”. There is another, newer wall, that was conceived in 1991 and separates Palestinian Arabs from Israeli Jews in the territory that Israel has forcibly seized from the Arabs. That wall is not coming down. It is still being built, with American and European money, intruding into Palestinian Arab space and destroying the Arabs’ lives, future and freedom. Ed Miliband knows this, and it is to his credit that he has had the courage to affirm his views of the modern state of Israel, and its works, even at the cost of Zionist funders. I realise I was right to vote for him, and will continue to do so.
Tim Llewellyn
London

• In the midst of rejoicing at the coming down of the Berlin Wall, let us still remember – and hang our heads in shame – that Walls are still erected, still impenetrable, in the Middle East, North Africa, Mexico, Korea … and Northern Ireland.
Godfrey Holmes
Withernsea, East Riding of Yorkshire

• There are two pictures on the front of Monday’s Guardian. One shows a woman with bare hands poking a living flower into a crack in a wall which a generation ago literally divided a nation. The other shows an older woman with gloved hands laying a wreath of artificial flowers on a monument that is all meaning and no purpose. What does either picture mean? The byword is “lest we forget”, but the truth is, no one alive now can personally remember a single one of the millions of young men who were persuaded to kill each other a century ago. So what are we pretending to remember? And wouldn’t the money spent on this collective contrivance be better spent helping still-living soldiers crippled in more recent wars?
John Bird
London

• Great that the government has given some war widows their pensions for life (Military widows will be allowed to remarry with pensions intact, theguardian.com, 8 November), but what about those of us who remarried? It appears that my first husband’s life is still worth less than that of other personnel whose death is attributable to their service. Is the government seriously proposing that we all take advantage of the current regulations and divorce our current partners, get our war widow pensions reinstated, as we are legally entitled to do, and then remarry our former husbands?

If that is the case then my husband and I are perfectly prepared to do so and invite everyone to our second wedding on 2 April 2015, which should be our 10th wedding anniversary.

Come on, prime minister, make it real equality for all war widows, not just a headline-grabbing opportunity on the eve of Remembrance Sunday.
Angela Haworth
Belper, Derbyshire

• As we contemplate the sea of poppies around the Tower of London, one for each member of the British armed forces who was killed in the first world war, it is salutary to remember that as many, if not slightly more, Rwandans were killed in the genocide of 1994 – in 100 days.
Peter Greaves
London

• Simon Lovelace suggests “a serious, workable and poignant solution” to the quandary felt in some quarters regarding the removal of the poppy installation (Letters, 8 November). I have one too, and it might allow for politicians of all stripes to display their “deep and honest care for the people of Britain” as espoused by Ian Flintoff (Letters, 8 November). I suggest that before the poppies are removed, and in the presence of the three “main party” leaders, the RAF should fly over the installation and drop the recently shredded expenses claims of parliamentarians together with a shredded copy of the provisions of habeas corpus. I’ve not yet been to the Tower. I might do if this suggestion were adopted. Meanwhile, I will proudly cast my vote for Ukip next May, as I have done for the past 10 years, and continue to be a subscriber to the Guardian.
Roger Gough
Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire

• The subtitles for the BBC Remembrance Sunday broadcast referred to “the women’s exhilarate your force association”. Is that what my mother was doing when she was in the WAAF?
Jennifer Henley
London

• In all the memorials, poppies etc, has anyone noticed any references to German or French (let alone Russian and Austrian) casualties in the first world war, all greater than British, even when those include the empire? Has the BBC considered, for instance, broadcasting All Quiet on the Western Front? At times it has all seemed to reflect the rise of Ukip.
Susan Reynolds
London

• On Remembrance Sunday the politicians who step forward one by one to lay wreaths on behalf of political parties should follow the example of the numerous high commissioners and the service chiefs, and consider uniting to lay their wreaths in a group. We don’t really need to gaze on our political leaders as individuals as the nation unites to pay tribute to those who have fought, died or suffered injury while serving our country.
Jane Barder
London

• Three pages on Remembrance Sunday’s official commemorations of “those who have fallen in a century of conflicts”, yet not a hint of the irony – not to mention the hypocrisy – of that phrase when it began as the “war to end all wars”. Nor a word about the alternative “white poppy for peace” events, eg the Veterans for Peace march under the banner “Never again”, followed by the laying of a white poppy wreath; Michael Morpurgo’s Movement for the Abolition of War lecture at the Imperial War Museum, on what he learned about the first world war that made him write his book War Horse; local events in Oxford, Liverpool, Halifax, Bromley, to name a few.

Then we have General Sir Nick Houghton, chief of the defence staff, blustering about “fixing his bayonet” to retain the ability to send more young men and women to kill and risk being be killed (Spending cuts: Defence chief pledges to fight on, 10 November. Apropos of which, and his and Gove’s comments on Oh! What a Lovely War, I forget which general it was who said “we mustn’t be squeamish about casualties”, but it could probably have been any of them. It was not so much lions led by donkeys, as “leaders” who had a callous disregard for the lives of their men in the pursuit of gaining a few yards of mud.
Frank Jackson
Former co-chair, World Disarmament Campaign

• I write in response to Dan Snow’s article (Remembrance Sunday should not be dominated by religion, theguardian.com, 6 November). I disagree with his view totally.

In Kempston last year there wasn’t going to be a parade or service on Remembrance Sunday as the British Legion were struggling with people to coordinate it. It was the religious-based 1st Kempston Boys Brigade company that got the parade sorted and the Kempston churches who worked together a few weeks before to arrange a service. I didn’t see the local humanists or other non-religious groups doing a lot to recognise our war heroes. If it had been left to them, they may have been forgotten altogether.

Remembrance Sunday is key, so our young know the cost of war and the benefits of doing everything we can to achieve peace. Surely that’s the important message, not peddling pro- or anti-religious messages.

If you want a non-religious ceremony, then organise it like the religious groups do, then we can really spread the importance of peace to even more people in this land. But please don’t criticise those religious groups who are actually prepared to do something so we can all remember – provide an alternative if that’s how you feel. Thanks to those who made that sacrifice, you are blessed with that opportunity.
Philip Timms
Company captain, 1st Kempston company, The Boys’ Brigade

Window of Home Office building in London ‘Over 100 files containing information on alleged child abuse by members of the establishment are “missing” from the Home Office.’ Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

Why are we surprised that the security services have been spying on lawyers (Report, 7 November), when the reputation of former senior government ministers is at stake? Likewise, when over 100 files containing information on alleged child abuse by members of the establishment are “missing” from the Home Office? The establishment – that shadowy beast – will always be ruthless in defence of its own. If there are people alive who are protected by the loss of those files, it’s more than likely that we, and the brave but so damaged abused, may only be permitted to know the truth long after the alleged perpetrators, and indeed some of the abused, have died. Is this one reason why these cases take so long to come to court?
Anna Ford
London

Exterior of Manchester's Victorian town hall Devo Manc: a new use for Manchester’s Victorian town hall? Photograph: Don McPhee/The Guardian

Two years ago Mancunians rejected plans for an elected mayor. Now Greater Manchester is being told that it will have an elected mayor regardless of the electorate’s wishes, making your headline (Mancunians granted power to elect mayor, 4 November) doubly wrong. The people of Greater Manchester will not be able to vote on whether or not they want a mayor, presumably because there is a risk of them giving the “wrong” answer again. Even worse, as Liverpool’s elected mayor has pointed out, “whatever they’re giving back to the region with this plan is nothing compared to what they are taking away”. Patrick Wintour has pointed out that this will undoubtedly portray “the chancellor in a favourable light in north-west marginal seats” (Report, theguardian.com, 3 November). The question is why the predominantly Labour leaders of Greater Manchester, after years of austerity, have signed up to this deal so close to a general election.
Declan O’Neill
Oldham, Greater Manchester

• While welcoming the idea of greater financial control promised by “Devo Manc”, I can’t help but be suspicious about George Osborne’s motives. His declaration to the people of Greater Manchester that “this will give Mancunians a powerful voice” may sit uneasily with the non-Mancunian majority in the region, and his trumpeting of a future mayor seems suspiciously like creating the opportunity for increased control by the Westminster-based party political establishment. Is he perhaps hoping to find one Boris to rule them all?
Chris Hardman
Manchester

• The main thrust of George Osborne’s proposals appears to be the re-creation of the former Greater Manchester metropolitan county council, but this time run by an elected mayor rather than elected councillors. The GM council was one of six in the great metropolitan areas (Greater London already had one) created by Tory secretary of state Peter Walker in 1974. Their role was essentially strategic. They were run by capable people and were generally considered a success. All seven councils were vindictively abolished in 1986 by Margaret Thatcher and Norman Tebbit essentially because they were run by the Labour party. So the re-establishment of a Greater Manchester strategic authority is to be welcomed and should be paralleled in other metropolitan areas.

The one huge caveat is that unless the new mayors are given full control over local tax levels, with no Whitehall interference, they will never exercise true governance of their areas.
Robin Wendt
Chester

• Newcastle city council leader Nick Forbes is right to assert that without a change in the unbalanced funding system “there will be nothing left for government to devolve to” (Slowly, a revolution is stirring in Britain’s most dynamic cities, 6 November). In addition to a reform of local government finance, three further measures are required: a return to and development of the Total Place policy introduced by the Labour government, in which the totality of public expenditure by local and central governments and its agencies would be reviewed and reshaped at local level; minimum national entitlements to key levels of service provision and benefits; and, preferably, the restoration of government offices in the regions, which acted as a valuable conduit between local government, the regions and central government until the present government abolished what a previous Conservative had usefully created.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords; former leader, Newcastle city council

Spectacular site: the Stonehenge monument is part of an enormous landscape with world heritage status. Photograph: Patrick Eden / Alamy/Alamy

John Cridland says there have been plans to upgrade the A303 since 2002 (CBI chief’s one big plea to the chancellor: give me a road tunnel under Stonehenge, 7 November). This is incorrect. I myself attended the first week-long public inquiry into the proposed tunnel scheme, held at the Red Lion in Salisbury, under Sir Jocelyn Stevens’ tenure as chair of English Heritage, in May 1995.

He mentions objections from English Heritage, the National Trust and the Druids, for whom Stonehenge is a sacred site. But far from objecting to the proposed “new” tunnel at the time, those Druid representatives present, including myself, fully endorsed the idea of the tunnel, provided it did not run closer than 660 yards to the site of the monument, in order to obviate vibration damage risk in the substrata.

With the old A344 road already closed to make way for the new visitors’ centre, removing that hopelessly congested strip of A303 from the ancient sacred landscape would in fact create a conservators’ dream – a 5,000-year-old giant stone temple in an almost pristine 5,000-year-old landscape, ie no visual or noise intrusion from the present-day motor car – while Mr Cridland and those from the south-west whose cause he champions speed on their way to London, noiselessly and out of sight, beneath it all.
Rollo Maughfling
Archdruid of Stonehenge and Britain

• The Stonehenge monument is only one part of an enormous and spectacular landscape, and it is not possible to tunnel anywhere near it without destroying the very thing that defines the area as of world importance and justifiably earns world heritage status. Should this really be sacrificed so that London second-homers can avoid the inconvenience of Sunday afternoon delays as they head back to the Great Wen from their Cornish getaways?
Dr Pauline Wilson
Sutton Courtenay, Oxfordshire

New Zealand's Patrick Tuipulotu in action New Zealand’s Patrick Tuipulotu in action in the pouring rain during England v New Zealand rugby union autumn international on 8 November 2014. Photograph: Tom Jenkins

I went to Twickenham on Saturday to watch the England v All Blacks international (England sunk by inability to think quickly under attack, 10 November). As a lifelong rugby fan, a straight man in his 60s, I could not believe that a bunch of men half my age watching a rugby match in the 21st century could be capable of hurling such nasty, foul-mouthed, racist, homophobic abuse at an openly gay match official. My equally disgusted son is in 30s, but next to him, hearing this vitriol, was a little boy; I felt ashamed.

I did speak to the men after the match, but they were not in a fit state to engage in sensible discussion. I suspect that if it had been in a football match they’d have been thrown out. There was a time when you could trust rugby supporters to take alcohol into a game and behave like grownups. The time has come to treat rugby louts like football louts – no alcohol in the ground, zero tolerance to bigots.
Keith Wilson
Loversall, South Yorkshire

• Though they lost narrowly to the All Blacks, the England rugby team acquitted themselves well at Twickenham on Saturday. As usual, the same cannot be said of the 82,000 unsporting yahoos in the English crowd, who drowned the sound of the haka, and booed the All Black kickers. As a keen New Zealand rugby supporter who has lived within 20 miles of Twickenham for 40 years, I gave up going there to see the All Blacks years ago, as I did not like being surrounded by xenophobic yobs who knew little about rugby. There is a marked contrast when I go to see Wales v the All Blacks at the Millennium Stadium, where I enjoy being surrounded by Welsh partisans who can appreciate and applaud good rugby from either side.
Ross Anderson
High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire

• Well done, Guardian Sport. Six pages of soccer, three pages of rugby union and – after two terrific rugby league Test matches – two columns about a player breaking a door (Hodgson embarrassed but set to escape with just paying damages on broken door, 10 November). Perhaps rugby league should get the Lib Dems’ sponsorship and get better coverage.
Mike Rafferty
Workington, Cumbria

Independent:

One should never underestimate the ability of Labour MPs to do the Tories’ work for them.

At a time when David Cameron and George Osborne have displayed yet again the most blatant dishonesty over the EU (“Osborne accused of accounting trick to claim cut in EU bill”, 8 November), why are Labour not spending their energies attacking them?

There has not been a Labour leader in recent times who has not been vilified by the Tory-dominated media – remember Gordon Brown the “one-eyed Scotsman”, Kinnock the “Welsh windbag”.

Red, now incompetent, Ed is just the latest to suffer the attacks which ignore that he has been on the right side of the agenda in the past four years.

Of course he is a geek – they all are. Can anyone seriously believe his equally geeky but capable brother would not be going through the same obnoxious characterisation? It’s time for Labour to start challenging the untruths and distortions that it seems to feebly accept.

The economic crisis was not caused by the previous government. Most of the sensible world praised Mr Brown and Alistair Darling for their part in rescuing the world from the disaster caused by grasping bankers – the same ones who now bankroll the Tories and are rewarded by tax cuts.

The economy was actually growing and the deficit going down until Mr Osborne and his ideologically driven zealots took over.

If Labour wants to be in power it has to start acting like it wants and deserves it. That applies to the whole party from the leader down. Some of us want Labour to save the UK from another five years of Tory-inspired social division and xenophobia.

Tom Simpson

Bristol

It would appear that we are going to go into a second successive general election in which potential victory for the Labour Party is sacrificed to the ego of its leader.

Gordon Brown should have known by 2008 that, such was his personal unpopularity, Labour couldn’t win under his leadership, but rather than step aside, he brought his arch-enemy Peter Mandelson back into cabinet to ensure that no effective challenge could be made against him and he could continue to lead his party.

And now Ed Miliband should know that his presence at the top of the party virtually guarantees that Labour cannot win the election outright. So when 8 May dawns next year and we all look forward with foreboding to another five years of Tory rule, Mr Miliband can have the satisfaction of knowing that at least he did not have to suffer the personal ignominy of resigning before the election.

Colin Burke

Manchester

Green targets make no difference

Why does it matter if the UK fails to hit its greenhouse gas reduction targets (“UK carbon emissions: the stench of missed targets”, 10 November)? The UK contributes barely more than 1 per cent (and falling) of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it would make no difference at all to global warming if we were to lower this to 0 per cent.

Our greenhouse gas targets exist for political rather than practical reasons. One possible benefit of having targets is to be able to say that we are setting an example to the rest of the world (though not much of an example if the targets are missed). A more substantial benefit for the Government comes in the form of green taxes aimed at discouraging greenhouse gas production.

On the other hand, these taxes contribute to the UK having some of the highest household energy bills and petrol prices in Europe and the highest air travel tax in the world. We should consider whether we really want to pay “green” taxes, given that they will have no effect on global warming.

Nick Marler

Otley, West Yorkshire

Ian East is correct (letter, 11 November) that it’s no surprise the Government will miss carbon emission reduction targets in part because of its flawed attitudes to onshore wind.

The Communities Secretary, Eric Pickles, has waged a war against the onshore wind industry, repeatedly calling in approved plans for onshore wind developments. In doing so, Mr Pickles is using his authority for cheap party politics and is undermining a sector capable of supporting the country’s energy requirements.

Onshore wind is not only a climate-friendly means of energy generation, it’s also considerably cheaper than alternatives including offshore wind. In the US, onshore wind is already the same price as gas. It is a sector meriting support, not party political persecution.

Andrew Whalley

Chief Executive REG Windpower, Guildford

Can anybody enlighten me on what a “legally binding commitment” on the reduction of carbon emissions by 2030 means?

“Legally binding” ought to imply some kind of sanction for failure, but who gets sanctioned? The Prime Minister, Chancellor or climate change minister in power come 2030? Hardly seems fair when they’ve probably been left an impossible task by their predecessors. All of the ministers between now and then? Surely not.

So if I can’t look forward to seeing David Cameron, George Osborne and Owen Paterson sharing a cell in Pentonville (at least not for this), what’s the point?

Maybe now that we have fixed-term parliaments there should be interim targets for each government, with a sliding scale of penalties.

Bill Linton

London N13

Not so liberal when it comes to tobacco

Rosie Millard’s call for yet another tax on tobacco companies on the pretext of clearing up cigarette butts is illogical (Another Voice, 10 November). Nearly all the price paid for their products goes to the Treasury. The idea that they impose a financial burden on the country is bogus.

Presumably, such a levy would come on top of the one announced by Ed Miliband to pay for the NHS. If Ms Millard and the Labour Party believe the tobacco companies are not handing enough money over to the Government, they should be calling for them to be nationalised.

More sensible people should welcome the contribution of an industry among Britain’s leading exporters to the salaries and pensions of politicians, doctors and those of us employed in the public sector.

To believe that a product should be legal but those who sell it regarded as enemies of society is a blatantly anti-capitalist and misanthropic view, especially as many who hold it, not least your newspaper, wish to liberalise the laws on illegal drugs.

Rupert Fast

Esher, Surrey

Wages should be set by the market

In your editorial of 7 November you argue that firms should pay staff more because, “a better pay deal for loyal workers is the only way for businesses to re-establish their social contract”. This is remarkably naive.

Businesses pay what they have to in order to attract, motivate and retain good quality staff. Any business which paid a higher rate than needed to its staff would place itself at a competitive disadvantage. A “social contract” is not included in the objectives of most senior executives, but growth and profit are. Wages rise with increased demand for skills, not as an act of philanthropy.

Paul Sloane

Camberley, Surrey

Did MPs think they were back at school?

There seemed to be an unusual degree of chaos around the House of Commons non-vote on the European Arrest Warrant on Monday evening, even by the accepted standards of such things. Until, that is, one remembers that the Government Chief Whip is Michael Gove, who presumably is trialling some new and radical model of how parliamentary business should be conducted.

Keith Flett

London N17

We could learn from The EU’s openness

I strongly support the call from C Richardson (letter, 11 November) for a daily page of EU news. The UK is very badly served in this respect.

Although my experience of contact with EU affairs is some years out of date, I was always impressed by the openness of officials and the very thorough way in which proposals were discussed and considered. The timescale is long, but the system has much to teach the UK.

D W Budworth

London W4

Private schools are in another world

Thanks for another example of “them and us”, embodied in the letter (11 November) from John Claughton, Chief Master of King Edward’s School, Birmingham. He would have us believe that his fees of “just over £11,000” are reasonably affordable. Within the reach of most?

Eddie Dougall

Walsham le Willows, Suffolk

Times:

Sir, Matthew Parris (“Labour is the problem. It’s no longer wanted”, Opinion, Nov 8) explained why the Labour party has no relevance: and he is right if Labour continues to try to fight the Conservatives by the old rules of politics. It is now time to do away with dogma-based politics. We need to move politics into the modern evidence-based era. The electorate is fed up with politicians who seem not to listen to evidence, especially if that evidence challenges their assumptions, to wit, the debates on immigration and decriminalisation of drugs. My vote would go to the politician who sincerely designed policies based on evidence. Labour would have nothing to lose by becoming the let-us-look-at-the-evidence party.
Dr David Fair
York

Sir, Matthew Parris is premature in writing the obituary of the left or radical wing of politics. Massive problems are developing in all western economies as the advance of technology prices half the community out of employment while vastly enriching the other half. Unresolved, this has always led to revolution. No politician is articulating this as a problem that the entire community needs to resolve — as much for the benefit of the haves as for the have-nots. Attlee, Wilson and Blair were able to do this; Ed Miliband and Labour show signs of beginning to appreciate this problem but haven’t found the rhetoric to take the nation with them. The progressive left is needed now more than ever.
Charles Ross
Devizes, Wilts

Sir, The NHS is bordering on collapse; the economy is good for the rich but not so good for the working poor; pensioners are having to sell their homes to survive; a million young people are still out of work; those with savings are scraping along; crime is increasing although government figures say it is falling; Ukip will have two MPs in the near future . . . and I have hardly touched the surface. Which party is in crisis?
GM Waddington
Messingham, North Lincs

Sir, I compliment Libby Purves on her clear-sighted critique (Opinion, Nov 10) of the seemingly endless grandstanding by our senior politicians, an affliction which will be with us at least until next May.
David Jones
Tring, Herts

Sir, The really worrying thing is that it has taken the Labour party so long to realise what was happening (“Miliband has lost public confidence, aide admits”, Nov 10). Miliband being prime minister is one thing; a potential ruling political party that cannot see the obvious is quite another.
Robert Harris
Warrington

Sir, Your view (“Leading Questions”, leader, Nov 7) that Labour MPs have no choice other than to keep quiet and rally round is mistaken. They should note the example of the Tories in 2003 who managed a consensual change of leadership and so greatly reduced Labour’s majority in 2005. MPs exerting muscle and decisiveness would be far more likely to produce a bounce for 2015 than the present inertia.
James Hickson
Bewdley, Worcs

Sir, Ed Miliband is the only politician for decades willing to intervene in imperfect yet sacred markets. He offers an alternative to the right-wing policies we have endured for four years. We would like real jobs with decent wages and protection for those at the lower end of the job market. It is working people who keep the system going.
Danny Cleary
Rishton, Lancs

Sir, Mr Miliband need do only one thing to transform his image: smoke a pipe. He will at once appear sagacious and mature. Think what it did for Harold Wilson.
Sir Michael Howard
Eastbury, Berks

Sir, Must we wait for more bodies on the streets of the UK (News, Nov 8) before we face up to the inability of our counter-terrorism strategy to prevent either radicalisation or the preparation of acts of violence? Four issues need urgent attention: Saudi and Gulf funding for extremist versions of Islam in the UK; the tolerance shown to Islamic organisations that promote anti-British, separatist, or Muslim supremacist ideas; the indulgence of extremist organisations promoting violence overseas, and the failure to ensure that liberal democratic norms prevail. The political calculus that has stayed the government’s hand requires recalibration.
Professor Shaun Gregory
Durham University

Sir, You report (News, Nov 10) on the disturbing influence of social media and cyberbullying on teenage girls’ self-perception. It’s easy to shrug one’s shoulders, but we’ve reached the point where a national campaign is needed to combat the negative effects of new technology. This should involve social media companies, parents, young people, schools, churches, newspapers and television, as well as celebrity role models.
Dudley Jones
Reading, Berks

Sir, As one who has three daughters, nine granddaughters and three great-granddaughters, my confidence in girls is still complete. Admittedly I may have little choice.
John Bishop
Needingworth, Cambs

Sir, Apropos Del Holman’s railway ticket purchases “to Duloe” at Liskeard station (letter, Nov 10): a bus passenger on the same route was overheard to ask for “two to Looe”.
Colin Greenhalgh
Hampton, Middx

Sir, I once knew a barrister who wore paper wing collars (“Downton drives crisp trade ”, Oct 31). Given the state of legal aid fees I imagine many more do today. I even once wore one with a dinner jacket, but noted that the late Philip Howard of The Times said that wing collars were not worn with DJs in England. Someone should tell the makers of Downton Abbey.
Neville Peel
Mottram-in-Longdendale, Cheshire

Sir, Downtonfollowers must admire the producer’s verisimilitude in ensuring that the Earl of Grantham — Hugh Bonneville — shares his birthday with the Earl of Carnarvon, the real-life owner of “Downton Abbey” — Highclere Castle (Register, Nov 10). Or is it just coincidence?
Denise Jones
Metfield, Suffolk

Sir, My late father used to become furious when those that should know better used “registry office” instead of the correct “register”. Could the writers of Downton Abbey fix their script? If I have to bellow at the television again I feel sure my dog will leave me, as well as my senses.
William Quennell
Ingatestone, Essex

Telegraph:

Remembrance away from the Tower; boosting teachers’ morale; in search of sobriquets and friendly household ghosts

Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red by ceramic artist Paul Cummins

Blood Swept Lands And Seas Of Red by ceramic artist Paul Cummins Photo: Geoff Pugh/The Telegraph

7:00AM GMT 11 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – The installation, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, around the Tower of London is an amazing piece of art, and it is quite understandable why so many wished to view it.

However, there is a spectacular year-round centre of remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. There, more than 300 thought-provoking memorials, sculptures and other works of art have been carefully placed. Trees with immense significance adorn the 150-acre landscape.

Oh, to be there today, at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, when a shaft of sunlight will shine through the truly magnificent Armed Forces Memorial.

Yvonne Kirk
Chester

SIR – How can the memory of our service personnel best be remembered, beyond simply our annual ceremony? The crowds at the Tower illustrate the significance of collective appreciation as a shared experience that crosses generations.Remember WW1 aims to mobilise such collective desire and make it a positive experience of “active commemoration”.

This not-for-profit campaign to mobilise volunteer activity is funded by the Government and businesses, and works in conjunction with The Telegraph, the Woodland Trust, the Not Forgotten Association, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the War Memorial Trust, the Churches Preservation Trust and the National Council for Voluntary Organisations, among others,

By encouraging people to give at least one hour’s volunteering in memory of a relative, we can create new public spaces and woodlands, increase volunteering with youth initiatives and see more charitable activity generally.

Clive Aslet
Editor at Large, Country Life

Captain John O’Brien (retd)
Co-Founders, Remember WW1
London N1

SIR – On Sunday, the Queen stood motionless in a London street knowing that she could be in the cross-hairs of a terrorist sniper.

Would an American president have done that without armed secret servicemen inches away? The Queen’s nearest bodyguard was an unarmed 93-year-old man, her equally brave husband.

Charles King
South Croydon, Surrey

SIR – On Sunday the Royal family laid wreaths to the fallen. All of them, from the Queen downwards, have served, or are still serving, in the Armed Forces.

They were followed by the politicians. Not one of them ever served their country, in the Royal Navy, Army, or Royal Air Force, or even a comparable civilian role, before entering Parliament.

It speaks volumes for everything that is wrong with today’s politicians.

David Wiltshire
Bedford

Teachers’ morale

SIR – As an experienced teacher, I believe the intentions behind establishing a Royal College of Teaching are good ones, but I am sceptical about them working out in practice. The recent, ill-fated General Teaching Council (GTC) demonstrates the potential problems.

There is a danger that the college would be dominated by activists like those who control the teaching unions, and who often do such harm to the profession’s image. Good, ordinary teachers were already too busy to give time to the GTC.

Professional morale would be improved if paperwork was cut, pointless initiatives reduced and denigration by politicians ended. Teaching still lacks a career and pay structure to reward experienced teachers who stay in the classroom, but no government will meet the cost of introducing one.

The best way to restore morale and reduce bureaucracy would be to give freedom and responsibility to the overwhelming majority of good head teachers and teachers in their own schools and classrooms.

Ben Fuller
York

Paying for the banks

SIR – I welcome the news that I will no longer have to bail out failed banks in the future.

I now look forward to paying higher bank charges instead.

John Snowden
Rockhampton, Gloucestershire

Sea Lords’ swords

SIR – I wish a few First Sea Lords had fallen on their swords over cuts to the naval strength in the same way that General Sir Nick Houghton is prepared to sacrifice his career and bloody his bayonet over future defence cuts.

Had they done so, Britain might still have a Royal Navy to be proud of.

Chris Watson
Lumut, Perak, Malaysia

A little gratitude

SIR – When checking out of a hotel recently I handed the receptionist a card thanking all the staff, especially those I had never seen, such as kitchen and housekeeping staff. She was pleasantly surprised. Am I in the minority?

Bernard Powell
Southport, Lancashire

New Cold War

^{Vladimir Putin and Joseph Stalin}

SIR – Unlike the total and unequivocal

de-Nazification in West Germany from 1945, Russia was not de-Stalinised (“A new Cold War”) nor has it paid massive reparations to its domestic and client-state victims since 1917. Vladimir Putin called the demise of the Soviet Union “the greatest global catastrophe of the 20th century”. That was not something Konrad Adenauer or Ludwig Erhard would have said about the Third Reich.

The EU and Nato’s Ukraine policy was myopic in ignoring Russia’s concerns and predictable reaction, but it is sad that Mikhail Gorbachev trots out Putin’s line without mentioning his Crimean annexation or his defence of the German-Soviet rape of Poland from 1939 to 1941. Few Russians seem able to accept that Stalin’s regime was just as fascist as Hitler’s.

John Birkett
St Andrews, Fife

SIR – President Putin claims that “Britain and France had destroyed any chance for an anti-fascist front with the Munich Agreement”. He flagrantly falsifies history.

Throughout the summer of 1939, months after Munich, Anglo-French negotiators, led by Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary, held intensive discussions with Soviet officials about the possibilities of a mutual defence pact.

Neville Chamberlain complained that the Soviets were “the most impossible people to do business with”, constantly increasing their demands. Nevertheless, detailed talks about a military alliance began on August 12. Nine days later the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed.

Stalin cynically used the apparent prospect of a Western alliance as a ploy to get Hitler to promise him large territorial gains in Poland and the Baltic states when war broke out.

Lord Lexden
London SW1

Royal revenue

SIR – Andrew Johnston wonders why the summary sent by HM Revenue and Customs of things on which his tax is spent does not include the Queen.

His tax does not contribute towards the Queen’s maintenance. She actually subsidises him and other taxpayers through the Crown Estate revenue always taken by the Government.

This estate is the property of the sovereign in right of the Crown: but the Queen is only allocated 15 per cent of the revenue from it in the Sovereign Support Grant.

Jennifer Miller
London SW15

Toe-curling

SIR – Why is it that women who otherwise look extremely attractive – such as Claudia Winkleman or Karren Brady on your front pages of November 5 and 6 – spoil the effect by cramming their feet into high-heeled pointed shoes? Such shoes deform toes, wrinkle skin and make veins bulge.

Geoff Jones
Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire

In search of a sobriquet for weekend Whitstable

^{Second home from home: weekends see an influx of Londoners to Whitstable in Kent}

SIR – The north Norfolk coast is often referred to as Chelsea-on-Sea.

Given the influx of DFLs (down from London) at weekends, and the supposed effect on property prices, what nickname should Whitstable have?

Andrew Richardson
Whitstable, Kent

SIR – In the Sixties, Weston-super-Mare was known universally in the Royal Navy as Aggie-on-Horseback, after the English philanthropist Agnes Weston who provided home-from-homes for seafarers.

John Ley-Morgan
Weston-super-Mare, Somerset

SIR – My father-in-law, who came from nearby, called it Weston-super-Nightmare.

Jeremy Spencer-Cooper
Easebourne, West Sussex

SIR – Some Solihull residents become apoplectic when people refer to their town as “part of Birmingham”.

Stephen Gledhill
Chadbury, Worcestershire

A haunted house with a spirit of friendly contact

SIR – Our last house, which was 15th-century in parts, had a corridor where many people saw faces at the window and felt presences which they couldn’t explain.

One young plumber’s mate refused to go back inside the house because he saw an old woman, but our Yorkshire terrier would insist on going up to the corridor to sit in the dark looking up at what or whoever was there. I can only assume that it was a very friendly spirit as the dog never ran away.

Villagers told us that there had been an exorcism many years before, but when we gave our address to local people they’d often say: “Oh yes, the haunted house”.

We never had any unpleasant experiences. Perhaps ghosts come in many different types of different natures.

John Darling
Sherborne, Dorset

SIR – When I was about four, I would often walk to school through Canterbury cathedral, stopping to listen to guides, read inscriptions, or speak to visitors. When I was late, the school would call my parents to haul me out of the cathedral.

One day my mother found me and asked what I was doing. I explained that I had been talking to a man about the cathedral and the memorials, but the verger confirmed I had been holding an animated conversation with “nobody”.

I insisted there had been a tall man dressed in a long robe with a knotted rope round the middle and sandals. He had a bald patch on his head.

My family knew Archbishop Lang, who questioned me, and was satisfied that I believed I had seen somebody.

Alan J Burton
Shotley, Suffolk

Irish Times:

A chara, – The Dublin Aids Alliance is of the view that criminalising prostitution in Ireland is likely to produce a rise in HIV infection amongst sex workers and their clients by inadvertently pushing them further to the fringes of society thereby increasing the barriers they will experience in accessing health services.

If Ireland legislates to criminalise the buyers of sex (as per the Swedish model), sex workers will be forced further away from day to day health support services, running the risk of increased HIV diagnosis. We know that the report of the UN Aids Advisory Group on HIV and Sex Work, published in 2011, recommends that states remove criminal penalties for the purchase and sale of sex and establish legal and policy environments conducive to universal access to HIV services for sex workers. It would be prudent not to ignore this.

If Ireland adopts the Swedish model, sex workers and their clients will be increasingly at risk of contracting HIV. Criminalising the buyers of sex has negative implications for both public health in Ireland and reducing the prevalence of HIV in Ireland.

We need to tread carefully when introducing legislation that may well have unintended consequences for some of the most vulnerable people living within our society. – Is mise,

NIALL MULLIGAN,

Director,

Dublin AIDS Alliance,

Parnell Square West,

Dublin 1.

Sir, – Edward Mathews of the Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation rejects the idea that sex work is anything other than organised by criminal gangs with sex workers overwhelmingly under their control. How then does he explain what the PSNI has said about this in Northern Ireland – that the majority of prostitution there is through independent prostitutes who are not trafficked or controlled by organised crime groups? We do not have enough information to say what the position is here since independent research has not been done.

He quotes global figures for the value of sex trafficking but interestingly does not give the relevant figures, those so often claimed for its value here by Turn Off the Red Light. At the hearings, the Garda representative refused to put a figure on it beyond saying it was in the millions.

His claims about the violence and exploitation can also be compared to the independent research by Northern Ireland’s Department of Justice. This showed that no locally based sex workers surveyed supported criminalising the purchase of sex, with 61 per cent believing it would make them less safe and 85 per cent saying it would not reduce sex trafficking.

This does not support the notion of wholesale violent exploitation, the “horrible reality” he talks about so vividly.

Again, we do not have figures for the position here but such a baseline should be established before legislation is enacted.

As has been pointed out so often, the abolitionists do not want to hear from those whose welfare they so vehemently claim to represent. The same has happened in other countries, such as Denmark and France. Again, if the trafficking is as prevalent as he appears to suggest, why have the figures for all forms of this crime fallen since 2010?

This is a very contentious issue. It deserves the most open and honest debate with the best available evidence on the table and the laying aside of ideological positions. – Yours, etc,

DAVID WALSH,

Maynooth, Co Kildare.

Sir, – While all decent people will favour measures to protect exploited and abused women, the widely differing views being expressed on your pages on prostitution and the law certainly make it difficult for an ordinary layperson to make sense of the whole matter.

However, regarding the type of law that should be adopted in relation to prostitution, one that would have the effect of simultaneously criminalising and legalising the same transaction, which the current Swedish law seems to do, would seem, on the face of it, to be utterly perverse. – Yours, etc,

HUGH GIBNEY,

Athboy,

Co Meath.

Sir, – Isn’t it amazing that allegations by a senior civil servant about politicians and other senior State officials possibly engaging in tax avoidance can be left to languish for years, being pushed from desk to desk across various sections within Richard Bruton’s department, despite the Minister and other departments being aware of these allegations (“Tax evasion statement forwarded to authorities, says Bruton”, November 11th)?

When the matter became public, however, suddenly within a matter of days the same department that had engaged in a torturous process managed to complete its review and pass its statement to the relevant authorities. What a coincidence.

It makes you wonder what else is languishing all over government departments being pushed from desk to desk like a child pushing vegetables around a plate. It also explains a lot about the dysfunctionality of this Government since the steady hand of the troika left it to its own devices. – Yours, etc,

DESMOND FitzGERALD,

Canary Wharf,

London.

Sir, – Eoghan Murphy TD (“Fine Gael promised political reform, but the Government hasn’t delivered”, Opinion & Analysis, November 5th) and Noel Whelan (“How the Economic Management Council undermines Cabinet and Government”, Opinion & Analysis, November 7th) make some excellent points about the pretentiously named Economic Management Council (EMC), in particular in respect of the gradual expansion of its remit.

In April 2011 shortly after the EMC was established, the Taoiseach told the Dáil that it would deal with “economic planning and budgetary matters, the economic recovery programme including the representation of Ireland internationally in negotiations with the troika, the integration of the work of departments and agencies and the co-ordination of banking policy”.

Can someone explain how water services, an environmental matter previously under the remit of local government, came within this remit? The EMC has apparently been considering this issue since last April, clearly not to much avail.

The primary concern which has been raised is that the EMC acts as a government within a government, coming to conclusions on issues which are then presented to the Cabinet as faits accomplis for rubber-stamping.

This raises the prospect that civil servants and political advisers who attend EMC meetings have more impact on important decisions than the democratically elected members of Cabinet who are excluded from meetings.

This is further compounded by the 50:50 division of the EMC between Fine Gael and Labour Ministers, compared to 2:1 majority in favour of Fine Gael at Cabinet level and a similar division in terms of their respective representation in the Dáil. In other words, the Labour Party has a disproportionate influence over the decisions of the EMC relative to what it ought to be entitled to and, as a result, over the decisions of Government as a whole.

If these impressions about the operations of the EMC are to be dispelled, then the Dáil ought surely be made aware of instances where the Cabinet as a whole has rejected or overturned a recommendation made by the EMC. To date, however, no such instance has been publicly acknowledged. – Yours, etc,

THOMAS RYAN, BL

Harolds Cross, Dublin 6W.

Sir, – Your editorial “Cataluña Sí” (November 11th) describes as “contemptuous” the attitude taken by “Madrid’s political class” to the “referendum” held in Catalonia last Sunday on the issue of secession.

May I remind your readers that the so-called referendum had been suspended by the Spanish constitutional court on the grounds of its apparent unconstitutionality. Indeed, the Spanish constitution, which incidentally counted the support of 90.4 per cent of Catalans, does not recognise the right to self-determination of a part of the country, as is the case with the great majority of written constitutions in western democracies.

Sunday’s “referendum” was held in contempt of the court’s ruling and, with all due respect to those Spanish citizens in Catalonia that went to the polls, cannot be construed as a democratic exercise. There was no electoral census, no independent control at the polling stations or during the counting of the votes since all election officers were volunteers.

There is no official contempt regarding the aspirations for independence of many Catalans. The Spanish government has been and remains open to engaging in constructive dialogue. But in a democracy, any demand has to be based on institutional loyalty and channelled within the existing legal framework. No democracy is possible without the rule of law.

To compare the Spanish minister for justice’s understanding of politics with Erich Honecker’s is simply unacceptable. But the reference to the Berlin Wall is certainly relevant. Building new walls and creating artificial frontiers in Spain or anywhere else does not make any sense in today’s world and precisely when we have just celebrated the 25th anniversary of the fall of that Wall. – Yours, etc,

JAVIER GARRIGUES,

Ambassador of Spain,

Merlyn Park,

Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 01:07

First published: Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 01:07

Sir, – So The Irish Times and the Royal Irish Academy plan to “excavate” 100 Irish artworks “from the revolutionary period to today” (“Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks excavates the best of our art”, November 8th).

Apparently “the 100 artworks will be drawn from the literary and visual arts”, although the “panel of experts” (in literature, art and architecture) “will not neglect other areas of creative endeavour” and, without any explanation as to how this is to be achieved, “will also periodically include separate strands on . . . Irish music and song, Irish humour and Irish film.”

Despite this dutiful nod in their direction, Irish film-makers and musicians (and humorists, if they truly constitute a separate category) might well feel that the project should be renamed “Modern Ireland in 100 literary and visual artworks” and that the entire exercise smacks of the usual stereotyping of Irish cultural identity of which the Irish mainstream media outlets have been so consistently guilty. – Yours, etc,

RAYMOND DEANE,

Member of Aodána,

Dublin 2.

Sir, – “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks” sounds like a fine idea and will perhaps lead to a greater appreciation among Irish Times readers of the legacy of Irish poets, playwrights, novelists, architects, sculptors and painters in the last 100 years.

Maybe in time this will come to be seen as an Irish canon of creativity for modern times. No doubt a coffee table book will hit the shelves in due course. Wonderful.

But what’s this? No composers could be considered for some strange reason? Ireland has produced no operas or symphonies or string quartets?

Between the Irish Times and the Royal Irish Academy there appears to be a massive blind spot as to what Irish creativity can be. This invalidates the whole enterprise, in my view and in the view of many of my colleagues.

I imagine it is too late to stop the Irish Times in its passive denigration of aural culture.

I noticed the intention to “periodically” include a “separate strand on 100 years of music and song, humour and film”; or, in a word, entertainment. That doesn’t really help at all. – Yours, etc,

Dr JOHN McLACHLAN,

Inishowen,

Co Donegal.

Sir, – Judging from all the media coverage for the drama series Love/Hate, including in The Irish Times, it was by all accounts one of the most successful ever undertaken by RTÉ. There is no doubt that the characters in the series, drawn from working-class areas of Dublin, mirror those in real life, whose activities have devastated many a community throughout the country.

What a pity that RTÉ has never broadcast a series featuring the criminal activities of those politicians, bankers, developers and others from districts such as Dublin 4 and other affluent areas in the city and other parts of the country.

Could RTÉ create a series about these criminals who destroyed our county and ruined countless lives? Undoubtedly.

Would they be let? Never. – Yours, etc,

BERNARD NEARY,

Cabra,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – Cathal Quinn (November 10th) and many others offering commentary on the matter of same-sex marriage often cite the wellbeing of children as their reasoning for not supporting the upcoming constitutional referendum.

I find this a peculiar logic, given that the Government is working to introduce by the end of this year legislation to allow same-sex couples (and other non-biological parents of children) to adopt children and raise them in a loving home.

Surely if the welfare of children was their concern then this legislation would be the object of their opposition? Moreover, if being raised by their natural parents is in children’s best interest as the commentators so claim, then can I presume – with my tongue firmly in cheek – that they will voice their opposition to foster families, single parents, and our current adoption laws?

I have yet to see an argument against same-sex marriage that is not fundamentally flawed. – Yours, etc,

CONOR FARRELL,

Beaumont,

Dublin 9.

Sir, – Your letter subject heading “Same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron, presumably intended to condition those of us who reject it as biologically impossible into accepting it as an equally legitimate social norm.

Unfortunately, the subject heading denigrates the word “marriage” and tries to invest it with a new normality.

I do sincerely trust the effort to condition us fails. – Yours, etc,

MICHAEL AUSTIN,

Gorey,

Co Wexford.

Sir, – I agree with the president of the TUI Gerry Quinn (November 10th) about the critical importance of consultation with colleagues in an academic institution.

Earlier this year, as one form of consultation in a period of significant change, an independent survey was conducted with more than 2,000 colleagues across DIT.

Results from this important survey have been presented to the institute’s governing body, and to meetings of all academic leaders and managers of support functions.

The results have also been shared with our social partners and are being circulated to all colleagues. Through an institute-wide action plan, the results (both positive and negative) will be used to improve processes and the inclusiveness of decision-making.

This survey will be repeated every two years to review progress and to identify challenges that may emerge.

Such surveys are commonplace internationally but not yet in Irish higher education. As this changes, a national perspective may emerge. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN NORTON,

President,

Dublin Institute

of Technology,

Sir, – During his Remembrance Day address in St Patrick’s Cathedral last Sunday (”Changes in attitudes to Irish war dead”, November 10th), Rev Peter Rutherford singled out Michael John O’Leary “from west Cork” as an outstanding soldier on the western front.

More specifically, O’Leary was a native of Inchigeela, near Macroom. After his heroic VC exploits in February 1915, he became a celebrity figure in the British recruiting drive, one poster hailing him as “Mike O’Leary from Macroom, who spelt the Kaiser’s doom”. His father, smallholder Daniel, famously exhorted his listeners in Macroom town square to enlist because “if the Germans come over here, they’ll be a lot worse than the English, bad and all as they were”. It appears that the War Office hastily dispensed with his recruiting services thereafter. – Yours, etc,

JOHN A MURPHY,

Cork.

Sir, – I was sorry to hear of the death of Brian Farrell. As well as being a consummate broadcaster and interviewer, he was an inspirational lecturer who never failed to instil in his students an abiding interest in politics. He made politics relevant, interesting and even exciting. He inspired in his night students in UCD a confidence and self-belief. For that I will always be grateful. – Yours, etc,

MAUREEN FALLON,

Donnybrook,

Dublin 4.

Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 01:01

First published: Wed, Nov 12, 2014, 01:01

Sir, – Perhaps James Dineen (November 8th) might be surprised if his electricity or gas was cut off after he had already paid for it via a central fund and he refused to pay another bill for the same utility. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN DINEEN,

Clontarf,

Dublin 3.

Irish Independent:

There are crunch moments when individuals, firms, nations, etc, have to make a quantum leap if they are to survive into the next ‘stage’ of the process.

Such a moment came for us in the autumn of 2008. Indeed, some of us suggested then that an ad hoc majority of the Dail – thinking outside the frame, but basing itself on Edmund Burke’s definition of the overall patriotic role of the elected representative – should produce what would, effectively, have been a ‘national government’. Nobody in Leinster House was interested.

When that election did come, it found a political culture (and personnel dominating that culture) which was utterly unready for the 21st century challenge which lay ahead. The only Taoiseach available (according to the old rules) was an utterly charming but unfit for purpose Enda Kenny – who had entered the enclosed convent in Kildare Street in 1975.

To the average over-rational Vulcan (unfamiliar with terrestrial irrationality) it would seem impossible to destroy the clear, common-sense case for an equitable, usage-measured reform of the water system. A system which would also finance (‘off the books’) the elimination of the systemic 40pc wastage. Yet that is precisely what the very pleasant Phil Hogan did. So we (not somebody else!) promoted him to take charge of agriculture for all of Europe.

It would seem impossible to unite all the disparate whiners, fringe political groups, and begrudgers (I have been one myself!) into one coherent (if ultimately temporary) movement.

During World Wars I and II, in 1916 and 1940, when it seemed as if they were about to lose those wars, the British sacked their old-school prime ministers and appointed new ones – mainly for the electrifying PR effect those dramatic symbolic gestures had on their citizenry.

Arguing in Government Buildings about how many water meters can dance at any statistically-appropriate crossroads will not save this Government. Nor indeed the country and its people. Saying goodbye to Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Tanaiste Joan Burton might do so.

But the window of opportunity for those young Fine Gael and Labour politicians who want to be players in the decades to come is limited. Nettles do not like waiting indefinitely for Godot.

“T’were well it were done quickly”.

Maurice O’Connell

Tralee, Co Kerry

Can Love/Hate go white-collar?

Judging from all the media coverage for RTE’s crime drama series ‘Love/Hate’ it was one of the most successful pieces of programming ever undertaken by RTE. There is no doubt that the characters in the series, drawn as being from working-class areas of Dublin, mirror real-life individuals whose activities have devastated many a community throughout the country.

What a pity that RTE has never broadcast a series featuring the criminal activities of those politicians, bankers, developers and others from districts such as Dublin 4 and other affluent areas of the city and other country.

It was they who devastated the whole country and ruined the aspirations of a generation, forcing them in their thousands to leave Ireland for work abroad. Their parents have to deal with the loneliness and isolation that the forced emigration of their children has entailed – an experience that no politician, banker or developer will ever have to endure as there will always be work available in Ireland for their offspring.

Finally, many real-life criminals, whose lives were simulated on screen in ‘Love/Hate’, have had their own young lives indirectly blighted and destroyed by the activities of corrupt politicians, developers and businessmen, and directly destroyed by corrupting clergy.

Could RTE create a series on these criminals who destroyed our county and ruined countless lives? Undoubtedly. Would they be let? Never.

Bernard Neary

Dublin 7

Time to cater for Catholics

This might seem like an out-of-the-blue suggestion, but bear with me. In the Irish Independent, and its sister titles, we are privileged in having an Irish-language supplement, a golfing one, one for property, business, farming, motoring, etc. My suggestion is that it would be timely to include another once-a-week supplement on a subject also very dear to some of your readers.

What about a Catholic supplement?

In fact, strangely enough, that would be in keeping with tradition. Many Irish newspapers have had at least one Catholic columnist and, frequently, at least a page devoted to Catholic news and teaching various doctrines. It would catch a new modern Catholic wave that we can see now emerging internationally, looking forwards in time.

Internationally we can see huge interest generated by Pope Francis and a new Catholic media is emerging. This includes, for example,Crux – a Catholic news agency recently set up by the Boston Globe newspaper, one of the large important mainline newspapers in the US. In Ireland there is talk of a new Catholic university and Trinity College has recently opened an institute for the teaching of Catholic doctrine.

You might ask why Catholic? Why not all the religions or some sort of ‘spirituality page’? Well that’s being tried sometimes, but I don’t think it is ever all that successful. That’s because you cannot satisfy everybody in that kind of environment, unless you aim for a kind of lowest common denominator across religions, which would soon exhaust both available topics and target audience.

Catholicism is the religion of a vast number of people on this island and it’s important to not a few of them (and a strong feeling persists that it is not otherwise much catered for by the national media) who might therefore become enthusiastic patrons of such a new supplement?

An idea whose time has come?

Brian Nugent

Oldcastle, Co Meath

Leave 1916 behind

According to Maurice Manning’s article (November 10), the experts who deliberate on the commemoration of the Decade of Centenaries would like us to believe that “an enduring physical legacy” will ensure that the 1916 centenary commemoration becomes “truly inclusive”, but they offer little else in terms of vision, leadership or inspiration. The experts fail to recognize that Ireland has moved on in the intervening century and that the 1916 Rising was never a magnet for inclusivity. However, thanks to the 1998 Constitutional Referendum, our Constitution now confers the right to be part of the Irish nation on all those born on the island of Ireland (and certain others), but it acknowledges that the peaceful political unification of the island is subject to the consent of a majority of the people in both jurisdictions, democratically expressed.

Should the deliberations of these experts not be influenced by the opinions expressed in the 1998 referendum vote and therefore be aimed at facilitating thinking anew and acting anew in Ireland’s endeavour to foster a united people rather than suggesting that the public stew collectively in self-serving, myopic, muddled romanticism fed on a gruel of political expediency, group-think, inertia, fantasy and delusion?

Myles Duffy

Glenageary, Co Dublin

Irish Independent

13 November 2014 Cleaning

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left knee, but I manage to get round the park. A Very busy cleaning kitchen and office for the Blinds man tomorrow.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down gammon for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Oriel Malet – obituary

Oriel Malet was an aristocrat who wrote 12 novels and corresponded with Daphne du Maurier

Oriel Malet

Oriel Malet Photo: PAMELA CHANDLER/ARENAPAL

5:59PM GMT 12 Nov 2014

Comments

Oriel Malet, who has died aged 91, was a British aristocrat and gifted novelist who embraced the bohemian life in France.

Born Auriel Rosemary Malet Vaughan on January 20 1923, she was the youngest child of the 7th Earl of Lisburne and his wife, the Chilean beauty Regina de Bittencourt. Her early years were spent at the family home, Crosswood (Trascoed), in Cardiganshire, where she received most of her education from a French governess, “Mingo” Kaiser, who instilled in her an abiding love of all things French.

Auriel Vaughan (or Oriel Malet, as she styled herself) wrote from an early age, completing her first novel, Trust in the Springtime, when she was only 16. It was published when she was 20, and three years later her second book, My Bird Sings, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for young novelists . With her £50 prize money she bought a motorcycle.

By this time Oriel was already living in Paris, initially at the Villa Racine in rue Racine. She became close friends with the American folk singers Gordon Heath and Lee Payant, who performed nightly at L’Abbaye, a tiny bar illuminated only by candlelight in the rue de Furstemberg, beside the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés; the audience were instructed to click their fingers rather than applaud so as not to disturb those attending church across the street.

Another close friend was the actress Yvonne Arnaud, who stood as Oriel’s godmother when she converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1940s. In 1961 Oriel Malet would publish a memoir of Arnaud, entitled Marraine.

Oriel Malet was not yet 30 when she wrote Jam Today, an account of her early years in Paris, and she was an occasional contributor to the “Letter From Paris” feature in Tatler. In the mid-1950s she moved into a houseboat on the Seine at Neuilly. It was moored next to the houseboat occupied by Françoise Sagan, author of A Certain Smile and Bonjour Tristesse.

During a flash flood, Oriel fell into the river and would have been swept away but for the quick thinking of Sagan’s butler, who fished her out of the water with a boathook. To avoid further such calamities Oriel Malet went to live with her close friends Toto Barreyre, the historian and critic , and his wife Tototte, who had a flat on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne and a small house near Verneuil in Normandy .

She published several novels during the 1950s, the last of which, The Horses of the Sun, won praise from the critics; but before Putnam’s could reprint it to meet the rising demand there was a national printing strike, and by the time the industrial action was over the moment had passed. Oriel Malet suffered another setback when her accountant absconded with most of her capital. She was forced to earn her living as a translator, and had no time to concentrate on novels.

Oriel Malet had a gift for friendship, and one of her most enduring was with Daphne du Maurier, whom she had met at a cocktail party given by their mutual American publisher, Doubleday, in the early 1950s . For 30 years she and du Maurier wrote to one another weekly, exchanging confidences and discussing their literary projects. Oriel Malet published her correspondence with du Maurier, Letters from Menabilly, in 2000.

In all, she wrote 12 novels, but without fulfilling her early promise. Late in life, she spent several years researching a life of St Thérèse of Lisieux, and a fictional work about Oscar Wilde’s last days; both works, however, remain unpublished.

In 2003 Persephone Books reprinted her account, written in 1946, of the 19th-century Scots child diarist Marjory Fleming, who died in 1811 at the age of eight.

As a young woman Oriel Malet became engaged to an officer in the Welsh Guards, but he was killed in the war. She remained unmarried.

Oriel Malet, born January 20 1923, died October 14 2014

Guardian:

A drilling rig floats tethered to the sea floor a little more than 100km (62 miles) offshore from the Falkland Islands. Photograph: Gary Clement/Reuters

We utterly reject Daniel Filmus’s remarks in his interview with Luke Harding (Falklands: Argentina warns drilling could lead to oil disaster, 27 October) and the implication that hydrocarbons activities carried out by the Falkland Islands government are environmentally reckless. The Falkland Islands have a long history of responsible environmental stewardship, and we pride ourselves on protecting and safeguarding our unique environment.

The Falkland Islands government has responsibility for issuing licences and regulating the industry, and extraction offshore is regulated to UK North Sea standards, which are recognised as one of the highest standards of safety regulation anywhere in the world. The government is committed to transparency, and all environmental impact statements submitted are made available for public consultation.

Mr Filmus’s portrayal of the Falkland Islands hydrocarbons industry is skewed, alarmist, and represents yet another example of the Argentine government’s futile efforts to damage the Falklands economy. It is in no way an accurate description of the flourishing industry that is already planning its next round of drilling in 2015, nor the commitments the Falkland Islands government has made to developing an oil and gas industry that is economically and ecologically sustainable.
Roger Edwards
Chair of the legislative assembly of the Falkland Islands

Ed Miliband addresses the CBI's annual conference in London. 'Given that the rightwing media simulta Ed Miliband addresses the CBI’s annual conference in London. ‘Given that the rightwing media simultaneously smear Ed Miliband while not reporting his arguments, how, pray, is Labour expected to have its voice heard?’ asks Stephen Jones. Photograph: Mark Thomas/Rex

It is disappointing that, having led the G2 section with a piece on the press “monstering” Labour leaders (In the line of fire, 11 November), you should then argue (Editorial, 11 November) that Labour should raise its game, not change its leader. Given that the rightwing media simultaneously smear Ed Miliband while not reporting his arguments, how, pray, is Labour expected to have its voice heard?

Monstering the leader and shadow cabinet, ignoring the arguments, and repeating falsehoods such as Labour was responsible for the global recession is part of a concerted strategy and very difficult to counter. Kinnock was unable to do it, Blair did it having sold his soul to Murdoch, and Brown, an honest, decent man, faced an impossible struggle.

What your editorial might have reflected upon is why, given hostile media coverage and a weak recovery stimulated by “help to buy”, Labour is still managing to do so well? If you asked on the doorstep or maybe attended the food bank meeting in Malvern, as I did a few weeks ago, you would realise it is because a large proportion of the population, both waged and unwaged, are suffering.

Given that proposals to cut public expenditure in the next parliament will largely impinge on those least able to bear it, maybe the editors of the national press should raise their game and ask: “Is austerity really necessary?” It hasn’t worked before, is certainly not working in Europe, and the UK had a deficit/GDP ratio far greater than it is at present when it started the NHS, built over a quarter of a million homes a year, and progressively raised the school leaving age. Keynesianism may be a dirty word to some, but to others increasing public expenditure is both a moral and economic imperative.
Stephen Jones
Malvern, Worcestershire

• I have just torn up page 6 of Tuesday’s Guardian (New blow for Miliband as Labour lead shrivels in poll, 11 November) in disgust that a supposedly serious newspaper has chosen to print six deliberately unflattering photographs of the Labour leader addressing the CBI conference. Why? Why is there no report of his speech other than a brief mention in your otherwise negative editorial? Why is there no comment that Mr Miliband’s views on Europe are much more in tune with the CBI’s than the prime minister’s? Alan Johnson is right in saying that this world is obsessed with celebrity and personality. What the voters should demand from politicians is commitment and truth. Mr Miliband can deliver on this.
Judith Brooks
Fleetwood, Lancashire

• I write as Labour’s parliamentary candidate for Orpington, disgusted and demotivated by the suicidal speculation on Ed Miliband’s leadership from my own side. So it was with relief and pleasure that I read Alan Johnson’s excellent piece (I’ve never sought the Labour leadership – and I never will, 11 November).

Besides displaying admirable loyalty, logic and discipline, Alan also focuses on the Tories’ barefaced rewriting of history, blaming Labour for all the nation’s woes, and absolving their friends and paymasters in the world of finance from any responsibility. Meanwhile David Cameron, George Osborne and Theresa May fail dismally to deliver on their promises.

Alan shows no reluctance to rake over the past and so delivers a withering critique of the coalition government and provides a timely warning that returning Cameron to No 10 will amount to business as usual. In contrast, radical and courageous policies are required, such as Gordon Brown’s refusal to join the euro.

I am sure Labour leaders welcome Alan’s loyalty. I think they would do well to copy his willingness to remind people of the past. That dents the Tories’ claim to economic competence and lays the foundation for the development of considered policy alternatives to eternal austerity, which has been tried but manifestly failed. Thankfully, Ed Miliband has shown some signs of responding along these lines, but they need to be fortified.
Nigel de Gruchy
Orpington, Kent

• Alan Johnson makes a fair defence of Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour party. However, his lucid account of the current state of politics and policy serves predominantly to put me in mind of the theory ascribed to the Roman dictator Cincinnatus (519-430 BC) which held that power should only be given to those who want it least.
Professor Gwyneth Boswell
Norwich

• At 84, still a socialist, I despair at the current torpor of the Labour party. After all, it’s been obvious for months, even years, that Ed Miliband has problems that are far more serious than “image”. Yes, he’s intelligent; yes, he has some good and decent policies, though too few; but he thinks and reacts too slowly. His memory lapse during his speech at the Labour party conference is a terrifying glimpse of how he would respond “under fire”.

If he sincerely cares for the future of this country he should resign with dignity, and become “the power behind the throne”, with a more appealing and quick-witted minister to replace him. That would be a true act of magnanimity, and, dare I use an old-fashioned word, “patriotism”.
Barbara Brandenburger
London

• Recent comments about the policies of the Labour party and the merits (or otherwise) of Ed Miliband overlook one issue: the problem for Labour of confronting the way in which the Conservative party has been allowed to command the language of social – and political – unity through its endless invocation of the mantra of “hard-working families”. This leaves the Labour party with the problem of finding its own location for political cohesion, hugely difficult since the slogan about “hard-working families” has so much social resonance and is so vivid a description of many in the British population.

But while the great majority of us are hard-working (if in various forms of families), we have another shared characteristic: that at some point in our lives we will all (even those who suppose themselves above such assistance) rely on some form of that state support which the Conservative party and Ukip are so set on reducing, if not actually abolishing. This could lead the Labour party to the conclusion that the basis for a viable challenge to a political regime of austerity and the refusal to care for the vulnerable (be they in the UK or perilously afloat on the Mediterranean) lies in the articulation of a political morality of care. Or to put it another way, which perhaps challenges that “hard-working” slogan, however hard you work, you will never be able to afford to pay for all you need, not just for your care, but that of others.
Mary Evans
Patrixbourne, Kent

• Poor Ed Miliband, criticised on all sides. Yes, some of his inner circle may be Oxford-educated (Letters, 8 November), but before Oxford, Lucy Powell went to a comprehensive school in south Manchester, and grew up with ordinary Mancunians like my daughters and their friends.
Susan H Treagus
Manchester

• I’m tired of cheap jibes at Labour politicians. Lucy Powell represents Manchester Central, a deprived multi-ethnic inner-city constituency. It includes Moss Side, whose Labour councillors are a Pakistani woman who was partly brought up in a children’s home and who endured a forced marriage at the age of 14, a youth worker who devoted his life to homeless young people and those with mental health issues, and a young woman trade unionist who supports low-paid shop workers. (She replaced, on his retirement, a Windrush-era Jamaican who worked on the buses.) Other wards could tell similar stories of councillors and Labour activists rooted in everyday life, and seeing daily the ruinous effects of the coalition’s brutal policies. They (and her constituents) give Lucy, who is an active constituency MP, plenty of feedback and understanding about life as it is lived at the edge.

Those who criticise, quibble and mock from the comfort of academia or the media or less-challenged areas of Britain make us furious. It is time for people to decide which side they are on, or are we to assume that nobody actually cares about the outcome of the next election?
Gabrielle Cox
Manchester

• The Labour MPs who are sniping at Ed Miliband should be ashamed of themselves and get on with the job for which there were elected. There are too many in the House Commons who forget where they come from and become obsessed with celebrity politics and so-called “leadership” qualities.

The job of leading a political party has to be about coordinating a team and working collectively to bring about changes in the public interest. And there is the example of Clem Attlee whose quiet influence and determination as Labour prime minister was key to introducing the NHS, the welfare state, and greater educational opportunities for all.

There are Labour MPs – and especially young and dynamic female Labour MPs – who can be part of an effective team with Ed Miliband in office which the country deserves.

It is time for those Labour MPs and former Labour ministers who are calling for the departure of Ed Miliband to show responsibility to the Labour party and the country, to call off the dogs and stop behaving like naughty children.
Michael McGowan
Former Labour MEP for Leeds

• All Labour MPs (including Ed Miliband) should learn paragraphs two to six of Alan Johnson’s piece by heart and should be instructed to use them to begin every speech between now and next May. In fact, following the example of the big beasts of politics, they should repeat them every time they are asked a question about anything! Especially on Question Time. It may not too late to contest the coalition’s fairytale about the economy. It is vital for trust in politics that Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander (who promote that fairytale at every opportunity, knowing it to be false) should not be involved in any future coalition, so Labour has to do well enough to govern alone. Alan Johnson has just written part one of the script. Part two is a radical manifesto, which must include (see Polly Toynbee and Aditya Chakrabortty in the same issue) building enough social housing in the inner cities to reduce property prices, prick the buy-to-let bubble, and bring down the housing benefit bill.
Richard Gravil
Tirril, Cumbria

• Your editorial on the leadership of the Labour party rightly states that Miliband needs “to be more proactive and more focused about pushing his key policies”, but ignores the possibility that these “key policies” may be causing the problem in the first place. Your statement that there are “no easy fixes for centre-left parties in modern politics” overlooks an obvious option that Miliband would be well advised to consider – to move further from the centre. When he has done this in the past, as with the energy price freeze pledge, his support in the polls has increased. On the other hand, with policies that merely tinker, and change little, there can be neither vision nor transformation, and the UK after five years of a Miliband government would be pretty similar to what it is now, something the electorate clearly understands.

Joining the other two main party leaders queueing up to pay homage to the CBI, similar to his actions in Scotland in referendum week, will only enhance the view that there is little to choose between them. An £8-an-hour minimum wage by 2020 suggests exactly the same. “Left”-leaning policies, like ending privatisation and making City institutions pay their fair share at last, properly regulating rented property so that tenants do not pay inflated rents to profiteering Rachman-like landlords, and allowing the gradual renationalisation of railways to proceed when franchises become available, would at least indicate voters were not totally being taken for granted.

The adoption of transformational policies which aim to reshape society so that it works for the common good, and not just for the financial sector and the 1%, would actually show Labour, not before time, was “raising its game”.
Bernie Evans
Liverpool

• The massive Twitter response, by 50,000 Labour grassroots members and supporters, backing Ed Miliband’s leadership (…meanwhile tweeters say #webackEd, 10 November) emphasises the parliamentary plotters’ proposed denial of ordinary members’ democratic rights to participate in the party’s constitutional electoral college (to elect another leader). The time available before the general election would make this impossible, and some plotters have already called for a swift election with only one candidate on offer. The undemocratic outcome of such a parliamentary-party-only election, let alone one with a single candidate, would deeply offend and alienate the party’s grassroots members and supporters, who would be disenfranchised. Many would leave the party and/or refuse to work in the coming election.

Lessons must be learned from 2007 when Gordon Brown was crowned leader without a democratic election.This happened because Brown bagged the nominations of all but a handful of MPs. This prevented other candidates being offered, to the party as a whole, because of insufficient nominations from the parliamentary party. Following that debacle the party lost nearly 30,000 members and many remaining activists refused to work in the 2010 election campaign. The enormity of what the anonymous plotters are proposing would probably provoke a greater negative reaction this time.

As for the credibility of north-west MPs who apparently hatched the plot, they demonstrated their contempt for, and lack of democratic accountability to, ordinary party members when only one in nine of them bothered to attend their regional Labour conference a few days before they launched their conspiracy. Local MPs are expected to attend this function to report back to the ordinary members and demonstrate their accountability to them. Their lack of democratic accountability was criticised by a number of party members who addressed the conference.
Gaye Johnston
Chair, Campaign for Labour Party Democracy

Five years ago I stood in the cold and rain to witness the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Among the speakers was the then prime minister Gordon Brown. Our current prime minister seems to have been absent on Sunday (Jonathan Freedland, 10 November). Was he invited? If not, where were the “Merkel snubs Cameron” headlines? Or did he decline? If so, where were the “Cameron snubs Merkel” headlines? He had plenty of time to get to Berlin after performing his duties at the Cenotaph, so where was he?
Simon Gamble
Poole, Dorset

• The CBI wants the government to raise the threshold at which people pay national insurance to £10,500 and also provide more free childcare and extended maternity pay to help low-income workers (Report, 10 November). Presumably companies will pay their fare share of taxes to prevent an increase in the deficit that this would cause.
Bill Macinnes
Worthing

• Michele Hanson (G2, 11 November) does not mention the most frustrating thing of all about computer manuals. When it breaks down, where is the manual? In the computer itself, where you cannot get at it because the computer has broken. Oh, I know – print it when you first buy the thing, but who does?
Derek Hyde
London

• The solution to Michele Hanson’s problem with indecipherable manuals is to go to YouTube, where practically everything ever is demonstrated by someone somewhere – although more often than not an American in an interior so fascinating and distracting that one forgets the reason for watching.
Peter Knipe
London

• Seen on the back of a biker’s leather jacket at the Ace Café reunion (Letters, 11 November): “If you can read this, the Missus has fallen off.”
David Gerrard
Hove, East Sussex

• On a T-shirt in North Dakota: “North Dakota – just north of South Dakota.”
Arthur Lloyd
Aberdour, Fife

Santander online banking on a 13 ‘As we continue to move to online banking, there will be many new opportunities to get account numbers wrong,’ says David Flint. Photograph: Alamy

You ask what responsibility banks have when a customer’s single-digit error in an account number sends the money to the wrong place (Money, 8 November). It’s considerable, because of faults in the banks’ own processes. In most cases the person requesting the money transfer provides the intended recipient’s name as well as account number. This could act as a check, but banks seem not to make it. In systems analysis class, I was taught to use check digits to protect account numbers. Credit card companies do this and they protect completely against single digit errors, so the banks are not following best practice. As we continue to move to online banking, there will be many new opportunities to get account numbers wrong. These could be greatly reduced by re-engineered processes that required less copying of critical data.
David Flint
Visiting fellow, Cass Business School

Crosses in the Garden of Remembrance, Princes Street Gardens, Edinburgh, on 11 November 2014. Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

John Bird’s assertion (Letters, 11 November) that “no one alive now can personally remember a single one of the millions of young men who were persuaded to kill each other a century ago” is an insult to my generation.

I remember with sadness and horror my great-uncle, who, aged 15, ran away to join the Northumberland Fusiliers and became a runner between the trenches. He survived (with a Military Medal), only to live the life of a itinerant alcoholic, returning every so often to my grandmother’s home. And I remember the unearthly howling every night as he dreamt of things we cannot imagine.

I remember too my grandfather who was shipped out from the western front to fight in the Sinai peninsula. He too survived, having proved adept at handling camels, but wanted nothing more than his job as a beat bobby in Leeds.

I am proud that my granddaughter’s school recently displayed the mementoes of both these men. Personally, I will never forget either of them.
Nova Gresham
Exeter

• I personally knew my grandfather who at the age of 17 was driving a team of horses at Mons when the gun carriage they were pulling was hit by a German shell, instantly killing his four comrades. The force of the blast threw him clear but he laid injured and unconscious on the battlefield and suffered mustard gas inhalation that blinded him for six months and physically disabled him for the rest of his life, until he died a premature death in 1963.

I also knew my grandmother, who served as a nurse including time in the hospital at Woolwich Arsenal. She defied orders to abandon her post during a Zeppelin raid and organised her patients into firefighting teams to put out the incendiaries. She saved countless lives and was gazetted but had to wait 50 years for her bravery to be officially recognised, because she was a woman working with the British Legion and therefore not considered part of the armed forces.

I salute you, Ernest Trude and Frances Harris. You are my heroes.
Chris Trude
London

• My maternal grandfather certainly killed Germans. He was a sniper, and he hated it. He was twice wounded and twice sent back. He was lucky to survive, and I remember him well from my childhood. I carry his watch on Remembrance Day. My paternal grandfather also served, and was wounded and taken prisoner, and his brother was killed in a POW camp. I never met my great-uncle but I knew and loved my grandfathers. Both had their lives irremediably changed by serving in the first world war and serving as fire-watchers in the second. I suspect that for many of us, remembrance is not just about the war dead but about all those who served.

We should also remember that this ceremony is not just about the dead of the first world war, who may indeed have passed from living memory, but of the second world war and subsequent wars, for which memories are still very much alive. I find the Remembrance Day services overblown, lacking in rage, and too religious and militaristic. However, I still take the opportunity to reflect on the sacrifices of my forebears.
Catherine Rose
Olney, Buckinghamshire

• At primary school (in the 30s) I remember our teacher telling us about the Great War and suggesting that we bring in a penny to buy a poppy to wear. The next morning, the teacher quietly gave coins to those who had forgotten or were not able to spare the money. The seller, an ex-serviceman, then came in with his tray and talked a little about what the poppies meant. He then said: “If you have a penny you may take a small poppy but if you have sixpence or more you may take one of the poppy sprays in the tray.” I remember being deeply upset by this disparity. I could not understand why just because you were able to give more you should expect to have a more ostentatious spray. Nowadays poppy sellers all have the same simple flower but royals and celebrities still appear with elaborate sprays or precious metal brooches with enamelled poppy flowers. More than 50 years on I find this as distasteful as when I was five. Am I alone in this?
Brenda Banks
Teignmouth, Devon

• Presumably I am just imagining my father, who joined the medical corps in 1914, aged 15, after hearing that wounded men were being left on the battlefield due to a lack of stretcher-bearers. I am only 62, so I can’t be the only one who still remembers.
Cathy Schling
London

• I remember my dad very well, as a matter of fact. He was at Gallipoli. He didn’t like it.
Barry Hewlett-Davies
Brighton, East Sussex

• The poppies around the Tower of London have touched extraordinary chords of remembrance, art and charitable giving. Is there not opportunity to grasp this concept to mix pleasure with sentiment and alms, in other times and for other purposes? Such artworks could be displayed, dismantled, then dispatched to offer genuine lifelong remembrance mixed with joy to those who grieve.
Mel Wilder
Scarborough, North Yorkshire

• Civilian victims of wars still lack their memorials, though one that could be counted, from 1935, stands in Woodford Green, Essex. A stone bomb on a plinth, it is inscribed with the words: “This monument is raised as a protest against war in the air.” Commissioned by Sylvia Pankhurst, its tone is ironic, as it refers to the 1932 World Disarmament Conference in Geneva that upheld the right to use bombing aeroplanes.

It initially drew attention to the bombing by Italian airmen of Abyssinia, which led on to the second world war. Its renaming as the Anti-Air War Memorial extends its increasing relevance to the high cost paid by civilian victims of the ever-increasing firepower visited on them not just by bombing planes but by increasingly marketed unmanned drones.
Sylvia Ayling
Woodford Green, Essex

• Once again the UK’s Remembrance Sunday commemoration at the Cenotaph gave religion a privileged role (Comment is free, theguardian.com, 6 November), with a Church of England bishop leading a hymn and prayer, accompanied by male clergy and boy choir. A dozen religious denominations were also represented, but no atheists. This disrespects the many war dead and injured, as well as members of the armed forces and other citizens, who reject religion.

The Cenotaph, which dates from 1920, was deliberately designed as a secular state monument bearing no religious symbols in recognition of the wide diversity of the fallen. The same should apply to the annual ceremony. It should be a fully inclusive occasion, not an opportunity for one section of society to impose their particular belief.
RM Atkinson
Edinburgh

Nottingham aerial view Nottingham: ‘We will never truly be able to tackle worklessness until we have local control of work-related benefits, employment support programmes and core skills funding,’ says Cllr Nick McDonald. Photograph: Lewis Stickley/PA

Ken Livingstone, George Galloway et al are totally wrong to suggest that the proposed intervention in Tower Hamlets is an attack on local democracy (Letters, 7 November). It is entirely to do with protecting local taxpayers from an abuse of executive power and the systematic breakdown of local democratic checks and balances. The independent inspection of the council by PwC found extensive evidence of poor governance, financial mismanagement and a lack of transparency over the awarding of public grants and disposal of public buildings in Tower Hamlets. This also follows the Electoral Commission’s concerns about the conduct of local elections in the borough.

The residents of Tower Hamlets have a right to expect that their council tax is properly accounted for, providing transparency and audit trails of how their money is spent, and that correct democratic processes are upheld. We do not take intervention actions lightly, but previous interventions – such as in Doncaster in 2010 – have helped tackle dysfunctional governance and restore public confidence in the integrity of councils. Localism requires transparency, probity and robust scrutiny: as Eric Pickles said in parliament last week, “there can be no place for rotten boroughs in 21st-century Britain”.
Tariq Ahmad
Communities minister

• There is much more to be done to tackle worklessness in Nottingham (Report, 7 November). However, a like-for-like comparison with other conurbations is misleading. Nottingham has a large number of students and an unusually tight local authority boundary. Both of these facts skew the figures. In the Greater Nottingham area the figure (excluding student households) is 20.4%. This is much closer to comparable cities (Liverpool (24.6%), Birmingham (22.7%), Newcastle (22.5%), Manchester (20.2%). Unemployment remains too high in Nottingham, but it has fallen by 26% since May 2011, so we are making some progress. However, we will never truly be able to tackle worklessness until we have local control of work-related benefits, employment support programmes and core skills funding. Regional cities account for over a quarter of the nation’s economy, and we have the ability to create jobs, but we are let down by an overcentralised system that needs to change. Therefore, whilst the reality that underlies the statistics is complex, the solution is simple. Government needs to empower all cities to generate jobs by devolving power, and it needs to do so right away.
Cllr Nick McDonald
Cabinet member for jobs and growth, Nottingham city council

• Your correspondent refers to the plans for an elected mayor in Greater Manchester (Letters, 11 November), saying that two years ago Mancunians rejected such a proposal. Oh no, we didn’t! There are nine local authorities in Greater Manchester but only the residents of one of those districts, Manchester, were consulted in that referendum. The remaining 80% have never been asked.
David Hoult
Stockport

Independent:

Your pro-motoring editorial (11 November) claims almost nobody uses only train, bus and bike. Speaking as an almost-nobody, no shortage of us can be found in London, Cambridge and Oxford, cities where walking, cycling and public transport play their rightful roles.

Even if motoring could be made as environmentally sound as these modes (it can’t), car-centric planning is a social disaster: it excludes children, the elderly and the disabled, and creates built environments that are both unpleasant and dangerous. Self-driving cars would solve few of these problems.

Holiday traffic makes the A303 an extreme case, and its upgrade may well be justified. Holidays are one thing, but I know almost nobody who regards daily driving as desirable rather than an unfortunate necessity.

You write that rail is often not an option, invoking Beeching. When £15bn is on the table, many things are possible. In Scotland, a 30-mile stretch of the former Waverley route is being rebuilt with a budget of under £300m. At that rate, the £15bn earmarked for roads would rebuild 1,500 miles of double-track railway, 30 per cent of the amount cut by Beeching. A modest but sustained investment would yield a comprehensive rail network within a generation.

Equating road-building with “economic revitalisation” is out of date by at least 40 years. Prioritising the car has been a failed experiment.

Dr Stephen Kell
Grantchester, Cambridgeshire

I have used Eurostar many times and find it excellent. It would be mad to fly. (“Why I’m a Eurostar sceptic”, 12 November.) However, when I get to Paris it’s another story.

The Gare du Nord is a mess, but many busy stations are. But when it comes to going wherever in Paris you are heading for, you enter a world of pain.

Last time I went, in August, arriving there at 9pm, there was a queue of 150 people, and three taxis vaguely coming in. Wait time? Who knows? Two hours? So I took the Métro.

Everywhere steep staircases and very few escalators anywhere. With a suitcase, more pain. Stations like Montparnasse, Châtelet and Invalides a nightmare.

I know Paris very well, lived there for years, love it. But it has fallen way behind London in these respects.

David Halley
Hampton Hill, Middlesex

Your article on Eurostar neglects the true difficulties of the present routing, that is the major termini in Brussels and Paris.

Leaving aside the appalling facilities, both stations are threatening environments where predators lurk ready to prey on vulnerable travellers in a Dickensian manner.

In Brussels, rail stations appear to be no-go areas for police and the problem in Paris extends to Métro links. It is no wonder that passengers prefer the relative security of the airports patrolled by armed guards.

Carole Lewis
Solihull, West Midlands

Where is the ‘better’ world they died for?

One great sadness of Remembrance is recalling how so many millions gave their lives for a better world that has never come to be.

So today, the 85 richest people control as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. In this country, there are around 100 billionaires, while a million go to food banks. Billions are wasted on weapons such as Trident, while millions struggle across the globe for basics, such as water.

In the meantime, people vote for parties committed to the sort of intolerant policies on Europe and immigration that caused so many to go to fight in the world wars. The sad conclusion is that they may have given their tomorrows for our todays but we squander and insult that legacy by the way we behave today.

Paul Donovan
London E11

Left to the market, we’d all be in trouble

No, Paul Sloane (letter, 12 November), you are naïve, not the writer of the editorial you criticise.

I think we all know by now that in conditions of a surplus of labour, employers will screw wages down as far as they can – to starvation levels if they can get away with it.

If we are to have a stable civilised society, we need strong trade unions or statutory minimum wage controls, or possibly both, otherwise the less skilled will be ruthlessly exploited.

Do we learn nothing?

Dudley Dean
Maresfield, East Sussex

The most striking feature of the CBI report, “Better Off Britain”, published to coincide with its annual conference, is the near total absence of any direct action from its members to alleviate the hardship of employees. They expect the vast majority of measures to come from government at the taxpayers’ expense.

Geoff Naylor
Winchester

Prosperity hinges on a combination of skills

Nicky Morgan’s choice of language in your report was unfortunate (“Want to keep your options open? Then do science, says Education Secretary”, 11 November). The UK has an unrivalled reputation for its arts and humanities teaching and research, and the world comes to us for these subjects, as also for our eminence in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The arts and humanities fuel the success of our creative industries and provide millions of young people with the training to prosper in today’s knowledge-based economy.

The fastest growth over the past four decades has been in the services sector, and has been dependent on the combined skills that come from the humanities, social science, science, technology and medicine. We walk hand-in-hand with our colleagues across all research disciplines, because it is the combination of all this expertise which guarantees our future success.

The British Academy’s project Prospering Wisely shows how the humanities and social sciences contribute to our economy, our culture and our society. They help us understand what it is to be human and how societies function and occasionally malfunction – and as such they are an essential part of the eco-structure that supports the UK’s health and prosperity.

Baron Stern of Brentford FRS
President, The British Academy, London SW1

We should champion EU migration

All the evidence shows that EU freedom of movement is a boon, not a curse for the UK. European migrants contribute hugely to the economy, and while 2.2 million EU nationals live in the UK, more than 2 million British citizens reside elsewhere in the EU.

But free movement should mean the right to work, study or retire in another EU country, not the right to move and claim benefits. That is why the European Court ruling this week (“EU migrants can be denied unconditional benefits”, 12 November) is so important, as it clarifies this long-standing principle in EU law. From now on, when there is an issue with benefit tourism, it will be clear that the problem lies with UK law, not with Brussels.

The Coalition Government has already tightened up the rules in the UK, including by ensuring that EU arrivals cannot claim benefits within three months of arrival. Now there is a need to build on this and address outstanding issues, such as child benefit being sent abroad. That way, we can champion the advantages of EU free movement and put any concerns about benefit tourism soundly to bed.

Catherine Bearder
Liberal Democrat MEP for South East England

London attracts the best teachers

While I agree that the ethnic diversity of pupils contributes to the London effect (“Hard-working ethnic minority pupils lifting schools’ results”, 12 November), I think another factor is the calibre of teachers London attracts. It has so much to offer in the way of culture compared with the rest of the country.

Having taught in London for many years and just retired from teaching in the North-west, I found that here a number of teachers went to local schools, trained at local colleges and then returned to teach in local schools, and had not the breadth of experience and sometimes enthusiasm of London teachers.

Mary Ripley
Silverdale, Lancashire

Why not widen EU arrest warrant?

If the European Arrest Warrant is not an early step towards a pan-European justice system, why isn’t the concept extended to all those countries to which and from which we would be prepared to extradite suspects, whether within the EU or not?

Robert Edwards
Hornchurch, Essex

Victoria (and Albert) like to keep it clean

David (front page, 11 November) has always been in his glory in the V&A. Johanna Puisto has simply given him a bath.

PS: Queen Victoria may have been “shocked” by the statue, but do we know what David thought of her?

Malcolm Addison
Windsor

Times:

Removing 65 ‘unsightly’ pylons will cost £500 million. Opinion is split over whether it is money well spent

Sir, Alice Thomson says that we will all profit if National Grid buries cables underground (Opinion, Nov 12). Her argument seems to be based on the opinion that transmission lines and pylons are an artificial intrusion into otherwise unspoilt landscapes. If this is a valid argument, will we be seeing structures such as the Ribblehead viaduct being dismantled?

If the argument is that pylons are ugly whereas viaducts are beautiful, that is truly in the eyes of the beholder — impossible to be quantifiably defended and open to endless discussion. Conversely, the removal of overhead power lines in certain areas has a measurable effect on all of us. Unlike viaducts that serve only those who wish to travel from one point to another, power transmission lines serve us all, and this is reflected in the 22p addition to everybody’s energy bills.

Moreover, when a transmission line is buried the land above it can never be used for anything that might hinder repairs, and so no trees can be allowed to grow there. Will the resulting barren scars not in themselves be seen in the future as artificial blights on the landscape?

David Lindsley, FIET Hon Fellow
Kingston University

Sir, It is welcome news that National Grid is to spend £500 million on removing unsightly pylons from some of our most beautiful countryside (report, Nov 11). It is absurd, however, that at the very time that it announces these improvements, National Grid is consulting on a “preferred route” for a new power line that would string 50-metre-high pylons for 44km through or close to the Lake District National Park?

Surely the first priority should be to put underground all new grid lines that have to cross National Parks or Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Even stranger, National Grid has identified an “offshore south” alternative route in Cumbria that would take its cables across the sea bed and avoid the Lake District National Park altogether. This route would almost certainly be cheaper, too.

Sir Martin Holdgate
President, Friends of the Lake District, Kendal, Cumbria

Sir, I was struck by the contrast between the stark message in your leader (“The State We’re In”, Nov 11) and the news in the same edition that National Grid is planning to spend £7 million per pylon to reduce its visual impact. As you point out in your leader, we need to decide what we can, and cannot, afford. How can spending £500 million of electricity customers’ money on this scheme be justified? These pylons were built after a robust planning process: reversing the outcome is an unnecessary luxury.

To add insult to injury, we are told by Chris Baines, the environmentalist who is apparently to decide where this money is spent, that consultation on his plans would “take for ever and become parochial”. This is a very different approach to that taken by the green lobby when it opposes infrastructure developments.

Alun Ellis
Tallentire, Cumbria

Sir, You report that the burying of cables to remove 65 pylons will cost £500 million, which I can well believe having buried high-voltage cables myself. What I find remarkable is that National Grid can somehow obtain the money and only charge the ordinary consumer 22p a year. Please let us all know how they do it as I need to borrow a large sum of money to start a wealth creating venture and the repayments are eye-watering in comparison.

Mike Travers, FIET
Saline, Fife

Sir, In the Sixties and Seventies the CEGB employed a group of architects and landscape designers to weave pylons and their cables into the natural folds of the countryside, often very successfully. This art seems to have been forgotten. I would far rather that the wind turbines were buried (or drowned), as parts of our landscape and Liverpool Bay are ruined by them.

Giles Velarde
Battle, E Sussex

Is this the definition of irony? Spending £7 million per pylon to remove unsightly overhead cables while subsidising the erection of wind turbines.

Christopher Wheeldon
London SW13

Nicky Morgan is surely wrong to insist that the way forward for pupils is to stop studying arts

Sir, Nicky Morgan is correct to claim that “it takes a pretty confident 16-year-old to have their whole life mapped out ahead of them” (“Stop studying arts if you want a good job, minister says”, Nov 11), but surely she is wrong to insist that the way forward is to stop studying arts. As a teacher of mathematics I would say the real problem is narrowing choice at 16 towards either science, arts or humanities. A properly rounded programme (such as the International Baccalaureate or a suitable combination of varied A levels) is the only way to guarantee the open career options Ms Morgan supports.

A leading designer who visited my school last term told the pupils that she believed her most important qualification was in foreign languages.

Paul Mitchell

Headmaster, Cobham Hall, Kent

Victor Matfield is not the only veteran rugby player to have enduring power. What about Paul O’Connell?

Sir, Owen Slot (Nov 11) writes an insightful article on the enduring powers of certain rugby veterans, such as Victor Matfield, Richie McCaw and Bakkies Botha. I admire all three but wonder why he did not mention Paul O’Connell: 35 years old, 90-odd caps for Ireland (and a winning ratio), seven caps for the Lions including the captaincy, and a 5-3 winning record in head-to-heads with Matfield, including last Saturday.

Perhaps the answer lies in Mr Slot’s last paragraph. Could it be that for all the criticism it receives, and its relatively limited resources, Irish rugby has it right?

Maurice Byrne

London SW10

David Blunkett is right about the farming radio soap: The Archers has lost its way

Sir, How I agree with David Blunkett about the new editorship of The Archers (Nov 11). Everything is sad and bad and thoroughly depressing, and all my friends who are regular listeners feel the same. We have followed the characters over the years and now some of them have become ridiculously unreal.

Bridget Ryle

Winsford, Somerset

Sir, While I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Blunkett, he seems to have missed Mike Tucker’s point. It was not Mike who wanted to leave the village but Vicky. She persuaded Mike, saying that there would be better opportunities for their daughter, Bethany. In real life, many families who have farmed for generations on the same land have been faced with similar problems of compulsory road or house-building. They have fought their cases, and those who have lost have stayed and diversified to save their livelihoods and farms for the next generation.

David Archer should show he is British and built of sterner stuff and carry the farm forward for Pip . . . not fly the white flag and run.

Laura Shuttleworth

Cherington, Glos

Sir, Lay people tend to attribute knowledge to doctors which they often do not have. Mr Heenan’s assumption (letter, Nov 10) that we will make the diagnosis correctly and go on to predict the time of death accurately is a case in point.
Professor Peter Davies
Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital

Telegraph:

The Let Britain Fly campaign calls on political leaders to make clear manifesto commitments stipulating that they will reach a quick decision on airports expansion

A Virgin Atlantic Airways Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet comes into land at London Gatwick airport

Most of London’s airports will be full by the middle of the next decade Photo: Alamy

12:00AM GMT 13 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – The Airports Commission has launched its public consultation on airports expansion, following its recommendation that the South East needs one new runway by 2030.

The need for action could not be clearer. Heathrow has been full for a decade, Gatwick will be full by 2020, and most of London’s airports will be full by the middle of the next decade. Inactivity is costing our economy billions in lost trade and investment.

The business community wants expansion because our international connectivity is vital to attracting new business and it underpins our competitiveness. We trade 20 times more with countries with which we have a direct air link and, by value, 40 per cent of exports go by air.

The Let Britain Fly campaign is calling on British political leaders to make clear manifesto commitments stipulating that they will reach a quick decision on airports expansion and agree to be guided by the Commission’s final recommendation.

Sir George Iacobescu
Chairman and Chief Executive, Canary Wharf Group
Michael Spencer
Group CEO, ICAP
Martin Gilbert
Chief Executive, Aberdeen Asset Management
Samir Brikho
Chief Executive, AMEC
Mike Turner CBE
Chairman, Babcock International Group
Robert Elliott
Chairman and Senior Partner, Linklaters
John Allan CBE
Chairman, Barratts Development
Chris Grigg
Chief Executive, British Land
Martin Gilbert
Chief Executive, Aberdeen Asset Management
Nicola Shaw
Chief Executive Officer, HS2
Richard Fursland
CEO, BritishAmerican Business
Samir Brikho
Chief Executive, AMEC
Ian Reeves CBE
Senior Partner, Synaps Partners
Richard Dickinson
Chief Executive, West End Company
Ufi Ibrahim
Chief Executive, British Hospitality Association
John Burns
Chief Executive, Derwent London
Richards Solomons
Chief Executive Officer, InterContinental Hotels Group
Michael Spencer
Group CEO, ICAP
Angus Knowles-Cutler
London Senior Partner, Deloitte
Colin Stanbridge
Chief Executive, London Chamber of Commerce and Industry
Professor Michael Arthur
President and Provost, UCL
Mark Boleat
Chairman of Policy and Resources Committee, City of London Corporation
Simon Walker
Director General, Institute of Directors
Baroness Jo Valentine
Chief Executive, London First
Surinder Arora
CEO, Arora Holdings
John Allan CBE
Chairman, Barratts Developments
Ian Durant
Chairman, Capital & Counties Properties
Chris Grigg
Chief Executive, British Land
Martin Gilbert
Chief Executive, Aberdeen Asset Management
Rebecca Kane
General Manager, The O2
James Rook
Managing Director, Nimlok
Basil Scarsell
Chief Executive Officer, UK Power Networks
Nicholas Cheffings
Chair, Hogan Lovells International
Mark Reynolds
Chief Executive, Mace Group
Bill Moore CBE
Chief Executive, The Portman Estate
John Stewart
Chairman, Legal and General Group
Gordon Clark
Country Manager, Global Blue
James Rowntree
Managing Director – Transportation (Europe), CH2MHILL
Andrew Murphy
Retail Director, John Lewis Partnership
David Tonkin
Chief Executive Officer, Atkins Global
David Sleath
Chief Executive, SEGRO
Francis Salway
Iain Anderson
Director and Chief Corporate Counsel, Cicero Group
Harold Paisner
Senior Partner, Berwin Leighton Paisner
Sir Win Bischoff
Hugh Seaborn, Chief Executive, Cadogan
John Rhodes
Director, Quod
John Lehal
Managing Director, Insight Public Affairs
Bob Rothenberg
Senior Partner, Blick Rothenberg
Robert M Noel
Chief Executive, Land Securities Group
Inderneel Singh
Group Corporate Development Manager, Edwardian Group London
George Kessler CBE
Group Deputy Chairman, Kesslers International
Kevin Murphy
Chairman, ExCeL London
Michael Ward
Managing Director, Harrods
Sue Brown
Senior Managing Director, FTI Consulting
Mark Lancaster
Chief Executive Officer, SDL
Tim Hancock
Managing Director, Terence O’Rourke
Michael Hirst OBE
Chairman, Business Visits and Events Partnership

The collapsing Tory vote; an inspired tribute at the Tower of London; terror attacks in Nigeria; Britain’s longest viaduct

David Cameron listens to an aide during the Lord Mayor's banquet at the Guildhall

David Cameron listens to an aide during the Lord Mayor’s banquet at the Guildhall Photo: Reuters

7:00AM GMT 12 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – Just two weeks ago, during Prime Minister’s Questions, Ed Miliband asked David Cameron to explain why he was delaying a vote on the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). Mr Cameron answered: “We are going to have a vote. We are going to have it before the Rochester by-election. His questions have just collapsed.”

The chicanery used by the Government to deny MPs the promised vote wasn’t clever. Ukip will certainly benefit from this spectacular own goal.

The only thing collapsing will be the Tory vote.

Nigel Draper
Takeley, Essex

SIR – First there was the sleight-of-hand accounting employed with regard to the £1.7 billion levy from the EU, which David Cameron must have known would be halved by the rebate due on it. Then came Monday’s debacle in Parliament.

Mr Cameron promised a debate on the adoption of the EAW, but it turned out to be a debate on all 35 justice measures being opted back into, with the EAW not even mentioned in the motion.

We are often told by governments that they have “learnt lessons”. It seems that the Prime Minister and his Government have not learnt that these kind of tactics will not endear them to the electorate.

Daniel Bratchell
Worcester

SIR – The Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, criticised the Government’s handling of the EAW matter, saying that failure to hold a vote on the issue had increased voters’ contempt for the parliamentary system.

In fact, among many voters, the repeated failure of Mr Bercow to observe the time-honoured convention of the Speaker’s neutrality is exactly the sort of thing that aggravates the public.

Bob Timmis
Warrington, Cheshire

SIR – The EAW is good news for victims and bad news for those dodging accountability.

John Barstow
Fittleworth, West Sussex

SIR – Adopting the EAW would place every British subject at the mercy of foreign courts and legal systems very different to our own. Without the safeguard of an extradition treaty, foreign judges would have the power to order the arrest of any British person without substantial evidence of a crime having been committed.

Derek Bennett
Walsall, Staffordshire

SIR – Can our legislature not come up with an emergency statute which dovetails into the EAW to achieve what is needed, without further EU integration, and with further permanent legislation outside the EAW that particularly suits British interests?

Quentin Skinner
Lower Zeals, Wiltshire

Poppies at the Tower of London speak to us all

SIR – Paul Cummins’s inspired tribute at the Tower of London has brought us all together irrespective of colour, class or creed: something that no single individual has managed to do since, perhaps, the Rev David Railton and his similarly inspired idea of the Unknown Soldier.

I would like to think that this country might honour Paul Cummins in the New Year Honours with a knighthood.

Geoffrey Aldridge
Wingrave, Buckinghamshire

SIR – The image of the poppies in the Tower of London’s moat is very poignant.

My grandfather was in the 3rd Battalion Grenadier Guards from 1908-11. During that period he was often posted to the Tower, where he used to play football in the moat with his fellow soldiers.

As a reservist, he was called up at the outbreak of war and posted to the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards, with whom he landed at Zeebrugge in early October 1914. He took part in the famous Christmas Day football matches, but spoke very little of this for many years. It was, of course, a treasonable offence to fraternise with the enemy.

Later, he was seriously wounded at the 2nd Battle of Ypres in April 1915, and never returned to the Front. He was one of the lucky ones.

J R Martin
Colchester, Essex

SIR – The poppy installation at the Tower is wonderful. My own poppy will be placed on my father’s grave in a small churchyard north of Glasgow.

Born in 1921, he was a soldier in the Second World War, and died last year. He was well known locally for poppy collections and collected his last can just before his death.

Every purchased poppy has a story.

Marlyn Watt
Alicante, Spain

Nigerian school attack

SIR – In the early Sixties I worked in Northern Nigeria as an education officer, teaching at the Provincial Girls’ School in Bauchi. There were 100 girls in the school, who came from all parts of the province. Many continued their education at a secondary school in Kano and, generally, the education of girls was encouraged.

The school was visited by Sir Ahmadu Bello, the premier of the Northern Nigeria region while I was teaching there, and he appeared to be very pleased with the education the girls were receiving. He recommended that the head teacher of the school, Margaret Shier, should be awarded an MBE for her work over more than eight years to promote the education of girls in the region.

I am so sad that, 50 years later, so much damage is being done to the education of both girls and boys in this part of Nigeria. Girls have been targeted in previous attacks and the horrific killing of so many boys at a school in Potiskum on Monday, in a suspected Boko Haram suicide bombing, is such a backward step.

Rosemary Pardey
Cuckfield, West Sussex

A fond farewell

SIR – At a time when we hear so many stories about the poor treatment of vulnerable patients, it was refreshing to read the report about Sheila Marsh, who was granted a visit from her favourite horse in the grounds of the hospital where she died a few hours later.

Well done Wigan Royal Infirmary for this outstanding example of listening to the requests of end-of-life patients, and showing what can be done to allow them to die peacefully and with dignity.

Margaret Senior
Uppingham, Rutland

Absorbing languages

SIR – Catherine Ford believes children as young as three should start acquiring other languages in order to reap the benefits of bilingualism.

Research published over several decades suggests that older children generally progress faster in second languages than younger children; language acquisition is possible at any age; and those who begin as adults can achieve very high levels of proficiency in second languages.

One of the world’s greatest polyglots, Kató Lomb, who mastered 17 languages, started acquiring other languages in her twenties. When I met her 20 years ago in Budapest, she was working on number 18 at age 86.

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California

Talk of the town

SIR – The company I worked for transferred me to their Haverfordwest branch. Colleagues later told me that this posting was known as “Haveagoodrest”.

Gordon Doughty
Hook, Pembrokeshire

SIR – Reflecting the current woes of the local football team, there are children growing up in Blackpool who genuinely believe that their home town is called “Blackpool-Nil”.

Bill Honeywell
Clitheroe, Lancashire

SIR – Us’ns on the Isle of Woight calls that gurt lump close to us’ns “North Island”.

Bill Miller
St Lawrence, Isle of Wight

Stay-at-home mothers

SIR – I hardly think that Karren Brady, newly appointed Baroness Brady of Knightsbridge, is a role model for mothers who elect not to return to work, given that she spent only five months at home with her daughter.

When I had my son I gave up a fairly lucrative career as a lawyer to take care of his needs, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

It is my belief that many of the moral and practical shortcomings of children today can be laid at the door of parents who put their careers before the needs of their children. Women are continually being “nudged” by this government to return to work against their better judgment.

Eileen Godfrey
York

SIR – I thought stay-at-home mothers stayed at home – at least until their youngest child was at school. Five months sounds more like maternity leave.

M E van Rees
Lindale, Cumbria

Backing soundtrack

SIR – You refer to a scene in Casablanca in which “Dooley Wilson plays the film’s signature song As Time Goes By” (report, November 10).

Dooley Wilson was a drummer and could not play the piano. The music for that and other scenes was provided by Elliot Carpenter, who sat at a second piano on the set, out of sight of the camera. Wilson was thus able to observe and copy his arm and hand movements.

John Carter
Bromley, Kent

Let there be light

SIR – In the northern hemisphere, on any day after the spring equinox and before the autumn equinox, it is possible for the sun to shine through the left-hand windows when looking towards the altar in a church with the altar in the east (Letters, November 6).

Martin Mears
East Ord, Northumberland

Bottoms on seats

SIR – Does the cinema that has had to replace its Victorian-sized seats so as to accommodate modern audiences’ bigger bottoms (report, November 10) still sell popcorn, ice cream, cola and chocolates?

Anne Jappie
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

View from the longest railway viaduct in Britain

SIR – Thank you for the beautiful picture of the steam train crossing the Harringworth Viaduct (report, November 10). It is not, however, the longest masonry viaduct in Britain.

The London and Greenwich railway – at around 3.75 miles long and entirely on a viaduct – is longer. The Harringworth Viaduct is the longest across a valley.

Keith Ferris
Maidstone, Kent

SIR – I wonder at what point the longest masonry viaduct across a beautiful Rutland valley became regarded as “magnificent”.

There are lessons for those involved in the construction of HS2 to build with the style and quality of our Victorian forefathers, ensuring that the construction projects of today will be viewed as magnificent additions in the future.

J S Hirst
Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Irish Times:

Sir, – Thank you to the authors of the Garda Inspectorate report (“Garda chief denies crime figures massaged”, Front Page, November 12th). This is the first time that our fears for the policing of Ireland have been clearly enunciated and confirmed by experts who have set out clear steps to correct the situation.

Generally, such reports are carefully prepared, read by a few interested parties, and carefully shelved, never to see the light of another day.

We can all remember the announcement that the penalty points scandal was over. It would never be allowed to happen again. Except, of course, that it did.

This report needs to be read by everybody. The state of An Garda Síochána is truly appalling. The overhaul cannot be carried out from within. The appointment of a new commissioner should be the result of a global search. He or she needs to have a towering reputation and a zeal for reform.

We need to take a firm approach to the implementation of the recommendations of the inspectorate.

The working members of An Garda Síochána must have a voice in the reform required. We appreciate their goodwill and their desire to serve the public. Above all, we must listen to them. – Yours, etc,

PATRICIA R MOYNIHAN,

Castaheany,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – One of the failings of our systems for recording crime highlighted in the Garda Inspectorate report is the failure to reflect accurately levels of racism and hate crime, an issue which the Immigrant Council of Ireland has worked on for over a decade. The report notes that “during inspection visits the inspectorate asked gardaí of all ranks about investigating racist and homophobic crimes and not one garda reported that they had ever recorded such a crime or investigated an offence”.

Last year we produced figures that show that the levels of racism reported to the PSNI were 700 per cent higher than those recorded by An Garda Síochána.

The gap is so wide that, even allowing for different legal definitions and laws, clearly something is wrong.

Failure to record an accurate picture of levels of racism not only inadvertently sends a message to victims that if they come forward their complaints will not be taken seriously, but also prevents an evidence-based approach to future policy and laws.

It is worth noting that through our own reporting systems, the Immigrant Council of Ireland recorded an 85 per cent increase in cases last year, while year-to-date figures for 2014 show a further increase of 55 per cent.

We are committed to continuing our work with partners across a range of sectors, including the Garda, to ensure the delivery of a robust reporting system which offers support and justice to victims and laws which are fit for purpose. – Yours, etc,

DENISE CHARLTON,

Chief Executive,

Immigrant Council

of Ireland,

Andrew Street,

Dublin 2.

A chara, – After paying for water charges since coming to London three years ago from Donegal, I think it is fair to pay for the service. If it’s not paid for, then there is nothing to invest in improving the service. I agree that a lot of the water services in Ireland are substandard and the infrastructure less than appropriate, but if someone doesn’t pay for it, it will never be improved.

That said, I really can’t get my head around the nonsense of the charges – one person is this charge, three children are another, etc. At what point is a child “chargeable”? If a child goes away to university and is home at the weekend, are they charged for the two days at home? What about families where one spouse is away in Canada half the time – do they have to register for the few precious weeks they spend at home with their children? What about people who spend days looking after their sick or elderly relatives on a regular basis? Are they charged at their own home or the home of the person they look after?

My husband and I pay around £25 a month for water. But we have the advantage in the UK of there being choice in the supplier. Yes, some homes are metered and others are not and they work it out, but this situation of how many people live at a property is insane! We should learn from others, and not create a system from nothing, a system that is virtually impossible to understand and to keep track of. – Is mise,

MARY LANE,

London.

Sir, – The suggestion that water services could be the subject of a constitutional referendum is outlandish (“Alan Kelly refuses to rule out vote on Irish Water ownership”, November 5th).

The Minister for the Environment ought to acquaint himself with the unhappy experience of Germany after it embarked on such a venture. When its postwar constitution was drafted in 1948, a provision was included that explicitly placed all of the country’s motorways in state ownership, a clause which survives to this day. The unforeseen consequence of this became clear decades later when the German Constitutional Court ruled that any attempts by the German federal government to develop the motorways through public-private partnerships were unconstitutional and that only publicly funded development was permissible.

The Government has already held six referendums since it came to office and has pledged further votes on same-sex marriage, the voting age, and the age of presidential candidates, all of which are Labour Party vanity projects of no relevance to those seeking employment or struggling to pay the bills. So why on earth should we add another potentially dangerous referendum into this mix?

The management of our water services should be left in the hands of the Oireachtas and future governments that will ultimately be accountable to the people for any decisions they make. – Yours, etc,

BARRY WALSH

Clontarf, Dublin 3.

A chara, – Your main editorial of November 11th (“Cultural vandalism”) hits several nails on the head. You write, “The €4 million fund allocated to the 2016 commemorations would be better spent safeguarding the heritage that previous generations did so much to gather and build into collections of vital importance to understanding the past”.

Over the past year or so, you have published several letters from your readers making the same general point. Is there anyone listening out there? Please remind me, why exactly do we have a Minister for the Arts? – Is mise,

COLETTE

NÍ MHOITLEIGH,

Baile Átha Cliath 6.

Sir, – In your editorial, you refer to the record of the Government in areas of arts and heritage, the economic arguments for investment in the arts and the need for more voices to be heard from the arts community.

A new way of thinking is needed to allow our cultural sectors to develop and flourish involving collaboration between the arts community, private sector business and government. A strong lobbying voice for the economic and commercial interests of people in these sectors is required.

It is for these reasons that the Chamber of Arts, Heritage and Culture was established in 2013 to address a deficit which we identified in the support available for creative people who wished to commercialise their ideas. We started a conversation at our inaugural forum in Dublin Castle in January 2014 on how our cultural resources could be harnessed to make them key economic drivers; this led to the launch of our strategic plan in June.

Quite apart from the economic arguments, arts, heritage and culture should be supported in themselves for their intrinsic value and as they are essential to who we are as a people. However, the economic arguments based on our research are absolutely compelling.

These sectors are the largest contributors to GDP in a number of EU countries, government subsidies are a tiny part of the income generated by these sectors and the type of employment created in them is exactly the type of long-term, diversified and sustainable jobs that are needed for the development of a knowledge economy.

We call on Government to examine the clear and compelling economic data and ensure that these sectors are supported in the same way that other key economic sectors are supported.

Our cultural resources are our greatest resource as a people but they can also be our greatest economic resource and as we approach the centenary of 1916 we have an unparalleled opportunity not just to safeguard and develop our rich tradition in arts, heritage and culture but to also harness these unique resources to drive our economic renewal. – Yours, etc,

NEIL KEENAN,

Chairman,

AUDREY McKENNA,

Chief Executive,

Chamber of Arts,

Heritage and Culture

(Ireland) Limited,

21 Castle Street,

Dalkey, Co Dublin.

Sir, – Kathryn Holmquist’s piece deserves further attention (“Does prostitution demean, degrade and dehumanise the buyers of sex?”, November 12th). For in turning the spotlight on those who buy sex, Ms Holmquist has looked at a crucial cohort, which all of your letter writers have managed to ignore skilfully, thus far.

If we are to have a full and frank examination of the prostitution issue, surely we need to focus on the men (and some women) who feel entitled to buy sex from women (and some men). This sense of entitlement is surely critical to an honest analysis of this multibillion euro worldwide industry, which would be non-existent without the demand it enjoys? – Yours, etc,

FRANCES BYRNE,

Dublin 15.

Sir , – Whether you agree or disagree with prostitution, everyone has to be concerned with the very high risk of violence to those engaged – mainly female – in the prostitution trade. But not alone is there the risk of violence, but also the risk of disease and ill health.

I have no doubt but that the suggestion of having licensed brothels will give rise to moral outrage and anger but at least the issue should be discussed. – Yours, etc,

MARTIN CROTTY,

Blackrock, Co Louth.

Sir, –In the current debates about prostitution and the law, surely consideration should be given to viewing both the actions of seller and buyer as unlawful and even more importantly, unethical. We should speak loudly and clearly against enshrining in law the perspective of the human body as a mere commodity for sale. Such perspectives are an abuse of common humanity and demeaning of the whole human family. – Yours, etc,

Dr VINCENT KENNY,

Dublin 16.

Sir, – Michael Austin counts himself among those who believe same-sex marriage to be “biologically impossible” (November 12th). In all my years of scientific and medical training, nowhere have I come across the biological process of marriage. There is a social construct of marriage and a religious construct of marriage, both of which are engaged with during traditional “church” marriages. Both these constructs involve the ideal of two individuals who love one another and are willing to commit publicly to one another. It should only be the religious version of marriage that is allowed to exclude same-sex couples, based on that religion’s particular beliefs system. The state should remain blind to the gender make up of any loving couple brave enough to seek permanent union. – Yours, etc,

Dr MAITIU Ó FAOLAIN ,

Foxrock,

Dublin 18.

A chara, – If we vote next year to extend the meaning of “marriage” to cover same-sex relationships, how, in fairness can we refuse to include bisexual relationships? – Is mise,

PÁDRAIG McCARTHY,

Sandyford,

Dublin.

Sir, – As a self-employed person, I need a tax-clearance certificate each year. For some bizarre reason, the state agency I work for stops payments to me several weeks before the previous year’s tax-clearance certificate runs out.

Although my accounts were submitted well within the deadline of October 31st (tax paid and my current account debited within hours), I still have not received a tax-clearance certificate, which means all payments to me are blocked.

I have not been paid since September 19th and have no idea when I will be. Tax clearance should issue automatically so that self-employed people are not left without income for many weeks. This can put us out of business.

I really dread this time of year, every year, because state agencies make things so unnecessarily difficult and complicated.

Our public servants have no consideration whatsoever for struggling self-employed people. – Yours, etc,

JOHN BRADY,

Phibsborough,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – We must congratulate Javier Garrigues, the Spanish ambassador, for his letter (November 12th) summarising the Spanish government’s myopic view of the Catalan question. This view is certainly very useful when the objective is to garner votes for Spanish nationalist parties.

Unfortunately, as much of the recent international press coverage has shown, it is very hard to sell inside any modern democracy, especially so shortly after the exemplary Scottish referendum. What Mr Garrigues fails to see is that we are facing a political problem of massive proportions that needs to be solved with a large amount of political courage and not through the courts of law.

Negotiation by using a highly politicised constitutional court whose president was a member of the ruling PP party is not only fruitless but has been a great help to the pro-independence movement, which has grown spectacularly over the last few years. An outdated, unchanged constitution drafted under the watchful eye of the 1978 military cannot be used to stop the legitimate demands of a sizeable portion of the Catalan population.

So far the replies from Madrid to any negotiation attempts coming out of Catalonia are reminiscent of a different conflict on this island and could be simply summed up as “Madrid says no”. – Yours, etc,

DANI CARLES,

JOSEP JUNYENT,

JORDI COMAS,

MIREIA ROIG,

Catalan Council

of Ireland,

Navan Road, Dublin 7.

Sir, – While it is fascinating to hear of the involvement of Irish scientists in designing a probe to land on a tiny comet 500 million kilometres from Earth (“Scientists ready for mission to land probe on comet”, November 12th), I wonder why we on Arranmore cannot receive fibre-optic broadband. We are only 4.8 km from mainland Ireland. – Yours, etc,

MARIAN QUINN,

Arranmore Island,

Co Donegal.

Sir, – Throwing a washing machine at a rock – isn’t that going a bit far? – Yours, etc,

OLIVER McGRANE,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 16.

A chara, – Bernard Neary (November 12th) wonders if RTÉ would be allowed to create a series chronicling how our country was ruined by affluent ne’er-do-wells. I suggest he watches Charlie when it screens. – Is mise,

Dr GARETH P KEELEY,

Düsseldorf,

Germany.

Sir, – For many years Irish audiences were entertained on a Sunday night by The Riordans, Bracken and Glenroe, dramas centred on the lives of people living in rural Ireland. These are now replaced by a new drama series Love/Hate, a drama depicting life in Dublin’s criminal underworld. It has gripped the nation. Old Ireland appears to be dead and gone. Are our values, respect and decency heading for the grave with it? – Yours, etc,

THOMAS DENNIGAN,

Newtowncashel,

Co Longford.

Sir, – While the Central Bank is to be commended for imposing the maximum possible fine on Ulster Bank for its technology-related snafu, the paltry penalty shows that our politicians must now update the legislation to give it real teeth. A fine of €3.5 million per day would, I am sure, encourage a speedier resolution should this entirely avoidable problem recur. – Yours, etc,

PEADAR GRANT,

Dundalk,

Co Louth.

Sir, – Perhaps Frank Byrne (November 11th) cuts to the heart of the matter when he says “nine customers waited patiently” and “without complaint” as an oblivious mother ahead of them indulged her toddler to play at scanning items at the “express” checkout! – Yours, etc,

SHEELAGH MOONEY,

Naas, Co Kildare.

Sir, – If we recalled the maxim that “Nobody loves your children as much as you do”, we would have no trouble. – Yours,

BRONWYN HEADON,

Dublin 13.

Irish Independent:

If a Martian was tuning in to the Irish Water discussion, she/he would hear:

1. A public sector group of politicians sets up a utility at the behest of a European group of public sector central bankers;

2. The details are designed by public sector civil servants;

3. These are then implemented by ex-public sector and semi-state executives and managers – and it is such a good example of the workings of the public sector that we need a referendum to ensure that it stays in the public sector!

The privatisation issue is complex and best approached pragmatically, but in the two privatisations I was involved in:

1. We did not “pass on” waste to our customers by locking in restrictive practices and overmanning for 15 years – rather, we removed waste (including lots of senior positions to create the space for internal promotion of talent and commitment);

2. We immediately removed promotion by seniority and extra pay for just being there and instead promoted talent at all levels (often supported by union reps once we established trust);

3. We explicitly changed the culture of entitlement and perks to one of service to the customer and community.

Irish Water was an opportunity to demonstrate what a group of committed and talented Irish people could do in building a world-class utility from the bottom up.

Our so-called leaders did the precise opposite. Tragic.

Frank Devine

Kenilworth, Warwickshire, UK

Mum’s letter struck a chord

Donna Hartnett’s letter (Irish Independent, November 11) was heart-wrenching. She is speaking for thousands of young families.

One issue I would like to take up with journalists is a term that maddens me – “ordinary people”. Which of us are not the “ordinary people”? What makes people non-ordinary? How do I become non-ordinary? Essay please on this – is the term only found in Ireland?

Great paper- keep up the good work.

Imelda Walsh

Address with Editor

There are few things that will turn me to tears but the letter penned by Donna Hartnett was it for me this time.

Reading her letter, I felt she had hidden cameras in my house, as she encapsulated how I feel day in, day out.

Her interview with you (Irish Independent, November 12), where she says, “Ordinary working people are in a prison of bills, debts and taxes. People who never took a gamble on the property or stock markets,” had me nodding continually as I read each word.

When she spoke of her child being sick and her first thought was about work and her job, I felt a huge pain in my heart. I’ve been there, done that, and bought that T-shirt. My mother (a saint in my eyes) has brought my daughter at least three times to her GP in the last two years, because I work full-time and it’s impossible to take a day off at short notice, and unfair to my employer.

My thoughts of the future are encapsulated in the words of another Irish person: “When I was young I thought that money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old, I know that it is” (Oscar Wilde).

Fiona Purcell

Drogheda, Co Louth

A priest protests

It is time for us all to unite in peaceful, but firm, protest against the water charges.

We should do this as an act of social justice, and as a belated statement of solidarity with the thousands of Irishmen and women who simply cannot take anymore. We should protest against the charges in themselves, but also at the persistent lack of good communication, which has, in turn, led to unnecessary fear.

Our water system needs to be repaired and properly maintained. However, I believe every citizen in this country is entitled to a basic amount of water, to wash, to cook, to launder. This calculated average amount of water should be free. After this, and only then, should charges be introduced.

Here are some ways I would like to suggest for effective peaceful protest:

1. Wherever a member of the government parties is speaking, select a member of the audience to throw a shoe up beside or past them.

2. Wherever a member of the government parties is speaking, arrange for the audience to stand and turn their backs on them.

3. Present public representatives, who do not clearly oppose water charges, with your written resolve not to vote for them at the next election.

4. Arrange for public ceremonial burning of the water packs.

We could call it the shoe, back, no vote and burn protest.

Fr Joe McDonald

St Matthew’s, Ballyfermot, Dublin 10

No love for ‘Love/Hate’

For many years, Irish audiences were entertained on a Sunday night by ‘The Riordans’, ‘Bracken’ and ‘Glenroe’, dramas centred on the lives of people living in rural Ireland.

These are now replaced by a new drama series ‘Love/Hate’, a show depicting life in Dublin’s criminal underworld. It has gripped the nation. Old Ireland appears to be dead and gone – are our values, respect and decency heading for the grave with it?

Thomas Dennigan

Newtowncashel, Co Longford

GAA’s capital gains

I would like to make a few comments on Eugene McGee’s article (Irish Independent, November 10).

With the population that Dublin has, and the very many more clubs and players, if they have the proper organisation and commitment then they are bound to have more players of the required calibre than, say, smaller counties like Carlow or Longford.

This has become very obvious over the past 10 years. If Offaly were to beat Longford and play Dublin in O’Connor Park, why would Dublin get 15,000 tickets (rather than 10,000) out of 20,000? Why are clubs in Dublin not based on parishes, as in other parts of the country? And why do some other clubs draw from several parishes and consequently have a huge population of players, compared to some tiny parishes down the country?

Name and Address with Editor

Long live the letters page

I wish to welcome back Mr Declan Doyle to your letters page after a pretty long absence (Irish Independent, November 11). Of all your contributors, and I have contributed a few letters myself in the past, his submissions were well balanced and insightful, and just like Mr Downey said last week, I hope the Irish Independent is not dropping the letters page on a Monday. As he said, it is the first page I read. Others read the sports or business first and that’s fine. Me, I just like to see what people are thinking.

We hear far too much from politicians, celebrities and every other media-junkie. The letters page lets ordinary people talk back. In truth, it should be mandatory for the political class to read the letters page. I look forward to continuing to read Messrs Doyle, Downey, O’Sullivan, Doran, Fitzgerald et al in the future.

Also, I am delighted Ian O’Doherty is now in the mainstream op-ed section. There is far too much consensus among opinion formers and a contrarian and part-time satirist is always welcome.

Frank Buckley

Tullamore, Co Offaly

Let’s get some perspective

The CSO tell us that the average household spends €26 per week on alcohol. There have been over 5 million trips abroad by Irish people so far this year. There have been 95,000 cars sold this year to date, with an average cost per car of €20,000.

The people who holiday abroad, spend huge amounts on alcohol and buy new cars – are these the same people who now say they cannot afford the water charges?

Eunan McNeill

Letterkenny, Co Donegal

Irish Independent

Promoted articles

14 November 2014 Blinds, Rice and Gout

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left knee, but I manage to get round the park. A Very busy day Peter Rice appears doing some hinges upstairs, the Blinds man appears and fixes the blinds, and finally I am stricken with gout.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down trout for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Professsor Donald Cameron Watt – obituary

Professsor Donald Cameron Watt was an academic, author and historian who analysed the origins of the Second World War and edited Mein Kampf

Professsor Donald Cameron Watt

5:52PM GMT 13 Nov 2014

Comments

Professsor Donald Cameron Watt, who has died aged 86, was a historian noted for his independence of mind and wide-ranging interests; his study of the origins of the Second World War, How War Came (1989), the fruit of decades of research, won him the Wolfson Prize for history in 1990, was selected by the New York Times as its History Book of the Year and was praised by Lord Bullock (the historian Alan Bullock) as the one book to read on how the war came about.

Cameron Watt taught at the London School of Economics for nearly 40 years, heading the International History department and holding the Stevenson chair of International History from 1981 to 1993. During this period he inspired a generation of students, many of whom would go on to become prominent contemporary historians in their own right.

In addition he edited the Survey of International Affairs at Chatham House from 1962 to 1971, served as official historian in the Cabinet Office from 1978 and was a sought-after conference speaker.

Donald Cameron Watt was born on May 17 1928 at Rugby School, where his father was then a housemaster. He himself was educated at the school and, after National Service in the Intelligence Corps as a member of the British occupation forces in Austria, won a scholarship to Oriel College, Oxford, where he read PPE, edited Oxford Poetry and took a First in 1951.

Cameron Watt was a gifted musician who had been a boy chorister at King’s College School, Cambridge, and after leaving Oxford he considered taking up a career as a professional opera singer. Instead, driven by a desire to find out why the Europe of his childhood had fallen into ruinous war in 1939, he joined a team led by Sir John Wheeler-Bennett which screened and edited for publication the captured archives of the German Foreign Ministry.

In 1954 he joined the International History department at the LSE where he was encouraged by Professor W N Medlicott to pursue his studies of the causes of the war. He was promoted to a readership in 1966, was appointed professor in 1971 and finally took the Stevenson chair in 1981 along with the leadership of the International History Department.

There, among other things, he founded an LSE programme on the Law of the Sea, anticipating by many years the need for governments to study transnational and environmental issues in the area of offshore resources.

Cameron Watt was a stout defender of the historian’s right to be given access to all the evidence. As official Cabinet historian, he had been expected to produce a volume on the establishment of the Ministry of Defence, but he never completed the book because officials were unable, or disinclined, to provide the documentation he needed.

In addition to How War Came, he wrote or edited a further 25 books, including the first edition of Mein Kampf to be published in Britain after the war. In Too Serious a Business (1975) he proposed that the Second World War arose out of a breakdown within European society as a whole; in Succeeding John Bull (1984) he explored Britain’s replacement by the United States as the primary world economic and political power. He was also a frequent contributor to The Daily Telegraph.

An outgoing, gregarious man, known for his stock of gaudy ties, Cameron Watt had an almost magical ability to summarise with great accuracy the conclusions of presentations throughout which he had given every appearance of being asleep. From particularly tedious administrative meetings he would often emerge clutching origami animals or beautifully-drawn treasure maps.

In 1990 he was elected a fellow of the British Academy, and in 1998 an honorary fellow of Oriel.

In 1951 he married Marianne Grau, who died in 1962. Later that year he married Felicia Stanley, who died in 1997. A son by his first marriage survives him.

Professor Donald Cameron Watt, born May 17 1928, died October 30 2014

Guardian:

‘Recent findings suggest that what we do and what we think influence brain chemistry but also the structures of our brains. This line of approach wouldn’t have surprised Freud in the least.’ Sigmund Freud leaves Victoria Station after his arrival in London on 6 June 1938. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

How clever of Juliette Jowit to pinpoint the error in the thinking of all us NHS and social care professionals beavering away in the psychosocial approaches to “mental illness” all these decades (The NHS can no longer act as if minds don’t matter, 10 November). Stone me, mental illness isn’t a “mental” thing at all – it’s simply a physical illness, “the physical basis” of which “is clear”. So our current epidemic of depression has nothing to do with loneliness, unrealistic competitive expectations, huge differences in wealth, obsessive focus on material gain, racism, sexism, homophobia, bullying, xenophobia, childhood abuse or other trauma – no, none of that stuff. As Dr Cantopher apparently assures us, it’s simply “a deficiency of two chemicals”. The answer: drugs. Simples. So however screwed up, spiritually barren and mean our society, those without the deficiency, drug-corrected or otherwise, would bounce out of bed every morning, blissfully unconcerned about all the social crap, and eager to get on with creating more wealth.

Well, if Cantopher were to draw fluid from the spinal cords of depressed people, and eve (again, pretty logical)n if he were to find such a deficiency, it wouldn’t prove a thing. The whole chicken-and-egg thing about “mental illness” is very far from clear. Recent – neurobiological – findings suggest that what we do and what we think influence brain chemistry (not much of a surprise there, I think) but also the structures of our brains. This line of approach wouldn’t have surprised Freud in the least, and Jowit is right in thinking he might feel somewhat vindicated. And that great bete noire of biological psychiatry Thomas Szasz made exactly the point she makes: “the concept of mental illness is unnecessary and misleading”, and if you believe that a person is suffering from a disease of the brain “it would be better … to say that and not something else”. Of course, he had hold of the opposite end of the stick from Jowit.

No, mental illness isn’t like diabetes. (Why is the comparison always diabetes?) There are moral, political, economic, social, spiritual aspects to it. Those things are beyond the scope of any National Health Service.
Mike Kaye
Huddersfield

• In reading Jon Ronson’s interesting article (Why didn’t we see it coming?, 8 November), I was disappointed by the unnecessary inclusion of a simplistic and somewhat misleading summary of principles of the Mental Health Act 1983 alongside it (Psychopaths and the law around the world). I was particularly concerned that comments about personality disorders being deemed untreatable perpetuate a damaging and inaccurate view held historically within the field of mental health, increasingly considered by professionals to be a myth. Such comments especially neglect the developing evidence base demonstrating the effectiveness of psychological therapies in ameliorating the emotional suffering of, and difficulties presented by, many individuals who receive such diagnoses. Let us hope that, through ongoing research and clinical innovation, these unhelpful perspectives on recovery are put to bed for good.
Nathan Kitchenham
Clinical psychologist working in forensic services, London

• Your guide to the legal status of psychopathy in the UK is wildly out of date. The 1983 Mental Health Act that you cite did require those suffering from “personality disorder” to be deemed “treatable” to be detained against their will. There was no such requirement for “mental illness”. However, this act was amended in 2007 specifically to remove the “treatability” clause. The act no longer has the terms personality disorder or mental illness in it. There is only one broad category of “mental disorder”, and the requirement is for “appropriate treatment to be available”. These weasel words were introduced primarily to allow for the detention and treatment of individuals with “dangerous severe personality disorder”.

Compulsory treatment of personality disorder (then called “psychopathic disorder”) was only introduced into the 1959 Mental Health Act against vigorous resistance. Psychiatrists at the time did not want the power and responsibility of detaining individuals for whom they believed they had no effective treatments. The “treatability” clause was added to sugar the pill. Other, wiser jurisdictions have recognised this mistake. Rather than widen the net as we did in 2007, they have excluded personality disorders from detention under their mental health acts.
Tom Burns
Emeritus professor of social psychiatry, University of Oxford

• In the last few days there have been reports of three tragedies involving people who lost their lives because mental health and other services failed to adequately treat severely ill patients. The cases of Deyan Deyanov (Care failings betrayed us, say murder victim’s family, 12 November), Matthew Williams (Review into oversight of cannibal killer after jail, 10 November) and Peter Holboll (Son with paranoid schizophrenia admits killing Tamara Holboll, bbc.co.uk, 3 November) inevitably hit the headlines and wrongly link mental illness to violence, which can only fuel stigma.

They also reveal the failure to take psychotic illness seriously and to respond to the concerns and requests for help from families. What is even more unforgivable, and does not require resources or inquiries, is the failure to extend fundamental courtesy to the families of victims in their quest for the truth.

If mental health services continue to be unable to treat safely those very few cases of patients with severe illness and a history of violence, how can they provide for the majority of mentally ill people who pose no risk to anyone but themselves? Surely services have a duty of care to protect the lives of their patients and the public.
Marjorie Wallace
Chief executive, Sane

George Clooney … not yet tidy enough to play Alan Johnson. Photograph: Alessandro Bianchi/Reuters

I had the great pleasure of meeting Alan Johnson last week at a literature festival. In front of a packed audience he reiterated his support for Ed Miliband and his decision not to return to frontline politics. Here is a man totally at ease in his own skin. He is authentic Labour and comes across as a thoroughly decent bloke. I asked him, when he signed my book, if a film was made of his very interesting and varied life, who would he like to play him. Quick as a flash: “George Clooney if he tidies himself up,” came the reply. Now here is a politician who doesn’t take himself too seriously.
Judith Daniels
Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

• I have followed with interest the debate on overt and structural racism in football (Report, Sport, 11 November). Whereas progress has been made but far more needs to be done, I have far more concerns about racism in flat and National Hunt racing. When was the last time an Asian or African-Caribbean person was seen on a horse at a racetrack in Britain? There are no trainers, stable hands or journalists either.
Peter Thomas
Hastoe, Hertfordshire

• For the record, there are 10 districts in Greater Manchester (not nine, Letters, 12 November) including Bury, which held a referendum for an elected mayor in 2008. The idea was rejected by 5,000 votes on a turnout of 18%.
Bob Hargreaves
Summerseat, Bury

• So one of the companies aiming to buy Canary Wharf with the Qataris is called Brookfield (Report, Financial, 8 November). Is there something The Archers’ producers should be telling us?
Marian Nyman
Whitstable, Kent

• Stephen Moss’s otherwise delightful and most informative profile of Sir Nicholas Winton (G2, 10 November) failed to mention a more local tribute to the great Sir Nicholas Winton. Since September 2010, Platform 3 at Maidenhead station has been decorated with a bench that includes a bronzesculpture of Sir Nicholas reading a book containing the names of the children he saved and the trains used to evacuate them.
Quentin Falk
Little Marlow, Buckinghamshire

• Never mind sparrows – they still have Woolworths in New Zealand (Letters, 11 November)?
Henry Malt
Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

Don't walk sign, US ‘Police didn’t seem to understand the idea of exploring the locality on foot purely for pleasure.’ Photograph: Tony Edenden

Well done, Ben Okri. Reading your piece (King for a day: My reign will be a walk in the park, 8 November) I felt like I was listening to myself. The pleasures of walking are greater than in any other form of activity – whether brisk walking to get to a specific destination quickly, long-distance walking for exercise, or a saunter to the local park (or just to the local). His experience of walking in the US is exactly as happened to me. Stopped twice by police who didn’t seem to understand the idea of exploring the locality on foot purely for pleasure, they then circled the area several times to keep an eye on what I was up to. It seems Churchill only got it half right. We are separated by more than a common language.
Sean McCarthy
Cork, Ireland

Former BBC reporter and documentary film-maker Olenka Frenkiel, whose experiences ‘provide yet another frustrating reminder of the dismissive way women are treated in broadcasting’. Photograph: Teri Pengilley

We need more women like Olenka Frenkiel to speak publicly about what amounts to institutionalised discrimination against older women in professions (The BBC: I saw guys my age thriving. Women were gone…, 8 November). That an award-winning journalist should be treated by the BBC in the way she has described is disgraceful.

Although your editorial in the same edition focused mainly on ageism and older women “not looking the part” in our visual world (which of course is true), I suspect – as acknowledged by Penny Marshall (Report, theguardian.com, 5 November) – that the real root of the problem lies in men keeping top jobs for themselves.

As a criminal barrister for over 20 years I have witnessed how women in my profession are too often sidelined as their careers progress. One of the most obvious ways this happens at the criminal bar is that senior women are increasingly instructed on sexual abuse cases (often to the exclusion of little else), while men get murders, lucrative frauds and many of the high-profile cases. I agree that the BBC has a special duty to lead the way on gender imbalance, and Tony Hall’s announcement that, by 2015, 50% of breakfast presenters on local radio should be women is a good first step. However, it does little to solve the problem of older women and top jobs.
Mary McKeone
Manchester

• Olenka Frenkiel’s experiences provide yet another frustrating reminder of the dismissive way women are treated in broadcasting. I have just written my third letter of complaint to the BBC over the last 18 months about the paucity of women panellists on Question Time. Last week, four out of the five panellists were male.

I was informed in response to my previous complaints that “programme contributors are appointed on the basis of their experience and talent”. Can they seriously expect us to believe that they continue to be unable to find enough sufficiently experienced and talented women to address this gender imbalance? Your editorial rightly emphasises the duty of the BBC to lead the way on gender equality in broadcasting. The BBC needs to recognise that the time for excuses is long past.
Dr Edie Friedman
London

• It is a sad fact that it is not just in journalism that older women are being pushed out. I am a 51-year-old primary school teacher now working as a supply teacher. Olenka Frenkiel talks of women being encouraged to sign a gagging clause and of not doing so herself (Why I rejected gagging clause – BBC journalist, 8 November). Teaching unions give the impression that there is no choice but to be gagged. The unions seem to not be interested in the situation faced by older women. I go to many different schools now and rarely meet other teachers as old as myself. Older teachers are more expensive but we do not take maternity leave or time off with sick children. We are also more experienced.

Perhaps Olenka could undertake some research into the fate of older women. Could she start with the statistics for women leaving work with gagging clauses?
Mary Daykin
Chorley, Lancashire

• BBC, what are you thinking? As a licence payer I demand that you commission Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode forthwith (Everybody thinks we’d be great on TV – apart from channel controllers, Media, 10 November). White, middle-class, middle-aged males with large protuberances of self-regard are clearly in short supply.
Karen Peploe
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire

IPSO protest Alan Moses, chairman of the Independent Press Standards Organisation, the new press self-regulation body, encounters Hacked Off campaigners who say Ipso is not independent enough. Photograph: Daniel Leal-Olivas/PA

You report (New press watchdog Ipso needs clearer rules, says chairman, 10 November) that Alan Moses believes simpler rules will make his organisation “fair and independent”. There is now a public test to determine whether any press self-regulator is fair and independent – and Moses will find that he needs to do more than simplifying a few rules to pass it.

The test is laid out in the royal charter on press self-regulation and based on criteria set out by Lord Justice Leveson after his painstaking public inquiry into press standards. Approved by every single party in parliament and overwhelmingly supported by the public, it is applied by a new body that is itself impeccably independent both of politicians and of the industry.

The Independent Press Standards Organisation satisfies only 12 of the 38 Leveson report criteria. Notably, it is not remotely independent of the industry: indeed, it is effectively owned by the big national newspaper companies. Simpler rules will not change that. As the Leveson inquiry found, those big companies do not want an independent self-regulator. That is why they designed Ipso as it is and that is why they refuse to submit it for assessment by the charter body.

Alan Moses claims to have “offered support for the victims”. Might I suggest that perhaps a good start would be for him to reply to the letter that I, along with 29 other victims of press abuse, sent to him on 8 September. We asked him how he was going to turn the organisation he has chosen to chair into the sort of effective and independent watchdog that Leveson and the public demanded.

His lack of response speaks far more loudly to us than his recent speech to the industry. Neither he nor his sham regulator, in anything like its current form, has our trust or support.
Chris Jefferies
Bristol

Paul Kingsnorth, the author of The Wake. Photograph: Gary Calton

I congratulate Paul Kingsnorth on the literary award for his innovative novel The Wake (A novel approach to the use of Old English, 10 November), but seriously question his environmental activism. Kingsnorth’s Dark Mountain project, described as “a network of artists, writers and thinkers who basically see the world as being doomed – ecologically and economically”, is hardly the message we need to hear in the week following the 2014 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change setting out the challenging, but achievable, targets for control of carbon release and temperature rise; in fact, for our Earth’s survival.

This despairing doomsday scenario emerges clearly in Kingsnorth’s recent review of two books (The four degrees, London Review of Books, 23 October). The first, George Marshall’s Don’t Even Think About It, is heavily influenced by US psychologists, Dan Kahan and Daniel Kahneman, who clearly share the pessimistic doomsday scenario. The second, Naomi Klein’s deeply researched This Changes Everything: Capitalism v The Climate, is peremptorily dismissed by Kingsnorth as “an American liberal wishlist”. The climate-change threat is the ultimate challenge to human creativity and capacity for change. This is no time for our creative elites to be opting for despairing nihilism. Realism with optimism is the Arts Social Action way.
Ralph Windle
Arts Social Action, Witney, Oxfordshire

• The G20 countries’ handout of $88bn a year in fossil-fuel subsidies is appalling (Report, 11 November). The new report’s recognition that investments through RBS and UK Export Finance are UK subsidies is particularly important. But we need to go even further. The support of the government for frontier oil drilling also includes diplomatic and military intervention on behalf of oil companies. The Foreign Office maintained a consulate in Basra whose job largely consisted of supporting UK oil companies, with three diplomats on staff and a £6.5m budget. High-profile UK political figures appear on request of oil companies for deal signing, such as Chris Huhne attending the signing ceremony during BPs first attempt to broker a deal with Russia’s Rosneft.

If these forms of support don’t add hugely to the figures governments spend on supporting fossil fuels, they certainly add billions to oil companies’ balance sheets through enabling major deals. Moreover, according to our calculations, if the UK’s tax regime was modelled on Norway’s, the country’s budget would have received an extra £74bn due to windfall profits on oil in the years 2002-08. We need not just to stop handing out tax breaks to oil companies, but to change the taxation regime in the first place, instead of catering to oil companies’ every whim.
Anna Galkina
Platform

Independent:

The levying of fines on banks by the world’s regulators, including our Financial Conduct Authority, is a measure of those regulators’ impotence. Banks are merely a protective vessel inside which bad behaviour can take place that ought to be proscribed as criminal. To fine the vessels for bad behaviour is collective punishment levied upon the taxpayer, honest employees, customer and shareholders.

The cause of the continuing banking crises is that it is not a profession. The professions of law, medicine, clergy, architecture and teaching are the least prone to corruption. This is not a coincidence. It is because the members of these professions have a code of practice to which they must personally adhere or be excluded from practising it. Failure to do so results in personal sanctions.

The bankers (famously) privatised the profits and socialised the losses, leaving the banks and taxpayers to pick up the blame and the tab. The latest forex and Libor scandals prove that nothing has changed and will not do so until criminal responsibility accrues to the criminals and not to everyone else who just happens to be hanging about nearby.

It may grate and be counter-intuitive, but bankers need to be made a profession.

Bill Summers
Sturminster Newton

That the City will feel no shame about the latest scandal is a given. Can I therefore propose a simple piece of legislation? Enact a corporate governance bill which states that any major bank transaction is carried out with the explicit assumption that the board is both aware of it and approves it. If that transaction is found to be illegal, both board members and traders involved will be subject to asset seizure. This will include, but may not be limited to, bank accounts, cars, homes and helicopters.

One hopes that would focus minds and spur the boards to take a little more interest in what their employees are up to.

Alan Gent
Cheadle, Cheshire

British, and other, bankers involved in the forex scandal would do well to heed the words of a committee of the House of Lords: “The best banking system may be defeated by imperfect management; and, on the other hand, the evils of an imperfect banking system may be greatly mitigated, if not overcome, by prudence, caution and resolution.”

This is taken from the report of the committee of the House of Lords on the Causes of Commercial Distress, 1848. It would seem that some things never change.

David Hearn
Wallasey, Merseyside

‘Philae’ and the search for life

The successful landing of Philae on comet 67P/C-G was an epoch-making technological achievement and everyone involved in this project deserves unqualified congratulation. However, the much-publicised scientific goals of this project fall well short of public expectations.

We should not be content with the boast that Philae will search for water in the comet – we know it is there already. What is most exciting is the search for life. For several decades the late Sir Fred Hoyle and I developed the theory that comets are responsible for the origins of life, and in recent years evidence in support of this theory has grown to the point of being compelling. Discovery of life in comet 67P/C-G would transform science, and would make billions of euros of taxpayers’ money well spent.

Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe
Director, Buckingham Centre for Astrobiology
University of Buckingham

The wonderful achievement of landing a module on a comet will provide scientists with material for writing papers for many years, but its benefit to the man in the street is likely to be more questionable.

On the day in 1959 that I was conscripted into the Army and issued with a uniform, the quartermaster sergeant wryly commented: “They spend effin’ millions firin’ effin’ rockets to the effin’ moon but I can’t ’ave a bleedin’ electric fire in ’ere!”

David Morrison
Belford, Northumberland

After a 10-year journey Rosetta sent a message home from 300 million miles away. This morning after a five-minute walk I was unable to call home on my mobile phone from a quarter of a mile away as there is insufficient signal strength.

Peter Knapp
Vale of Glamorgan

Raped women are wars’ forgotten victims

So, the poppies are being packed up at the Tower and those on people’s coats disappear but in this momentous centenary year, with seemingly every angle of war examined, there was not a single commemoration for the women and girls raped as a direct consequence of both world wars.

Nothing for the women and girls gang-raped by the advancing Red Army in 1945, not only “enemy” women (who had the least political impact within Nazi Germany). Rape, including gang-rape to and beyond death by the Red Army, was indiscriminate and inflicted on women of Allies and Jewish women who had survived the Holocaust.

No thought for the women who raised children or those who were a constant daily reminder of the appalling assaults, which plenty of women committed suicide to avoid.

There were white poppies for peace and purple poppies for animal casualties. When will there be a commemoration for women raped and sexually exploited as a direct consequence of war?

Clare B Dimyon
Brighton

Paul Donovan (letter, 13 November) regrets that the “better world” soldiers of the First World War died for has not come to pass. In answer, let me quote from this vivid picture of Edwardian Britain by a former editor of The Independent.

“Every town had places where the children were literally shoeless and where people were withering (not growing fatter) from malnutrition… Child prostitutes were readily available on busy streets… For the poor there was no state welfare, just charity relief or the threat of the dreaded workhouse.” (Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain).

The modern world is not perfect, but it is a whole lot better than before 1914.

John Dakin
Toddington, Bedfordshire

We can all do our bit for the planet

The argument of Nick Marler (letter, 12 November), that whatever we do in Britain about carbon emissions won’t save the planet because Britain is so small, is fallacious in a most fundamental way.

It is certainly true also that whatever the inhabitants of his street do, it will have even less effect, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t each do our bit.

Each time we as individuals walk or cycle instead of using the car, or desist from flying thousands of miles for a holiday, we will reduce the burden that will be borne by future generations, whatever collectivity we feel we belong to.

Dennis Leachman
Reading

Fracking does not solve our problems

Oliver Wright clearly thinks that he has steered a reasonable course between the proponents of fracking and the protestors (Inside Whitehall, 13 November) but ignores the fact that shale gas is just another fossil fuel. The question he needs to ask is not whether Greenpeace is more or less persuasive than Cuadrilla, but how he reconciles the exploitation of unconventional gas and oil with the future survival of the planet.

We already have three times more fossil fuels in proven reserves than we can safely use, so why does the UK Government insist on fracking when renewables offer the only sane solution to our current predicament? He should also recognise that fracking companies in the US have not been prosecuted for air and water pollution because the Bush administration granted them exemptions from the relevant legislation.

Dr Robin Russell-Jones
Stoke Poges, Bucks

Monstering means they’re scared of Ed

The “monstering” of Ed Miliband by the right-wing press, no doubt orchestrated by the two Aussies, Lynton Crosby and Rupert Murdoch, can only lead people to one conclusion. The Tory Party is petrified that Ed Miliband will become Prime Minister on 7 May 2015. They’re scared the NHS will be saved from privatisation by stealth, hard-working families will get a fair deal and the Conservative Party will be sent packing by the British public.

Duncan Anderson
East Halton, Lincolnshire

Ed Miliband should do a “Captain Oates” and allow someone else with a fighting chance to be installed in time for the next election. In 1983, Canada’s hapless leader, Joe Clark, stood down, thus allowing Brian Mulroney to succeed him in time for electoral success the following year.

Dominic Shelmerdine
London SW3

In the light of his determined pursuit of fairness and justice, do we see in Ed Miliband the next president of Fifa (“FA braced for Fifa criticism”, November 13)?

Godfrey H Holmes
East Riding

Times:

Vernon Bogdanor ‘is wrong to suggest that the McKay Commission recommendations could result in deadlock’

Sir, Vernon Bogdanor (“English votes for English laws is a hopeless proposal,” Thunderer, Nov 10) is incorrect to suggest that the McKay Commission recommendations could result in deadlock, and so lead to the wrangling that can occur between a US president and Congress.

The commission’s principal recommendation was for a general principle: that where legislation has a separate and distinct effect for England, it should normally require the consent of a majority of MPs from England. That exactly corresponds to the principles already governing the relationship between the UK parliament and the devolved legislatures.

Supplementary procedural recommendations were also made for ensuring that MPs from England can express their views on the legislation before other MPs vote on it. The issue would then be whether circumstances justify overruling English opinion, rather than about the detail of the legislation. The extra transparency would demonstrate that English opinion had a voice, and inevitably inhibit the use of the power to override it.

Professor Bogdanor is also incorrect when he suggests that budget issues give MPs from outside England an interest in legislation implementing expenditure reductions for England. That assumes that the tail wags the dog. In practice, expenditure budgets are decided first and detailed policy is developed within budgetary constraints, not vice versa.

Professor Bogdanor wants a written constitution. It could be produced only by compromises between conflicting political ambitions. The resulting fudge would leave politically controversial issues to be resolved in the courts, rather than by political debate. That would be undesirable because it would reduce democratic accountability and make essential but controversial change slower, and much more difficult.

Impartial judges cannot be expected to exercise the leadership needed to make controversial political decisions stick; and the value the law puts on predictability creates an inevitable partiality for the status quo.

Sir Stephen Laws, QC
(Member of the McKay Commission 2012-13) Westbere, Kent

Sir, The debate on English devolution is at risk of confusing executive devolution and the devolution of legislative powers: they are not the same or interdependent. The chancellor wants to see the former rolled out to city regions incrementally. The prime minister wants to see English votes for English laws on a national basis. Vernon Bogdanor suggests that splitting legislative responsibility will generate two governments: one for the UK and one for England, and that the grand committee solution will be a hostage to fortune.

Pre-1998 Scottish bills were debated at second reading in a Scottish grand committee. That led neither to confrontation with government nor the creation of two de facto governments. At an executive level a considerable amount of autonomy was vested in the Scotland Office in Edinburgh.

The Osborne/Cameron solution can be made to work.

Jonathan Teasdale
Haywards Heath, W Sussex

Sir, Vernon Bogdanor uses the West Lothian question to make a case for drawing up a British constitution. This would doubtless involve years of rather boring negotiation between technocrats and pedants, following which our great great grandchildren would be encumbered by a set of rules and rights designed to work in the world as we find it today.

The advantage of our present “constitution by precedent” is that it is fluid. If the US were building its constitution today, it is unlikely that the right of all men to bear arms would be included. It is by having a constitution that Americans are lumbered with it.

Rob Allison
Stoke d’Abernon, Surrey

Why not plant real poppies in the grass moat of the Tower of London as a permanent — and transient — memorial?

Sir, My aunt, on discovering that my wife and I had bought a Tower poppy, said: “That’s Joe’s poppy, then.” Joseph Leeson was indeed one of those 888,246 British and Commwealth soldiers who died in the Great War. I had not thought of it that way, but she is right. Had Joe lived he would no doubt have had children and grandchildren to love, and I would have dozens more cousins to know.

As it is, we have his poppy.

Victor Launert

Matlock Bath, Derbys

Sir, The Tower of London is surrounded by a grass moat in which the ceramic poppies have been planted. Would it be possible to plant poppy seeds there so that real poppies could bloom every year? The remembrance would thus be both permanent and transient, as nature is.

Michelle Garrett

Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Sir, Anna Whitworth (letter and report, Nov 13) should appeal against her parking ticket, using as her defence her observance of George V’s proclamation of November 7, 1919.

This called for a two-minute silence at 11am on November 11: “All locomotion should cease, so that, in perfect stillness, the thoughts of everyone may be concentrated on reverent remembrance of the glorious dead.”

Nigel À Brassard

London W1

Harold Wilson actually preferred to smoke cigars – lighting a pipe was more a tactical decision

Sir, Away from the public eye, Harold Wilson preferred cigars (letter, Nov 12). The pipe enhanced his “common man” credentials but its main purpose was tactical. When faced with a tricky question he would bring out the pipe, tamp the tobacco and light it slowly — thus buying himself at least 30 seconds in which to compose his answer.

Malcolm Oliver

Edinburgh

Our leading article on the first book of Latin crosswords prompted this erudite reply

Domine, Tempora licet mutentur, sed ut scripseras (Id. Nov.), lingua Latina perennior perdurat. magnopere igitur delectabar te tam eleganter Aenigmata ista nobis proposuisse. mirabar tamen aliquantulo te cum nos ut “cari lectores” adlocutum tum in proxima sententia verbo singulari “videbis” usum esse. o Tempora, o mores!

Dr Lindsay GH Hall

Theale, Berks

Winged collars were all the rage from the invention of the DJ in 1886 until the Second World War

Sir, Neville Peel (letter, Nov 12) quotes the late Philip Howard’s assertion that wing collars were not worn with dinner jackets in England. Wrong. They were de rigueur from the time of the invention of the DJ by members of the Tuxedo Club at Delmonico’s restaurant in New York in 1886 until the Second World War.

Antony Stanley Clarke

Mosterton, Dorset

Sir, Given all the correspondence about detachable collars, it must have been easy to miss the starched shirt fronts in Downton Abbey: Mr Moseley wore his done up the wrong way — like a lady’s blouse — throughout the last series.

Malcolm Watson

Welford, Berks

Nicky Morgan is plain wrong in her views about the arts — as world events this week make clear

Sir, In a week in which we reflect upon past wars and face the threat of new ones, is it not obvious that history, languages and other disciplines that help us to understand and communicate with the rest of the world are among the most vital?

Nicky Morgan’s ill-informed, biased and crudely utilitarian view of education (“Stop studying arts if you want a good job”, report, Nov 11, and letter, Nov 13) demonstrates that she is not fit to hold the post of secretary of state for education.

Dr Alexandra Wilson

Abingdon, Oxon

Telegraph:

What humanities graduates bring to the economy; the Lusitania disaster; tests for bowel cancer risk; Freya the cat in exile; p-picking up penguins

UNIVERSITY STUDENTS ON GRADUATION DAY UK

Nicky Morgan is wrong to discourage pupils from aspiring to achieve in the areas to which they are best suited Photo: Alamy

7:00AM GMT 13 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – The Education Secretary, Nicky Morgan, needs educating. Far from barring able students from worthwhile careers, arts and humanities degrees produce adaptable and entrepreneurial professionals across a wide range of industries.

Forty-five years of teaching the history of art has taught me that someone with an arts degree can do almost anything: serve in the Armed Forces, train racehorses, start up IT companies, create and successfully run their own businesses, enter banking and finance, go into law or find employment in the publishing, heritage, museums and art market sectors, which contribute enormous sums for this country’s economy. Arts and humanities graduates enjoy a wider genuine education in, and understanding of, the liberal arts, which a civilised and cultured nation needs.

Mrs Morgan is wrong to discourage pupils from aspiring to achieve in the areas to which they are best suited. Aren’t they just as much a part of the “knowledge economy”?

Michael J H Liversidge
Emeritus Dean, University of Bristol

Letters: The business community wants airport expansion in the South East

13 Nov 2014
Nicky Morgan: pupils ‘held back’ by overemphasis on arts

10 Nov 2014

SIR – Our economy needs arts graduates as much as it does graduates of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

In Britain the creative industries alone are worth more than £36 billion a year. They account for around £1 in every £10 of the country’s exports and employ 1.5 million people.

Students should not be forced into one particular area. They should be encouraged to develop skills in various disciplines so that they become well-rounded citizens, ready for the changing world of work.

Professor Christina Slade
Vice Chancellor, Bath Spa University
Newton St Loe, Somerset

SIR – Nicky Morgan is right to highlight the need for more of Britain’s young people to go into science and engineering. Alongside the urgency to meet the competitive demands of an ever more technological world, we still have much work to do addressing the gender balance.

From a young age, students need access to excellent careers advice. Girls in particular need compelling role models in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Jane Lunnon
Head, Wimbledon High School
London SW19

SIR – My husband, who has a PhD in engineering, was asked by an Oxford-educated solicitor whether he wore a suit to work.

Engineers have no standing in Britain, unlike in Europe. With attitudes such as this, who is going to turn the situation around? Obviously not the Oxbridge elite, who think an engineer is someone with an oily rag hanging out of dungarees.

Margaret Stamper
Darlington, Co Durham

Fit for a king

SIR – The Gold exhibition at the Queen’s Gallery is not the first time that the Bronze Age Rillaton Cup, discovered in a burial mound on Bodmin Moor in Cornwall in 1837, has been shown at a royal residence.

Because it had been found on royal land, the cup was sent to King William IV, and in the 1850s Prince Albert displayed it in his family museum at Osborne, Isle of Wight. But by the reign of George V, it had mysteriously disappeared from view.

On the King’s death in 1936, worried archaeologists made discreet inquiries. One of them showed an engraving of the cup to Queen Mary, who realised that it was sitting on her late husband’s dressing table: he had kept his collar studs in it. The new King, Edward VIII, agreed to lend the cup to the British Museum.

The fate of the collar studs is unknown.

Simon Welfare
Tarland, Aberdeenshire

Honouring civilians lost aboard the Lusitania

^{Wartime tragedy: the ocean liner was torpedoed by a German U-boat off the coast of Ireland}

SIR – In recent weeks we have rightly been reminded of those in our Armed Forces who have fallen in wars over the past century. But we must also honour those civilians who lost their lives or were severely traumatised during these conflicts.

May 7 next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania – a catastrophe in which some 1,200 civilians lost their lives. The last known survivor, Audrey Lawson-Johnston, lived in the village of Melchbourne until her death in January 2011.

We should mark the centenary with a national day of remembrance in honour of the civilian casualties.

Michael Jefferson
Melchbourne, Bedfordshire

Coverage of extremists

SIR – BBC News has acknowledged an Ofcom ruling over the appropriate context and scheduling of a report on Newsbeat featuring an interview with a British man fighting for the so-called Islamic State.

BBC News, in common with national newspapers and other broadcasters, has a duty to explore, interpret and analyse both domestic and international news for our audiences. Inevitably, this means occasionally broadcasting opinions which most people would find uncomfortable or offensive.

We should not shy away from tackling difficult issues on behalf of our audiences.

Louisa Compton
Editor, Newsbeat
London W1A

Bowel cancer risk

SIR – More than 1,000 cases of bowel cancer a year are attributable to Lynch syndrome (LS). This is an inherited condition that predisposes individuals to bowel and other cancers, with a lifetime risk of around 70 per cent.

Yet in Britain we have identified fewer than 5 per cent of families with LS. The family of Stephen Sutton, the fundraiser who was diagnosed with bowel cancer and whose father has LS, was one of them. It is a consistently under-diagnosed condition.

Both the Royal College of Pathologists and the British Society of Gastroenterology recommend testing everyone with bowel cancer under the age of 50 at diagnosis to help us to identify family members who may carry LS and be at risk of bowel cancer. We urge all hospitals across Britain to implement this guidance.

This testing would mean people at risk could access surveillance programmes for regular colonoscopies, helping to detect bowel cancer early but also preventing it.

Patient groups such as Bowel Cancer UK are in support. A recent NHS study found that LS testing at diagnosis for everyone under 50 with bowel cancer would be cost-effective enough for approval by Nice.

We must end this postcode lottery.

Dr Kevin Monahan
Consultant Gastroenterologist and General Physician, Family History of Bowel Cancer Clinic, West Middlesex University Hospital
Professor Sue Clark
Chair, Colorectal Section of the British Society of Gastroenterology
Professor John Schofield
Consultant Pathologist, Maidstone Hospital and Kent Cancer Centre
Professor Huw JW Thomas
Consultant Gastroenterologist, Family Cancer Clinic, St Mark’ Hospital, London
Professor Malcolm Dunlop
Colon Cancer Genetics Group and Academic Coloproctology, Head of Colon Cancer Genetics, Institute of Genetics & Molecular Medicine
Professor D Gareth Evans
Professor of Clinical Genetics and Cancer Epidemiology and Consultant Geneticist, University of Manchester
Mark J Arends
Professor of Pathology, University of Edinburgh and Chair of the Lynch / Mismatch Repair Protein Immunocytochemistry Module for NEQAS (National External Quality Assessment Scheme, UK)
Dr Fiona Lalloo
Consultant in clinical genetics, Chair of the UK Cancer Genetics Group
Shirley Victoria Hodgson
Emeritus Professor of Cancer Genetics, St. Georges University of London
Dr Suzy Lishman
President, The Royal College of Pathologists
Professor Ian Tomlinson
Professor of Molecular and Population Genetics, Group Head / PI and Consultant Physician, Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics

The changing fortunes of Britain’s supermarkets

SIR – David Cameron declares that Aldi’s expansion plans are a vote of confidence in the Government’s economic policies.

They could more accurately be seen as a result of this country’s recent economic decline, driving shoppers to look for cheaper ways to feed themselves.

True recovery will be apparent when “hard–working families” begin to return to Waitrose and Sainsbury’s and the food banks close for lack of customers.

Kevin Wright
Harlow, Essex

SIR – Much favourable publicity has been given to Aldi’s plans to open new stores and create 35,000 jobs.

At the same time we are given to understand that Aldi’s success is at the expense of the established retailers such as Tesco. It therefore follows that, in the virtually static retail food market, the jobs “created” by Aldi will be balanced by a similar number of job losses elsewhere. No additional employment will result.

David Leech Balcombe
West Sussex

SIR – Small wonder that many supermarkets are suffering. A family can only consume so much food per week, yet more and more stores keep opening.

Instead of redundant outlets, these sites should have been given over to new housing, relieving the pressure on our precious green countryside.

Margaret Whelband
Barrow upon Soar, Leicestershire

SIR – I have never seen a self–service till in a Lidl store. Tesco, on the other hand, seems to have a policy to get customers to use self–service tills whenever possible.

Might this explain, at least in part, why Lidl’s profits are growing?

Edward Harrison
Folkestone, Kent

Cat’s out of the bag

SIR – George Osborne has made a grave political error in dismissing his cat Freya to the countryside.

Cats know who their friends are, and you can be sure Freya will be spreading the message in Kent about the true economic situation in Downing Street.

Tim Melhuish
East Bergholt, Suffolk

In the groove

SIR – I was accused of being among the “dancing dads” of this world (report, November 11), and this led me to take lessons in ballroom and Latin dance.

I now dance just as embarrassingly but with style and aplomb.

Chris Jones
Caerphilly, Glamorgan

Penguins take flight

SIR – I hear that penguins are flying off the shelves at John Lewis.

Shouldn’t David Attenborough be informed?

Gordon Cleugh
Sunderland, Co Durham

Irish Times:

Sir, – I read with amazement and despair of the Government’s plans to mark the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising by a further attempt to expunge from the public mind and from the minds of future generations all actual knowledge of our history (“Rising commemoration launch”, November 13th) . Who on earth concocted the list of amusements and distractions proposed? The only element left out seems to be face-painting. – Yours, etc,

ALICE HANRATTY,

Dublin 1.

Sir, – The Government has released a promotional video for the centenary of the Rising called Ireland Inspires 2016. Containing references to Google, Facebook and Twitter, there are cameo roles featuring David Cameron, Queen Elizabeth and Ian Paisley. There are, however, no images of Patrick Pearse, Thomas Clarke or Constance Markievicz. There are no images of the destruction of Dublin or the prisoners being marched off to Frongoch. If we need to be inclusive, there is also a need to include those who we are remembering. Is Fine Gael aware that Michael Collins was in the GPO in 1916? Has the Labour Party forgotten the name James Connolly?

This video is the worst example of hat-doffing revisionism and is one good reason why we need to act together and do our best at community level to organise our own events in 2016. – Yours, etc,

LORCAN COLLINS,

Templeogue, Dublin 6W.

A chara, – I was delighted to read that Ireland 2016, the programme of events to mark the centenary of the Easter Rising, will have both national and international dimensions (“Relatives to play key role in 2016 Rising commemoration”, November 13th). I despaired, however, when it was reported that “two former taoiseachs” attended the launch. Two former taoisigh. Let’s at least get that right by 2016! – Is mise,

TRISTAN ROSENSTOCK,

Baile Átha Cliath 7.

Sir, – The decision to hold the commemoration of the 1916 rebellion on March 27th, 2016, seems to me to be a missed opportunity. It continues the tradition of associating the rebellion with the moveable feast of Easter and its consequent association with very significant religious beliefs.

The rebellion happened on April 24th and logic would suggest that it should be commemorated on the anniversary of that date. – Yours, etc,

LOUIS O’FLAHERTY,

Santry, Dublin 9.

Sir, – I hope the invitations to relatives to participate in 1916 commemoration events will extend to the relatives of the civilians killed in Dublin during Easter Week 1916, including those of the 40 children killed. – Yours, etc,

SEÁN McDONAGH,

Raheny,

Dublin 5.

Sir, – In 2016, we intend to commemorate the events that proclaimed the Irish Republic. A defining characteristic of a republic is that an accident of birth should not entitle anyone to a privileged position in the state. The descendants of participants in the Rising – an accident of birth – are demanding, and being allowed, a privileged position in deciding the programme of commemoration, and to lead the parade that will be the main event. Some of the people so privileged are voicing concern at the possible invitation of other people, whose position in their own country is entirely a result of an accident of birth. Is it any wonder that, though we can’t even grow them, an Irish company holds so dominant a position in the banana industry? – Yours, etc,

CHARLES TYNER,

Dublin 7 .

A chara, – The Government – specifically the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht – has unveiled the website ireland.ie with details of how 1916 will be commemorated. Superficially, the website appears to also be in Irish.

However, when originally launched it could be seen that the Irish text was apparently generated by inputting the English version into Google Translate. Some superficial improvements have been made since, but it is still far from inspiring for an Irish speaker, except to inspire disappointment and frustration. That this department is the one also responsible for the remaining areas in which Irish is natively spoken adds to the bafflement. Tús maith? – Is mise,

AONGHUS Ó hALMHAIN,

Baile an Chinnéidigh,

Co Chill Mhantáin.

Sir, – The purpose of commemoration is to remember and pay tribute. The Ireland 2016 programme does neither. A 1916 Relatives Centenary Programme is to be launched on Sunday (November 16th) at 3pm at Wynns Hotel, Abbey Street, Dublin. The aim is to include all citizens in a celebration of the lives of the men and women of 1916 who participated in the pivotal event in Irish history that led to our freedom and independence. – Yours, etc,

JAMES CONNOLLY

HERON,

The 1916 Relatives

Centenary Initiative,

c/o 4 Oxford Road,

Ranelagh, Dublin 6.

Sir, – Attempts to portray the sex trade in Ireland by some of your correspondents as a benign place where independent people “work” in a legitimate, healthy profession is utterly misguided. A major study, of which I am a co-author, Globalisation, Sex Trafficking and Prostitution: The Experiences of Migrant Women in Ireland (Kelleher Associates, et al, 2009), revealed a highly organised, criminal sex trade in this country in which international traffickers, Irish pimps, prostitution agencies and buyers collaborate in the commercial sexual exploitation of between 800 and 1,000 girls and women. The vast majority are young, vulnerable migrants from impoverished regions of the world, at least 10 per cent of whom have been trafficked to Ireland for the purpose of sexual exploitation. The findings of this research have been further validated by the Garda and an extensive Prime Time investigation by Paul Maguire, which makes it even more surprising that claims are made by some that no independent research exists in Ireland.

This research supports multiple international studies that demonstrate the severe harm and sexually exploitative nature of prostitution sex. – Yours, etc,

Dr MONICA O’CONNOR,

Bray, Co Wicklow.

Sir, – In the debate on prostitution and the law, a point that I rarely see discussed, but which I think is worth raising, is that certain groups, either due to disability, health, or some other factors, do not have the same opportunities for sexual contact as your average person does.

This, of course, does not mean that such people should be “entitled” to another person’s body for their own gratification – nor is it desirable that they would permanently replace authentic intimacy with the professional kind – but criminalising those who seek (and offer) sexual services effectively condemns certain groups in society to a life without physical intimacy. – Yours, etc,

DAVID McGINN,

Sandymount,

Dublin 4.

Sir, – Most, if not all of the letters on this subject seem to exclusively focus on the plight of the woman, and while that is right and understandable, it should not be the only consideration. Men are involved. Consent between adults is not sufficient to make the transaction morally right. Those who follow the natural law tradition may argue that love is an essential ingredient, while any reasonable person of a secular disposition would surely argue that any act which may, even if entered into freely, damage one of the parties or their family members is morally objectionable. – Yours, etc,

DAVID NELSON,

Dunshaughlin,

Co Meath.

Sir, – I can but marvel at those who claim that a man should be able to buy the use of a woman after a night out, just as easily as he buys a kebab, have the interests of the woman at heart.

Nearly 100 years ago, Dublin had one of the largest red light districts in Europe, the Monto. For the centenary of its closure, do the people of Ireland really want it to be reopened, and parts of Dublin to resemble Amsterdam’s De Wallen?

I have lived in Stockholm and I have lived in Amsterdam. While the Swedish model is not perfect, it is much preferable to the spectacle in Amsterdam. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN KELLY,

Athlone, Co Westmeath.

Sir, – Having witnessed the devastation which prostitution does to those who engage in it, it is extraordinary to see so many letters in The Irish Times defending the continuation of this devastation and the rush to defend what will be the continued exploitation of women, girls and young boys. Having led an EU-funded project, the Dignity Daphne project, that examined various solutions to discontinue sexual abuse and exploitation transnationally (Lithuania, Scotland, Ireland and the UK, including a field trip to Sweden to meet the high court justice who wrote the 10-year evaluation of their legislation), we concluded that the Swedish model of criminalising the purchase of sex, while also decriminalising those who offer commercial sex, leads to a situation where demand for commercial sexual services are deterred and the accompanying support services to those wishing to escape prostitution allows for a lifeline for the more vulnerable, including those trafficked for sexual exploitation.

Calls to protect the rights of those who want to buy women and young boys for sexual exploitation are misplaced. They are calls to protect the right to buy women and young boys and this means protecting the continuation of harm and hurt. It is interesting to note the high number of migrant women engaged in the sex industry in Ireland. In protecting the human rights of all women to live free from exploitation and sexual violence, it is incumbent on policymakers and legislators to ensure that we are not creating a subset of women whom it is acceptable to purchase. – Yours, etc,

GRAINNE HEALY,

Glasnevin, Dublin 11.

A chara, – Fintan O’Toole, in his article “Signs of a slow slide towards an ungovernable Ireland” (Opinion & Analysis, November 11th), would appear to confuse the notion of the unpredictable with that of the ungovernable. Something big is certainly happening in the Irish political landscape. The basically predictable era of 2½ parties (Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Lab) is being replaced by perhaps 4½ parties (Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin, Independents and Labour). So the outcome of the next election has become much less predictable.

However, neither this nor the Government’s failure to deliver as yet on a slew of very big projects in the immediate aftermath of stabilising the country’s finances can be read as a slide towards ungovernability. Non-delivery is at worst evidence of poor management and at best evidence of over-ambition in the midst of severe crisis.

The ability of the State to absorb sharp differences and maintain stability, which Mr O’Toole appears to think has atrophied, is still very much in evidence. We are currently witnessing the absorption of Sinn Féin into mainstream politics north and south. This State is now honouring all of its war dead, including those of the first World War. This democracy is one of the few in Europe to have endured unbroken over the past 90 years. It has seen regular changes of government, variously hued coalitions and much healthy protest, usually within the law.

I see no evidence of a slide towards ungovernability either now or after the next election, whose outcome will undoubtedly be exciting but will, as always, produce a coalition governing with the consent of the electorate.

A simple reform that would add to both the stability and predictability of the political process would be the institution of fixed-term mandates for the Oireachtas. This would ensure, as in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe, continuous if, on occasion, minority government without the artificial tension engendered by the current inherited system, whereby a government can fall and an election be called at any given moment in the lifetime of parliament. – Is mise,

GERALD ANSBRO,

Malahide,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – What a glorious election faces us in 2016, or earlier. It will be about who is the best of a bad lot, who might do the least amount of harm to society. I am filled with dread at having to face those choices on the ballot paper. Enda Kenny welcomed the “democratic revolution” after the last election, but I fear we might be about to have a “democratic coup” and the instability that goes with it. This might be a very good thing; it could hardly be worse. – Yours, etc,

CONAN DOYLE,

Kilkenny.

A chara, – Like Michael Austin (November 12th), I too hope that “the effort to condition” him fails but am hopeful that he may come to realise, of his own volition, that other people’s understanding of marriage need not undermine his own. Unlike Mr Austin, however, I do not think that the letter subject heading “Same-sex marriage” is an oxymoron on the basis that the context in which we use language is forever changing – who would now expect one partner in a marriage ceremony to undertake to “honour and obey” the other, whereas not too long ago that was accepted as “the norm”? – Is mise,

GREG SCANLON,

Shannon,

Co Clare.

Sir, – Michael Austin(November 12th) takes issue with the “Same-sex marriage” letter subject heading. I take issue with it as well as it should be called marriage equality (which is what the referendum will call it).

Marriage equality seeks to recognise the integrity and commitment of gay people. Opponents ignore the social role that gay parents actually play; 230 gay couples parent, according to the 2011 census.

Separate and unequal is not a status a liberal democracy should champion. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN DINEEN,

Clontarf,

Dublin 3.

Sir, – Conor Farrell (November 12th) seeks an argument against same-sex marriage that is not fundamentally flawed. This of course is the wrong end of the stick. The fundamental question is why has a private relationship between two individuals any place in the Constitution. Its origins are an effort at social engineering based on the premise that the nuclear family is the ideal sub-unit of society. This idea has long since been jettisoned (rightly or wrongly), so the logical step is to remove this anachronism from the Constitution. All other matters can be dealt with by legislation and private contracts and the weapon that marriage has become can be relegated to the past. – Yours, etc,

CHARLES O’CONNELL,

Phibsboro,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – The Spanish ambassador (November 12th) states that 90 per cent of Catalans voted for the 1978 Spanish constitution. That may be so, but the majority of Catalans now living did not have a vote in that election. Those who did vote, voted on the specific and stated understanding that the constitution would be a provisional post-Franco instrument subject to major revision. No revision ever took place. In fact, Madrid has consistently blocked every attempt made to rewrite this antiquated and dysfunctional document.

The nation of Catalonia lost its statehood in 1714. It has been a colony of Spain ever since. As with all colonies, Catalonia is treated with utter contempt by its ruler. The only truly democratic course for Madrid would be to allow an official vote on secession in both Catalonia and the Basque Country. – Yours, etc,

NIALL GILLESPIE,

Ward’s Hill,

Dublin 8.

Sir, – How wonderful it is to have Frank McDonald enlighten us mere mortals about the new building (“Why I love Dún Laoghaire library”, Saturday, November 8th)! It is not a monstrosity after all, as hundreds of people of the area have been saying, individually and at meetings. No, its “superb finishing” makes it a public building to be proud of. Mr McDonald tells us it is not an ugly, misplaced, concrete hulk in the midst of Victorian Dún Laoghaire, rather it is a “bold addition to the landscape”. He informs us that the bizarre English red brick on the Sandycove side is in sympathy with the town’s Victorian buildings. Wow! So now we know!

Mr McDonald does not delve into the reasons for local outrage at the cost of the building – €36 million, which came from the public purse. Many of Dun Laoghaire’s shops went to the wall as a result of the council’s high rates and car parking charges, which no doubt contributed to the funding of the folly on the seafront. – Yours, etc,

FERGAL McLOUGHLIN,

Blackrock, Co Dublin.

Sir, – “Modern Ireland in 100 Objects” is followed by “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks”, already prompting a certain amount of what-about-ery. But how much more of this before it’s time for “Modern Ireland in 100 Gimmicks”, starting with those two? – Yours, etc,

ANTHONY G O’FARRELL,

Kilcock,

Co Kildare.

Sir, – I see that Irish Water took in a big delivery from its wholesaler yesterday. – Yours, etc,

PADRAIG J O’CONNOR,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 14.

Irish Independent:

I write after reading Donna Hartnett’s letter in your paper and her situation only serves to remind me that things do not change, only in scale.

You could transfer her situation to thousands of people like myself in the early 1980s and 1990s. We paid 65pc tax on all income above an average wage.

We paid an average of 12pc interest on our then overextended mortgage. Work was, to say the least, hard to come by and harder to keep.

My most vivid memory and fear was that one of my children would need to attend the doctor, as the £25 fee would throw our meagre budget out of kilter.

There were no holidays. To have a night out every three months or so was a luxury. Luckily neither of us smoked, as this was unaffordable.

We, to this day, cannot afford VHI or a pension scheme.

My wife also stopped working due to the high cost of childcare and worked from home as best as she could to supplement our income.

Meanwhile, I worked as often and as long as possible so as to have a comfortable existence .

Every generation believes they have it harder than the previous one, and cannot conceive the struggle of others who have gone before.

I do not see this as a competition of woes but merely recognition of a troubled spirit separated by decades but joined in a universal struggle to provide for our families.

Ray Dunne

Enfield, Co Meath

Healing scars of our past

There is a small country, where, after centuries of oppression from a brutal, foreign colonial power, a generation of educated nationalists and radicals managed to achieve independence for the small, economically underdeveloped nation.

No sooner had the colonial power withdrawn than the country fell into bitter and bloody civil war, one viewed as extraneous and petty by outside forces.

This conflict still leaves a profound mark on the nation’s politics today, with politicians and citizens alike still dividing themselves by loyalties to opposing tribes. Though the country has stabilised since, it finds its politics wracked by widespread corruption, incompetence and stagnation.

Paramilitary groups remain an intimidating presence and the majority of its public have no confidence in public or political institutions. Yes, it could be any post-colonial country in Africa or Latin America. But this is not some distant land to be glimpsed on the nightly news or the sides of a Trocaire box. This is our land. This is Ireland.

President Michael D Higgins has recently been visiting African countries, including South Africa and Malawi, and has been stressing the way in which Ireland shares a history of brutal colonial repression with these nations.

Centuries of oppression and violence has mangled our public and political systems and left people with no confidence in a corrupt and self-serving political class. Yet we refuse to identify ourselves as a post-colonial country in the same way that Bolivia or the Congo do.

Just because we are white, educated and European we assume we cannot be like so many of those struggling developing countries. We believe we cannot heal. We believe it is simply the Irish way to make a mess out of things. But it doesn’t have to be.

The only way we can heal these wounds and become a better functioning nation is by creating a new form of nationalism for a new age. A nationalism not of blood or conflict, but a nationalism of idealism, aspiration and unity. We must gain a new concept of what it means to be Irish, a bloodless civic and cultural nationalism that asks us to transcend our expectations and be better than “good enough”, to show the world and ourselves what we can accomplish in the name of our nation and to heal the scars of our undeniable colonial past.

The nationalism of the soldiers and freedom fighters must end. We have forgiven our colonial masters and cast them out of our house. Now we must take pride in our dwelling and make it a welcoming place to live for all creeds, colours and characters. Our wounds will close up and we will grow into a better, stronger, fairer society.

David O’Donoghue

Lixnaw, Co Kerry

Gender imbalance in teaching

Your edition of November 13 carries a report on the concern being expressed at the gender imbalance in third-level technology and engineering courses where male students are in the majority. This prompts the question: why are gender imbalances perceived as a problem?

Little concern is expressed in the media or anywhere else at the large and growing gender imbalance in the teaching profession, despite some UK research suggesting that this is contributing to the unfavourable academic performance of boys relative to girls, something which itself seems to arouse little concern. Is that because it is a male-related rather than a female-related issue?

Just to illustrate the growth of the gender imbalance in teaching in this country in recent decades, in 1971 the ratio of male to female teachers (primary and secondary combined) was 40:60, which actually represented a slight narrowing of the gap over the previous 10 years – in 1961, the ratio was 38:62.

Forty years later, in 2011, the ratio was 26:74. Breaking down the 2011 figures between secondary and primary teachers, the ratio at secondary level was 32:68 and at primary level it was 14:86. Presumably these imbalances are even larger today. Now, is it nothing more than a coincidence that the growth in the gender imbalance in teaching has coincided with the growth of the academic performance gap between boys and girls, illustrated, year after year, in the Leaving Cert and Junior Cert results?

Hugh Gibney

Athboy, Co Meath

Tears for ‘Easter, 1916′

I watched, and heard Tanaiste Joan Burton mangling Yeats’s beautiful poem ‘Easter, 1916′ in the GPO. I presume the banging on the doors and windows were the ghosts of the volunteers trying to get out.

Declan Foley

Berwick, Australia

Ulster Bank should be paying us

Wouldn’t it have been more appropriate for the Central Bank to force Ulster Bank to compensate its customers to the tune of €3.5m rather than imposing a fine of the same amount on it for the inconvenience it caused them?

Michael Gunn

Celbridge, Co Kildare

Rivers run free from tax

Profound words in history are surely coming to pass now. “Only our rivers run free.”

Tom Gilsenan

Beaumont, Dublin 9

Free GP care will cause chaos

Despite the fact we still have people badly in need of medical cards, the Government is ploughing ahead with free GP care for all under six, including those whose parents are wealthy. I can understand why the ‘squeezed middle’ welcome it, but will they when they see the reality? Some GPs may accept the contract, others for ethical, workload or financial reasons may not.

Families will have to move practices and as the surgeries that do accept under sixes become busier it will get even harder to have their sick child seen quickly.

They will be driven into overwhelmed, out-of-hours and A&E services which will benefit no one -least of all the child.

Dr Eluned Lawlor

Loughboy Medical Centre, Kilkenny

Irish Independent

15 November 2014 Gout

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left knee, but I manage to get round the park. A n awful day I am stricken with gout.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down gammon for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Alexander Grothendieck – obituary

Alexander Grothendieck was a mathematician hailed as a genius who embraced ‘militant activism’ before losing his reason

Alexander Grothendieck

Alexander Grothendieck Photo: REX

5:53PM GMT 14 Nov 2014

Comments

Alexander Grothendieck, who has died aged 86, was considered the greatest pure mathematician of the second half of the 20th century, his name uttered with the same reverence among mathematicians as that of Einstein among physicists. Yet in the 1970s he effectively abandoned his brilliant academic career and, in 1991, disappeared altogether; he was later reported as “last heard of raging about the devil somewhere in the Pyrenees”.

A mathematician of staggering accomplishment (one reference work described him as “the mathematician whose work was to lead to a unification of geometry, number theory, topology and complex analysis”), Grothendieck’s ubiquitous presence in almost all branches of pure mathematics between 1955 and 1970 revolutionised the subject, in recognition of which he was awarded the Fields Medal (the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 1966.

His extraordinary creativity expressed itself in the form of thousands of pages of mathematical literature, notably in the monumental Eléments de Géométrie Algébrique and Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique – although his achievement was matched only by the impossibility of explaining it to anyone without at least a degree in Pure Mathematics. (Grothendieck’s most important single accomplishment, for example, was said to be “the invention of the étale and l-adic cohomology theories”.)

Grothendieck’s most creative period was spent at the French Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques (IHES), and his time there was regarded ever after as the institute’s “Golden Age”, during which a whole new school of mathematics flourished under Grothendieck’s charismatic leadership. He established the IHES as a world centre of algebraic geometry, with him as its driving force.

There was, however, another Grothendieck, a man who felt deeply about the world’s injustices. As a young student, he had decided not to study physics (despite his love for the subject), as he saw the discipline, after Hiroshima, as hopelessly compromised. During the Vietnam War, to protest against American imperialism, he gave lectures on category theory in the forests around Hanoi while the city was being bombed.

In the 1960s he refused to participate in conferences supported by Nato, Nasa or other defence interests. In some cases conference organisers went to the length of securing alternative funding in order to secure his participation. In 1966, when he was awarded the Fields Medal, he refused to travel to Moscow for the ceremony in protest at Soviet militarism.

His career reached a crisis in 1970 when he discovered that IHES was being funded in part, and indirectly, by the French Ministry of Defence. This triggered a bitter debate between Grothendieck and the founder of IHES, Leo Motchane, who maintained a clear division between scientific matters, which were left to the professors, and financial ones, which were the director’s domain.

Grothendieck poured scorn on the ease with which colleagues had accepted the situation, observing that their willingness to accept military funding had not prevented them “from professing the ideas ‘of the Left’ or from being indignant at colonial wars. They generally justify this by saying that this did not limit in any sense their independence or freedom of thought. They refuse to see that this collaboration gives an aura of respectability and liberalism to this apparatus of control, destruction and depreciation. This is something that shocked me.”

^{Alexander Grothendieck (REX)}

When Grothendieck failed to secure an immediate halt to the offending subsidy, he felt he had no choice but to resign. His attempts to find a position at an alternative top-ranking university or institute failed, either because the authorities were wary of his fiery reputation or because they did not fulfil his exacting preconditions.

He found work at lesser institutions, but not in areas of advanced research; and in any case, he had become increasingly preoccupied by politics.

In the 1970s, declaring himself a “militant activist”, he founded a small group called Survivre et Vivre, an anti-war, anti-imperialist, environmental movement. But partly because of its founder’s increasingly eccentric behaviour, the group failed to establish a popular base.

By the 1980s, Grothendieck had become seriously psychologically unstable. Finally he secluded himself in a small hamlet in the Pyrenees. In 1991, after burning thousands of pages of manuscript in the garden of his then girlfriend, he vanished altogether.

Alexander Grothendieck was born to Jewish parents in Berlin on March 28 1928. His father, Shapiro, was a Russian-born anarchist who had taken an active part in the Revolution and, after falling out with Lenin, in various Leftist movements in Germany, where he married the equally radical Johanna (“Hanka”). In 1933 Alexander’s parents moved to Paris to escape the Nazis, leaving their five-year-old son with a family in Hamburg, where he went to school. During this time his father fought in the Spanish Civil War.

In 1939 Alexander came to France, and in 1940 was interned with his mother as an “undesirable” (German, then after the German invasion, as a Jew) in the Rieucros camp near Mende. Shapiro, meanwhile, was interned in the camp of Le Vernet, from where he was deported to Auschwitz and died in 1942. Though Alexander never really knew his father, he held him in great esteem. His office at the IHES had no decoration except a portrait of his father.

Life in Vichy France was not easy. But in 1942, after the Grothendiecks had been moved to a detention camp at Gurs, Alexander was able to attend the Collège Cévénol, a school run by Protestant resisters at the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, where he obtained his baccalauréat.

After the war Alexander and his mother moved to a small village near Montpellier, where he found part-time work on a farm while studying Mathematics at the university. In 1948 he went to Paris, carrying a letter of introduction from his former school to the mathematician Henri Cartan. Cartan advised him to go to Nancy, where he studied for a doctorate under Jean Dieudonné.

Grothendieck then spent several years travelling and teaching in Brazil and America . In 1956 he returned to France and, in 1959, he and Dieudonné accepted appointments as professors at the newly-established IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette, where, over the next 12 years, Grothendieck completely revolutionised the theory of algebraic geometry.

After leaving the IHES, Grothendieck tried but failed to get a post at the Collège de France in Paris. Instead, in 1973, he accepted a professorship at Montpellier University, where he mainly taught elementary subjects such as linear algebra and calculus. He became estranged from the high-level mathematical community.

During the 1980s Grothendieck wrote thousands of pages of mathematical and non-mathematical meditations, much of it mixing philosophical invective, paranoid attacks on rivals and, here and there, insights of pure genius. These included his autobiographical Récoltes et Semailles (1983-85), a paranoid 1,000-page treatise in which he set out his dissatisfactions with the mathematical world but also laid the groundwork for a new field known as anabelian geometry; La clef des songes (1986), in which he explained how the reality of dreams convinced him of God’s existence; and Esquisse d’un programme (1984), a proposal for a position at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, in which he described new ideas for studying the “moduli space” of complex curves. Although Grothendieck never published work in this area, the idea became the inspiration for other mathematicians and the source of the new theory of dessins d’enfants (children’s drawings).

In May 1988 the Swedish Academy awarded him the Crafoord Prize, a belated attempt to repair the neglect of Alfred Nobel in not creating a prize in mathematics, which came with a cash award of $160,000. But Grothendieck astonished the mathematics world by rejecting it, and in a rambling letter to Le Monde explained his decision as motivated by disgust at the dishonesty and corruption of the scientific and political establishment .

In August 1991, Grothendieck left his home in the Pyrenees, suddenly and without warning, for an unknown location. Severing contacts with friends, family and colleagues, he refused practically all human contact.Over the next few years various rumours circulated. Some suggested that he had remained in the Pyrenees and become a Buddhist. Others maintained that he was living in the Ardèche, herding goats and entertaining radical ecological theories. According to another rumour he was working on a 50-volume manuscript addressing, among other things, the physics of free will.

One of the members of the mathematical establishment to come into contact with him was Leila Schneps who, with her future husband, Pierre Loschak, tracked him down and found him “obsessed by the devil which he sees at work everywhere in the world” . In a subsequent letter to Leila Schneps, Grothendieck said he would be prepared to share his research into physics with her if she could answer one question: “What is a metre?”

In 2010 he tried to eradicate all trace of his past life, writing a letter to one of his students demanding that his entire back catalogue be removed from libraries and refusing to allow republications.

Alexander Grothendieck, who was twice married and had four children, died in hospital at Saint-Girons in south-west France.

Alexander Grothendieck, born March 28 1928, died November 13 2014

Guardian:

To let signs Actions that could address the inequities of the housing market include ‘stop regarding it as a market and begin regarding it as a necessity’. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

Reading Polly Toynbee (Behind this door live 160 families, 11 November) and Aditya Chakrabortty (The story of the millionaire Tory MP and the tenants facing homelessness, 11 November), it seems to me there are three key actions that could address the iniquities of the housing “market”. They are, first, stop regarding housing as a market and begin regarding it as a human necessity. Second, reintroduce rent controls, requiring all landlords to be licensed, paying for the inspections and processes by charging for the licence. Third, only allow council houses to be sold at full market value, with all money raised from the sales used to build more council housing. If the Labour party were to espouse these policies, it could demonstrate understanding of the average person’s difficulties, as well as dramatically reducing the housing benefit bill.
Sally Plumb
Smethwick, West Midlands

• Neither of these articles proposes the obvious solution: rent control. It should be illegal to evict tenants who are not in arrears for at least a year (two years? five years?) to eradicate revenge eviction. The same rule should apply in cases where landlords default on their loans. In this case, the tenant should simply pay rent to the lender, with the option of converting the tenancy to a mortgage.

Rent could be based on the council tax. For example, a maximum of five times the council tax, so a property with an annual council tax bill of £1,000 could be let for a maximum rent of £5,000 a year (about £416 a month). Rents could increase in line with council tax. If this means that buy-to-let landlords default on their loans, so much the better; it would allow those first-time buyers jostled off the housing ladder to buy such properties cheaply. Don’t forget buy-to-let landlords get tax relief on the interest on their loans. Rent control would also reduce the £9bn that the taxpayer is handing over to landlords each year, another result of the buy-to-let boom, and would relieve the misery of tenants such as in your articles. Come on Labour, rent control could win you the next election.
Roy Saberton
Sale, Cheshire

• My mum and dad in Cardiff bought their council house in the 1980s, as did most of my aunts and uncles, and at the time it was a wonderful thing, driving aspiration, social mobility and great DIY. Thirty years later with our social housing stock dwindling, Labour needs to make an election pledge to end right-to-buy and stop the vulture-like property speculation shockingly reported on by Polly Toynbee. Prompted by this article to check the main parties’ websites, I found the Green party’s policy slate on housing to be thoughtful, broad in scope and highly detailed, with a strong commitment to keep social housing in the public realm.
Mark Garland
New Malden, Surrey

• I lived until the age of seven with my older sister and parents in a Glasgow single-end (one room) on the third floor of a tenement with an outside toilet (not even containing a wash hand basin) on the stair. We then got a new two-bedroom council house, and two years later, a new house in a new town (East Kilbride). I was born in 1946. I have always been puzzled as to why, following six years of war, the country could afford to build tens of thousands of council houses, but will not do so now, preferring to pour billions of pounds into the pockets of private landlords.
Anne Buchanan
Hamilton, South Lanarkshire

• It isn’t just private landlords who are causing the housing crisis in London. My landlord, the supposedly philanthropic Peabody Charitable Trust, is at it as well. A family flat has three bedrooms. One for mum and dad, and one each for teenage children coping with homework and puberty. Peabody is charging such high and fast-rising rents for these homes that two key workers with kids can’t afford them. They are being let to three single working people who have to revert to the student life of shared bathrooms and kitchens. This deprives working families of homes and disrupts the balance of old and young in our communities.

As a concession to the campaigning efforts of our tenants’ associations (Letters, 9 October), Peabody has agreed to limit rent rises to 5% a year for this year only. But wages are not going up at anything like that rate and Peabody’s costs have been held down in line with the inflation indexes. The result is a declared surplus of £281m last year and ever growing hardship among exactly the sort of people George Peabody set up his charity to help. Concerted action by tenants to get landlords and politicians to respond is essential if we are to see any resolution of this shambles.
Nik Wood
London

• Your article and opinion piece made me feel very angry about the greed of the already wealthy; the “we’re all in it together” hypocrisy of the chancellor; and the sheer apparent inability of councils and the London mayor to do anything meaningful about low-cost housing. The New Era estate that Aditya Chackrabortty writes about was built by a charitable trust apparently; one has to ask what were the trustees up to – were they fulfilling their obligations by selling out to a private firm, resulting in tenants being evicted?
Peter Hartley
West Hoathly, West Sussex

• Polly Toynbee’s reference to slum landlords who evict tenants complaining about the condition of their homes reminded me that my own great-grandfather Alfred Valentine was a Labour councillor in Stepney in the 1920s when he and the mayor, Clement Attlee, fought the slum landlords who failed to repair their properties. Plus ça change.
Dudley Turner
Westerham, Kent

• Affordable housing is needed in many rural areas for those who work or have family ties in our villages and hamlets (Paying the price, 12 November). Without it, these areas will no longer support vibrant communities. Wednesday was also #Housing Day, dedicated to celebrating “the positive impact of social housing on thousands of people across the UK”. Yet government statistics show that only 10,840 social rented properties have been built this year, a quarter of the number built in 2010-11 at the height of the recession.

A further irony is that the government is working on changes to the planning system that will cripple the amount of affordable homes built in the countryside. The proposals will exempt sites with under 10 housing units from the requirement to include a proportion of affordable housing. In 2012-13, 66% of rural affordable housing was delivered via this requirement. This is why CPRE is urging the government not to give rural sites this proposed exemption and to increase investment in truly affordable homes. It is possible, and should be a priority, to ensure that the beauty and tranquillity of our countryside is preserved, while allowing the communities within it to thrive.
John Rowley
Campaign to Protect Rural England

The director of the Landmark Trust (Gormley commemorates Landmark Trust on a human scale, 7 November) is probably mistaken in thinking that the trust’s founder Sir John Smith was the only Conservative MP who was also a member of the union of fairground showmen. As far as I am aware he was never a member of the Showmen’s Guild of Great Britain in any capacity. However, he had an active interest in the world of the travelling showmen, and in 1964 – the year before he launched the trust – he played host to the Great Steam Fair in Shottesbrooke Park, his Berkshire home. This one-off event brought together several fairground rides that had survived from the age of steam. It was a great success, and through the similar events that it inspired in the following years, such as the Great Dorset Steam Fair, it prolonged the active life of a whole generation of veteran rides that were then on the verge of being consigned to the scrapheap. Significantly, all the rides that appeared at the great steam fair half a century ago are still in existence today. For the record, the only member of the Showmen’s Guild to be an MP was the legendary showman Pat Collins, who served as Walsall’s Liberal member from 1922 to 1924.
Graham Downie
Chairman, the Fairground Association of Great Britain

Baby's feet Compensation for children affected by foetal alcohol syndrome matter ‘is about supporting the child born from that situation throughout their often very challenging life as a result of the injury received in the womb.’ Photograph: Danny Lawson/PA

I helped promote abused children’s entitlement to criminal injuries compensation and a local authority’s duty to make application on behalf of children in their care. Both your editorial (6 November) and Simon Jenkins (Opinion, 7 November) assert that any compensation received would alleviate the burden on the council and be to their benefit. The implication is that councils are pursuing these applications in their self-interest. Upon what evidence are these statements based? My understanding is that any award would be directly to the child concerned. While it may be put in trust until the child achieves majority, it could not simply be used by the council to offset any costs of its statutory duty of care.

In raising the matter as far back as 1988, I sought to highlight the parlous situation of many children leaving care with little support, financial or otherwise. Would your writers not wish to pursue any avenue that might benefit a child who has suffered harm at the hands of another person? The issues of whether a foetus can have a legal identity and whether a crime has been committed are difficult, but it’s wrong to criticise a council for seeking to further the interests of a child in its care if there is an arguable case. For them to do otherwise would truly be a proper cause for concern.
Peter Ferguson
Castle Heather, Inverness

• As a lawyer working in care proceedings, I frequently represent children who have been damaged by their mother’s abuse of alcohol while pregnant. In other cases I act for the for mothers and can see both sides of the problem. The use of inverted commas around the phrase “foetal alcohol syndrome” almost implies Simon Jenkins is sceptical about this condition, perhaps implying an invention of fee-hungry lawyers? Foetal alcohol damage is seen on a spectrum – foetal alcohol spectrum disorder – and is one of the largest undiagnosed causes of mental health problems and behavioural issues in this country. For a child to be diagnosed with full foetal alcohol syndrome, rather than foetal alcohol spectrum disorder, indicates a high-level of permanent brain damage and must be taken more seriously.
David Jockelson
Solicitor, Miles & Partners LLP

• Contrary to your editorial and Joanna Moorhead (Don’t turn these mothers into criminals, 6 November), this matter is not about criminalising the birth mother. It is about supporting the child born from that situation throughout their often very challenging life as a result of the injury received in the womb, and who indeed should be liable for compensation from the criminal injuries compensation scheme. These children often come through the care system and are brushed off to unsuspecting adoptive parents, who have little or no idea of how this will impact upon their family lives. These parents become people who can no longer work because their child cannot attend mainstream schools, for whom no specialist schools exist, and who struggle with their hampered development, their constant rages and their damaging behaviour.

Invariably all these parents want to do is get their child through to adulthood in one piece – a challenging task. I am one such parent. I sit in roomfuls of parents exposed to similar difficulties. It is not rare. We struggle alone, turned away by child and adolescent mental health services and with local authorities telling us there is no funding to support us beyond a few kind words and a couple of “parenting” courses. If the only route is criminalisation, so be it. At least this will put the plight of many families up and down the country in the limelight and these children might finally get the help they need.
Name and address supplied

Tacloban's typhoon Haiyan survivors, Philippines Survivors of typhoon Haiyan, which struck on November 8, 2013. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty Images

Your report (After the storm, 7 November) highlights that despite intensive relief efforts, including £95m raised from the British public in response to typhoon Haiyan, 2.5 million Filipino people affected by the hurricane remain without proper homes. This situation can be better understood in the light of the crippling external debts that the Philippines inherited from the days of the Marcos regime (1965-86), when western governments and institutions financed the dictator with loans to secure his loyalty during the cold war. In the year since central Philippines was devastated by Haiyan, the country has spent $5.6bn on foreign debt payments. This amounts to 14% of the government’s annual revenue and 25 times more than was given by EU member states in aid in response to the disaster.

In 2000, world leaders committed to “deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries” to help meet the millennium development goals. Yet, the Philippines was considered too rich to qualify for debt cancellation. This despite the fact that 42% of the population – 41 million people – live on less than £1.25 a day. If the international community is truly committed to supporting the Haiyan recovery efforts, and the Philippines’ adaptation to the worsening impacts of extreme weather caused by runaway climate change, then the calls of Philippines movements and peoples’ organisations for the urgent cancellation of the country’s unjust debts, and for grants not loans for relief and reconstruction, must be heard.
Sarah-Jayne Clifton
Director, Jubilee Debt Campaign

• If Bob Geldof and co want to make an impact on the Ebola crisis then they should write a protest song about transnational agri-business’ culpability in the outbreak of the disease, instead of droning on about Christmas. The destruction of West African forests and the takeover of small farmers’ land to grow cash crops for export has forced large numbers of people to migrate to overcrowded cities or seek alternative sources of food such as bush meat. Some have found badly paid work in the explosion of plantations growing African palm for the production of an oil that is used in products from toothpaste to hamburgers. Moreover, the dislocation from their forest homes of animals that carry ebola and their subsequent contact with humans, via bats urine in oil palms for example, has been a key factor in the spread of the illness. African Ebola sufferers are the victims of an unsustainable neocolonial economic order that prioritises western company profits over everything else and no amount of charity from ageing rock stars will change that.
Bert Schouwenburg
International officer, GMB

Hansel and Gretel. Image shot 2012. Exact date unknown. Detail of an image from Hansel and Gretel. Might Johann Peter Hebel’s stories be less gruesome? Photograph: Alamy

As Grimm stories become more gruesome (Grimmer Grimms, 13 November) parents might like to turn to his contemporary Johann Peter Hebel. None of the stories in Hebel’s Treasure Chest (Penguin Classic)is unsuitable for children, and some are probably best appreciated by them. Like the Grimms, Hebel, who also collected his stories from popular sources, was admired by Goethe – and by Tolstoy, Kafka and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Hebel’s stories often imply or express a moral, but are less specifically Christian than the Grimms.
Nicholas Jacobs
London

• The deification of Alan Johnson in your pages continues apace (Letters, 13 November). I suppose the poverty-to-parliament story is irresistible to some, but I find the transition from trade unionist to ultra-smooth Blairite deeply questionable. Enough already.
Tom McFadyen
Glasgow

• It is incorrect to say that only the residents of Manchester, rather than the other areas of Greater Manchester, were consulted about the election of a mayor (Letters, 12 November). We in Salford now bitterly regret we had that opportunity, which resulted in not just an elected mayor but a deputy and 13 assistant mayors, now cut to a mere 10. The rest of Greater Manchester should not follow our example but learn from it.
Terence Hall
Salford, Greater Manchester

• Now that the longest-running radio serial is emulating its TV counterparts, why not go for broke (Letters, 13 November)? It happened to Bobby Ewing, Dirty Den. and Nick Cotton. Surely it is time for Phil Archer to be brought back from the dead to sort out the projected move from Brookfield.
Edward Thomas
Eastbourne

• Seen on a T-shirt in Broken Hill, New South Wales (Letters, 12 November): “My anger management course pisses me off.”
Nikki Knewstub
Liskeard, Cornwall

• If no one was bribed to let Qatar have the World Cup (Sport, 13 November), Fifa are more stupid than we thought.
Richard Head
Melksham, Wiltshire

Independent:

Let’s get something straight. The foreign exchange and Libor scandals (“Shame in the City: £2.6bn fine leaves London’s reputation in tatters”, 13 November) did not start and stop with a handful of overpaid adolescents engaged in deliberate wrongdoing for personal gain.

The trading floor is open plan. Traders sit on desks. Fellow traders who sit two feet away know what colleagues are up to. The desk head knows the behaviour of the people on his or her team – their character, their attitudes, their strengths and their weaknesses. Similarly, the head of trading walks the floor, takes in the activity, checks unusual gains and losses, and is fully aware of outbursts, happy and otherwise.

For such wrongdoing to persist, it must be because either it was condoned by leadership of the company’s trading room or the executives responsible on the floor were monumentally incompetent.

Similarly, for this to persist without intervention from the CEO suggests that senior management either did not know, did not care to know or knew and enjoyed the ride. A final possibility is that banking activities have simply become too complex for a CEO to be expected to know.

As with every scandal to come to light, one must ask: did senior management know? If they knew they were complicit, if they did not know they were incompetent. And if banks have become too complex for anyone to be expected to know then they are too big to manage.

The first two argue for an immediate ban from the industry of a long list of bankers at multiple levels. The last argues for an immediate break-up of the banks.

Let regulators take their pick but they must get off the fence. We need not wait for a criminal act. Regulators can improve accountability by ensuring that these people never work in finance again. Can anyone explain why they should not do so?

Robert Jenkins

Senior Fellow, Better Markets, London W9

Yet another round of risibly small punishments for the usual purveyors of financial disservices. Shall we compile a list of the significant activities for which they haven’t been fined, investigated (with adverse findings), or otherwise censured over the past 15 years or so?

No, I couldn’t think of any either. How about some really eye-watering sanctions, such as one per cent of global turnover (well within the compass of the Competition and Markets Authority)? Ah, but that would hardly be of benefit to all of those institutional shareholders who invest our money in these dysfunctional entities, or, by extension, us, would it?

Jeremy Redman

London SE6

I was most surprised to read that the banks had been allowed to negotiate their latest round of fines. Presumably this was necessary in order to ensure that they were able to make repayments. Perhaps they ought to consider taking out some kind of payment protection insurance…

Julian Self

Milton Keynes

Miliband takes his eye off the ball again

If Ed Miliband is convinced that Ukip intends to privatise the NHS, he has clearly not read its leaflet: “What a Ukip Government will do”. Under the section on the National Health Service, it states: “We will stop further use of PFI in the NHS and encourage local authorities to buy out their PFI contracts early where this is affordable.”

In any case, why so much concentration on Ukip? Mr Miliband stands to lose far more support to the Scottish National Party. Could it be that he has taken his eye off the ball again?

Edward Thomas

Eastbourne

The point about maths is it gives you options

A number of distinguished commentators have sought to condemn the Education Secretary for her comments about the importance of studying maths, but I think that they have all missed the point. I am qualified to speak on this as I am a professor of electronic engineering who also has a degree in history of art, which I studied part-time while continuing to work.

The critics have implied that the Secretary of State was downplaying the importance of culture and the arts generally but that is not what she was saying. She simply stated what to me is the “bleeding obvious”: if you don’t study A-level maths then you close off a number of options. If you do, then all your options remain open.

I am happy to confirm that studying history of art is challenging and intellectually stimulating and that you learn valuable life skills. However, it is obvious that you could not be employed as an engineer or as a physicist.

I am sure that I would not have been able to do what I did in reverse – base my career on a degree in history of art and then study engineering in later life. So it is just a simple fact, if you don’t study maths, you limit your options in later life.

Professor Chris Guy

School of Systems Engineering,

University of Reading

All hopes that greater sanity would prevail at the Department of Education were dashed when Nicky Morgan announced to the world that the only subjects worth studying were maths and science and that those who study the humanities and arts will be disadvantaged for life.

She has told the nation’s children that unless they are talented in these particular areas they are going to experience a lifetime of disadvantage. If this point of view gains ground, schools and universities will reduce funding and resources for subjects other than those she favours and within a short time generations of expertise will be dissipated.

When I recently visited China, I discovered the Chinese government has identified art and design as one of six new focuses in the economy and education. Chinese families are now encouraging their artistically gifted young to come to British schools to study art and design subjects. Many families are prepared to invest in an education that suits their children’s talents rather than being confined to the same narrow range of subjects which are now apparently preferred by our Education Secretary.

Lynne Taylor-Gooby

Principal, The Royal School

Haslemere, Surrey

What does electorate want from its leaders?

In your leader of 12 November you ask what the electorate expects of its politicians and then answer that “they like their leaders to work together in the public interest”, which, you say, is the reason why the Coalition has survived.

The opposite is the truth. The Liberal Democrats have remained part of the Coalition even though all opinion polls suggest that the electorate does not like the fact that the dire state of the public finances and the need to compromise with the Conservatives have meant they have had to take responsibility for unpopular measures.

As a result their poll rating has gone down to below what it was when they just criticised from the opposition benches. In fact, it is well below what it would be had they decided to not share responsibility and instead continued to criticise and pretend that there are easy answers, as does Ukip.

Charles Jenkins

London SW4

Shame on Sainsbury’s profiting from war

Commercialisation of the First World War has sunk to a new low with the Sainsbury’s Christmas advert. It cannot be right to allow a company such as Sainsbury’s to play upon an event such as the 1914 “Christmas truce” – a tiny event amidst the carnage and horrors of the war – for the purposes of advertising its shops and increasing its profits.

Martin Jeanneret

Newhaven, East Sussex

The world is a whole lot better now

John Dakin (letter, 14 November) writes: “The modern world is not perfect, but it is a whole lot better than before 1914” and he is correct, but what he omits is that, in seeking to diminish institutions like the EU and the NHS, the current UK government is actively helping to move Europe back towards those pre-1914 conditions.

Phillip Marston

St-Gingolph, Switzerland

Metric or imperial – it can’t be both

Please make up your mind whether you’re metric or imperial – a foot (or metre) in each camp makes for muddled journalism. The caption for the photo of Bob Diamond’s daughter (14 November) states her dress was ‘‘made from 35 metres of silk and comprising a 15ft-long train’’. If this was part of a ‘spot the deliberate confusion’ competition, I claim my prize.

Shane Malhotra

Maidstone, Kent

I agree with Farage – what a dilemma!

I have just read Nigel Farage’s column (14 November) and have to say I agree with every word. He is so right to condemn private finance initiatives as this policy is making billions of pounds for private companies over and above what would have been reasonable amounts. As Farage says, it will be future generations who have to pick up the tab. The only problem I have with Ukip is that leaving the EU would be an economic disaster. What a dilemma!

Malcolm Howard

Banstead, Surrey

Times:

Sir, As joint editors preparing the 5th Edition of Clinical Negligence we join the concern voiced about the usefulness of the Medical Innovation Bill (report, leader and letter, Nov 13). Exposure to civil liability has limited effect on medical innovation as most clinical negligence claims concern poor rather than innovative practice. Moreover, the safety of medicines and the performance of doctors are regulated by law. We are not aware of negligence cases founded on medical innovation alone. Existing common law is robust and flexible enough to address innovation and in its present iteration the bill adds nothing to it. There are better ways of promoting medical innovation such as the recently failed Off-patent Drugs Bill, which had little media attention.

While we sympathise with Lord Saatchi and share his aims, this bill addresses an emotional need to provide hope rather than a deficit in current law.
Dr Michael J Powers QC
Dr Anthony Barton
Solicitor and medical practitioner, Lincoln’s Inn, London

Sir, Lord Saatchi’s bill would not enable doctors to give any treatments they can’t already give — it simply puts their treatment decisions beyond questioning by anybody else, beyond the reach of the law. This bill would apply to “innovative” treatment for any condition, serious or trivial, even when there is an existing effective treatment available. The majority of paediatric prescribing, for example, is for “unlicensed” medication, an area about which Saatchi’s campaign has made particular mention. Do we want such patients to be unprotected by the law? Far from simplifying the law, this bill will make the area more complex and unclear.
David Hills
Stop the Saatchi Bill Campaign
Bridgend, Mid Glamorgan

Sir, As your leading article observed, Lord Saatchi is sincere but misguided. There is a lot that needs to be done to speed up medical research and to reduce the burden of litigation against the NHS but his bill tackles neither. It does not provide anything new that would encourage better science. It does not propose ways to cut the legal claims which cost the health service over £1 billion a year. Instead it removes protection from patients and, as you rightly point out, it opens the door to improper experimentation and downright quackery.
Dr James May
Chair of HealthWatch-UK

Sir, Most cancer patients with a terminal prognosis are able to understand their situation and when all other options have been exhausted, given a choice, some will undoubtedly be happy to try untested treatments. They should be free to do so with the proviso that proper safeguards are in place, not only for the patient but also for the medical practitioners. Hope is important even if it is only the hope of a life extension or of a possible addition to our medical knowledge, thus improving someone else’s chances of survival.
Karen Gabony
Cobham, Surrey

Sir, Lord Saatchi’s bill would prevent some patients who have been harmed by what today would be defined as negligence from having any redress. Worse than that, it would make it easier for a small number of maverick doctors to try out experimental treatment on vulnerable patients. No one wants patients to receive treatment which will genuinely help them more than ourselves but we see this bill as both dangerous and unnecessary. Peter Walsh
Chief executive, Action against Medical Accidents

Sir, It is absurd that Saatchi portrays oncologists as being too timid to innovate. Eleven years ago I had an aggressive cancer — like the one that killed Jackie Kennedy Onassis. It didn’t respond to chemotherapy, so my NHS specialist, not being timid, suggested high-dose chemo and a stem cell transplant, which had a modest success rate of 2-3 per cent. I am still working at 73. I go back to see my specialist once a year to thank him.
Caroline Richmond
London N12

Sir, The BBC has sacrificed TV and radio production in the Midlands for some time now (“Please can we have our everyday Archers back?”, Nov 11). It is making further cuts in the staff making The Archers. It could be just a matter of time until the production of The Archers moves to Salford and BBC production leaves Birmingham altogether.
Richard Jeffs
Edgbaston

Sir, Perhaps the solution for The Archers is to dam the Am at Lakey Hill and so create a reservoir to supply Borset and farther afield. Unfortunately, Ambridge will be submerged, but at least there will be fewer objections there to the re-routed HS2 through that part of Borsetshire. The Archers, along with the Grundys, can then start all over again in Northumberland.
Andrew Sanderson
Spennymoor, Co Durham

Sir, I dispute Sir Harold Walker’s contention (letter, Nov 13) that behaviour at the luggage carousel is indicative of the selfish gene. Being no longer in the first flush of youth (I’m in my mid-80s), I find that often a young stranger is extremely helpful in lifting my case off the conveyor belt for me.
David Morris-Marsham
London SW12

Sir, The best way of dealing with litter that I have seen (“Fast food litter on rise”, Nov 13) was a few years ago in the Dutch theme park, Efteling. Talking litter bins in the shape of a nursery rhyme character called out “Papier hier!” (litter here!) and growled “Dank u wel” when litter was thrown into their mouths. Every so often, instead of a thank you, a donation was met with a belch. Giggling children were pouncing on scraps of litter in order to feed the bins. The park was spotless.
Jane Courtier
Dorchester

Sir, Jenni Russell believes that the fall in the number of children put forward for adoption is “bleak news.” (Opinion, Nov 13) Rather, it should be seen as good news and evidence of better standards being required. Whereas other professionals are trained to back up their assertions with facts, social workers often put forward views supported by minimal evidence. Also, a child’s security is based in its sense of identity, which is best developed if a child is placed in the extended family. Organisations such as Grandparents Plus are pressing for a legal obligation to be placed on local authorities to do this.

Social workers cannot be accused of tardiness: a mother can be sent to court only two days after giving birth. Her human rights can be ignored because she will not necessarily have the chance to consult a solicitor. Women who have been mentally ill during pregnancy are likely to fare the worst of all. The judiciary are society’s defence against indifferent and “sloppy” social workers, some of whom seem more concerned to protect their backs than strive to do what is best for the child.
Diane Packham
Newcastle upon Tyne

Telegraph:

British aid promise; Tower poppies without stems; and a Petit Prince comet

Ed Miliband

Ed Miliband Photo: PA

7:00AM GMT 14 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – Because the hapless Ed Miliband is so bad, the Tories should work to preserve him as leader of the Labour Party as a kind of morality tale – that is the suggestion Boris Johnson made earlier this week. This view is dangerously smug.

The spread-betting websites, which have been excellent predictors of elections both here and in the United States, currently predict, by a small margin, that Mr Miliband will be the next prime minister.

Michael Schewitz
London N2

SIR – Ed Miliband’s address to his apparatchiks puts me in mind of Iain Duncan Smith’s promise to the Conservative party conference when he said that “the quiet man is here to stay and he’s turning up the volume”.

Letters: Don’t underestimate the value of an arts degree

13 Nov 2014

Mr Duncan Smith has since transformed himself into a very successful Secretary of State for Work and Pensions. As for Ed Miliband, it may be doubted that, on the basis of his latest performance, he has any such future.

Alec Ellis
Liverpool

SIR – I note from his latest relaunch speech that Ed Miliband is promising to take on the “vested interests” and “powerful forces” in this country. Trade unions first, then?

Graham Jones
Tytherington, Cheshire

SIR – Ed Miliband told the BBC that he had just been auditioning to become our next prime minister; yet for over four years when he has had the opportunity to question the Prime Minister on our behalf, he has asked nothing but “have you stopped beating your wife” non-questions, from which we have learnt nothing.

If he can’t ask intelligent questions, what hope has he got of gleaning the right answers, if he should ever become prime minister, when he would have to rely on the knowledge of experts, with different political leanings, on virtually every subject?

Brian Christley
Abergele. Denbighshire

SIR – Mr Miliband says that his job is an audition for the part of prime minister. Well, thanks Ed, don’t ring us…

John Newman
Pattishall, Northamptonshire

SIR – My reluctance to vote for the Conservatives is based on David Cameron and his ministers making speeches one day contradicted by their actions the next.

In this area of Somerset, we were told by Mr Cameron that money was no object in dealing with the floods. But, as I write, the poor souls affected last year are under threat again.

Why would I vote for more of this? But then, why would I vote for Ed?

Stuart G Pullen
Monkton Heathfield, Somerset

British aid promise

SIR – Philip Hammond is misguided in his comments about the aid law passing through Parliament.

This Bill enjoys cross-party support. Enshrining Britain’s aid promise in law would deliver the 2010 manifesto pledge of all three main political parties as well as the Coalition agreement.

We should be proud that Britain has reached this international target. This law puts life-saving aid beyond politics, guaranteeing that 0.7 per cent of gross national income is spent on aid each year, linked to economic performance, until it is no longer needed. The Bill would also move the debate from “How much aid?” to “How can we use aid most effectively?”

This Bill sends a signal to developing countries that we will keep our aid promise to them. It reminds other rich countries that they too must meet their aid targets.

British aid saves lives and changes lives every day. Philip Hammond is witnessing that first-hand in Sierra Leone where Britain leads the fight against Ebola. However, humanitarian aid alone is not enough. Enshrining the target in law will enable future British governments to make smart long-term investments that address the root causes of poverty.

Ben Jackson
Chief Executive, Bond

Brendan Cox
Director of Policy and Advocacy, Save the Children UK

Chris Bain
CEO, Cafod

Jehangir Malik
UK Director, Islamic Relief

Juliet Milgate
Director of Policy and Advocacy, Sightsavers UK

Aaron Oxley
Executive Director, RESULTS UK

Amy Dodd
Coordinator, UKAN

Bert R Smit
CEO, ADRA-UK

Diane Sheard
UK Director, The ONE Campaign

Justin Byworth
CEO, WorldVision UK

Loretta Minghella
Chief Executive, Christian Aid

Margaret Batty
Director of Policy and Campaigns, WaterAid

Rose Caldwell
Executive Director of Concern Worldwide (UK)

Simon O’Connell
Executive Director Elect, Mercy Corps

Tanya Barron
CEO, Plan UK

Sale of ceramic Tower poppies without stems

_{Photo: REUTERS/Peter Nicholls}

SIR – I wonder how many people purchasing one of the poppies from the installation at the Tower of London realised they would receive only the ceramic head.

Wendy Rainford
Brayton, West Yorkshire

SIR – I have just discovered that only the heads of the poppies will be sent to the buyers, without the stems, many of which have weathered in the rain.

I bought poppies for family members in the belief that we would receive the poppy head together with a stem and the washers so that we could reconstruct them for our own memories. I don’t care if the stems have weathered – in fact, it would add to their authenticity.

Fiona Todd
Radlett, Hertfordshire

SIR – Following our visit to the truly breathtaking display at the Tower of London, we tried, unsuccessfully, to buy one of the ceramic poppies.

We fully understand the significance of limiting the number of poppies to 888,246 for this work of art, but we would urge the artist and organisers to continue producing and selling poppies until public demand is sated. Not doing so will lead to the inevitable profiteering that will take place via online auction sites.

Tony Hunter
Solihull, West Midlands

SIR – While my wife and I were visiting the beautiful poppy display, the woman standing next to us observed: “I wonder what will happen to them all? I suppose some will end up on eBay.”

Those who may not wish to keep their poppy on the mantelpiece for ever could indeed re-sell it, donating the proceeds to the Royal British Legion and other charities.

A single poppy could thus generate donations totalling many times its original £25 price, while giving others a chance to take part in this unique tribute.

Stephen Kemp
Tilton on the Hill, Leicestershire

State-run banks

SIR – Extra taxes, regulation and demands for much greater capitalisation are unlikely to make banks attractive to investors. It is the people and banking culture that need to be reformed.

If we fire at the wrong targets we will find that there are precious few investors prepared to put their money into banks, whether as depositors or shareholders.

We are in danger of ending up with state-run banks that direct business according to the political colour of the current government. Is this what the authorities are really aiming for?

Alexander Hopkinson-Woolley
Bembridge, Isle of Wight

SIR – As the wonders of electronic banking were ushered in through the door of the finance industry, the morals were ushered out through the window.

Time for a clear-out.

J A Whitmore
York

SIR – Shakespeare has Dick the Butcher, accomplice of Jack Cade, the leader of the Peasants’ Revolt, say: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

If Shakespeare were alive today would he write: “We’ll sort out the bankers”?

Denis Durkin
Lewes, East Sussex

SIR – The bankers involved in the foreign-exchange scandal would, perhaps, do well to heed the report of the Committee of the House of Lords on the Causes of Commercial Distress: “The best banking system may be defeated by imperfect management; and, on the other hand, the evils of an imperfect banking system may be greatly mitigated, if not overcome, by prudence, caution, and resolution.”

The date of this report? 1848. It would appear that some things never change.

David Hearn
Wallasey, Wirral

Conservative chaos

SIR – It is unfair to blame the Speaker for Monday’s chaos in the Commons.

The fault lies squarely with the Government. It controls business and decides the motions that are debated. It cannot, therefore, reasonably complain if the motions it sets down for debate are not wide enough to discuss matters it believes to be relevant.

Indeed the Speaker was generous in the latitude that he allowed to the Home Secretary. The normal Commons rule is that debate must be strictly on the subject set down on the order paper. Anything else is disorderly and members are regularly stopped by the Speaker and his deputies if they wander from the central point.

The Government was warned on Friday by the chairmen of two select committees, one a Eurosceptic the other a strong pro-European, that the procedure it intended to adopt would not cover the European Arrest Warrant. The Government chose to ignore this and similar warnings and has no right to squeal when it has been found out.

Jacob Rees-Mogg MP (Con)
London SW1

Petit Prince comet

_{Photo: ESA/Getty}

SIR – I am sure my sense of déjà-vu on seeing the photograph taken from the Philae lander of the 67P comet was shared by generations of aficionados of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella Le Petit Prince.

Christopher Prince
Stocksfield, Northumberland

SIR – Congratulations to the brilliant scientists who, after its 10-year journey, touched down the Philae lander on the 67P comet. Maybe these brilliant minds could now give thought to redesigning my small tea pot, which persists in pouring most of the contents on to the tray and just a little into my cup.

Peter Dace
Cuffley, Hertfordshire

The most versatile of British film actors

_{Photo: Allstar/MGM}

SIR – While I greatly admire Michael Caine’s considerable talent, I cannot accept Anne Billson’s judgment (Arts, November 12) that he is “the best, most important, and most versatile film star that Britain has ever produced”.

In terms of quality and quantity, and extraordinary versatility, no British star can match the record of John Mills, who appeared in more than 120 films. He played with distinction the widest possible variety of characters, ranging from heroic figures, such as the title character in Scott of the Antarctic, to an Oscar-winning performance as the village idiot in Ryan’s Daughter.

John Cottrell
Addlestone, Surrey

One-stop supermarket

SIR – I see Sainsbury’s is considering letting out concessions in some of its larger stores to make better use of the selling space.

May I suggest it could do much worse than incorporate an Aldi in each of its stores. It would make our shopping expeditions so much easier, as we still prefer Sainsbury’s multi-seed bread, and its car parks are so much more commodious.

Paul Harrison
Terling, Essex

Irish Times:

Sir, – So now we see the Sinn Féin strategy (“Dáil adjourned until Tuesday after Mary Lou McDonald sit-in”, November 13th). Obliterate all embarrassing talk of cover-ups of sex crimes by creating a big diversionary noise elsewhere. Mary-Lou McDonald, by her sit-in in Leinster House, has displayed Sinn Féin’s contempt for democracy and a cynical disregard for the electorate. – Yours, etc,

GERARD McDERMOTT,

Gorey, Co Wexford.

Sir, – If the Ceann Comhairle cannot stand the heat, he should get out of the kitchen. If the media is going to vilify a TD that dares to challenge the status quo, then we are left with a culture of deference that benefits nobody except the establishment. – Yours, etc,

ANNE-MARIE McNALLY,

Lucan,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – One person took it upon herself to tear up the rules and destroy the ability to function of the forum chosen by the electorate of this democratic republic to represent and make decisions on behalf of all citizens. That is totalitarian intolerance for democratic procedures and should be stated to be such. Instead what has happened is that much of the media coverage has made that person a celebrity. – Yours, etc,

A LEAVY,

Dublin 13.

Sir, – Having spent decades supporting an armed terrorist campaign that tried to shut down the Dáil, Sinn Féin has finally succeeded in doing so – for a day, at least. Ms McDonald’s behaviour this week gives a good flavour of what we can expect if Sinn Féin is ever elected to government.

Most rational observers would agree that the level of parliamentary oversight which the Dáil has over the Government remains a joke in comparison to other national parliaments. However, some parliamentary oversight is better than none. If Sinn Féin was happy to shut down the Dáil for a full day while in opposition, just a day after its own conduct, past and present, was exposed to sharp parliamentary oversight, then I doubt it would have any compunction about doing so if it were ever elected to government.

In the British House of Commons or the US Houses of Congress if a member was ordered to leave and refused to do so, they would be physically dragged out of the chamber by the sergeant-at-arms. A similar rule applies in the Dáil; however, according to media reports, the Captain of the Guard did no more than politely ask Ms McDonald to leave the chamber. Would a male member have been treated with kid-gloves in this way? Ms McDonald has been quick to use her gender to deflect criticism in the past, resisting objections to her populist grandstanding with cries of “sexism”. It seems that she was allowed to get away with her conduct this week on the basis that she would do likewise on this occasion. – Yours, etc,

BARRY WALSH,

Clontarf, Dublin 3.

Sir, – Mary-Lou McDonald has been accused by the the Ceann Comhairle of causing “reputational damage to the institution” (ie Dáil Éireann). Is this because she actually bothered to be present in the chamber and then had the impertinence to demand an answer from a Minister to the question asked, behaviour which, of course, cannot be allowed to continue for fear it undermines Irish democracy as we know it? – Yours, etc,

ROGER BLACKBURN,

Naul, Co Dublin.

Sir, – If Sinn Féin forms the next government it will only be because power was handed to it by those who abdicated it by refusing to govern properly. – Yours, etc,

CHRISTIAN MORRIS,

Howth, Dublin 13.

Sir, – The president and vice-president of Sinn Féin both recently announced their intention to break the law on water charges, notwithstanding that the law in question has been approved democratically by the Oireachtas. Now, that party’s vice-president refuses to abide by the vote of Dáil members on her suspension from the House. For me, this calls into question the commitment of Sinn Féin to democracy. – Yours, etc,

TOM SHEEDY,

Malahide, Co Dublin.

Sir, – It is not difficult to detect a tone of ambivalence in Government at the prospect of having the responsibility of marking the centenary of perhaps the seminal event of Irish national self-determination. It would seem that what should be an opportunity to reassert and celebrate with confidence the legitimate declaration and establishment of the sovereignty of the Irish people is in fact being played out as a dubious privilege.

It is true one cannot ignore the complexity of Ireland’s journey to nationhood nor the fact that some, even today, struggle to accept the fact or desirability of Irish independence. It is nonetheless a reality.

A European friend observed to me recently how strange it was that the Irish were so uncertain about celebrating periodically what most nations boast of constantly.

I fervently hope we shall as a people in all our rich diversity compensate for the prevailing and governing political ambivalence toward the forthcoming centenary with an enthusiastic celebration of our nationhood and leave apologies to those who will inevitably mess up the logistics. – Yours, etc,

RONAN B TOBIN,

Malahide,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Could someone representing the 1916 relatives please explain to the rest of us citizens why exactly they see themselves as being so important to the upcoming commemoration? There doesn’t seem to be a plan or programme of activities announced that does not have this group pontificating or complaining about it.

It goes without saying that none of these relatives were actually there during the Rising. They played no part in it, yet because of their bloodline they feel themselves entitled to lecture the rest of us mere citizens and indeed the Government on what should and should not be done. Giving a special place to citizens just because of an accident of birth is the antithesis of republicanism. – Yours, etc,

ROBERT COUSINS,

Dublin 18.

A chara, – The only surprise so far is that the Government is not planning to commemorate the 1916 Rising on April 1st, 2016. – Is mise,

LOMAN Ó LOINGSIGH,

Dublin 24.

Sir, – I note with some trepidation that the military parade on Easter Sunday 2016 will be led by relatives of those who participated in the Rising. What will be the dress code for the marchers? Military uniforms or leprechaun outfits with Google, Facebook and Twitter insignia? – Yours, etc,

PATRICK O’BYRNE,

Phibsborough,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – Frank McDonald concludes his article on Dun Laoghaire’s new and controversial library with, “In time, the controversy over how it came about will be forgotten” (“Why I love Dún Laoghaire Library”, Saturday, November 8th).

I’m not so sure. Dublin Corporation’s “bunkers” on Wood Quay, also referenced in Mr McDonald’s article, are far from forgotten and not just by those of us who fought with such energy to try and stop them. The Civic Office bunkers stand today as they have since completion 35 years ago, a brutal insult to the Liffey riverfront and to the city, a monument to the arrogance of Dublin Corporation and to the deliberate destruction of our Viking heritage. No hazy sentimentality can airbrush such a carbuncle from the cityscape, no matter how long they stand. I predict Dún Laoghaire Rathdown’s new library, built with the same arrogance, will earn the same opprobrium.

What is the purpose of architecture in a town like Dun Laoghaire? There are the one-off buildings, such as the new library or the council’s own offices, the idea of building as sculpture. Then there is the architecture of the vernacular, the day-to-day buildings where we live, shop and do business and which make up the fabric of the streets and squares of our towns and cities. Many such beautiful streets have somehow survived in Dún Laoghaire, made up of low-rise buildings, built to an attractive human scale and giving a great sense of enclosure and cohesion.

But Dún Laoghaire Rathdown County Council can only envisage one-off “spectaculars”, alone and contemptuous of their environment, while the rest of the town, particularly the main shopping streets, slip into vacancy and dereliction. Businesses are crippled with enormous county council rates so that vanity projects such as the new library might be developed. As Mr McDonald states, “no expense has been spared” and the final €37 million bill for the library, a figure which few in the town believe, and with enormous ongoing running costs, will remain a burden which ratepayers and taxpayers must bear into the distant future.

The new library may indeed be beautiful on the inside but its exterior is what the people will see every day. It is a constant and expensive reminder of when the Celtic Tiger briefly visited Dún Laoghaire. – Yours, etc,

GARY O’CALLAGHAN,

Dún Laoghaire,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – I hear that the initial pictures of the Dún Laoghaire library building, taken from the spacecraft Philae on Comet 67P, are quite flattering. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN CULLEN,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 16.

Sir, – Prostitution has occurred in all societies throughout recorded history. Some countries prohibit it, some permit it and regulate it as a business. In either event, prostitution continues. When we criminalise the transaction (by either party), it must hide from the law, so it goes underground. Neither provider nor user now has the protection of the law, and prostitutes are exposed to criminal intermediaries who can coerce them, confiscate earnings and physically abuse them. Because the business in Ireland is invisible to the law, anything goes. Women can be trafficked and enslaved, working conditions can be vile, health and hygiene precautions can be ignored. Intensifying the legal prohibition will serve only to make this worse. – Yours, etc,

STEPHEN McCORMICK,

Wicklow Town.

Sir, –To date the majority of people discussing the future of sex workers in Ireland do not, and have never sold sex in any way and never will, with the understandable result that most of them are mistaken about the facts of the issue.

I do not believe that there is any moral justification for the issue to proceed further without an opportunity for people who have worked in the sex industry to challenge those misconceptions autonomously and on equal terms in public debate, something with which, to date, the main protagonists have declined to engage.

If it concerned any other subculture or social group this state of affairs would be considered appalling.

Because of the stigma attached to sex work, it is hard for sex workers to feel comfortable engaging with such a process, but stigma should not cancel out human rights. – Yours, etc,

GAYE DALTON,

Donard,

Co Wicklow.

Sir, – The Irish Times continues to give coverage to those who are against the “whip” in political life (“Spare the whip”, Editorial, November 7th).

As someone who once “lost the whip”, on Dublin City Council, I understand fully the need for party discipline in ensuring the smooth running of our democracy and political structures. Those who advocate otherwise are usually commentators and not practitioners.

I broke the whip, which I do not regret, and took the consequences. This took the form of serving as an Independent member of the council for 18 months. During that time I was, of course, free to take any position I wanted on any issue – and did. It was also the case that I could no longer automatically assume the support of my Labour colleagues on issues of key importance to me and my constituents. It was, in that respect, the most enjoyable, but least productive, time I have spent as an elected councillor.

The whip exists to ensure some degree of stability. It provides for stronger leadership and decision-making. It is a freely decided decision to seek a party nomination and accept the whip – after that, if you join the game you obey the rules. Conscience applies to many issues and not just the highly emotive ones. And even after losing the whip all is not lost. Ten years after doing so I became leader of the group that I was once thrown out of. I am, of course, not encouraging any of my present colleagues to follow that lead. – Yours, etc,

Cllr DERMOT LACEY,

Donnybrook, Dublin 4.

A chara, – Judging from the letters on this topic from Raymond Deane and Dr John McLachlan (November 12th), the series on “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks” (November 8th) has already been a success after just one instalment.

Surely the point of a series such as this is to celebrate the included works and debate the merits of those absent? I, for one, will enjoy following, and discussing the series over the coming months. – Is mise,

JOE McLAUGHLIN,

Midlothian, Scotland.

Sir, – The debacle over “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks” and the absence of classical music is probably not the fault of the perpetrators at The Irish Times and the Royal Irish Academy.

They are guilty of what the Catholic Church calls invincible ignorance, the doctrine proposing that even those who have not heard of salvation can be redeemed by good works.

But knowledge is still preferable to ignorance, and to have to exculpate the sinners on the basis that they didn’t, and don’t, know any better is humiliating for our country, its culture – and them. – Yours, etc,

KEVIN O’CONNELL,

Royal Irish

Academy of Music,

Dublin 2.

Sir, – Ian Lindsay (November 7th) points out that “all we need to do is have the people who write letters to The Irish Times run the country”. Declan Kelly agrees; Dermot O’Rourke does not (November 8th).

Oscar Wilde would support Mr O’Rourke: “I am afraid that writing to newspapers has a deteriorating influence on style. People get violent and abusive and lose all sense of proportion, when they enter that curious journalistic arena in which the race is always to the noisiest” (Scots Observer, August 16th, 1890).

PG Wodehouse would support Messrs Lindsey and Kelly: “I yearn to write letters to the papers. All authors do. Novelists are merely those who have failed as contributors to the Correspondence Column. Unable to make the grade, they drop down a rung on the ladder and write novels” (St Petersburg Times, May 13th, 1951). – Yours, etc,

BRENDAN KELLY,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – If Marian Quinn (November 13th), writing from Arranmore Island in Donegal, thinks she has an inferior broadband service compared to the mainland, then I’m happy to tell her that the grass is certainly not any greener here. I live 28km outside Dublin and my broadband speed this afternoon was a princely 1.5Mb/s. Fibreoptic cable? Workable internet would suffice. – Yours, etc,

JENNIFER

PRENDERGAST,

Kilmacanogue, Co Wicklow.

Sir, – I notice a lot of water meter installations going on, but see that Irish Water has not yet installed any water recycling systems in these same houses? Would this not make perfect sense, and help to curb the national outcry?

Perhaps that’s it, it makes too much sense. – Yours, etc,

MICHAEL O’KELLY,

Saggart, Co Dublin.

Irish Independent:

Is there any way that our elected representatives in Dail Eireann would stand back for a moment and reflect on what their representation of the citizens of this country actually entails?

Thankfully, we still live in a democracy and at every general election we get the chance to decide who will represent us.

Following elections we as genuine republicans (ie citizens who accept and abide by our Constitution and laws) wait to see what collaboration of TDs will group together to form a majority and control our Dail. Whatever our opinions, we accept that the majority of TDs shall rule. As citizens we continue to abide by our laws and contribute socially and financially to our country.

Politicians put themselves forward for election because they want to be leaders of our country. As we have learned to our cost in recent years the decisions that even a couple of them make does have a huge effect on all of us. Their responsibility to the citizens of this country should not be taken lightly.

Our Government has decided that Irish households should pay for the water that they receive from the newly-created utility, Uisce Eireann. People in Ireland do not – and should not – expect to receive treated water for free forever. Water charges should be based on actual costs, like all utilities – and not on how much the Government believe will be politically acceptable.

The Department of Social Protection is there to assist those who cannot afford all of the charge. As can be seen in the Dail and on the streets, our Government’s indecision is fuelling an anti-everything movement and creating a platform for wannabe future politicians who will be elected on an anti-everything mandate.

In recent days the behaviour of some of our TDs in the Dail can only be compared to that of playschool kids. On Wednesday one Deputy came in to tell everyone that she had a list of eight people allegedly involved in serious crimes, but she wasn’t telling the Dail who they were.

On Thursday another asked that if somebody didn’t pay for what they were supposed to would that be okay. When the question went unanswered she proceeded to sulk and caused proceedings to be suspended.

The Government representative answering Thursday’s questions was either unable or afraid to answer the simple question. I am not trying to make light of any of the Deputy’s remarks or the serious issues, but if our toddlers behaved in a similar fashion we would correct them.

People want leadership and certainty and to see our leaders “of the people, by the people and for the people” govern this great little nation.

We all understand that politics is somewhat of a game, but you can’t keep playing the politics game all of the time. Every politician will be tripping over each other to be in the front row for the upcoming 1916 centenary commemoration.

Maybe if they study the history of the time they will see the great sacrifices made for this country, but also that poor communication and indecisiveness existed in 1916. Show us some real leadership and get things done. You may be surprised by the results.

Kieran McEvoy

Cullohill, Co Laois

Donna captures nation’s mood

Donna Hartnett’s impassioned, compelling letter (Irish Independent, November 11) has really struck a chord with people and captured the immense frustrations of ordinary families facing the onslaught of wave upon wave of taxes and bills.

The Irish people have taken so many austere measures on the chin already, but introduction of water charges has simply pushed too many of us too far. It has been the catalyst that has seen more than 100,000 of us across the nation taking to the streets to protest this latest assault on our already meagre means.

We always understood that domestic water was paid for out of general taxes, but it turns out the money wasn’t invested in maintaining the network. Who’s responsible for that? Not ordinary people. Yet we’re unjustly expected to pay again.

Exactly where does Mr Kenny suggest we find the money to pay TWICE anyway? Would it be at the expense of feeding or clothing our kids? Heating our homes? Paying health insurance, home insurance or life insurance? The list goes on. It really does come down to this for many of us: What else are we prepared to sacrifice? The simple fact of it is that most of us just don’t have any more to give.

Mr Kenny says he’s listening. But yet he keeps bleating on about allowances and affordable water charges. The concessions won’t work this time. He really needs to listen and look to those who have benefited the most in successive budgets: the millionaires and big businesses availing of generous tax arrangements.

It’s time to start redressing this imbalance instead of continuing to squeeze the poor, the vulnerable and hard-working struggling families. This protest is about injustice as much as it’s about our water.

Paul Hogan

Mountmellick, Co Laois

Low antics in the lower house

In reference to Mary Lou McDonald’s velcro-style stubbornness in the Dail the other day. There was nothing to praise, it was hard to see the point of it other than a distraction.

For my own part, I didn’t vote for any candidate or party the last time.

I was born in 1976 and the truth is, at this stage, I’m bored stiff of the talking shop. The proceedings at Leinster House unfold like ‘Muppet Show’ style segments, their only purpose is to fill time in the Dail.

At the same time, the nation’s children are still being raised daily like hens in creches nationwide as we speak.

We have a leader of the house who, in my opinion, comes across as a silly shrill referee of some sort comparable to a character on Fr Ted.

As all this unfolds Sinn Fein are still pushing financial figures that they think will work, but the realists like me believe it’s Disneyland economics.

Tax the rich they say… The rich will just transfer the wealth to the wife or to a different jurisdiction.

In any event Sinn Fein have more excess baggage than any Ryanair flight could possibly manage – or fine – at this stage. Then again, the whole management system in my lovely Ireland is now more Mick the Bull instead of the steady hand that populates the halls of Westminster.

I am setting these thoughts down as a disillusioned squeezed middle-income single-earner in Waterford city.

Eamon Dunphy was probably right when he said this county is a kip… for lads my age anyways.

David O’Connor

Dunmore Road, Waterford city

It took long enough to coerce Sinn Fein into the Dail.

Now we can’t get them out.

Typical.

Killian Foley-Walsh

Kilkenny city

The haves and the have-nots

Eunan McNeill asks if people who holiday abroad, spend huge amounts on alcohol and buy new cars are the same people who now say they cannot afford the water charges.

Perhaps he should ask himself if it is possible the people who cannot pay for water are in fact not the same people at all?

John Williams

Clonmel, Co Tipperary

Irish Independent

Promoted articles

16 November 2014 Walking

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to the Co op and post office,

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down rabbit for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Lady Wardington was a model who was considered ‘too beautiful for the BBC’, and later compiled the Superhints series of books

Lady Wardington with Sir Malcolm Sargent (left) and Alec Guinness

5:41PM GMT 14 Nov 2014

Comments

Lady Wardington, who has died aged 87, was a 1950s cover girl of striking beauty, the founder of a financial management course for women, and the compiler of a series of “Superhints” handbooks — compendiums of ideas “personal, perspicacious and practical” — which she published to raise money for her local hospice.

An only child, she was born Margaret Audrey White on November 2 1927 in Bradford. Her father, a commercial traveller, left his family when Audrey was young and she was brought up by her mother, Eva, in north London, where they sat out the Blitz with their cat, Luftwaffe.

Audrey attended Henrietta Barnett School in Finchley, taking her school certificate exams in the middle of the first doodlebug raids. The girls were allowed to get under their desks if one cut out overhead, at which point they would often try to whisper the answers as they hid.

She left school aged 16 and found a job at the Elizabeth Arden salon in Bond Street as general dogsbody to the woman giving facial treatments. There she was spotted by one of the salon’s clients, Phyllis Digby-Morton, the editor of Woman and Beauty, who asked her if she would like to have her photograph taken for the magazine. Audrey’s manager grudgingly allowed her the afternoon off on condition that she would not mention the fact she worked at the salon.

At the suggestion of the photographer at the session she became a professional model. Described by one journalistic admirer as a “raving beauty … with a smile as fresh as spring and the playful eye of a puppy”, Audrey White became a well-known face in the newspapers of the early 1950s, appearing as a bride in a series of National Savings posters and taking small parts in a handful of films.

In 1951 she hit the headlines when the BBC refused to give her a job as a stand-in television announcer in case her loveliness “alarmed timid men from Wigan and country districts”. “Too beautiful for the BBC!” ran a banner headline. But the BBC was right, argued one commentator: “Could you watch Miss White taking about depressions over Iceland and absorb what she was saying?”

Audrey White accepted defeat gracefully: “I don’t want to scare any timid male viewers,” she declared.

^{Lady Wardington: ‘too beautiful for the BBC’}

Audrey dated the future Doctor Who star Jon Pertwee and the actor Anthony Steele (their romance ended when she fled from a taxi in which he had drunkenly escorted her home, as he got out to pay on the other side). In 1953 she married the theatrical impresario and former racing driver Jack Dunfee, one of the famous “Bentley Boys”, 25 years her senior. “Mrs Jack Dunfee leaves London airport for a week’s holiday in the South of France,” ran a typical newspaper report. “She wears a mushroom-coloured outfit.”

The following year she was made fashion editor of Housewife magazine, after meeting the magazine’s managing editor, Marcus Morris (a former vicar turned “insatiable womaniser”, by her account) at a cocktail party. She worked for six years on Housewife and for two years on the magazine Go.

By this time her marriage had broken down, and in 1964 she married her second husband, Christopher Henry Beaumont (“Bic”) Pease, the 2nd Lord Wardington, a stockbroker and noted bibliophile, with whom she adopted three children.

At their Oxfordshire home, Wardington Manor, a substantial medieval-Jacobean house near Banbury, she and her husband worked together to embellish the garden and supported numerous charities, Lady Wardington helping to fight the closure of the village school, getting involved in local clubs and activities and delivering Meals on Wheels.

As her husband became increasingly involved in the world of rare books, the Wardingtons were enthusiastic attendees at international congresses and colloquia of the Association Internationale de Bibliophilie in continental Europe.

When her husband suffered a heart attack in his late forties, Lady Wardington was so shocked to realise how little she knew about money that she set up a financial management course for women. “I called it Capital and Savings Handling [CASH],” she recalled. “It was about savings and pensions and the stock market, and was aimed specifically at women. It was quite a success.” She ran the course for eight years until the Equal Opportunities Commission warned her it might take action if she continued.

^{Lady Wardington, wife of the 2nd Lord Wardington}

She was moved to start compiling her Superhints books in 1991, when a former secretary was dying of cancer in a hospice. At that time, funds were being raised in Banbury for the Katherine House Hospice. “I wanted to help them raise money and so, being a great corner-cutter, I hit on the idea of these Superhints books,” Lady Wardington recalled. “I simply wrote to about 3,000 people, asking them to donate a hint.”

First came Superhints; then Superhints for Cooks; then Superhints for Gardeners; and finally Superhints for Life. A large proportion of her contributors were titled, and their “hints” were often rather less practical than they were revealing of their authors.

The best way to pacify an angry child, suggested Lady Dashwood, was to “whisper gently into his ear and he will stop crying to hear what you are saying. This is also 100 per cent effective with husbands.” Lady Cobbold commended paper knickers because “it saves washing and they are good for lighting the fire”. Lord Hanson cautioned readers never to “stand up in the bath without pulling the plug out first”. Princess Margaret’s solution to a red wine spill on the carpet — sloshing white wine on it to remove the stain — perhaps proved only that she had never had to do it herself.

The Wardingtons’ happy life at Wardington Manor came to an end in April 2004 when a devastating electrical fire swept through one of the two wings of the house. They were abroad on holiday, but their daughter Helen, with the aid of villagers, managed a dramatic rescue of Lord Wardington’s priceless collection of books, including volumes containing some 60,000 maps produced between the 15th century and the present day. The collection was saved intact and unharmed. The house, however, was gutted.

Stoic in the face of disaster, the Wardingtons embarked on a full-scale repair, for which a model Wardington had made as a boy proved a useful guide. But Lord Wardington died the following year, his health possibly affected by the shock, and although work on the house was well advanced by his death, Lady Wardington decided to sell the manor and to live in a smaller house in the village.

She is survived by her son and two daughters.

Lady Wardington, born November 2 1927, died November 8 2014

Guardian:

British Labour Leader Miliband speech Party politics have become too presidential, say some, as controversy continues over Ed Miliband’s leadership of Labour. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

British politics has become too presidential with far too much emphasis on individual party leaders instead of policy (“Miliband in new crisis as senior MPs back leadership change”, News)).

Labour’s problems stem from urging their leader to stick to the centre ground for fear of frightening floating voters with too much radicalism at a time when the centre has been so imploded by austerity that the old two-party game is over.

The Scottish referendum is just the start of irreversible progress towards a new federal constitution that the Tories cannot stem, either with their undemocratic call for English votes on English issues, when there are no such issues that will not affect Scotland and Wales; or with one elected mayor for Manchester with a budget well below the level of funding cut by devolving austerity to local councils in England and Wales in a classic divide-and-rule manoeuvre.

The real Tory agenda is not deficit reduction, otherwise they would not have wasted billions on needless NHS reorganisation and on their botched welfare “reforms”.

The only way to prevent this is for Labour to make common cause with Liberal Democrats, who have always been consistent on the need for constitutional and electoral reform; they must make clear they will have no truck with a Tory party that has lurched so far to the right

Margaret Phelps

Penarth

Vale of Glamorgan

Daniel Boffey was probably right when he wrote: “The headlines (relating to the Labour leadership) are distracting from significant problems currently facing David Cameron.”

They certainly seem to have distracted him and his colleagues on Sunday’s paper from writing about Mr Osborne’s dissimulation with regards to the UK’s payments to the EU. In the Observer this important issue was conspicuous by its absence.

However, this edition of the paper did devote the title page and four other pages to a leadership struggle in the Labour party in which the principal heir has specifically refused to stand now or ever.

All of this was inspired by some gutless wonders so confident in their stance that they were afraid to express their views openly.

Paul Hewitson

Berlin

I turn the page from Ed Miliband and the Labour party’s squabbling and read that carers for vulnerable disabled people have – after 90 days of strikes with support from the Unite union – done a deal with the privatised Care UK that will see their wages “edging towards the living wage” (“After 90 days of strikes, Care UK workers celebrate new pay deal”, News). And Labour’s shadow ministers are muttering about Miliband instead of fighting about issues they can win an election on? Now that makes me despair.

David Reed

London NW3

Labour’s lack of credibility is far more serious than its leadership.

Thanks to our crazy electoral system, rather than fighting the Rochester and Strood byelection to win the seat with a higher turnout and divided rightwing vote at the next general election, Labour have decided to fight on as narrow a front as possible.

Locally in Chipping Barnet, having in May won 11 out of 21 council seats, we have not seen a single leaflet introducing their prospective parliamentary candidate and so we have no reason to consider voting tactically .

Such campaigning would give their supporters hope and stretch Tory resources. Without this, Labour will fail to make many gains and not just in Scotland risk being outflanked.

David Nowell

New Barnet, Herts

Big blue truck. Isolated over white. Transport links need to be improved all over Britain. Photograph: Alamy

Improving transport is not a zero-sum game of investment in the north at the expense of investment elsewhere (“Wherever you build new infrastructure… build it in the north”, News). Investment is actually needed by cities across the country to drive economic growth. These economic benefits can only be realised if cities have greater financial flexibility. Investment should be evaluated on the strength of economic payback through the creation of jobs, housing and business growth. For example, improvements to London’s transport and the construction of Crossrail support almost 58,000 jobs and apprenticeships outside the capital.

The current system of funding is too centralised. Just 5% of taxes raised in Britain are controlled by cities themselves, compared to 30% in Germany. This is not a question of investment in the north versus the south. We need the flexibility to do both.

Sir Peter Hendy

Transport commissioner

London SW1

Our dubious dependencies

As well as hammering Jean-Claude Juncker and Enda Kenny, shouldn’t we also be looking at Britain’s own dubious dependencies, such as the “British” Virgin Islands, Jersey and the Isle of Man (“Ireland insists it can still be hi-tech hub despite axing ‘double Irish’ loophole”, News)? Is Ed Miliband so scared of not seeming “business friendly” that he doesn’t press David Cameron about these three tax havens. Something for him to do when he discovers his “inner radical”?

Ian Goodacre

Sevenoaks, Kent

Assisted dying is unacceptable

Dr Kailash Chand’s arguments in favour of the assisted dying bill are, at best, confused (“Assisted dying will be made legal in UK ‘within two years’”, News). He attempts to equate physician-assisted suicide, which is what this bill proposes, with dignity in dying, which is an entirely different concept.

He also shows scant respect for his colleagues if he thinks that around 80% of them would oppose this bill publicly while privately supporting it. If this bill becomes law, no judicial oversight could ever provide a safeguard for vulnerable people (or “unnecessary life”, as Chand chillingly puts it) implicitly offered a choice of ending their lives if they felt they were a burden on others.As deputy chair of the BMA, Chand must be aware of the possibility of an underfunded NHS hiving off or withdrawing funding for palliative care if a cheaper alternative was available. No change in the law is the only option.

Dr Barry Cullen

Fareham, Hants

True love ignores the years

In 1982, I met my second husband on an anti-apartheid demonstration. He was a single, vegetarian, academic of 29. I was a 42-year-old divorcee, a parent of three teenage children and carnivore (“I find older women attractive. I decided that youth doesn’t stop at 30”, last week).

After a few months, we decided to live together and eventually get married. Our wedding was the best Labour party meeting that I and my comrades ever attended. Our honeymoon was spent at a grim hotel on the M62 where I was being grilled by media hacks in preparation for the European elections in 1984.

When he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 54 some eight years ago, the day after I had been cleared of cancer, my friends witnessed my utter devastation. All I can say is those near-24 years were the happiest and most wonderful I have ever experienced.

Yes, there were difficult times, which were not helped by people asking us stupid questions such as: “Is he your toyboy?”, a term I loathe. Even worse was: “Is he your son?”. I say “good luck” to anyone facing a relationship with an age difference, but isn’t it sad that the adverse comments are usually in relation to an older woman and younger man?

Shirley Haines-Cooke

York

Speed up on the speed cuts

Local authorities try to look at three years’ worth of data before deciding on the impact of 20mph (“Limitations of speed limits”, Letters). Road accidents will continue to happen, whoever is at fault, but mistakes can be designed out of the system as far as possible. Cutting speed is a simple and cost-effective measure but on its own may not be enough. Other solutions, such as infrastructure, crossings, segregated facilities for cyclists and road design are also key factors.

The suggestion that speed restrictions should only be implemented in certain “sensitive” areas (around schools, near to hospitals) ignores the fact that all our streets are thoroughfares to somewhere else and used by everyone, including vulnerable people. All the evidence shows that reduced speed works much better on a community or borough basis, otherwise it is more confusing for pedestrians and drivers alike and is more costly. To suggest that lower speed limits may actually cause more harm through drivers’ frustration is to imply that anything that holds up a driver is wrong.

Too often missing from this debate are the many public health benefits of introducing slower speed, which can lead to an increase in cycling and walking, reduced obesity, improved air quality and adapting our public spaces for an ageing population.

Monica Saunders

Teddington

A handout sketch of Rosetta lander superimposed on image of the comet surface Sketch of the Rosetta lander superimposed on an image of the comet surface near the estimated point of touchdown. Photograph: European Space Agency/Getty Images

The earthbound examples of human endeavour in your editorial (A triumph for human imagination and ingenuity, 13 November) did not mention the programme of manned moon landings, which took place more than 40 years ago. With hindsight, this was perhaps the last hurrah for the idea that the conquest of space was simply an extension of terrestrial exploration. Space is too big, the distances too far, the journey times too long and the costs of maintaining a human-friendly habitat too vast for the human exploration of space. What the Rosetta mission has so successfully done is to put the final nail in the coffin of the idea that only human explorers can offer a feasible solution to the problem of making future extraterrestrial discoveries.
Ray Perham
Ilford, Essex

• We have landers on Mars and now on a comet, all adverts for the amazing power of science and technology. Yet some of us in the scientific community are disappointed that these landers are not actually looking for life. The world’s space agencies have become fixated on searching for the “building blocks of life”. What the public (ie taxpayers) really wants to now is – does life itself exist in space? Like Nasa, the European Space Agency has presented us with an amazing achievement and at the same time an incredible missed opportunity.
Milton Wainwright
Professor of astrobiology, Sheffield University

• Your editorial salutes the human imagination and ingenuity of the Rosetta mission scientists, which is undoubtedly a great achievement. The vocabulary you use, however, startled me. Was the landing of a bit of high tech on a rock on a “heroic scale”? Can that bit of high tech be heroic? It isn’t human, like Magellan or Edmund Hilary. Do the scientists have “courage” in “thinking the unthinkable”, or perhaps delusional fantasy? The commander of the International Space Station tweeted that the lander was “poised to rewrite what we know about ourselves” (Report, 13 November). Will it really? I am frankly alarmed at such hyperbolic nonsense.

It seems to me that, as with Richard Branson’s narcissistic space-tourism project, the shades of Icarus and Ozymandias might give us pause. In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon hoped that new inventions would be applied to relieving mankind’s misery and needs.

What a waste of intellectual, scientific and technological expertise this space thing is. Science has lost its purpose and its way, and all we can do is gawp at it.
Frank Grace
Ipswich, Suffolk

• Not only is the Rosetta mission a superb scientific achievement, but its leading scientist, Jean-Pierre Bibring, has given us two comments worth bearing in mind for more mundane day-to-day living back on Earth (One giant heartstopper, 14 November). Referring to Philae’s present precarious position on the comet, he says: “What’s really impressive here is not the degree of failure but the degree of success,” and “We are running against the clock. Don’t put the emphasis on failure – it is gorgeous where we are.”
Norah Wagon
Langport, Somerset

• A small step for mankind, and a very large step for the European community. No US help, no Russian help, just a combined effort by the 20 member states of the European Space Agency. What a symbol! United, we’re a force. Divided, we’re a bunch of petty, squabbling children. Let the word go out: a united Europe matters.
Bernard Besserglik
Pantin, France

• “We are there … we are on the comet” (Report, 13 November), but we are also here, on the planet, where £1bn could have been so much better spent, combating climate change, so that the human race could continue to live here.
David Bradnack
Oxford

• The European Space Agency has spent £1bn to learn something about how we got here in the first place. Well, we are here, we’ve been here a while, and we have some pretty pressing problems. Over the past week, debate has taken place in your pages about the aetiology, treatment and reporting of serious mental disorder, and if nothing else has reflected the scandalous underfunding of research – especially the necessary interdisciplinary research – in this area. Right next to the story of the Philae lander, you report that the Treasury has gained a £1.1bn windfall from fines imposed on banks for rigging the foreign currency markets (Report, 13 November), but hasn’t decided how to spend it yet. I have a suggestion – and it ain’t rocket science.
Professor David C Sanders
Durham

• In your otherwise excellent account and photographs of the Philae landing, you failed to mention the comet’s size. I am forced to guess. The size of Wales? Half of Wales? Just a little bit of Wales? Wales and some more?
Barbara Kirby
Hoylake, Merseyside

Hindley prison, young offenders Hindley prison, a young offenders’ institution in Wigan. Photograph: A.P.S. (UK) / Alamy/Alamy

I have visited several youth prisons in Spain to explore models for urgently needed reforms in Britain (Tough love, Weekend, 8 November). Inside the prison gates in Spain, almost all the adults in sight are professionally qualified teachers, whose primary purpose is to prepare the children for crime-free adulthood, acceptance by their families and readmission to their local schools, preferably even before final discharge from custody.

What a contrast to Britain, with its under-trained and under-paid prison officers and misguided focus. The system here fails most young offenders as well as the wider community, with 73% being reconvicted within 12 months of discharge. In Spain it is a fraction of this.

Despite the examples of good and successful practice in many EU member states, I am ashamed to say that the Ministry of Justice and Youth Justice Board plan to build a giant, 600-place prison or “secure college” in the East Midlands, at which most of the children will be detained hundreds of miles from home. Do they never learn?
John Plummer
London

• Paul McDowell’s position as the chief inspector of probation is unsustainable (Grayling pledge over probation conflict of interest fears). His inspectorate is charged with assessing the performance of Sodexo in its new role of supervising thousands of offenders. He may send in inspectors other than himself to assess the performance of his wife’s company, but the final report on Sodexo is the chief inspector’s, just as when Nick Hardwick reports on a prison inspection. He cannot escape the charge of personal interest, whatever the outcome of a Sodexo inspection.

Grayling needs to be squeaky-clean at the outset of these fundamental changes in managing offenders; letting McDowell remain in post looks like an early own goal of his own making.
John Harding
Winchester

Independent:

It was revealed in your newspaper (9 November) that some Jewish supporters were refusing to donate to party funds because of the party’s Israel-Palestine policy. As I understand it Labour’s policy is to support the continued existence of Israel and its right to defend itself, but to oppose the continued persecution of Palestinians in their own land, such as roads on which they are not allowed to travel, theft of their land and homes, and harassment by illegal settlers. If I understand that rightly, then I am more encouraged to vote Labour, even though we will have to struggle along without Maureen Lipman.

Peter Metcalfe

Stevenage, Hertfordshire

The religious financial donor who declares he does not want to “see Mr Miliband in Downing Street” illustrates the reason for supporting Miliband all the way. Miliband is a democrat, above price, and who should be sent to Downing Street by democrats and not donors. The religious donor who cannot accept the authority of a democratic party must consider joining the political party where power and authority, responsibility and justice, are bought and sold.

Miles Secker

Heckington, Lincolnshire

The story claiming that “Jewish donors and supporters” are “deserting” the Labour Party invokes a largely mythical British “Jewish community” supposedly united in lockstep support of any policy undertaken by the Israeli state. As a British Jew myself, I can assure you that – thankfully – no such uncritical endorsement exists of Israel’s illegal aggression in Palestine or its institutionalised racism to Arab-Israeli citizens. British Jewry is a diverse constituency ranging from ultra-Orthodox communities to secular leftists like myself, with a large middle ground whose interest in Israel is inevitably intense but whose attitudes predictably diverge widely.

Barry Langford

via email

Ellen E Jones should stop feeling guilty for being grammar-school educated (9 November): it was her parents’ decision and it is perfectly honourable to use educational advantage to better oneself. The important thing is how we use our advantage. Do we just perpetuate a system that benefits the few, or do we use our influence to improve the lot of the many?

Stan Labovitch

Windsor, Berkshire

It is a pity that DJ Taylor chose to take a cheap swipe at those who wish to remove religion from Remembrance Day, especially as he begins his piece describing a good and godless example of such an event (9 November).

The Service of Remembrance is an act of worship in the Christian tradition, little understood by, and alien to, most of the people who join together on a Sunday in November to remember friends, family and fallen comrades, and to give communal thanks for their sacrifice. The most meaningful and moving parts of the ceremony, the laying of the wreaths, the Last Post and the reading from Binyon’s “The Fallen”, are not religious at all. The “service” element of the occasion, I believe, does not serve the purpose of the day, but rather hinders it.

Roger Moorhouse

Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Rodric Braithwaite mentions “Margaret Thatcher and the Americans” encouraging Solidarity, but how could he possibly not mention the overt encouragement given by John-Paul II to Lech Walesa? (“The wall fell because of Gorbachev”, 9 November.) Without the influence exerted by John-Paul, Communism in Poland would not have fallen when it did and the Berlin Wall would have stood for a little longer.

Rev David Clemens

Saffron Walden, Essex

Matthew Engel’s Round England Quiz (9 November) held Shropshire the only county without a direct train service to London… news to Isle of Wight travellers I’m sure!

M L Hunter

Pewsey, Wiltshire

Times:

The celebration of British beauty spots such as Lindisfarne must be balanced against the needs of country-dwellers (John Woodworth/Getty)

Preserving countryside in aspic is no help to us who live there

THE plan of Sir Simon Jenkins, the former chairman of the National Trust, for listing the countryside reveals his London-centric, urbanised view of our rural areas, a position shared by all too many of our influential town-dwellers and pseudo-country-dwellers (“PM ‘has wrecked beautiful Britain’”, News, last week).

The countryside is not a leisure facility for the benefit of towns and cities. People who live and work here also suffer from a lack of affordable housing, a problem partly caused by our urban compatriots wishing to move out of cities and now seeking to preserve our working and living space in aspic.

The countryside needs to respond to today’s needs. A small increase in homes in our villages would have an enormous impact on the nation’s housing supply, while contributing to the survival of rural communities and their much depleted services. I can only assume Jenkins bases his proposal on his experience with the National Trust — another lover of aspic.
James Weld
Wareham, Dorset

GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND

It was very heartening to read Jenkins’s comments on the ruinous effect the government is having on the countryside. I do not see that those of us who value green spaces can vote for any of the main parties.

It can only be hoped that the coalition hears what he is saying. It should be made extremely difficult to build on greenfield sites, whether or not they are of exceptional beauty. Developers need to be restrained for the sake of future generations. We should be creating green areas, for air quality and all our wellbeing.
Cynthia Purkiss
Eltham, London

COUNTRYSIDE ALLIANCE

Countryside protection is at the heart of what we are doing to reform planning. Our nation is still largely countryside, often beautifully so. This is why we have safeguarded protections for the green belt in England, so it can continue to offer a strong defence against urban sprawl, as well as safeguarding national parks and other designated rural land.

And we have shifted power from Whitehall and the town hall to local people, so councils can determine through local plans where new homes should and shouldn’t go. We are proud to be building more homes but in a way that recognises the importance of protecting the environment.
Brandon Lewis
Housing and Planning Minister

AWAITING DEVELOPMENTS

When the Brecon Beacons national park planning guidance note declares that the countryside is “a place with no potential to accommodate any level of growth”, we should be wary of heeding calls for any further restrictions on appropriate development of rural areas.
Rob Yorke
Abergavenny

Stop dithering over grammar schools

LAST week the home secretary, Theresa May, an alleged aspirant for the Tory party leadership, issued a statement in support of more grammar school places. However, an aide quickly made clear that her support was limited to a satellite extension to a grammar school in her own constituency and was not of national application.

Boris Johnson, another leadership aspirant, has also made vague rumblings of support, but when invited by the National Grammar Schools Association (NGSA) to identify with a proposed campaign for a new grammar school in a London borough, his response was obfuscation and to wish the project every success.

The Conservative party’s volte-face on grammar schools under David Cameron has not been acceptable to many in parliament and the constituencies. Now that Ukip has made it an electoral issue, the support of these elements might prove crucial in any leadership contest. As a result, an early positional marker — even if equivocal — might be important.

Nigel Farage may be ahead of the game with his unequivocal support for selective education as a matter of parental choice and his demand for a grammar school in every town. The embargo on new grammar schools must be removed.
Robert McCartney, Chairman, NGSA; Professor Colin Lawson; Steve Backley; Nick Catlin; Samantha Murray; Chris Woodhead

Remembering fallen from the other side

IS IT not time to rethink how we remember the First World War (“Lest we forget, there’s a war memorial even finer than this field of poppies”, News, last week)? Should we not have compassion for the thousands of German soldiers — also sons, fathers and brothers — who were killed by our own? We honour our dead as heroes and forget that the people they killed also left grieving families.
Vic Brown
Morpeth, Northumberland

RECONCILABLE DIFFERENCES

The Irish ambassador Daniel Mulhall’s presence at the Cenotaph this year was very welcome: a timely and grown-up gesture of reconciliation as well as fitting remembrance of the huge numbers of Irishmen who served in the British armed forces.

Perhaps one day we will include those such as the Poles and other eastern Europeans. The subsequent integration into British society of those who survived and stayed on suggests that anxiety over European migration may be exaggerated.
Dame Denise Holt
Worthing

MEDAL DETECTOR

Like Sheila Hutton, the nurse who discovered a Great War medal in a field (“‘Disillusioned’ soldier’s medal found”, News, last week), I found a 1914-15 Star medal in my garden. The inscription on the back of it is Gunner GH Lowe 774 RFA.

Internet searches unfortunately yielded only a copy of his medal index page showing that he received the Star, British and Victory medals and that he served in western France and was discharged on July 17, 1916.
Liz Lacey
Bramber, West Sussex

LESSONS OF HISTORY

I agree with the author Michael Morpurgo that every schoolchild in the UK should be given the opportunity to visit battlefields and museums in Belgium and France (“Let every school saddle up for a war course”, News Review, last week). His description of an exuberant school party becoming quietly absorbed in the task of seeking the grave of Private Peaceful at a cemetery near Ypres was heartening.

Sadly, however, on a battlefield tour earlier this year I witnessed a group of English schoolgirls, who were on a trip to a restored British trench, shouting, taking selfies and showing no respect to other visitors wishing to reflect quietly on the site of the deaths of our nation’s soldiers.
Elaine Milan
Epping, Essex

TO DINE FOR

My thanks to the Vogue editor, Alexandra Shulman, whose anger over the restaurant review of Spring (“Unpalatable criticism”, Letters, last week) by Camilla Long drew my attention to the critic’s tour-de-force dissection of the venue. I expect more letters will follow, but take no notice — indeed, long live Long. The most engaging of The Sunday Times’s scribes, she follows a proud and fearless tradition.
Herbie Knott
Weobley, Herefordshire

PERSONAL SERVICES

Women are not freely offered to businessmen in Hong Kong alone (“Drugs, drink and girls on tap in Asia’s Wild West”, Focus, last week). Once, my husband, my young son and I were at a booking desk in a family shopping area buying tickets for the hovercraft to Macau together with an overnight stay in a hotel. A brochure was pushed in front of us from which to choose a woman — or women — to visit us in our room that night. Our teenage son’s eyebrows shot up, but we declined.
Gloria Gillott
Cambridge

COURT TIME IS MONEY

I sit in a magistrates’ court in London, and although cutting legal aid may appear to save money, it costs a great deal more in court time (“I cheered legal aid reform but now it can rob parents of their child”, Camilla Cavendish, Comment, last week). We are instructed to help an undefended defendant as much as possible, which takes time. We often have to wait while they consult the duty solicitor, and cases frequently have to be adjourned because the defendant has not had proper disclosure from the Crown Prosecution Service. When such factors are taken into account, I suspect these so-called cuts are actually costing rather than saving money.
Alexandra Kingston
Twickenham

SECOND AMONG EQUALS

Cavendish is right to state that the bluntest cuts in family law should be reversed. This is an equalities issue too. It is not impossible for a father to represent himself in most circumstances if his case is: “I want to see my kids.” It is different for the financially disempowered mothers, who are now expected to bring cases to court with technical, legal and practical challenges that can vex qualified lawyers. The so-far hidden statistics are the minimal costs to the public purse, as funding is only a loan, not a grant, and the fact that family lawyers settle 95% of these cases without a final hearing.
Caroline Bowden
Anthony Gold Mediation
London SE1

IN THE HOT SEAT

In assuming that the Muslim 5% of the population is more electorally significant for Ed Miliband than the less than 1% of Jewish voters, your correspondent Mike Newton overlooks the key fact that the vast majority of Muslims live in safe Labour seats (“Lipman misses her cue on Ed Miliband”, Letters, last week). As a result, of the 20 seats with the highest percentage of Muslims, only one is on Labour’s 106-seat “battleground” target list. Of the 20 with the highest Jewish percentage, five are on the list.
David Cohen
London NW3

COLD SHOULDER

I am astonished that Mayer Hillman of the Policy Studies Institute (“Carbon date”, Letters, last week), or anybody else for that matter, can take seriously the warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that precautions to combat global warming need to be taken within 16 years. This is the blink of an eye in climate terms and the IPCC’s prognostications have proved in the past to be unreliable.
Neil Stuart
Keswick, Cumbria

LEARNING CURVE

Your story “Top graduates to pour into failing schools” (News, last week) appears perversely to celebrate graduates with just six weeks’ experience. Imagine running the same article about, say, nurses, paramedics or electricians. Teaching is a skilled job. A recent BBC series showed how hard it is for new entrants, with many not lasting the course.
Professor David Oliver
Sulhamstead, Berkshire

COLLAR FELT

When I joined the police service in 1972 my shirts all had detachable collars that I duly starched and ironed (India Knight, Comment, November 2). However, I cannot say I liked them. They made one’s neck sore and clearly the message was that the shirt itself was intended to be worn for more than just one day. Softer collars and a daily hygienic wash get my vote any day.
Linda Hawkins
By email

AWAY GAME

I never fail to be amazed that columnists such as Rod Liddle appear to believe that migration is a one-way process into Britain (“Sure, mate, if your beer mat sums say immigration is fab . . .”, Comment, last week). Where did the 1.5m Britons who live and work in other EU states come from? Where did the 5.5m British-born citizens who live worldwide come from? Are they the imaginings of yet another academic study by people who may have strange-sounding foreign names and don’t fit in with Liddle’s own particular paranoid inclinations?
John Belcher
Coleford, Gloucestershire

Letters should arrive by midday on Thursday and include the full address and a daytime and an evening telephone number. Please quote date, section and page number. We may edit letters, which must be exclusive to The Sunday Times

Corrections and clarifications

The vessel portrayed in the article “‘Negro’ discreetly cut from war headstone” (News, last week) is not the SS Tuscania that was torpedoed off Islay in February 1918, but its namesake, which was built in 1922 by the same owner, the Anchor Line. We apologise for the error.

Complaints about inaccuracies in all sections of The Sunday Times, should be addressed to complaints@sunday-times.co.uk or Complaints, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. In addition, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) will examine formal complaints about the editorial content of UK newspapers and magazines. Please go to our complaints section for full details of how to lodge a complaint.

Birthdays

Peter Boizot, founder of PizzaExpress, 85; Frank Bruno, boxer, 53; Willie Carson, jockey, 72; Bonnie Greer, playwright, 66; Maggie Gyllenhaal, actress, 37; Diana Krall, jazz singer, 50; Griff Rhys Jones, comedian, 61; Paul Scholes, footballer, 40; Sir Magdi Yacoub, heart surgeon, 79; Waqar Younis, cricketer, 43

Anniversaries

1857 24 Victoria Crosses are awarded at second relief of Lucknow, the most in one day; 1914 US Federal Reserve Bank opens; 1938 LSD is first synthesised by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann; 1979 Sir Anthony Blunt named as the “fourth man” in the Cambridge spy ring; 1988 Estonia defies Soviet Union by declaring sovereignty

Telegraph:

as international matchmaking agency

Gatwick launched a new report claiming that even with a second runway it would be able to meet EU and UK air quality targets

Gatwick has restrictions on the number of planes that can fly at night, but noise pollution remains an issue in neighbouring areas Photo: Alamy

7:00AM GMT 15 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – As a financial journalist, Jeremy Warner was right to give the strong monetary and political argument why a new runway at Heathrow will never be built.

But there are more compelling reasons why a third Heathrow runway is a non-starter. The existing noise and pollution problems are bad enough, and recent trials by the airport have shown that these can easily overspill into outlying areas.

Heathrow’s promise of “quieter planes” is pie in the sky. So is the eradication of night flights, which begin as early as four o’clock in the morning and disturb many thousands of people.

A new runway at Gatwick will affect fewer people and is the best political option for the major parties.

Laurie A Anders
London W4

SIR – Jeremy Warner’s article misses one very important consideration, which is what the airlines want.

No major airline has come out in support of the case for Gatwick expansion. Even easyJet, Gatwick’s major customer, has reserved its position on the case for Gatwick. Any decision taken without considering the views of these companies would be an unsound one.

Aidan Zeall
Crawley, West Sussex

SIR – Jeremy Warner observes that Gatwick “fits… into the political zeitgeist – with its emphasis on encouraging competition, different business models, low-cost alternatives and keeping the bill for connecting transport infrastructure to manageable levels”.

How then does he account for our politicians’ devotion to HS2, which fails on all these counts?

Neil Voyce
Reading, Berkshire

SIR – Our Victorian great-great-grandfathers would never have wasted time patching up Heathrow. They would have gone for Boris Island with at least four major runways.

A British firm built Hong Kong International Airport in just two years. Surely we can do it here in four.

Dick Lees
Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire

SIR – There has been much talk about the capacity of Britain’s airports, with rarely a word about the skies above them.

Those skies not only have to cope with traffic to and from Britain – there are also many civil and military aircraft which overfly the country. I have a radar picture, taken at five in the afternoon in August two years ago, which shows there were 8,245 aircraft flying over Europe at that moment.

I would welcome the views of those unsung heroes, the air traffic controllers. In my many years as an airline pilot, I have always held them in high regard.

Lawrence Nutton
Weybridge, Surrey

Overseas aid choice

SIR – It is ludicrous to propose enshrining British overseas aid in law, or even to ring-fence the amount as a percentage of GDP (Letters, November 14). The sole criterion for providing aid should be whether it is in Britain’s vital interests to do so.

There should be no moral priority or charitable considerations to this expenditure of taxpayers’ money. Many national and international organisations, such as Oxfam, the Red Cross and Save the Children, are wholly and expressly structured for providing aid funded by voluntary contributions – and the British people devote significant amounts of their own (taxed) income to such causes.

It is unacceptable for the taxpayer to be forced to fund aid other than that which is deemed to be essential to Britain’s defence, home security, diplomacy and trade.

William Pender
Stratford-sub-Castle, Wiltshire

Planting poppies

^{Photo: David Rose/The Telegraph}

SIR – I have spoken directly to a worker in the office distributing poppies who said that stems will be included with the ceramic heads (Letters, November 14); but not necessarily the stems seen at the Tower of London.

Denise Hilton
East Guildford, Surrey

SIR – I donated £25 for a poppy from the Tower of London, knowing the money was going to help our servicemen and women of today, and at the same time recognising the sacrifice those of earlier generations made during the First World War.

Those who feel hard done by because a different stem may be sent with their poppies should be ashamed of themselves. The display of poppies at the Tower of London was a huge tribute to the almost 900,000 servicemen and women who died and I doubt whether anyone who visited the display failed to be moved to tears. When my poppy arrives, it will still be treasured.

Stephen Ivall
Devoran, Cornwall

Waste in space

SIR – While I admire the scientists working on the Philae lander, could we not have spent the £1.1 billion more wisely?

Simon Morpuss
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire

SIR – I admire the success of the Rosetta space mission thus far, which illustrates the high level of engineering ability throughout many European nations. To maintain contact and control of the craft and module over a distance of 300 million miles is an amazing achievement.

Some years ago while travelling by hydrofoil across the Mediterranean, my tour guide received a mobile phone call. All around was sea – no visible land at all on the horizon in any direction. If I am approximately 10 miles north of my house I am out of mobile phone contact.

M G Watkins
York

Happy clappy

SIR – What has caused the outbreak of clapping that seems to be sweeping the country? People now clap at funerals, during one-minute silences, when a golfer holes a putt for a triple bogey, and when they answer successfully a question on a television quiz show.

Last week, for the first time, I noticed contestants on University Challenge clapping themselves, and applause even broke out at the Remembrance service at the Cenotaph.

Jon Petcher
Oadby, Leicestershire

What lies ahead for the residents of Brookfield?

^{Felicity Finch (Ruth Archer) and Tim Bentinck (David Archer) (BBC)}

SIR – What are they doing to The Archers? I’ve put up with a lot of the recent storylines, but the final straw must be the selling of Brookfield and the move to Northumberland.

It simply would not happen. The owners of a family farm, which has been in the family for generations, would find a way to manage the building of a new road.

It’s fanciful to think a whole family would uproot to be near a mother with failing health. Common sense says she would move to be near them.

I, for one, will not be listening to The Archers if David, Ruth and Jill leave Brookfield. I suspect I will be joined by other loyal fans.

Jane Walbank
Garthorpe, Lincolnshire

SIR – Dame Jenni Murray, the Radio 4 broadcaster, need not worry. I suspect that there’s about as much chance of the Archer family leaving Brookfield as the pickled remains of Darrell Makepeace being unearthed in the Grundys’ cider shed.

Ambridge’s only homeless person is yet another character to have disappeared off the radar – or, more accurately, the radio.

Chris Arnot
Earlsdon, Warwickshire

SIR – I am thoroughly enjoying the new quicker-paced Archers. It is keeping me alert and the ironing is done faster.

In a past life, my husband and I ran a village pub and, believe me, what country life appeared to be on the surface belied what lay beneath.

So cheerio to Ruth, David and the children, and hello to a new era with fewer Archers.

Though Jill will really have to stay.

Sarah Cade
Taunton, Somerset

Camps and woodcraft still prevail in the Scouts

^{Scout’s honour: a Belizean stamp honours the movement’s founder, Lord Baden-Powell (Alamy)}

SIR – I have no doubt that badges such as public relations, circus skills and IT are becoming popular with the current generation of Scouts, but I do doubt whether they are more popular than badges for more adventurous pursuits such as camping and hiking.

Furthermore, community service has always been at the heart of scouting. It is true that leaders need to be more versatile now than at any time in the movement’s 107-year history, but it is the traditional activities for which most young people join scouting, and skills such as knot-tying have many applications.

Adult Leaders in my Scout county continually ask for more training in the practical skills such as camping, woodcraft and survival because they know that these teach young people how to be resourceful, self-reliant and to show initiative.

Christopher C Dean
Deputy County Commissioner,
Greater London South West Scouts

Performers’ wages

SIR – Nicola Fifield is right to point out the disgraceful underpayment of London’s dancers, which is an issue that affects the vast majority of performers in the capital.

However, it is wrong to compare this with the wages of box-office staff, who do a completely different, yet important, job.

The chronic problem of low pay is best solved by tackling the employers and the industry itself, rather than pitting different sets of workers against each other.

Daniel de la Motte-Harrison
Young Vic, London SE1

Hidden calorie content

SIR – There seems little point to food labelling when retailers can use it to mislead the buyer.

I recently purchased a “snack size” packet of fruit and nuts, with the nutritional information clearly stated on the label. However, on closer inspection, the statement “A typical 25g serving contains” was barely discernible in small dark letters. The pack weighed 60g. So my “snack” contained not the 107 calories most prominently stated, but closer to 260 calories.

Donna Cartmell
Elswick, Lancashire

Attitude to engineering

SIR – Margaret Stamper has my sympathy over the failure of fellow professionals to recognise her husband’s engineering qualifications (Letters, November 13).

As a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, I was once told by an eminent doctor during a medical examination that a “career of heavy lifting” had probably contributed to my medical condition.

Craig Kennedy
Balmain, Sydney, New South Wales

Readers united

SIR – It would appear that the Telegraph has yet another use: that of international matchmaking agency.

Following a letter I had published on September 18, a charming gentleman contacted me as he had enjoyed my sense of humour. We arranged a rendezvous near where I live in Brittany and this retired group RAF captain, my husband and I are now good friends.

So thank you for that.

Julia Evans
Beganne, Morbihan, France

Irish Times:

Irish Independent:

Madam – So, Bob Geldof is re-running the Band Aid single, Do They Know It’s Christmas?

Did you know that the combined wealth of the new generation of Band Aid singers is circa €3bn? More interestingly, the combined wealth of the original Band Aid singers is fast approaching €20bn.

No doubt Bob would say that personal wealth isn’t the issue.

But it is, Bob, it certainly is.

What we need today is a firebrand public figure, to rally a call to confront the astonishing and fundamentally immoral, world-wide wealth gap, between the desperately poor and the complacent rich.

I have no doubt that bored pop singers feel good when they ask others to throw a few coins at starving and desperate Africans. But that approach was seen to be an abject failure 30 years ago.

So, come on Bob, it’s time to twist Bono’s arm for a three hundred million euro donation. Get Sting and David Bowie to hand over five hundred million.

You know they will still have more money than they could ever spend after your finished with them. After all, it’s Christmas time, there’s no need to be afraid of putting your vast wealth where your mouth is.

Declan Doyle,

Kilkenny

A choral treat in store tonight

Madam – This very evening at 6.30 in the magnificent Titantic Building in Belfast, the final of the School Choir of the Year Competition will take place.

Watching this competition on the last few Sunday evenings on RTE has been an absolute joy.

The talent of all the choirs performing has been wonderful and of a very high standard. And the short introductory films of school life by the pupils themselves before each performance, brought tears to my eyes, as such a school life is alien to what I experienced back in the 1960s. I do not recall one happy day of my long school life.

So, to today’s generation I say enjoy your school life and be happy. For be assured, from the evidence of your own excellent film-making, all aspects of school life have improved beyond my expectations, and for the better.

Having such wonderful memories of last year’s competition, I can guarantee a real treat of music and song for all who tune in this evening. I wish all the finalists the very best.

Brian Mc Devitt,

Glenties, Co Donegal

Sunday Independent

Madam – The ghastly scenes that rounded off the latest series of Love/Hate shocked even the most hardened fans.

But I wonder how many viewers actually make the link between the images of violence, terror, and intimidation that characterised the series and the reality of gangland that confronts our society?

Fair enough, it’s fiction, and the primary aim is to entertain. But watching it I couldn’t help but think of the heartache, trauma, and human misery that criminals are wreaking on already hard pressed communities nationwide.

What I liked about the drama was that the characters that many viewers sneakingly admired have now been shown up as evil predators.

And who would seriously want to end up with either a long prison stretch or summary “execution” at the hands of rival or fellow hoodlums?

So, next time anyone has information that might help the fight against organised crime, let’s think of that stomach-churning Love/Hate finale, and tip off the gardai.

John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny

Enda’s big risk over water costs

Madam – What does it take to get Enda to realize that water charges are a loser? Is he willing to decimate his party in trying to force this charge on us? When members of his own party are in open dispute and some have already jumped ship what does it take to make him see the light.

When 150,000 protesters take peacefully to the towns of Ireland to protest this unfair charge why can he not listen? Will he be prepared to jail those who will not pay this charge as has been done to some of those who have not paid their television license fee? If so they had better start building a lot of new jails fast.

The Labour party for some reason has carried on as if this is none of their business. They are very wrong and will be wiped out as the Green Party was.

Michael O’Meara,

Killarney, Co Kerry

Memories of the well and barrel

Madam – With all the debate at the moment on water charges, it gets me thinking back to days when we had no running water.

I remember my dad making a large splash each morning as he ducked himself in the barrel of rainwater that stood under a down pipe at the back of our house. Indeed I can still recall him breaking the ice in the barrel on frosty mornings.

Ice baths are used now by many sports teams to refresh and invigorate the members, so my dad must have been a pioneer in that regard. Indeed there was a barrel at every neighbours’ house to catch the precious rainwater which was lead, copper, iron, manganese and ecoli-free.

Boiled, it was perfect for a cup of tea or cooking vegetables, though we mostly used the water from the local well for those purposes. The only treatment the well got was a yearly dose of lime.

Today we are going to have to pay for our water, and some of it isn’t even fit to drink.

Murt Hunt,

Ballyhaunis, Co Mayo

Water chaos will hit business

Madam – It is estimated that almost half the water that runs through our mains is lost in leaks spread across the entire network. The mammoth task to trace and repair is certain to cause chaos throughout the country. Yet Irish Water has provided neither a programme nor a method statement to show how it proposes to carry out these works.

For businesses these works can cause a loss of valuable income. It is generally accepted that the best time to carry out large disruptive infrastructural works is during times of economic buoyancy, something we are certainly not experiencing at present.

John Bellew,

Dunleer, Co Louth

Broadford is up to the challenge

Madam – Last Sunday’s story of emigration and separation in Broadford, Co. Clare, is entirely true but it only represents half of the truth of Broadford.

It is also a home of spirited people, a community that has always refused to lie down, that in recent years has fought, successfully, to retain its post office, has rejuvenated its handball club after years of decline and whose hurling club continues to develop its underage structures. This year it won its first underage title at “A” grade.

The purpose of this letter is not to claim credit for any government for the community’s triumphs. None is due. It is merely to dispel the image of Broadford as a community of passive victims of the recession from which we may now be finally emerging. The people of Broadford are, and have always been, ever prepared to meet any challenge (on or off a pitch), including, but not only, the challenge of going abroad for a period to work.

Michael McNamara, TD,

Scariff, Co Clare

Trichet letter was a blunt threat

Madam – After reading the letter sent by the former President of the ECB, Jean-Claude Trichet, to the late Brian Lenihan, I am of the view it wasn’t a request, but a threatening demand by the bullyboys of Europe.

I am under no illusion as to what caused this country to end up in financial disaster. However, that doesn’t excuse the outrageous threatening behaviour of the ECB which enrages me, especially now knowing Mr Lenihan was under tremendous strain both physically and mentally on account of his serious illness which eventually led to his demise, Lord rest him.

The onus is now upon this government to secure a huge write-down of our massive debt, and immediately separate sovereign and private debt.

Mattie Greville,

Killucan, Co Westmeath

We should take ECB to court

Madam – The ‘secret letter’ of the ECB’s Jean Claude Trichet written to Brian Lenihan, now needs to be brought to the European Court of Human Rights and entered on behalf of the Irish people as a ‘crime against humanity’.

Irish citizens were asked to pay an unfair and unjust price for the recklessness of both an Irish and a European private sector ‘problem’ which has resulted in the enforced emigration of an entire generation of young Irish people and six years of austerity.

It was clearly the political framing of this financial crisis through a combination of oppressive responses – the secret letter from the ECB, the political ambitions of the German Chancellor and the G8 leaders at the time – as being exclusively Irish and exclusively due to Irish government fiscal policies, that makes this an issue of human rights and moral rights for the Irish people.

Geraldine Mooney Simmie,

Faculty of Education & Health Sciences,

University of Limerick

Martin never ever forgot small defeat

Madam – I am a past pupil of St Patricks NS, from the north side of Cork city, who crossed over the bridge to the South Side to complete my secondary education in Colaiste Chriost Ri back in the day.

Chriost Ri had many talented footballers and hurlers who went on to play with Cork down through the years but none more so than the group who competed from 1968 – 1970. In the football final in 1970 they were up against huge favourites St Malachy’s of Belfast who had current Irish manager, Martin O’ Neill, in their ranks. Malachy’s led all the way right up to the final minutes, but Chriost Ri hung on and never let them get too far ahead.

Near the finish, famous Cork dual player, Martin Doherty, hit a long clearance up the field and the hero of the hour, Noel Miller, blasted it to the net to put Chriost Ri ahead. The ball was kicked out and the referee blew the final whistle. To say the Malachy’s players were distraught is an understatement.

I was at a dinner some years ago where the speaker was none other than Martin O Neill who won two European Cups with Nottingham Forest, was capped 64 times for Northern Ireland and managed, among others, Celtic. He was asked what was his greatest disappointment over his career to date. Without hesitation he recalled that game against Chriost Ri in Croke Park over 45 years ago. He could still remember the tears and disbelief, still hurting, wondering how they ever lost that game.

Ernest O’Mahony,

Co-president and founder of Mayfield Utd, Cork

Is modern Ireland anti-Catholic?

Madam – We must be grateful to the Sunday Independent (9 November) for uncovering the apparently countrywide targeting of Catholics in universities because they are against homosexual practises and pro-life in all respects. So much for modern Irish culture.

Frank O’Meara,

Quinn, Co Clare

Anti-Catholic bias is “conjecture”

Madam – The article last week on “Catholic fear and loathing in our universities” is wholly based in conjecture. There is no evidence of any campaign to marginalise third level students who are informed by their Catholic faith. This is an attempt to attribute the cause of the decline of participation of religious students on secularism, rather than recognising that general disillusionment is caused by clerical sex abuse scandals.

Sean Cassidy,

Dublin 20

SF emboldened by poll results

Madam – Your front page story (Sunday Independent, 9 November) that Mary Lou McDonald was defending Gerry Adams’s sick joke may have surprised some – but I’d ask why?

Maybe the fact that Sinn Fein/IRA have risen a few points in a poll, makes them more confident to admit things they previously would have remained silent on. I wonder if they jump another point or two in the next poll, will Gerry Adams suddenly remember he was in the IRA.

Tony Fagan,

Enniscorthy,

Co Wexford

We have short memories of past

Madam – I had to put in writing my disgust at the way Gerry Adams can so flippantly mention guns, threats and newspaper personnel in the one sentence.

Independent Newspapers lost two quality reporters in shocking atrocities and there was not a mention of this in his speech. We must make sure that his likes do not get into a real position of power and lessen our international standing, and we must do it for all those who lost loved ones too.

We seem to have short memories about some of the things that happened in our country not so long ago. And must we be forever grateful for the “peace process.” It’s the least we might have expected after 30 years that destroyed a generation.

I also must praise Eilis O’Hanlon for her outstanding and quality articles of late in your newspaper.

Ken Maher,

Kilcoole, Co Wicklow

Where are young women of SF?

Sir-It was shocking to read the disgusting contents of Gerry Adams’s twitter account chronicled by Eilis O’Hanlon in last week’s Sunday Independent.

It would be a matter of shame for any normal decent father or grandfather to be involved in such salacious material which is insulting to women, particularly those who suffered abuse.

It is disturbing, however, that the article elicited so little reaction from those who are always ready to pounce on any deviation from political correctness around women.

It also tells us a lot about the so-called young educated women of Sinn Fein who appear to acquiesce in all of this.

Martin Crotty,

Monkstown, Co Dublin

Warning on rise of Sinn Fein

Madam – Over the past months the Sunday Independent has been very critical of Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his Government.

Some of it is justified. Enda Kenny himself has admitted mistakes were made. Other criticisms were unwarranted and little credit was given to the government’s achievements.

At no time has Enda Kenny threatened the staff of the Independent or suggested that your printing equipment be smashed up. Whatever your views on Enda Kenny one thing cannot be disputed – he is a democrat and believes in the freedom of the press.

I am concerned at the startling similarities between Sinn Fein and the rise of the Nazi party. Both started as a small insignificant party and used the economic situation in their respective countries to gain support. Both used their private armies of thugs and bully boys to stifle opposition and the Nazis did indeed smash up printing presses of newspapers that were critical of their actions.

Sinn Fein claim to be the heirs of the men and women of the 1916 Easter Rising. Nothing could be further from the truth. Think about them beating children, the fate of Jean McConville and the treatment of Mairia Cahill.

I warn my fellow citizens that if you want a future that your children and grand children can look forward to with confidence, we need a stable government with prudent economic policies and, most importantly, freedom to express our opinions, then you must ensure that Sinn Fein does not get its hands on the levers of Government.

Uinsionn O’Colmain,

Sutton, Dublin 13

Sunday Independent

Promoted articles

17 November 2014 Reading

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and read a little

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down gammon for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Ralph Herman was a versatile artiste in the sunset years of variety who performed with Jack Hylton and supported Vera Lynn

Ralph Herman, comedian and circus artiste

7:08PM GMT 16 Nov 2014

Comments

Ralph Herman, who has died aged 104, was an enterprising and versatile Russian émigré with a long career in the closing years of variety on stage both as a musical comedian and as a speciality act with his circus family, the Four Hermans.

Contemporary reviewers termed them “equilibrists”, explaining that Herman, his brother and two sisters “are balancers while perched on rollers and on the tops of pedestals – at the same time playing music, juggling, and changing costumes”. All the balancing and tumbling required strength, and the 5ft 10in Herman was broad-shouldered and powerfully built, capable of holding up a human pyramid.

Bills featuring the Four Hermans also tended to include the Five Ralfinis, “Russian musical eccentrics”, for the good reason that they were Herman and family doing double duty. Throughout his career, Herman used various professional names deriving from his own, including when in a double act with his wife, Joan Knight.

Among the musical instruments Herman commanded were the soprano saxophone (his personal favourite), the clarinet, concertina and tin whistle, plus a specially constructed musical waistcoat. The family legend was that, when visiting Britain in the 1930s to ascertain its suitability for the family profession, Ralph saw a map of the London Underground and eagerly cabled back: “Many circuses here – Piccadilly, Oxford, Cambridge. Come at once.”

Raphiel Herman was born on February 18 1910 in the Russian city of Nizhny Novgorod. (He settled on “Ralph” as part of the stage name “Ralph Rockfeld” in the late 1950s.) His parents, Aaron and Olga, had fortuitously taken the circus on a tour of the Far East just prior to the events of 1917. Then, attaining British citizenship by way of India, they travelled first to Paris and later to London. Among the Four Hermans’ first British appearances was at the Adelphi, Slough, in 1936, where Leon Cortez, a Cockney comedian and supporting actor who specialised in Shakespearean send-ups, was top of the bill with his Coster Band.

Soon they were supporting the tempestuous pairing of Arthur Lucan (as Old Mother Riley) and Kitty McShane at the Blackpool Palace, and by 1937 were playing Sidney Bernstein’s Granada chain. At the Holborn Empire in that year, the Hermans were on a bill headed by George Robey, the “Prime Minister of Mirth”, camp monologuist Douglas Byng, and (in a rare venture down south) Robb Wilton. In the same year, they performed alongside Hughie Green and his Gang at the Wolverhampton Hippodrome; the future quiz show host was then a teenage impressionist.

^{Ralph Herman and his wife Joan Knight}

They twice performed with Jack Hylton and his band in 1937, at the Empress, Brixton, and at the notorious Glasgow Empire. A 1938 date with Tommy Trinder was at the Wood Green Empire, subsequently a venue for television shows. When Hylton turned from bandleader to impresario, the Hermans appeared in his presentation of Band Waggon (Finsbury Park Empire, 1938), with the radio pairing of Arthur Askey and Richard Murdoch also augmented by the future Coronation Street stalwart Betty Driver.

The Hermans also performed as a circus act. At Christmas 1938 in Birmingham, they (as the Five Ralfinis) were among the comparatively few human performers, the line-up also comprising a boxing kangaroo, “performing Himalayan bears”, sea lions, waltzing horses and “Monsieur Julian’s educated monkeys and dogs”. They supported Vera Lynn at the Glasgow Empire in 1942 .

One of the last outings for the Four Hermans was in 1951, as part of an International Festival Circus at Rhyl. A year later, at the Alhambra, Morecambe, Herman and his wife made their debut as Ralph and Joan, an act in which he would produce a succession of instruments diminishing in size, with the cry “I got another one!” Amending the billing slightly to Ralph and Joan Rockfeld, they supported the outrageous Frank Randle in one of his last shows, Let’s Be Frank (1956), at the Pavilion, Liverpool.

Going solo as Ralph Rockfeld, he advertised himself as having “four changes of programme… either lounge suit or continental clown”. From 1957 onwards he featured in summer seasons on Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man, and at Pontins holiday camps. He supported Harry Corbett and puppets in Sooty’s Christmas Party (Royal, Brighton, 1961-62).

On television, he appeared in Caravan (BBC, 1960), a children’s programme presented by Jeremy Geidt, who joined Peter Cook’s Establishment Club the next year. Herman’s fellow guests included Jimmy Edwards, Cardew “The Cad” Robinson, and Trevor Little, publicised as “TV’s comedy balloonist”. Work in “Olde Tyme Music Hall” revivals at seaside venues continued throughout the 1970s, and “Ralph Rockfeld and his musical extravaganza” had television spots on Morecambe and Wise and The Black and White Minstrel Show. A late stage turn was in Golden Years of Music Hall (Richmond, 1981) as one of a roster of veterans headed by the singer Adelaide Hall.

Ralph Herman’s wife survives him with their two daughters and one son.

Ralph Herman, born February 18 1910, died October 8 2014

Guardian:

British Labour Leader Miliband speech Party politics have become too presidential, say some, as controversy continues over Ed Miliband’s leadership of Labour. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

British politics has become too presidential with far too much emphasis on individual party leaders instead of policy (“Miliband in new crisis as senior MPs back leadership change”, News)).

The real Tory agenda is not deficit reduction, otherwise they would not have wasted billions on needless NHS reorganisation and on their botched welfare “reforms”.

Margaret Phelps

Penarth

Vale of Glamorgan

Daniel Boffey was probably right when he wrote: “The headlines (relating to the Labour leadership) are distracting from significant problems currently facing David Cameron.”

All of this was inspired by some gutless wonders so confident in their stance that they were afraid to express their views openly.

Paul Hewitson

Berlin

David Reed

London NW3

Labour’s lack of credibility is far more serious than its leadership.

Such campaigning would give their supporters hope and stretch Tory resources. Without this, Labour will fail to make many gains and not just in Scotland risk being outflanked.

David Nowell

New Barnet, Hert

Independent:

Times:

Sir, The welfare and upbringing of children is the first duty of parents and they should know these responsibilities well enough to be able to judge when children are sensible enough to be left alone or in the charge of younger siblings; if there is any doubt then children should not be left. Anything less is in breach of parents’ moral responsibilities (report and leading article, Nov 15).

To ask government ministers to take on those responsibilities, and so give parents the opportunity for others to take the blame when things go wrong, shows a grave lack of any sense of duty and care.

The welfare of children starts at home, from where most of their guidance should emanate. These ethics of parenthood were learnt by example, among the poorest of people during the 1930s; without a welfare system they coped alone and showed their children that they were cherished. Most of the parents in our community put their own needs and wants second to our welfare. Both my parents were in work for most of the time, and we children assumed responsibility in home-alone situations (coal fires and all) when they judged that we were able — but certainly not before.

I am a great-grandmother, and care deeply about family life and my mother-country, but I am in despair for the welfare and upbringing of many children and for the future of Britain. It is appalling that parents feel the need of such a law. What culture has raised them to believe that they come before the welfare of their children?

Eileen Johnson
Cheadle, Staffs

Sir, “Parents seek clarity over when to leave a child”. Who are those parents? Surely it all depends on the situation, the maturity of the child, how well the parents trust a child, and the reason for leaving a child on their own, etc. If a parent cannot judge this, there is something wrong. A law cannot provide the answer. Or is this simply so parents can hold the authorities responsible rather than themselves, if anything goes wrong?

Yvonne Graham
Chichester

Sir, Many years ago, when living on the edge of a large town, my 6-year-old son was in bed while my 7-year-old daughter was walking home in the dark from Brownies. I then received a message that the person coming with her had left her. Previously my older son had been hit by a group of boys when walking past them in daylight. What would you have done that night? Parents are responsible for their children and must make difficult decisions.

Joanna Young
Cirencester, Glos

Sir, As soon as the law tries to specify the age at which children may be left alone there will be cases in which no harm at all has occurred but where the law has been broken and responsible parents persecuted. Why should this area of parental judgment be superseded by statute when there are so many judgments required of parents? Should we not consider legislating to protect more crucial aspects of children’s lives, such as the advertising directed at them and the liberty of those who have behaved manipulatively towards them?

Peter Inson
East Mersea, Essex

Sir, I left my elder son at home alone for the first time at the age of 11. The 15-minute absence to collect a prescription was preceded by an equal amount of time warning him what not to touch and explaining what to do in case of any emergency, however improbable. I concluded by asking if he had any questions. “Yes,” he replied, earnestly. “Where do we keep the matches?”

Sandra Clarke
Dartford, Kent

Sir. Once again we are told that the Somerset Levels are close to flooding (Nov 14). Locally it is even reported that a levy may be imposed on every inhabitant in the Somerset area to cover dredging costs and road repairs, etc. I think the government should purchase, at market value, the small number of properties at risk and demolish them (even if listed), so that no one can inhabit them. The cost would be considerably less than the current policy of hurling millions of pounds at the flooded areas.

Surely, nature will eventually win.

Anne Hague

Taunton

Sir, David McCandless is wrong (“Collie is top, but don’t tell the bulldog”, Nov 15). The border collie is a wonderful dog, but one that it is cruel to keep as a pet unless you are prepared to give it hours of work or walking a day. The Irish wolfhound will happily get by on little exercise given the proximity of a warm fire, and will give much love and affection during its (usually) shorter life.

The glory of the dog is that there is a breed to match almost every personality, environment and situation. But every breed — and every dog — has its own needs. If Mr McCandless thinks the border terrier an overlooked treasure, he should take a walk around my village, where they are almost as ubiquitous as cockers.

David Laven

Ruddington, Notts

Telegraph:

The impact of EU migration; Imperial War Museum cuts; changing Songs of Praise; and James Bond’s appetite for eggs

Wildcat strikes

Protesters at the Lindsey oil refinery in North Lincolnshire in 2009 Photo: PA

7:00AM GMT 16 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – Simon Danczuk, the Labour MP, eloquently describes the downsides to cheap immigrant labour.

At present, we have a shortage of particular skills in Britain. Only by improving the skill-set of British workers can we hope to provide the sort of expertise for which we too often rely on migrant workers.

This would decrease the likelihood of companies undercutting each other on price and lead to fewer British people emigrating for jobs, as well as far less social disruption and cost caused by uncontrolled influxes of migrants from Europe.

John Hannaford
Lymington, Hampshire

SIR – We hear a great deal about certain benefits and costs relating to immigration, but we rarely address the additional costs resulting from the increase in population that immigration brings.

Presumably those EU member states that lose significant numbers of people to migration will, at some stage, benefit from a reduction in social benefit costs. As we appear to have a particular problem with excess immigration, would it not be reasonable for EU members who benefit from this imbalance to compensate Britain?

Peter Harvey
Lincoln

SIR – Population is the most critical aspect in the debate on immigration. Many would argue that Britain, as one of the most densely populated countries in the world, already has too many people.

Do those who oppose stricter immigration control believe that there is no upper limit to the population of this country?

William Deller
Reading, Berkshire

SIR – Claire Duffin is right to note that migrants in Calais would rather perish than return to a country of origin where they have no future.

I have just returned from Pas de Calais, where I met destitute migrants living in absolutely appalling conditions, which will worsen considerably with the onset of winter. They all lack essentials like safe drinking water, adequate nutritious food, sanitation and proper shelter. Many suffer ill-health from the physical and psychological effects of their situation. They are tired, hungry and desperate.

In fields near Saint-Omer I met several Syrian boys huddled together in a rain-sodden, muddy ditch under tarpaulins; one was just 10 years old and riddled with scabies. With little more than summer jackets and sandals to fend off bad weather, these children are at very real risk.

Our volunteer doctors and nurses are doing what they can to meet essential health needs.

In any other setting the international community would assure these vulnerable people the elementary assistance that should be afforded them according to globally agreed humanitarian standards.

Migrants in Calais are the responsibility of every government in Europe.

This inexcusable humanitarian crisis on our doorstop demands action.

Leigh Daynes
Executive Director, Doctors of the World UK
London E14

SIR – Immigration from the EU is not the main problem; illegal immigration and the ongoing chaotic asylum system is.

Our representatives in Parliament must resolve these issues now. Failure to do so will destabilise our homeland.

Hugh Jones
Cardiff

SIR – As a country with a reputation for welcoming immigrants and asylum seekers, we should be more positive about the situation in Calais.

We could send an immigration officer to the shelter to advise these unfortunate people on their rights, and an English teacher to help with the future integration of those considered eligible for entry to Britain. This would be an intelligent, humanitarian approach.

Wayne K Thomas
Treorchy, Glamorgan

How do you like your eggs in the morning, Mr Bond?

_{Roger Moore as secret agent 007 alongside Kristina Wayborn in Octopussy, 1983 . Photo: Alamy}

SIR – Andrew M Brown refers to James Bond’s love of eggs.

Bond was always very careful to do as the locals did for breakfast, and eggs, being pretty ubiquitous, would frequently be a part of that.

However, if he were in the tropics, for example, his meal would revolve round exotic fruit. If he were in Turkey, the main component would be yoghurt.

John Lawrence
London NW2

SIR – Andrew M Brown quite rightly eulogises the breakfast egg. As a boy travelling to Singapore in 1957 aboard the SS Eumaeus, a Blue Funnel Line cargo-passenger ship, I was amazed at my first sight of the breakfast menu showing, among many other culinary delights, “eggs: fried, turned, scrambled, boiled or poached, omelettes plain and savoury”.

Over the course of the four-week journey I managed to work my way through the entire breakfast menu and its offerings of perfectly cooked eggs, several times over.

Ted Shorter
Hildenborough, Kent

EAW fails to protect British citizens’ rights

SIR – The Home Secretary, Theresa May, fails to address the key point of objection to the European Arrest Warrant, which is that it denies to a British citizen the fundamental right to have a case brought before a British judge applying British principles of justice.

Mrs May’s article does, however, demonstrate how easily this right could be protected, without affecting the vast majority of cases in which the EAW is used. She tells us that only 4.3 per cent of the subjects extradited from Britain in the past five years were British. This 4.3 per cent should have this basic protection before being subjected to the rigours of a continental court applying the standards and procedures of continental systems.

Bertie Maddocks
Aughton, Lancashire

A different vice

SIR – If Mr McMillan wishes for a tougher and more rational approach to addiction, drug abuse and its social consequences, he might ask why governments are unwilling to tackle the problem of alcohol.

When I was younger there were licensing hours and alcohol was not sold in supermarkets. My university boasted few on-site bars and we students (who couldn’t usually afford alcohol anyway) sat around drinking coffee and discussing the human condition.

Alcohol is no more virtuous a way of taking away the pain of living, or of getting high, than cannabis.

Doraine Potts
Woodmancote, Gloucestershire

United songs of praise

SIR – I am delighted that Songs of Praise is going to embrace a “broader church”.

I am a Non-conformist but I have on occasion worshipped in a Roman Catholic church as part of a local “churches together” initiative. Long may such co-operation continue.

Dr Peter S Richards
Wallasey, Merseyside

SIR – I was intrigued to read about the plans that the BBC’s head of religion, Aaqil Ahmed, has to boost Songs of Praise’s “dwindling” following.

Unfortunately, the rot set in many years ago when it became the only vaguely religious programme on BBC 1; when it was gradually whittled down from 45 minutes in length to 32; when it was robbed of a regular slot and its mid-week repeat; and when 50 per cent of its diminished content was given over to formulaic interviews.

Godfrey H Holmes
Withernsea, East Yorkshire

Proud Canadians

SIR – Canada is a reserved, proud nation. We serve the world whenever we are needed. This is not always recognised, but that is not why we serve.

We recently were greatly shaken as a nation by the attacks on two of our soldiers on home soil. The effect of these attacks was clear in the huge increase in attendance at our remembrance services this week and the sale of over 19 million poppies, which we wore with pride to honour our veterans.

We have been shaken but we are resolved to protect the rights and freedoms won for us over the years.

Anne Bell
Victoria, British Columbia

Decoding the war

SIR – The story of Alan Turing and his team at Bletchley Park is very interesting, but it is only part of the story.

The origins of decoding can be found in the First World War, when wireless was in its infancy. Mata Hari, the Belgian courtesan and dancer, was caught by a wireless operator passing vital information to the Germans. She was tried and shot. Winston Churchill heard about the incident and encouraged the Armed Forces to set up wireless intercepting units.

My father was a railway telegraphist and a 1914 volunteer to the Army. The First World War ended and he came home safely. In 1938 he responded to the government’s appeal for civilian wireless enthusiasts. He was interviewed, signed the Official Secrets Act, and was accepted, becoming one of 1,600 top-secret civilian “Y” outworkers around the British Isles. Bletchley Park became top secret station “X”.

As a family we knew nothing of this. I remember hearing the Morse code sounds, wireless whistles and shushings coming from under the stairs and thinking it was Dad’s hobby.

M I Osbourne
Burton upon Trent, Staffordshire

Sing it out

SIR – Aled Jones finds it “amazing” that in the Birmingham Symphony Hall the acoustics are so good that someone can be heard from the stage without the aid of a microphone (Guestlist, Seven, November 9).

Does he not know that properly trained singers don’t need a microphone, except perhaps in vast arenas?

Never judge a singer until you have heard him or her unamplified.

Alan Gallagher
Wallsend, Tyne and Wear

Don’t undervalue an arts education

SIR – Nicky Morgan suggests that those who study the humanities and arts will be disadvantaged for life.

If this point of view gains ground, schools and universities will reduce funding and resources for arts subjects and, within a short time, generations of expertise will be dissipated.

The Chinese government has identified art and design as an important focal point for the economy and education. Chinese families are now investing significant sums of money to send their artistically gifted children to British schools to study art and design subjects.

Lynne Taylor-Gooby
Principal, The Royal School
Haslemere, Surrey

War Museum cuts

SIR – Mike Clancy writes about the proposed cuts to services across the Imperial War Museum sites.

I am particularly concerned about plans to cut the formal learning department at IWM Duxford. This is the educational service that brought in 50,000 schoolchildren last year from all over the East of England, and beyond.

Thousands of children every week benefit from sessions with Duxford’s highly knowledgable, experienced and charismatic staff. These are the people who do what they do for the love of it, certainly not for any financial glory.

My grandchildren very much enjoyed learning at IWM Duxford. Those behind these changes to think again; losing this exceptional service would be a great loss to the nation.

Anne Collins
Hatfield, Hertfordshire

Stiff collars

_{Photos: ITV; REX; BBC}

SIR – Your article about the revival of starched collars and their renewed popularity reminded me of my days as a junior banker in the Sixties and Seventies, when I would wear a starched collar every day.

The company that supplied the collars provided a cardboard box with a slip-in reversible address label. Each week I would send off my used collars and receive back the laundered ones within a few days. The service was excellent and always reliable.

John C Humphrey
Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Getting twitchy

SIR – As a keen birdwatcher I was dismayed to see a picture spread of six British birds just above the headline “Labour ‘must apologise for migration’” (report, November 2).

Anthony Kaye
Bristol

Irish Times:

Sir, – In recent years there has been a notable effort to encourage students to enrol in IT courses. John Cradden (“IT conversion courses: not all employers are converts”, November 11th) observes that many graduates of such courses are unlikely to find good jobs without additional experience and effort.

Clearly there is a gap between what employers are looking for and what the colleges are delivering. As someone who regularly interviews and make hiring decisions in the IT sector, I concur. The very large number of people who have “fallen” into successful IT careers having started out in finance, marketing, design, etc, is evidence that third-level qualifications are not essential.

IT courses tend to be diverse, touching relatively lightly on a broad range of topics, while most IT companies are specialists in particular technologies and business domains. Even IT courses that focus on particular industry sectors still tend to hedge their bets. While some larger companies may have the resources to turn generalists into specialists, most operate on lean margins and need new starters to hit the ground running. Much IT work is “service” based, in which IT companies provide technical expertise to other companies, and new starters who don’t know the ropes are very exposed in these circumstances. Someone who knows a particular product or area very well is much more valuable than one with a broad general knowledge. Early specialisation is vital in IT career development, and students should try to achieve professional certifications in specific technologies before finishing their academic courses.

Project work and placements are also key in developing a raw graduate into someone approaching a professional. The best graduates I have interviewed are those who have been involved in delivering a real project for a real customer, in many cases small projects for local charities, businesses or sporting organisations with which they have an association. Experience of the process of engaging with a customer, assessing requirements, and planning a solution that suits the available budget, skills and resources is just as important as being able to implement the technical solution. Colleges should develop partnerships with local organisations to allow students experience of delivering real projects. This could also give a boost to organisations that could not otherwise afford to develop IT systems. Ryanair’s first website was developed by students.

There has been much discussion in recent years of the need for higher-level maths in IT. Leaving Cert maths is a good “canary” subject, providing evidence that students have the ability to understand complex abstract principles and the dedication required to crack difficult problems. However, while most programming work requires excellent logical skills, outside of certain niches areas it requires very little maths. A lot of time can be wasted at third level in developing advanced mathematical skills that typically remain unused in the real world.

The emphasis on “hard IT” (maths and technical expertise) puts a lot of people off, supposedly women in particular. In fact, there are a very large number of people working in IT who will likely never write a line of code, instead using “soft” skills such as project planning and management. Pre-project engagements to elicit and document requirements, and to negotiate project scope and commercial details, are also very important, as are the skills to market and present. Courses that develop a mix of light technical, project management, business analysis and commercial sales and management skills, with involvement in real projects along the way, would attract a different type of candidate into the industry to fill these “soft IT” roles. – Yours, etc,

JOHN THOMPSON,

Phibsboro,

Dublin 7.

A chara, – Ian Talbot of Chambers Ireland refers (November 1st) to the “promise of a new era of growth and prosperity for the citizens of the EU and the US” and the “potential increase in GDP in Ireland” as a result of the negotiations on the Trans Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

The two words “promise” and “potential” are pertinent. I recall that it was the “promise” of jobs and investment that eventually convinced the Irish people to sign up for the Lisbon Treaty, arguably against their instincts and better judgement. We are still waiting for those jobs. However, on the same date that Mr Talbot’s letter was published in your paper, Ireland was feeling the effects of that decision as our voting weight in the EU was reduced as a result of our acceptance of the Lisbon Treaty, the same treaty in which we have also lost our right of veto in significant areas such as international trade.

I do agree with Mr Talbot’s assertion that TTIP does provide “potential” benefit for Ireland. A trade negotiation on this level, of course, has the potential to benefit both the EU and the US. The reality is, however, that there are also many potential drawbacks for areas such as agriculture, environment, workers’ rights and employment, which have been largely ignored by our Government and not explored in any great detail.

One of the most worrying aspects of the negotiations to date has been the secrecy in which they have been shrouded. The public only became aware of the mandate for the negotiations as a result of a leaked document. Indeed, the reference Mr Talbot made to the potential increase in GDP for Ireland is contained in a report commissioned by the Government on the economic assessment of TTIP on Ireland which, to date, has not been made public, although it appears that selective findings have been publicised. The reality is that we simply do not know what the consequences of this agreement will be.

What we do know, and has been generally accepted by all commentators on these talks, including the European Commission, is that TTIP will result in the “prolonged and substantial dislocation of EU workers”, with some suggestions of up to a million across the EU. What we also know is that, as it currently stands TTIP will result in the establishment of an external Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) mechanism, which operates external to the courts system and rule of law and gives investors the right to take legal action against member states for loss of revenue. This is the same mechanism by which tobacco giants are currently suing Australia over public health measures against smoking.

I agree with Mr Talbot that there does need to be a public debate on TTIP and what it means for Ireland, a debate in which all of our citizens participate fully with all of the relevant information, lest we are to sleepwalk, heads full of “promises” and “potential”, into an agreement which is not in our best interests and will have long-lasting consequences. – Is mise,

MATT CARTHY, MEP

Carraig Mhachaire Rois,

Co Mhuineachain.

A chara, – I am part of a new generation of secondary teachers. We simply get passed from one school to another, with no chance of a permanent position. I have taught in 11 different schools in eight years. We are simply fillers and stopgaps for career breaks and maternity leaves. There is no chance of progression.

It does cause concern when I read that a high number of retired teachers are still teaching in secondary schools this year. This leaves newly qualified teachers with no opportunity to teach and develop their careers.

While I am forced to pay a fee to the Teaching Council of Ireland each year, they do nothing to look into this farce, hence the widespread view that the only thing they do for teachers is ask for their fee. The current system must be altered and a proper chance given to a new generation. – Is mise,

JAMES O’REILLY,

Mount Merrion,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Fintan O’Toole believes we are becoming an ungovernable people (“Why the Irish political system can no longer guarantee stability”, Opinion & Analysis, November 11th).

I would suggest that we are simply repeating history. In the Clare Journal of 1838, there is an account of an attempt to implement the provisions of the recently passed Lighting and Cleansing Act in the town of Ennis.

This was supported by the clergy and the shopkeepers who saw it as a logical and advantageous move, and who were prepared to pay the extra tax required. It was vehemently opposed however by some who, in the words of the editor, “appealed to the prejudices and passions of the people, with unfounded statements”, and the proposal was defeated. Subsequent editions of the paper carried passionate letters on both sides of the argument until, finally, the editor called for “peace”. – Yours, etc,

LUCILLE ELLIS,

Dún Laoghaire,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Dr Maitiu Ó Faolain (November 13th) misses some of my point about same-sex marriage being “biologically impossible” when he overlooks that a consummated heterosexual marriage relationship has an inescapable and definitively constitutive biological dimension – considered as the science of life. Of course this dimension also applies to some other heterosexual relationships. And I freely accept that marriage considered as a cultural institution would properly be outside the scope of medical training. – Yours, etc,

MICHAEL AUSTIN,

Gorey,

Co Wexford.

Sir, – Recent correspondence on the issue of same-sex marriage has frequently focused on semantics, principally the meaning of the word “marriage”. Yet no-one so far has questioned what is meant by “sex” or indeed a “same-sex” couple. Although seemingly self-evident, this question merits some reflection.

Anatomical sex is technically a continuum, a truth quite evident, when considering that 0.5 per cent to 1 per cent of children born in Ireland display some degree of visible sexual ambiguity. Intersex is the term used to describe people whose chromosomes or genitals do not allow them be distinctly identified as male or female.

Where thus should we draw the line between male and female? What constitutes a heterosexual couple? Under our current legislation, should someone with XXY chromosomes be allowed marry someone with XX chromosomes? Should someone born with XY chromosomes and Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, a condition resulting in a fully female external body, be prevented marrying a “normal” XY individual with male genitalia?

Nature doesn’t draw a line between male and female. We draw that line on nature. Introducing marriage equality for couples of every shade of sex and gender makes not only moral but also biological sense. – Yours, etc,

RALPH

HURLEY O’DWYER,

Newbridge,

Co Kildare.

Sir, – One aspect of the reduction of funding for arts and culture as a result of the recession that has not received much notice is RTÉ’s cutting of its budget for drama.

Thomas Dennigan (November 13th) described Love/Hate as a replacement for The Riordans, Bracken and Glenroe. It is of course the excellent Fair City that replaced those shows. Written by Irish writers and acted by Irish actors, each of the four episodes per week of Fair City are viewed by five or six times as many Irish people as buy tickets for the Abbey Theatre in an entire year. Love/Hate is more of a successor to On Home Ground, Pure Mule, Proof, Single Handed, The Clinic, Raw – to name just a few – short series which return over a number of years. Brilliantly written and garnering more than one million viewers for many of its episodes, Love/Hate is a credit to all involved, and caught the imagination of Irish people to an extraordinary extent as well as generating considerable advertising income for RTÉ.

In endeavouring to address its serious financial problems, RTÉ seems to have abandoned its policy on drama and has cut back on its spending in this area more than on any other aspect of its programming. Between 2008 and 2102, according to its annual reports, RTÉ’s spending on indigenous programming fell by 28 per cent, but its spending on drama fell by nearly 50 per cent.

This is short-sighted and has a negative impact on the creative infrastructure necessary for great Irish television drama in the future.

Broadcasting is a more important part of our arts and culture infrastructure than we tend to acknowledge but, despite the success of Love/Hate, original Irish television drama is not well served by RTÉ’s current funding policies. – Yours, etc,

DAVID KAVANAGH,

Writers Guild of Ireland,

Temple Bar, Dublin 2.

Sir, – As a Catalan living in Ireland for many years, I would like to congratulate your newspaper for the excellent reporting of the present situation in Catalonia.

I was born and grew up in Barcelona during the time of Gen Franco’s dictatorship, a fact that undoubtedly has influenced my view of many things. At that time anything Catalan (except such things as the old traditional dress and a few folksongs) was viewed with suspicion and therefore had to be suppressed. Fortunately we have moved on, but it frightens and saddens me to see today’s Spanish government using some of the same methods that were used then, eg the constant use of threats and prohibitions instead of dialogue and compromise, the refusal to listen, the suspicion and the authoritarian attitude.

Has intransigence, whether in the political or private area, ever yielded any positive outcome? –Yours, etc,

CONCHA GILLESPIE,

Ballinteer, Dublin 16.

Sir, – Niall Gillespie’s assertion that Catalonia is a “colony” of Spain is ludicrous. Perhaps he is ignorant of what a colony actually is?

Catalans have full rights within Spain and a free vote in electing members to the national parliament. Catalonia is an autonomous community with more self-governance than probably any other region in Europe, with the exception of the Basque Country. Obviously I am referring to the Spanish Basque region since the French Basque region has no autonomy worth mentioning. – Yours, etc,

MATTHEW GLOVER,

Lucan,

Co Dublin.

Mon, Nov 17, 2014, 01:02

First published: Mon, Nov 17, 2014, 01:02

A chara, – In welcoming the Lexicon, Dún Laoghaire’s new library, I look forward to the day when it is fully appreciated and cherished by all locals and visitors to the town. For over 100 years, we have learned to love and use our Carnegie library buildings, bequeathed to the State by the Scottish philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Recently the Carnegie Blackrock building was refurbished, winning an international award for the excellence of the finished project.

Unlike Fergal McLoughlin (November 14th) I welcome the contemporary nature of the Lexicon. I look forward to it receiving prizes too, as a world-class building, housing a library, cultural venue and auditorium to be used, visited and loved by all us citizens. – Is mise,

NIAMH BHREATHNACH,

Blackrock, Co Dublin.

Sir, – I would like to echo the words of gratitude of the mayor of Concepcion Milliard Villanueva (November 10th) offered to the Irish people for their generous response to Typhoon Haiyan. This terrible natural disaster once again demonstrated the tremendous capacity of Irish people to empathise with children in times of crisis. Irish people were again amongst the most generous per capita donors in the world.

In the days after the typhoon, I flew to Tacloban City to oversee Unicef’s emergency response. It is hard to convey the scenes of devastation I witnessed. Typhoon Haiyan destroyed up to 90 per cent of the hospitals, schools and homes in its path. My most abiding memory is the stench of death in the air. The tragic consequences of this violent natural disaster will haunt me for a lifetime.

In the immediate aftermath of the typhoon, Unicef initiated its highest level of emergency response, mobilising our global resources and personnel to the region. Thanks to the generosity of our loyal supporters around the country, we raised €1.2 million to meet the immediate, life-saving needs of children. In the past year, 1.3 million children have been vaccinated, 1.3 million people have access to safe drinking water and almost 625,000 children received education materials.

Without the generosity of our Irish supporters, this work would not be possible. – Yours, etc,

PETER POWER,

Executive Director,

Unicef Ireland,

33 Lower Ormond Quay,

Dublin 1.

Irish Independent:

People are angry and anger is an ugly emotion which must be handled with great care; it can be constructive or destructive depending on how it is channelled. The treatment of Joan Burton by the mob was an example of how anger can become a shameful, disgraceful thing.

Ms Burton is a senior player in a democratically elected government. Will you dangerous fools who rage against the wind and shake your fists against the sky think for a moment about where you have come from? It may no longer be PC to mention the fact, but people fought and died so that we could choose our own government. The first members of the Dail carried guns inside their trench coats for protection, such were the levels of fear and intimidation.

Surely to God we have moved on, we are justly proud of the legacy of our unarmed gardai. If you want to protest you do so with right on your side. If you violate the rights of another individual then you are not a democratic protester. Compare the decency and dignity of Donna Hartnett, who articulated the pain and despair she was enduring, with the antics of those who trapped the Tanaiste in her car. Ms Hartnett did not threaten anyone, though she has been stretched to breaking point. She picked up a pen, not a rock, and put her thoughts into the public domain and what might have been a drop in the ocean became a wave.

Last week, Mary Lou McDonald stamped her foot in the Dail and flouted democracy for hours in a fit of petulance. Was this protest about water charges, or was it a distraction from the skeletons Sinn Fein still has in its closet?

When you enter politics you sign on to play by the rules. Peaceful, legitimate protest is an absolute right but taking away the liberty of another is an insult to democracy and a slur on the struggle of all those who sacrificed themselves in the name of freedom.

T G O’Brien

Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin

TDs’ expenses claims

Your article on TDs’ expenses (Irish Independent, November 15) states: “The system was remodelled in 2010 in an effort to safeguard against potential abuses and make it more transparent.”

Yes, the system was remodelled in 2010 – by our politicians and not by an independent body – and became worse than before. The pre-2010 system had its faults but at least all expenses were subject to the FOI Acts and expenses were claimed in arrears after being actually incurred.

The new system excluded the Public Representation Allowance (PRA) from the FOI Acts and only 10pc of members are subject to the audit of these expenses. It is relevant to note that Ivor Callely was caught defrauding the system following a FOI request made by the media under the pre-2010 system.

Under the other strand of the 2010 system, the Travel and Accommodation Allowance (TAA), politicians are paid a monthly round figure allowance based on where they live, and at the end of the year self-certify that they spent their travel money on travel.

Fortunately, these forms are available under FOI. Now, in any normal organisation, accounting staff receiving such forms would at a minimum scrutinise them for obvious discrepancies. However, our politicians’ self-certifying forms are clearly just filed.

All other workers pay their own travel costs. If an employer subsidises travel costs there are tax implications. Not so with our politicians, but then, they make the rules.

Enid O’Dowd FCA

Ranelagh, Dublin 6

You opened your editorial on Saturday saying politicians must wonder why their standing with the public is so low. I doubt that very much. When they see another negative portrayal of the cost of politics in your newspaper, they need hardly wonder at all.

Clearly, it’s a waste of time asking that the pay and allowances to politicians for doing the important but unpopular job they are elected to do be presented fairly in the media. When one sees a trumped-up headline like ‘TDs expenses average €147,000′, one should know the standard of journalism one is dealing with.

For instance, despite repeatedly explaining to journalists that TDs get an annual (not monthly) allowance for travel and accommodation costs, some cannot resist the lazy temptation to suggest that it is a monthly allowance, so that they can then suggest that TDs get expenses for the month of August when the Dail doesn’t sit.

They don’t. They get an annual payment based on annual attendance but sure, why bother explaining it again? The fact that TDs have incurred multiple pay cuts, including all public sector pay cuts, as well as a cut in allowances, was naturally also omitted from your spread last Saturday. But of course it was.

As I had stated to your reporter, grossing-up nearly four years’ costs and allowances and creating the perennial simplistic league table of allowances is easy, dramatic and might even sell a few extra papers on the back of stoking some more outrage, but it isn’t really informative and doesn’t represent real analysis. Nor does it capture the real story of TDs commuting long distances or the genuine demand that exists from the electorate for constituency work, especially in rural Ireland.

Of course, this letter is relatively pointless, the damage is done and your readership will continue to be misinformed on a subject that actually does deserve expert and informed analysis and debate.

Mark Mulqueen

Head of Communications

Houses of the Oireachtas

Leinster House

Dublin 2

NCT backlogs unfair on drivers

I understand that from December, three penalty points will be imposed upon a driver of a car which has not passed the required NCT. In some areas one may have to wait two months or more booking a test, therefore it seems very unfair that a driver could be penalised for what is a failure to provide reasonable facilities for timely testing.

No doubt, insurance companies will be pleased to increase the premium, even though the car might be entirely roadworthy. May I suggest that it should be a defence for the driver to produce evidence that he or she has booked a test?

Anthony W Scott

Tramore, Co Waterford

One-sided man of the match

At the end of last Saturday’s rugby international between Scotland and New Zealand, the winner of the ‘man of the match’ award was announced on BBC and appropriately went to a player on the winning All Blacks side.

The previous night, at the conclusion of the Scotland v Republic of Ireland Euro 2016 qualifier, a member of the Irish side which performed so moderately was named for a similar accolade.

But surely the ‘man of the match’ award should go to the best player in the game?

Please explain yourselves, RTE!

Eric Rice

Trim Road, Navan, Co Meath

Irish Independent

18 November 2014 Sharland

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and Sharland comes to call,

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down trout for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Jack Chalker – obituary

Jack Chalker was an artist whose sketches and watercolours recorded life as a prisoner of war on the ‘Death Railway’

Jack Chalker

Jack Chalker Photo: JAY WILLIAMS

6:19PM GMT 17 Nov 2014

Comments

Jack Chalker, who has died aged 96, was a British artist who drew and painted the atrocities he witnessed as a prisoner of war on the Burma-Siam Railway, also known as the “Death Railway”.

Made famous by Pierre Boulle’s book (and David Lean’s film) The Bridge on the River Kwai, the railway is now a byword for war crimes. More than 12,000 Allied prisoners perished during its construction, along with at least 90,000 Asian labourers. “The sad thing is that here is a race, the Japanese, with an enormous sense of beauty,” said Chalker, “and yet suddenly there was this.”

The construction of a 258-mile railway line between Bangkok in Thailand to Rangoon in Burma during 1943 was intended to provide a supply route for Japanese forces in Burma. Chalker, a bombardier who had been captured at Singapore, worked on a stretch of the line at Kanchanaburi Province in the west of Thailand. His sketches and watercolours, along with the works of his fellow PoW artists, Philip Meninsky, Ashley George Old and Ronald Searle, now form a valuable record of the brutality experienced by the men who were made to work for the Japanese forces, sometimes for up to 16 hours a day.

In later life Chalker described the conditions on the railway as “singularly horrific”. Torture, malnutrition, illness and execution were daily perils. “If you weren’t working hard enough they would make you stand and hold a stone above your head,” recalled Chalker. “You picked it up, which was better than collapsing because then they kicked you all over the place.”

That image – of a sick, beleaguered man holding a boulder aloft – is one of many that he captured on paper. Chalker managed to produce an exceptional body of work, numbering over 100 drawings, sketches and paintings, detailing the hellish circumstances of his captivity between 1942 and 1945.

On his capture, Chalker hid a few watercolour paints and pencils in a secret compartment in his haversack. For canvases, he stole paper from his captors and used the pre-printed postcards that prisoners were given to send home. His works provide a gallery of horrors: emaciated prisoners at the dysentery latrines; cholera tents; a man having his hands hammered for stealing food; a spoon used as a surgical device to extract maggots from a wound. In one, the celebrated Australian surgeon Colonel Edward “Weary” Dunlop carries out an amputation. In addition to Chalker’s unflinching images he kept microscopic diary notes.

He stashed the drawings and paintings in hut roofs and bamboo polls, which he then buried, and even in the artificial limb of a prisoner. Only once did he get caught.

^{Two working men, Konyu River camp by Jack Chalker (REX FEATURES)}

“A guard found me hiding some stuff and I got beaten up,” Chalker recalled years later. “The guard tore one drawing up in front of me, but when I came back later I found the pieces under a rice sack. All the others had been destroyed, but this one had survived. It is a symbol of the whole thing.”

Jack Bridger Chalker was born on October 10 1918 in London. His father, Alfred, was a stationmaster who had been appointed MBE for dispersing troops during the First World War. Jack won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art but found his studies interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War. He joined the Royal Field Artillery and was posted in February 1942 to Singapore, where he was captured by the Japanese. He spent time in Changi Prison and two labour camps before being sent to work on the Burma-Siam Railway, arriving at a camp on the Konyu River in Thailand after a five-day train journey.

During his time on the railway his camp commandant learnt of Chalker’s artistic talent and made him produce watercolour postcards to send back to his family in Japan. “I was ordered to produce 20 paintings a day under threat of being beaten up and incarcerated unless they were forthcoming, and this I did for a few wearisome weeks,” he recalled. In contrast to the devastation shown in much of his work, other drawings capture the beauty of the local plants and flowers.

^{‘From the artist’s bed, Dysentery hut, Chungkai Base hospital camp’ by Jack Chalker (REX)}

His art helped him to retain a semblance of humanity . “I was glad to have something to do, and it was such a privilege to be with so many interesting, wonderful people,” said Chalker. “There was one man, who was absolutely skeletal, a senior lecturer in mathematics at university, and he really loved mathematics and he talked quietly about maths and what a lovely subject it was and he made me feel that calculus must be wonderful. And then he suddenly died one afternoon.”

On Chalker’s release in 1945 he joined the Australian Army HQ in Bangkok as a war artist; some of his work was used in evidence at the Tokyo war trials. On his return to England he resumed his studies, graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1951.

For more than a decade after his repatriation he could not sleep properly. Nor could he look at his drawings and paintings: it would take 40 years for him to take his works out of the box in which they were stored.

In 1950, after teaching History of Art at Cheltenham Ladies’ College he became principal of Falmouth College of Art and, in 1957, principal of West of England College of Art, where he remained until his retirement in the mid-1980s.

He also worked as a medical illustrator and was elected a fellow of the Society of Medical Artists of Great Britain. In retirement, he made anatomical models for the medical firm Limbs and Things (he was “famous for his bowel”) and, having settled at Bleadney in Somerset, gave regular talks about his wartime experiences.

Chalker wrote two books: Burma Railway Artist (1994) and Burma Railway: Images of War (2007). The latter was published in Britain and Japan.

^{Col Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop, Australian Army Doctor, in the Operating Theatre at the Chungkai Hospital Camp by Jack Chalker (UPPA/PHOTOSHOT)}

In recent years he was sought out by the Japanese media keen to interview him as part of the process of reparation. A BBC Four documentary, Building Burma’s Death Railway: Moving Half the Mountain, screened earlier this year, drew heavily on Chalker’s stark images to illustrate prisoners’ stories.

He was elected a fellow of the Society of Medical Artists of Great Britain and awarded an honorary degree by the University of the West of England.

In 2002 Chalker, then 83, auctioned a collection of approximately 100 of his wartime works at Bonhams in London. “I feel reluctant and in a way guilty about doing this, but it will help us out,” he said.

^{Jack Chalker in his studio}

Bidders competed fiercely and many were later donated by a buyer to the Australian War Memorial, including Two working men, Konyu River camp, a pen, brush and ink work on paper which 70 years ago had been ripped up by a Japanese guard.

Jack Chalker married, first, during the war, Anne Maude Dixon; the marriage was later dissolved. He married, secondly, during the 1950s, Jill; that marriage was also later dissolved. He married, thirdly, Helene (née Merrett-Stock), who survives him with a son of his first marriage and a son and daughter of his second marriage.

Jack Chalker, born October 10 1918, died November 15 2014

Guardian:

Sonia Rolt working on the Grand Union Canal in the run-up to the 1945 general election

In addition to her work as a conservationist, for many years Sonia Rolt played an active part in the organisation of the Cheltenham literature festival, notably in the early 1960s, when its future was far from assured. In the late 80s and early 90s, Sonia’s lively and cheerful presence was a memorable feature of meetings. And as programme director in 1991 I was grateful for her unwavering encouragement and support.

Behind The Scenes At Heathrow's Terminal 5 Passengers walk to passport control at Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Heathrow has a proven record of delivering privately funded major infrastructure like Terminal 5 and Terminal 2 on time and on budget, and we are confident of delivering against our costing (Heathrow and Gatwick are underestimating cost of expansion, says Airports Commission, 12 November). The Airports Commission has simply increased the risk allowance and added a 20% “optimism bias” to all submissions for airport expansion. Heathrow’s runways have been full for 10 years. The commission has confirmed that if we expand, then passenger ticket prices will go down. Continue to constrain it and they will go up. That’s simple supply and demand economics.

The real prize for the UK is up to £211bn of economic growth and 180,000 jobs that would come as a result of expanding Heathrow. This is a much better future for Britain than Gatwick offers, because Heathrow is the only airport that can sustain long-haul flights to the fastest-growing economies, such as China. Gatwick can’t do this – Air China tried at Gatwick, but couldn’t make it work. Heathrow handles 26% of the UK’s exports today and expansion will help Britain double its exports. Gatwick doesn’t do cargo. Finally, Heathrow is the only airport that can serve the whole of Britain, rather than just London and the south-east, reconnecting regions such as Inverness, Humberside and Newquay to global markets. Only Heathrow can help Britain win the race for growth. If we are ambitious for our country, we should back Heathrow expansion.
John Holland-Kaye
Chief executive, Heathrow Airport

• I do not expect the Guardian to act as yet another PR arm of Britain’s most aggressive, devious and unpleasant business (Concorde captain’s split runway plan to end Heathrow impasse, 14 November). Those of us who suffer the noise and air pollution generated by Heathrow want fewer not more aircraft screaming over our homes, and preferably none. The Japanese have built two successful offshore airports. Surely it is not beyond the wit of the British to do something similar which, provided the construction is done by British companies employing British workers, could be done at zero cost to the UK economy?
Robert Walls
Camberley, Surrey

England v New Zealand, Britain - 8 Nov 2014 An England flag amid the crowd at the England v New Zealand rugby match, Twickenham, 8 November 2014. Photograph: Patrick Khachfe/JMP/REX

I am grateful to the Guardian for publishing my letter (Shamed by bigoted England rugby fans, 11 November), which rang bells across the media – all the way to the New Zealand Herald. The incident I reported was not an isolated one. A correspondent from a TV sports channel told me that the letter had caught his interest particularly because he had witnessed something similar at Twickenham but had failed to report it. Testimony to the fact that although a lone voice can be a waste of breath, you won’t know it’s wasted unless you shout.

The Rugby Football Union has been in touch and assured me it is pursuing my report on the incident. The RFU is committed in principle to eliminating homophobic and racial abuse from matches. However, if national stadiums are not to be used as safe havens for bigots and binge drinkers, a determined strategy is needed to stamp it out. If it doesn’t already have one, perhaps the RFU could appoint an official whose sole responsibility is to address discipline off the field of play? And at a practical level, it should be easy to advertise a memorable text number on the big screens, at notices around the ground and in the programme, which spectators can use to attract the attention of stewards when incidents are taking place. It is otherwise difficult, on a day when you have paid and travelled a long way to enjoy yourself, to start an altercation with abusive people sitting nearby.

I hope very much that the media, which have pursued this matter so brilliantly, will continue to be vigilant, checking that firm action is indeed being taken by the RFU and supporting that action when it occurs. At a selfish level, I would like my next 14 Twickenham experiences to be as great as the 14 I enjoyed before last Saturday week’s.
Keith Wilson
Doncaster

• Congratulations to the Rugby Ref who is out as gay. Nigel Owens you have made my day – and the Guardian too (Report, 14 November).
George Montague
Brighton

The City of London at sunset. Photograph: Vladimir Zakharov/Getty Images/Moment Open

Six years after the 2008 financial crash, we are finally recognising that the banking industry is “rotten to the core” (Editorial, 13 November). Fines and settlement fees of over £25bn in the UK and $100bn in the US can no longer be blamed on lone rogue traders or inadequate regulation. Banking has become synonymous with short-term profiteering to line the pockets of asset strippers, hedge fund gamblers and tax avoiders, at the expense of individual and business customers. Contrast this with India’s Tata Group, which in the same six years bought the loss-making Land Rover and by investing £4bn, including the recently opened Wolverhampton engine plant, has created a profitable company supporting 190,000 British jobs. UK banks have demonstrated that they have little interest in long-term investment in productive enterprise. A radical alternative banking system, such as Labour’s proposed British Investment Bank, with devolved powers for local and regional investment decisions, is required.
Martin Willis
Malvern, Worcestershire

• As an ordinary bank customer reading the editorial and the lead story in the financial pages (Barclays may face massive new penalty, 13 November), it is obvious that the three monkeys – Hear No Evil, See No Evil and Speak No Evil – have long been residents at the Financial Conduct Authority. The ability to still regard the actions of the investment banking community as only liable for fines, which we, as the simple customer, will probably end up paying in higher charges, is deplorable. If looked at from an ethical standpoint, perhaps they should be considered as criminal. If the FCA only considers this as corruption, there must be many of us, in the wider community, who regard this as more akin to deception and fraud. My moral code tells me that if I were to do things such as these, then I would expect to treated as a criminal. But then perhaps I am being simplistic and perhaps investment bankers really are the masters of the universe, and have to be treated as such.
Andrew Searle
Lavenham, Suffolk

• Although banks are regularly fined for their criminal activities we allow them a major role in our governance. They create 97% of the nation’s money through making loans, mostly in ways that inflate property values and underpin financial services. Only 10% goes to productive business. Even Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, has said, “Why should we let such a social creation [money] be handed over to profit-seeking private enterprises?”
James Bruges
Bristol

• While fining banks for the liability due to improper manipulation of market rates can be seen as a penalty, I wonder if a warning that further unacceptable organisational financial fraud could lead to the removing of banking licences would show teeth/unacceptable behaviour. Banks may then be more inclined to further look at HR issues – such as remuneration, further reducing incentives to cheat, behavioural interviewing and corporate social responsibility – as they are vicariously liable for the staff they hire.
Colin Rodden
Olney, Buckinghamshire

• Is there no end in sight to the litany of corrupt culture in banks? Financial Conduct Authority chief executive Martin Wheatley tells us that, “A lot of it is not rocket science.” He suggests that firms need to look at whether employees in dealing rooms are using mobile phones. They undoubtedly are.

What the regulators need to know is how many regulation-compliant registered phones there are in each firm, how that number compares with the number of traders and what amount of phone traffic is going through those mobiles or handsets, as against the volumes traded. All this is readily traceable through telephony. If the recorded trades and conversations fall short of expectations, would it be a surprise to learn that business was being transacted via non-registered uncompliant phones? This must be depressing and demoralising for the people inside the system trying against the odds to turn around their organisations.
Christine Elliott
Institute for Turnaround, London

• Perhaps the proceeds of the bank fines for misbehaviour (some £2bn?) could either be donated to the Disasters Emergency Committee (DEC) to combat Ebola or help pay the EU bill that falls due in December – if the UK is still short of readies to meet its bill on time.
Susan Gregory
Burton in Lonsdale, Lancashire

• Can you please stop referring to banking as an industry? When did banking last make anything? Considering the damage it has done, it should at least be called an unindustry or maybe a criminal conspiracy but an industry? It’s an insult to the real industries in this country, whose biggest problem is not competition, but the impossibility of getting much-needed finance from the “banking industry”.
Jim Morrison
New Barnet, London

Sandwich production at the Greencore factory in Northampton

Eight-hour days and five-day weeks, which were the norm till relatively recently and enabled people to organise care for children around their work, seem no longer to be on offer (‘They come here and make our sandwiches’, 15 November). But only young adults with no family responsibilities can consider working 12-hour shifts and cope at the same time with unpredictable work patterns. Hence the need to entice young people from eastern Europe, to whom the wages offered here sound wonderful, until they meet the reality of the cost of living.

Are companies such as Greencore and Sports Direct really unable to predict the staffing levels they need and offer regular work on permanent contracts or is this just a way to avoid holiday and sickness pay? Some companies seem to believe they get more out of staff from a regime of fear – bolstered by the attitude of the Department of Work and Pensions to the unemployed. Yet all evidence shows that when people are treated well, they respond with loyalty and a willingness to go the extra mile. The Quaker-run companies such as Cadbury and Rowntree were originally built on that principle.

Companies like Greencore should heed the words of Michael Marks who founded M&S: “I pay my staff enough so they can afford to buy my shirts.” Short-term profits are leading to a shrinking of the economy because of large numbers of people on minimum wage, with uncertain hours and no income security.
Ruth Funnell
Great Torrington, Devon

• Greencore workers are paid the princely wage of £7 an hour, while boss Patrick Coveney lavishesv £1.3m a year on himself, around £400 an hour – nearly 60 times the rate of his staff. Doesn’t this tell us all we need to know about “prosperity Britain”?
Dr Richard Carter
London

A sign above a chemist shop. Photograph: Alamy

I remember my mum telling me that pre-NHS people who couldn’t afford to see a doctor (including my family) went to seek advice and medicine from the chemist because it was cheaper. Is Jeremy Hunt preparing us for a return to that (Hunt urges patients to visit pharmacist, not A&E, 14 November)?
Karen Bates
Macclesfield, Cheshire

• I suppose I should apologise for having clicked on the link (Kim Kardashian naked didn’t break the internet, 13 November), but if your organ must pander to redtop tastes, is it too much to ask the subs to use arse rather than ass?
Steve Simmons
Camberley, Surrey

• Picked and ate possibly the last blackberry of the season today, a little winey but acceptable.
Alan Pearson
Durham

Independent

Reading the comments attached under media stories about the US and China signing an agreement to reduce carbon emissions, I found the usual petty diatribes from climate-change deniers and contrarians.

The funny thing is that their interventions are so utterly pointless. What are they in fact afraid of? Why does the act of creating employment by making homes more energy efficient, thereby saving money and alleviating fuel poverty, terrify the living daylights out of climate-change deniers? Are we to imagine that they sit at home with their fridge doors and windows open just to be able to waste a little more energy and money?

Why are they so afraid of the world moving on from fossil fuels? Why do they resent powering cars and homes differently? Would this same bunch of naysayers have been found at the side of the road at the end of the 19th century, screaming abuse at electric streetlights and shouting for gas lamps to be retained?

Never has so much venom and angst been expended so pointlessly.

Christian Vassie

York

I live in solid nimby country which has seen off a number of wind-turbine proposals. The objections mostly centre on the appearance of turbines in the countryside. One thing which doesn’t seem to enter the heads of the objectors is that the impact is strictly temporary.

If one day they are superseded by some better form of energy conversion, the towers can be taken down and all that will be left is a small concrete base. The countryside will be as it was. Quite apart from the global-warming issue, there will be no destruction by opencast sites, no acid rain, no aquifer contamination and no radioactive waste to be stored for 25,000 years.

What will our great-great-grandchildren think of us if we contaminate and degrade our beautiful country for ever, just because we want to preserve the view from our windows for our brief lifespan?

Derek Chapman

Southampton, Hampshire

Your editorial “Brisbane’s legacy” (17 November) needs a reality check. Obama may have forced climate change on to the G20 agenda, but nothing substantial was agreed. Australia’s prime minister is in denial about climate change and has disbanded his advisory panel. Both Abbot and Putin wanted climate change off the agenda because both countries are heavily dependent on fossil fuels for their energy needs and foreign revenue. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of natural gas and Australia of coal. What Brisbane demonstrated is that the chances of the UN brokering a meaningful climate-change deal next year in Paris are close to zero as long as deniers and dictators are in a position to sabotage the negotiations.

Dr Robin Russell-Jones MA FRCP FRCPath

Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire

David Hockney (report, 17 November) raised an important question when he said, “We can go on and on about oil, but if there wasn’t any, what would happen?” The International Energy Agency has said that two-thirds of known fossil-fuel reserves need to stay in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, and for many climate scientists, that is a conservative estimate.

We have the capacity to transition to a way of living without oil dependency – new technologies, renewable energy and adjustments to consumption patterns can make this a reality. If we shifted to living “as if there weren’t any oil”, we would be taking a significant step in protecting the planet for future generations.

The oil industry propagates a myth that fossil fuels are an essential part of our way of life. By sponsoring arts institutions, oil giants such as BP create the impression that they are generous and responsible; they cleanse their image and purchase a “social licence” to operate. But many in the arts world not only recognise the risks of tacitly supporting the fossil-fuel industry but, from the artist Conrad Atkinson to the playwright Mark Ravenhill, are willing to speak out against it.

Chris Garrard

Tadley, Hampshire

Free patients to make their own IVF choices

Professor Evan Snyder is right that mitochondrial donation must be licensed for patient trials or use only once regulators are satisfied that any risks are sufficiently low (report, 17 November).

But while US regulators are free to make this judgement, UK regulators are not: clinical use of the techniques involved is currently illegal in the UK but not in the US. It is thus critically important that Parliament rapidly passes regulations to allow mitochondrial donation in principle, so that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority can license specific clinics to offer it as soon as there is evidence that it is safe enough to proceed.

Families affected by devastating mitochondrial diseases, properly advised by their doctors about risks and benefits, are best placed to decide whether to use these techniques to try to have a healthy child. They should not be denied this reproductive choice for any longer than is necessary.

Dr Jeremy Farrar

Director, Wellcome Trust,

London NW1

Don’t let murderers choose our words

When someone commits a brutal and deadly act against another person it is often referred to by the media as a “killing”. Similarly those who commit such acts are often referred to as “jihadists” or “militants”.

Instead of using terms which are often generated and used by those people and groups responsible for these acts, the media should be using the words “murder”, “murderers” and “terrorists” – plain and simple. Please leave the fantasy, lies and fiction completely to the criminals.

Laurence Williams

Louth, Lincolnshire

I am deeply opposed to capital punishment and am horrified by the actions of Isis in Syria and Iraq. But consider these atrocities in the cultural landscape of the region: a quick internet search shows that Saudi Arabia beheaded 16 people in the first half of August this year alone. If it is a barbaric act for Isis then surely it is a barbaric act for Saudi Arabia? Western media, in general, condemns Isis but remains silent about Saudi Arabia.

Brian Parkinson

Oxford

Plenty of musicians north of the border

I read with interest Adam Sherwin’s article on the National Children’s Orchestra and the north/south divide (14 November). But I would like to reassure your readers that classical music is alive and well in Scotland. We have our own National Youth Orchestras of Scotland, which run a variety of orchestras at different levels from ages eight upwards, all to an amazingly high standard.

As I write this letter, I have just welcomed 60 nine- to 15-year-olds to one of the Scottish Schools Orchestra Trust’s regular Play Away Days in Perthshire. Seeing them at work convinces me that enthusiasm for classical music among the current generation of youngsters in Scotland remains high.

OK, we have six flutes but only three bassoons, and 19 violins but only five violas, but all these children are showing real interest and talent and a genuine desire to achieve high standards in orchestral playing. The National Children’s Orchestra of GB is doing a fantastic job, but please don’t assume that youngsters who don’t audition for it are not capable. Maybe they have simply found another outlet.

Jean Murray

Director, Scottish Schools Orchestra Trust,

Edinburgh

Countryside is a killing ground

Deirdre Conniss (Letters, 17 November) criticises Jane Merrick for “expecting the countryside to operate as a gigantic playground for herself and other townies”.

My experience is that the opposite is true – it is country landowners who expect to use the countryside as their own giant playground, mainly involving games that result in wildlife being hunted to death.

Merrick has clearly outraged Ms Conniss by “raiding” farmers’ sloes on hedges. She was perhaps lucky to find any sloes at all, as many farmers’ hedges are currently being massacred by heavy machinery, a barbaric process which strips off all hedgerow food, depriving not only the odd presumptuous “townie” of a few sloes, but thousands of birds of their winter food supply.

If the landowners and farmers of the countryside would stop slaughtering badgers, foxes, hares, deer, game birds and birds of prey, and decimating wildlife populations through intensive farming methods, they would be in a better moral position to lecture others.

Penny Little

Great Haseley, Oxfordshire

My tiny contribution to the cost of Europe

I have just received a letter from HM Revenue and Customs showing how my tax was calculated in 2013-4 and how this money was spent. Since it seems that three-quarters of 1 per cent is spent on Europe, it can be seen that both Ukip and the Coalition are guilty of gross exaggeration.

Malcolm Howard

Banstead, Surrey

A knotty landing

The existential problems experienced by the hapless Philae lander (15 November) bring new meaning to the expression “caught between a rock and a hard place”.

Stan Labovitch

Windsor

Times:

To ask government ministers to take on those responsibilities, and so give parents the opportunity for others to take the blame when things go wrong, shows a grave lack of any sense of duty and care.

Eileen Johnson
Cheadle, Staffs

Yvonne Graham
Chichester

Joanna Young
Cirencester, Glos

Peter Inson
East Mersea, Essex

Sandra Clarke
Dartford, Kent

Sir, I disagree with Ros Altmann (“Ageist road sign promotes job prejudice”, Nov 17). The sign warning of elderly people shows a couple in their 70s to 80s, not vigorous people in their 50s. I am in my 80s and am aware that in a busy street I am more vulnerable than previously, in that I am not able to respond as quickly.
Anthony J Carr
Solihull

Sir, It is not only road signs that discriminate. Most car parks have spaces for the disabled and parents with children, yet when I drive my mother in law, who is elderly and frail, no such facility is provided. It can be more demanding to get an aged person into a shop than a couple of children in a buggy.
Leo McCormack
Sedgefield, Co Durham

Sir, I was under the impression that the road sign depicting a hunched-over couple meant “Beware elderly pickpockets”.
Peter Bowen-Simpkins
Reynoldston, Swansea

Sir, My wife’s grandmother died in the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed 50 million people. Ebola could do the same, or worse, and should be the overarching concern of world leaders.

Many nations are helping generously, but others are not (News, Nov 15). Britain must urge the UN to shout louder to spotlight the pitiful response of Russia and to shake from their torpor Brazil, India and South Africa — all hit severely in 1918.
Rodney Buckton
Oxford

Sir, The refusal by the home affairs select committee to nominate a head for the historical child sex abuse inquiry (News, Nov 14) means that the home secretary, Theresa May, faces an even more tortuous task.

I suggest sending for a bishop. There has been outstanding work done by bishops: for instance as chairman of the Hillsborough independent panel and as adviser to the Macpherson report on Stephen Lawrence. In the debate on women bishops, the General Synod affirmed the critical role of bishops in building integrity, trust and sensitivity. In the previous synod there was a strong bishop lead on safeguarding and clergy discipline, with survivor groups represented. Sounds like a good CV for a place on the inquiry.
Dr Phillip Rice
Member of the C of E General Synod, London E9

Telegraph:

Why grammar is still important; the SNP’s referendum hopes; letting Ched Evans go back to work; and do you wish it could be Christmas everyday?

At least 30% of teachers are not fully qualified in 41 primary and 12 secondary schools.

Should traditional English lessons be scrapped? Photo: GETTY IMAGES

7:00AM GMT 17 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – Dr Heather Martin’s suggestion that traditional English lessons be scrapped from the curriculum is misguided.

Her argument presupposes that English lessons in mainstream schools are focused on the dry teaching of grammar and syntax. They aren’t, and haven’t been for years. Far from alleviating parents’ and teachers’ “anxiety” about this subject, the abolition of English lessons in favour of a “multi-disciplinary methodology” will only increase it.

Excellent English lessons in our schools already explore the richness and subtlety of the language using a range of sources. There is nothing wrong with combining this with a scrutiny of its grammatical and syntactical structures.

The key is stimulating and engaging teaching, not the abolition of a discipline.

Dr Millan Sachania
Head Master, Streatham & Clapham High School
London SW16

Letters: We need to broaden our skill-set to combat excessive immigration

16 Nov 2014

SIR – In the Eighties, many teachers believed that children would learn to read naturally, and that drilling phonics would take all the joy out of reading.

My son suffered from this fanciful notion, but an article in The Daily Telegraph alerted me to a retired teacher who still believed in teaching children about letters and sounds. Under new instruction, my son went from being a non-reader to being six months ahead in his ability.

Research has shown that higher-order skills cannot develop without a firm foundation of basic knowledge, which develops poorly unless explicitly taught.

Prof Tom Burkard
Easton, Norwich

SIR – I was initially taught Russian using the Nuffield method. This was similar to what Dr Martin is suggesting in that we were supposed to pick up the language by means of conversation and role play.

This approach did not work and the structure of Russian grammar remained a mystery to me until I learnt Latin the traditional way, and then it all fell into place.

I feel privileged to have received traditional English language tuition and pride myself on my grammar and spelling. Sometimes we have to endure boredom and hard work to reap the rewards.

Jackie Johnson
Birmingham

SIR – As a child of the Sixites I was not taught English grammar and there was no particular importance placed on correct spelling. I picked up some grammatical rules through studying foreign languages, but I would like to have a better understanding of my own language.

The basic framework of language should be taught to all children in primary school. This could be balanced with opportunities for them to put grammatical rules to one side and express themselves.

Christine Matkin
Sunderland, Tyne and Wear

SNP referendum hopes

SIR – Nicola Sturgeon has refused to rule out a second referendum after the 2016 general election if there is an SNP victory in Scotland and has even hinted that if Britain were to vote to leave Europe, but Scotland opt to stay, that would be a legitimate trigger for another plebiscite.

The majority of Scots who voted No did so because they believed Scotland’s future economic prosperity lay within the United Kingdom, and they held as a strong desire to remain British.

As Mrs Sturgeon takes over from Alex Salmond as party leader and First Minister she should accept the referendum defeat, rule out a second vote and respect the fact that the Scots chose unity over division.

William Beddows
St Andrews, Fife

SIR – Which part of the answer “No” does the SNP not understand?

Robin Lane
Devizes, Wiltshire

Litterbug Brits

SIR – Robert Colvile’s observations about the “litter crisis” in Britain (Comment, November 14) come as no surprise.

Littering is an offence but, like so many other rules and laws in this country, enforcement is lacking. Singapore seems able to get it right, so why not Britain?

R K Hodge
Chichester, West Sussex

Girl power

SIR – Jemima Lewis bemoans the lack of powerful female characters for girls to look up to.

May I suggest, with no irony whatsoever, the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic? Its compelling mixture of slice-of-life comedy, messages of tolerance and acceptance and, above all, powerful and central female characters have made it internationally successful with both male and female audiences.

Harry Drummon
Midhurst, West Sussex

Life before Ambridge

SIR – Enough about The Archers.

Bring back Dick Barton: Special Agent with Jock and Snowy.

David Hudson
Lyndhurst, Hampshire

Let Evans do his job

SIR – Ched Evans has served his time in prison, which is a clear enough message for young people. He now has a right to earn a living, doing the job that he has trained for.

Marguerite Bowyer
West Huntspill, Somerset

SIR – I wonder whether Jessica Ennis-Hill and all those who have protested against Ched Evans being allowed back into his football career have digested the facts of his case, which are so well reported by Allison Pearson.

His conviction is due for review. If he believes he is innocent, why should he apologise?

Ian Francis
Rochford, Essex

SIR – One would have thought that the Football Association would have a ruling on the employment of convicted criminals. It should not be a decision for Sheffield United alone.

Jessica Ennis-Hill has done well to make a stand and bring this issue to the fore.

Dr Robert J Leeming
Coventry, Warwickshire

NHS accountability

SIR – Laura Donnelly refers to patients’ confusion about out-of-hours GP services.

Primary Care Trusts, whatever their defects, had strong lay representation on their boards. The newly set up Clinical Commissioning Groups have only token lay representation. Similarly, the patient groups linked to GP practices appear to have unclear terms of reference and limited power. We have no democratic means, locally, of bringing about change.

The contrast with the reforms in education is stark. The system of academies and free schools is highly responsive to local democratic pressure.

We are unlikely to see significant improvement in the standard of delivery by NHS England until a strong system of local accountability is put in place.

Robert Batchelor
Northwood, Middlesex

Age is just a number

SIR – How ironic that, in her article lauding Dame Judi Dench and her stand against ageism and the media’s reluctance to employ older women, Cathy Newman should then choose to apologise to her role model for revealing her age.

George East
Havant, Hampshire

Time and a place

SIR – Clapping at ceremonies seems to have become the norm, despite it being so vulgar and inappropriate. I always tell school pupils that you clap at performances but not ceremonies.

The last time I attended the nightly Menin Gate ceremony, I reiterated this to my pupils and a group of visiting soldiers overheard. I was given a round of applause.

Noeleen Murphy
London SE22

Politicians’ porkies

SIR – I am greatly reassured to learn that the average Briton tells more than 10 lies a week – there must be some very honest people around to offset the politicians.

John Newman
Hinckley, Leicestershire

Christmas is spoilt by its ever-earlier arrival

_{The festive spirit arrives early at the Aldeburgh Carnival in Suffolk . Photo: Alamy}

SIR – Nathan Cunningham is to be congratulated on his work analysing data to establish the start of the Christmas season.

I conducted my own study, based on 32 years of commuting by train from Winchester to Waterloo, in which the “index” was the HBI (Hamleys Bag Indicator).

In the early Seventies, passengers would appear for the homeward journey carrying such bags in the second week of December. Over the years I noticed them earlier and earlier. By the time I stopped commuting in 2002, it was the third week of September.

Michael Fielding
Winchester, Hampshire

SIR – When I was a child the only time we ever saw a mince pie was at Christmas. It was a seasonal treat that we looked forward to and enjoyed.

Now that they are available from October, by the time Christmas finally arrives I’m heartily sick of the sight, taste and smell of them.

Robert Readman
Bournemouth, Dorset

SIR – While out shopping last weekend I was astonished to come across a display of Christmas bedding.

If proof were needed that there is more disposable income around than ever before, this has to be it.

Irena Milloy
Buckden, Cambridgeshire

Was the Philae lander project money well spent?

SIR – One cannot but marvel at the brilliant technological achievement of landing on a comet, but what is the point?

Instead of trying to work backwards over billions of years, at enormous cost, to determine what happened all that time ago, it would be better to sort out some of today’s desperate problems.

John Cuthbert
Sevenoaks, Kent

SIR – You report that the small lander “shot back up into the air”. Does this mean that the comet has an atmosphere?

Eddie Collings
Pinner, Middlesex

SIR – Should the brave little Philae lander be renamed the Philae bouncer?

Robert Graham
Wye, Kent

SIR – The European Space Agency asteroid lander Philae is performing exactly as one would reasonably expect of any European project.

It is largely in the dark, it is upside down, everyone with a financial interest declares it a success, but the solar energy isn’t producing as much electricity as it requires to survive.

Ian Wallace
Whitley Bay, Northumberland

Irish Times:

Sir, – The treatment of the Tánaiste was not a protest, it was mob rule (“Kenny says protests ‘not about water’”, Front Page, November 17th). In no way was this a peaceful protest. – Yours, etc,

BRONWYN MOLONY,

Clondalkin,

Dublin 22.

Sir, – Having marched against water charges, I am shocked, angry and ashamed at the menacing nature of the protest in Tallaght. People have a democratic right to protest and demonstrate in a peaceful, lawful manner, but they have no right to obstruct or hold captive anyone in a car, much less bang on it in a threatening manner. They may disagree with Government policy but that does not give them the right to intimidate any member of the Dáil.

People claiming rights have a responsibility to act within the law. Those involved should consider that their behaviour was counterproductive to their cause. Many, like myself, who have marched in the past may reconsider doing so in future. I have no wish for anarchy. – Yours, etc,

SORCHA DONNELLY,

Greystones,

Co Wicklow.

Sir, – Paul Murphy TD has stated that what happened in Tallaght was a non-violent protest. To be imprisoned in your car is a serious form of violence and a denial of freedom. – Yours, etc,

CLAIRE CONNOLLY,

Ballinasloe,

Co Galway.

Sir, – I suggest that members of the Government began the campaign of frightening and menacing the voters to bully and cajole us on many issues and it is simply chancing its arm to see how much they can bleed from us. Perhaps now the politicians will step back from the abyss, stop their confrontation with the justifiably angry voters and discontinue their bullying of us by actually listening for once. – Yours, etc,

JOHN MALLON,

Mayfield,

Cork.

Sir, – As tempting as it is to belittle the water balloon incident (and all credit to the Tánaiste for her dignified response in such circumstances), it would be very wrong for the Government or political class to sneer at those who throw water balloons and to misunderstand what such incidents mean.

The fact some people felt so angry, so disconnected from the political process, that they felt their only option was to throw a water balloon, or even worse a brick, means those people no longer have any trust in the State to respond to their needs. The political class has no concept of what it’s like to get a water bill, even if it’s €200, when you have €0 in the bank, or of the sheer drudgery of living week to week literally counting every single cent, so they genuinely don’t get it.

But the political class, including the media, would do well to stop to think that such public responses stem from the anger and frustration people feel that despite their sacrifices for the last six years, nothing has changed for them, as they struggle to feed, clothe and house their families.

Maybe the chattering and establishment classes, who think they won’t be affected by rising anger, need to start thinking through the consequences if those angry people actually do go and vote in the coming general election.

They don’t need to win the election, they just need to win more seats than their centre-right and hard-right counterparts. – Yours, etc,

DESMOND FitzGERALD,

Canary Wharf,

London.

Sir, – By now, it must be clear to everyone that Irish society is under attack from a small, tightly organised group of political ideologues who are fanatical in their determination to impose their will on the people.

This group is highly disciplined, secretive, has unlimited funds and access to an army of press advisers and spin-doctors. They have consistently shown their disregard for Dáil procedures and the broad wishes of the Irish people.

The Economic Management Council must be disbanded at once. – Yours, etc,

EUGENE McELDOWNEY,

Howth,

Dublin 13.

Sir, – It is time, I think, that Mr Kenny and Ms Burton took some meaningful measures to alleviate the extreme hardship their parties have created.

The patience of the “little people” has finally ended. – Yours, etc,

IAN KAVANAGH,

Kilmainham,

Dublin 8.

Sir, – Paul Murphy TD sees no problem about encouraging others to indulge in a type of behaviour that flouts the rights of other citizens, whether they be politicians or not, to pass peacefully on their way. How does this accord with his membership of the Dáil and its law-making role?

His attitude is in marked contrast to the dignified way in which over 100,000 people protested throughout the country a few weeks ago against water charges. The debacle of the water charge issue in no way justifies the type of protest Mr Murphy has “no problem” with. – Yours, etc,

PATRICK HOWARD,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 16.

Sir, – Can’t pay for water but can pay for eggs to use as missiles? Some logic! – Yours, etc,

AILEEN HOOPER,

Stoneybatter,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – Breda O’Brien’s article of November 15th displays a confusion of morality with legality (“Legalising prostitution legalises a fantasy – that sex does not involve the self”, Opinion & Analysis). The debate is not about whether prostitution is “wrong”. The issue is whether the customer should be criminalised or not. There are many things that are considered wrong and that the state (rightly) does not intervene to prohibit: for example worshipping false gods, or missing church on Sunday. States that do enforce morality are called theocracies and have a bad press (rightly so).

As a general rule it is not the legitimate function of the state to police private behaviour, insofar as such behaviour is confined to consenting adults. The logical result of a contrary view – regardless of its well-intentioned adherents – is that, potentially, it leaves the way open for the government to criminalise anything it doesn’t like.

Historically, laws prohibiting alcohol and gay sex are examples of how governments have got things disastrously wrong when the principle of individual freedom is not held as paramount. It’s entirely consistent both to disapprove of prostitution (which I do) and also not to want to control what other people do with their bodies.

The analogy with buying votes is invalid because buying votes undermines the democratic system. Buying sexual services may indeed morally harm one or both parties involved, but that’s an issue of morality, and should not be one of legality. Whether an individual wishes to indulge in fantasy, or risk the stability of a relationship they are involved in, is a matter for the individual’s conscience, not for the criminal courts.

Whether sex can be separated from a person’s body is an interesting question which, whether the answer is in the negative or the affirmative, is the appropriate province of metaphysics and moral philosophy, but not of legislators. In any case it’s not clear why, from a legal point of view, we should ban one form of alienation and not others. Any kind of paid work which the worker would not do if he or she were not paid for it could be described in terms of “bribery,” or indeed as a form of slavery for that matter. If the commodification of sex is banned, why should not other forms of commodification be banned as well?

There are well-worn arguments that the whole capitalist system should be prohibited since it involves both commodification and exploitation, both of which are seen as bad things by critics. What is not clear is why sex should be singled out over other activities (eg bricklaying or plumbing) as one that should not be commodified, unless such singling-out is for basically moral reasons. Such moral qualms may have validity in their own right, but they have no legitimate place in law-making or law-enforcement. It is a serious, and dangerous, incursion on freedom to allow the Garda to weigh up the relative quotas of love and money in any given relationship. – Yours, etc,

PAUL O’BRIEN,

Dublin 8.

Sir, – It is undeniable that vulnerable young women are trafficked for sex. It is also undeniable that some women choose to work in this area. Why are people seeking to use the “Swedish model” or, indeed, any model taken from another country?

From exposure to the debate on radio and in the newspapers in recent weeks, it seems that none of the “off-the-shelf” options from other countries even work properly for where they were designed. Is it not possible to carry out a proper analysis of the issues at play in Ireland and create the “Irish model”? At least that way we could have a solution designed to work properly for all those concerned in Ireland, making sure that trafficking is tackled and that those that choose to work in prostitution are properly protected. I would have thought that the illusion of a one-size-fits-all solution working anywhere would be well over. Although maybe people are looking to cover their behinds so that, when the “model” doesn’t work, they can point at the Swedes and blame them. That way no one need be accountable for the consequences. Actually, that sounds exactly like an Irish model. – Yours, etc,

STUART BOYLE,

Raheny, Dublin 5.

Sir, – I find myself totally on the side of the teachers who in the interests of students are resisting the continuing arrogance of the Department of Education and Science in demanding teacher assessment of their own students.

I am writing out of personal experience. Some 54 years ago, I sat the “mock” Intermediate exam, which was then marked by our own teachers. Mathematics was my best subject and there were three separate papers. I had an excellent teacher, but one who knew of only one way to reach a correct answer to any question. I obtained the correct answers but was failed in each paper because of my methodology. I sat the State Intermediate exam some three months later and obtained marks in excess of 80 per cent in each paper. Two years later I received a distinction in mathematics in the Trinity matriculation.

This persuades me that the teachers who refuse to assess their own students for a State exam are acting in the best interests of the students. – Yours, etc,

Right Rev Dr

JOHN RW NEILL,

Bennettsbridge,

Co Kilkenny.

Sir, – Professionals such as lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects and accountants are certified to practice through training, examinations, accreditation and registration. They assess, advise, treat, instruct and make judgment calls on a daily basis.

If teachers wish to retain professional status as educators, surely they need to be confident in their ability to assess objectively a student’s work – whether it is a student known to them or one whom they have never met before. – Yours, etc,

ALISON HACKETT,

Dún Laoghaire,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Recent weeks have seen a further worsening of traffic congestion in Dublin, to the detriment of the regional economy and quality of life (“Pause offers possible route to settling bus row”, November 15th). Dublin needs increased capacity in public transport. Consequently, there should be more than enough demand to sustain an increase, not a reduction, in driver jobs in Dublin Bus, as well as among private operators. Providing additional services to meet demand should be the priority.

In my view, the National Transport Authority would be better engaged in seeking to increase bus-carrying capacity on high-demand corridors in and out of the city, including by licensing more private operators in regulated competition, rather than getting bogged down in a process of privatisation of existing orbital and local routes which would generate a lesser return in terms of tackling congestion. – Yours, etc,

Cllr WILLIAM LAVELLE,

Lucan,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – How do you get from Gorey, Co Wexford, to Tinahely, Co Wicklow, a distance of 16 miles, using public transport? Take a bus to Dublin 60 miles away, then take a bus back for another 65 miles, but don’t make any promises to be there at any particular time. Can you just imagine how brilliant the national transport service will be when it is privatised? – Yours, etc,

DAN McDONNELL,

Gorey,

Co Wexford.

Sir, – I read with disbelief Carl O’Brien’s report on the queuing system at the Garda National Immigration Bureau (“A day in the life at the State’s immigration offices”, November 17th), where foreign nationals are required to get in line at the crack of dawn in order get a numbered ticket which will enable them to have the privilege to pay the Government the sum of €300 to apply for or to renew on an annual basis their GNIB registration card.

Despite the response by the Minister for Justice and Equality in relation to Dáil questions in relation this situation, in which it was claimed in June that an online appointment system was being planned, the situation has appeared to have worsened.

In an age in which Ireland boasts of being Europe’s technology hub, how difficult is it and how long does it take to set up an online booking system? To put things in perspective, my 10-year-old car, which requires an annual NCT at €55 a go, gets much better customer service than these foreign nationals. All I have do is to log on to the dedicated website, book a date, choose a time slot that suits me and my car, and so long as I arrive on time, the whole process takes less than an hour! – Yours, etc,

PATRICIA CRAVEN,

Blackrock,

Co Dublin.

A chara, – If I understand the latest proposals for water charges correctly, a single person living in a mansion with a swimming pool and a jacuzzi would pay less than a couple with several children living in a three-bed semi-detached house. If that’s correct, it would be a little hard to swallow, I’m afraid. – Is mise,

Rev PATRICK G BURKE,

Castlecomer,

Co Kilkenny.

Sir, – The latest drip-feed on likely water charges has been, as usual, devoid of debate. Should every resident get a reasonable amount of water free of charge? How much water is necessary, or excessive? How to structure the charges to incentivise both rich and poor to use water economically?

It is telling that Government politicians keep repeating that Dublin ran out of water last year. Dublin City Council turned off the taps, despite the supply meeting biological drinking water standards but only because cosmetic standards were not met. The water was coloured from minute peat particles, stirred up by storms. Yet it is practice elsewhere in the country to supply water which would make people sick. The motive? Vested interests will make a lot of money to pipe water from the Shannon.

Introduction of a progressive, affordable, way of charging for water, free for essential use, would incentivise everyone to conserve water, minimise the cost of a good, sustainable water service, and would improve fairness and equity. Alas, it seems that this Government has a different agenda. – Yours, etc,

CLAIRE WHEELER,

Ballsbridge,

Dublin 4.

Sir, – The recent US media interviews with IDA Ireland’s Martin Shanahan and Tourism Ireland’s Niall Gibbons have underlined an uncomfortable reality that is so readily ignored at home (“US radio host wants to know if Ireland plans to leave the UK”, November 14th). I have had personal experience of this while living abroad in the US and continental Europe. The reality is that the constitutional status of Ireland is not well known or understood outside our shores. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN FOX,

Mount Pleasant,

Washington DC.

Sir, – It seems that Mary Lou McDonald has figured out how to work the Dáil system for minimal accountability and maximum publicity. She won’t enter the Dáil when she doesn’t want to answer questions, and she won’t leave when her questions aren’t answered. – Yours, etc,

JAMES QUINN,

Sterling Heights,

Michigan.

Sir, – Surely the best way to commemorate the Easter 1916 Rising would be to have one day when no patient has to sleep overnight on a trolley or one night when we have zero homeless. – Yours, etc,

DERMOT O’ROURKE,

Lucan,

Co Dublin.

Irish Independent:

I applaud Donna Harnett on her letter to your newspaper (November 11), and for the debate it has sparked in relation to the work-life balance of taxpayers and childcare costs.

However, I was very dismayed after reading Gerard O’Regan’s article (“So, who is going to mind the baby?” – November 15).

I too stopped working due to the high cost of childcare. After my second child was born I realised I would be better off spending quality time with my children during their most formative years, rather than going out to work. This was because I did not even have enough money left over to put petrol in my car to get to work after mortgage repayments and childcare costs were covered. Luckily, we were able to restructure our mortgage and my husband’s income was enough to cover repayments – as long as we stuck to a very tight household budget.

Ironically, the job I gave up – a job which I loved – was as a Montessori teacher in an early years care and education centre. Although I was not highly paid ,I am offended by Gerard O’Regan’s statement that childcare centres have a “propensity to hire cheap-as-possible employees, who may lack both the aptitude and the interest required to look after children”. The vast majority of childcare employees are educated professionals who love and respect children and value greatly the impact the quality of their care can make on young lives.

However, requirements for staff under preschool regulations – and the measly capitation offered by the government under the ECCE Free Preschool Year scheme – means that fees charged for childcare for children aged up to three and for after-school care have had to be increased. This is to make services sustainable and in the interest of the quality experience of children.

The average fee for preschool in Ireland before the introduction of the ECCE scheme in 2009 was €75 a week. Five years later the government are giving only €62.50 capitation for 38 weeks a year. Out of this rent, rates and overheads costs have to be met – so is it any wonder staff are paid so little?

And how can we expect to improve quality and the level of staff training when the teachers delivering the ECCE scheme are forced to go on the dole over the summer months?

Like Donna Hartnett I believe the government does not understand the plight of the taxpaying public. It saddens me that Gerard O’Regan’s article shares the Government’s same lack of awareness about the financial reality for childcare providers in Ireland. It shows that Mr O’Regan obviously conducted no research at all before vilifying childcare services and making debt-burdened parents feel guilty for going out to work.

In summary, I would ask Gerard O’Regan, the media in general and the Government of this country to start respecting and valuing childcare professionals. This, in turn, will help working parents to feel confident about how their children are being cared for. In this way we can surely create brighter futures for Irish children.

Jo-Anne Corcoran

Navan

Politicians must heed the people

The recent spate of misgivings about Uisce Eireann’s intention to introduce water charges says much about the condition of politics in Ireland. Political life seems to have cut itself adrift from the people whose raw experience of supporting family life was so eloquently expressed by Donna Hartnett (Irish Independent, Letters, November 11).

A disjunction between the rhetoric and the reality of political activity tends to characterise all democracies. The rhetoric speaks of the wish to create a better tomorrow through a commitment to the demands of justice and fairness; the reality shows us that the driving force in politics is the tendency to minister to those who already have more than enough.

Spin doctors, masters of the art of persuasion, are employed to sell policies to the public in order to manufacture popular consent, often appealing to our worst instincts.

In a democracy, political authority is assumed to reside in the will of the people. We are free to the extent that we can regard the laws that govern us as the expression of our common values. Political policies and practices work well to the advantage of all if they are in tune with critically-formed public opinion.

What has stirred the outrage of people is that many crucial decisions are biased towards certain powerful interest groups. In a representative democracy we expect our politicians to focus on what is desirable, determine what is possible and implement what is feasible. We expect this form of reflection to be conducted on our behalf, in the interests of the nation.

However, what counts as the national interest has to be determined through a genuine attempt to seek consensus on the direction in which we wish to see our country going. In any thoughtful society things don’t just happen, they are made to happen.

One can only hope that the courage and conviction of Donna Hartnett will leave its mark on the minds and sensibilities of our politicians.

In another age much of what has been done in our name would have triggered a rebellion.

Philip O’Neill

Oxford, England

TDs beating the recession

Judging by the list of TDs’ expenses I’d agree with Mr Noonan when he says the recovery has spread across the country (Irish Independent, November 15). The question is, when will it get to the rest of us that are not TDs?

Philip Duffy

Knocklyon Road, Dublin 16

Ireland needs to calm down

As an Irish person living in Britain for over 30 years I am still a keen observer and participator in Irish political events.

When we go to our post office or GP surgery we observe people’s personal space and allow then their private transactions.

For me the events in Tallaght on Saturday violated the personal space of two women attending an adult education conferring event. Their space was violated severely when, in effect, they were held captive in the car, which it appears was banged on and had items thrown at it.

To see and hear an elected member of Dail Eireann then asking the rabble “Do we agree to let her go” only highlighted the fact that they were truly captives.

In order to get a full picture of the events of Saturday I have been listening to RTE radio and TV and other networks. I have just seen footage where an Tanaiste was physically hit on the head by something.

So the protesters said what they wanted to say, but they did it with violence. This was not peaceful protest. Nobody should be treated like that.

The launch of the Easter Rising consultation and planning was even marred by protest. Calm down Ireland or you will tarnish the one line of the 1916 Proclamation we all know – “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”.

Some readers might say: “It’s OK for you, you do not live here”. I lived through Irish austerity in the 1980s and as a result was forced to migrate to Britain, but I never lost my love for and interest in all things Irish.

Frankly, with the sulk of Mary Lou in the Dail and the events in Tallaght are for me a giant step backward for Ireland’s democracy and does nothing for the reputation of Ireland and her emigrants abroad.

Gerry Molumby

Nottingham, England

Irish Independent

19 November 2014 Fluff

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and take Fluff to the vet to have five teeth out.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down rabbit for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Lucien Clergue – obituary

Lucien Clergue was a photographer known for his friendship with Picasso and his images of bullfighting and nudes

Lucien Clergue with his first camera at Montmajour Abbey in Arles in 2004

Lucien Clergue with his first camera at Montmajour Abbey in Arles in 2004 Photo: AFP

6:41PM GMT 18 Nov 2014

Comments

Lucien Clergue, who has died aged 80, was a French photographer whose friendship with Pablo Picasso helped forge a passion for bulls in the ring and women on the beach.

A short, sharply dressed man with a clipped beard, Clergue was a true Mediterranean. He lived in the Arles area for most of his life, photographing its bullfights, circuses and local beauties.

The last were the subject of a series of nudes taken in the dunes and surf along the coast of the Camargue. He treated a nude as if it were a landscape: his models were generally photographed in part, mostly with faces out of frame, and with their contours striped with shadows or, as he put it, “dressed in light”. They often appeared more like Henry Moore’s amorphous sculptures than real women.

However, Clergue’s impact on the photographic community was perhaps more pronounced away from the lens. In 1968 he co-founded the Rencontres d’Arles festival in his home town, now one of the most important dates in the photography calendar; 96,000 people visited in 2013.

Enamoured by the legacy of Vincent van Gogh, who had lived with Paul Gauguin in the city during the late 19th century, Clergue acknowledged that the artist’s “presence was all over Arles, his shadow is in every corner”. Picasso was his other great inspiration. The pair met in 1953 outside the city’s bull-ring, where Clergue had photographed the toreadors and baying crowds.

The teenage photographer accosted Picasso, then 52, and showed him his photographs.

“I don’t know what gave him the feeling that I had something,” recalled Clergue, “but he said: ‘I’d like to see more.’ ” The pair collaborated on several projects and their friendship lasted until Picasso’s death in 1973. “Clergue’s photographs are from God’s own sketchbooks,” declared Picasso.

Lucien Clergue was born in Arles on August 14 1934. His parents divorced when he was seven, and the young Lucien worked at his mother’s grocery shop, running deliveries to the neighbourhood brothels. “It was my first impression with not exactly nudity but of the femininity of women in their beauty and their charm,” he recalled.

^{Portrait of Pablo Picasso taken by Lucien Clergue (AFP)}

At 18 he returned as a customer. “I went to the prostitutes myself. It was like a celebration. I remember always climbing this little staircase and closing the window in the boudoir, thinking van Gogh did the same thing, imagining him maybe looking out at the river and saying to himself: ‘Maybe I should do a painting from here.’ ”

Clergue’s first enthusiasm was for music, which remained a pivotal influence. “When I heard a J S Bach piece for violin, Ciaccona, I was 14, and I entered into another world,” he said. “I was studying violin but because I had no money I turned to photography.” At 19 he encountered Picasso, at that time living close by in Vallauris, and his career took off. Picasso introduced him to Jean Cocteau and Max Ernst and designed a cover and poster for his first book.

Clergue’s work embraced esoteric Provençal characters, including the Saltimbanques, the region’s travelling acrobats and harlequins. He also worked on a series of photographs of Gipsies that helped to bring the flamenco guitarist Manitas de Plata to a larger audience. But mostly he was known for his nudes, which drew heavily on the work of the American photographer Edward Weston. “Really, you couldn’t get any better than that,” said Clergue. “I decided I will do the nude like him.” The lack of heads in his photographs evolved from the fact that his earliest models were often his friends and requested anonymity.

^{Lucien Clergue in Paris in 1981 (AFP)}

In 1959 the photographer and curator Edward Steichen bought 10 of Clergue’s prints for MoMA’s permanent collection. Two years later he included a selection of Clergue’s pictures in his exhibition “Diogenes with a Camera”, at the New York museum, alongside the work of Bill Brandt.

Founding Rencontres d’Arles with the writer Michel Tournier placed Clergue fully at the heart of the international photographic community. The festival became renowned for introducing new photographers and staging unusual exhibitions in the city’s historic sites, such as medieval chapels or 19th-century industrial buildings.

Clergue was made a knight of the Légion d’honneur in 2003 and elected a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts three years later. He was chairman of the academy for 2013.

He published numerous books, including Picasso My Friend (1993), a memoir of his time with Pablo. Other volumes concentrated on his favourite themes: erotica (Practical Nude Photography, 2003) and bullfighting (Tauromachies, 1991). A retrospective, Lucien Clergue: Poésie Photographique – Fifty Years of Masterworks, was published in 2003.

Provence remained his muse. Breakfasting on “fruits, cookies and tea of thyme”, he continued to roam the area until late in life, photographing its beauty and drama. “Mediterranean countries are the beginning of civilisations,” he said earlier this year. “So my roots are full of these civilisations of the South, the theatre in particular, the tragedy, and also the sculptures of women naked. We have in Arles the Venus of Arles. She is my favourite.”

Lucien Clergue’s wife Yolande, the founder of the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, survives him with their two daughters.

Lucien Clergue, born August 14 1934, died November 15 2014

Guardian:

Nigel Walker’s lectures were considered Oxford’s best

As an Oxford student in the 1960s, I thought the lectures by Nigel Walker the best in the university. He was the first lecturer to ask the audience to rate his performance. After analysing the questionnaires, he announced that our only complaint was the screech his chalk made on the blackboard. He promised to go for further training.

Intermingling identities

Timothy Garton Ash provides a valuable and timely exposition of victims becoming victimisers in Poland as well as in Israel (A little miracle lightens Warsaw, 7 November). I observed this myself as a (Christian) visitor in Poland six years ago. But he could advance the “better place in the relations between … Poles and Jews” if in his terminology he were to avoid the grievous disjunction of mutually exclusive terms Poles and Jews, and so acknowledge their “intermingling”. Many Jews are Poles, just as many can now be called “Germans”.

Garton Ash himself recognises that 20,000 Israelis have taken Polish citizenship. All the Polish Jews are Poles, which is surely the message of that Yiddish “spine-tingling refrain” he will never forget: Mir zaynen do! “We are here!”
Ren Kempthorne
Nelson, New Zealand

Beware repressive laws

As a Canadian, I was most concerned to read your editorial Canada under attack (31 October). It appears to many of us that you have been reading our conservative press, who echo our official Canadian government stance, which is slanted in order to give the Canadian Security Intelligence Service greater powers over our democratic freedoms. This approach is nothing short of hysteria and we would certainly not call it a proper response.

The young men who committed these terrible acts felt they had no place in Canadian society, and targeted official representatives of our society. Canadian Muslim leaders have officially condemned their actions.

We do appreciate your conclusion that many (most?) of us, including all three opposition leaders, wish our political leadership would pause before drafting legislation which limits civil liberties in the name of national security, as this seems to be totally unnecessary.
Christine Johnston
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

Advancing a western agenda

Federica Mogherini, the EU’s new foreign policy chief (7 November), relishes her “firefighter’s role” too much. By denouncing the elections in Donetsk and Luhansk last month and declaring her commitment to the territorial integrity of Ukraine, she is presenting a recipe for disaster.

The borders of Ukraine are not inviolable and a European-oriented Ukraine without the eastern oblasts (and Crimea) is very possible and maybe perhaps even desirable.

Such intransigence encouraged by her declarations sends the new government in Ukraine a message that cannot lead to anything but more unrest and violence. Negotiations with the separatist groups, who represent real concerns of the Russian-speaking majorities in eastern Ukraine, need to be undertaken based on the principle of national self-determination.

Mogherini is using Ukraine to advance a western agenda aimed at the so-called imperialist Putin, meanwhile ignoring the very real problems of the Ukrainian people. The EU should be encouraging peaceful dialogue between the conflicting parties with the goal of a settlement of outstanding issues, even it means boundary changes.
Robert Milan
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Population pressures

Three interlinked pieces in your 7 November issue brought home the destructive realities of the Anthropocene. Lost Mayan civilisations are being uncovered in Campeche’s forests (Rescued from the jungle); we will have a human population of over 10.4 billion by 2100 (Not even WW3 will save us); and we are now having to irrigate our crops with saline water (Spud poised to launch revolution).

Mayan civilisation collapsed because population growth imposed the need for greater harvests, which in turn led to unsustainably intensive agriculture, soil degradation, falling yields and starvation. Mankind had succeeded in destroying its own habitat.

But the Maya are not the only example; many other civilisations have foundered on the rocks of soil destruction and loss due to poor agricultural practices and failed land husbandry. And we still continue to batter the natural resources of our poor planet.

Human-induced climate change is now causing sea level rises that are contaminating fresh water supplies and obliging us to adapt our crops to the new saline reality. Meanwhile, there seems to be no end in sight as the global population continues to burgeon, thus putting intolerable pressure on the planet’s few remaining resources.

Was Private Frazer of Dad’s Army fame right to observe, whenever possible, that we’re all doomed?
Brian Sims
Bedford, UK

We’re not really that free

For Natalie Nougayrède, the conflict between east and west is between them and us (Two angry men harangue the west, 7 November): “They concentrate power, repress opposition, restrict media freedom, control the internet and have cowed the judiciary.” But Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan must see us as concentrating wealth among a few bloated billionaires who are empowered to control almost every aspect of our lives, who then tell us through the media they own that we’re leading a free and fortunate life, and that our system generously rewards the daring few.

As for the internet, I thought Edward Snowden demonstrated how free that is.
Chris Rezel
Rosebery, Northern Territory, Australia

Flag debate is a distraction

New Zealand’s referendum on a new flag is a distraction from initiatives that will render our national identity meaningless (World roundup, 7 November). The secretly negotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal is a cynical power grab by multinational companies that will prevent local responses to climate change, and enforce use of toxic chemicals and GM crops.

Destroying our brand will suit competitors well, yet there is extraordinary local media acquiescence to the TPP agenda. Our newspapers need to give more space to nationwide protests against the TPP than the Guardian Weekly gave to the false flag debate.
Jon Carapiet
Auckland, New Zealand

Insurgency and resistance

While I enjoyed George Monbiot’s article on the corruption of language for political ends (31 October), he missed the most gratuitous and damaging example. When one country invades another and its citizens fight back, they are properly called “the resistance”, but when we invaded Iraq and some Iraqis fought back (as they were perfectly entitled to do under any conceivable international law), they somehow became “the insurgency”.

An insurgent is defined as one who surges in, so since the US army surged into Iraq, the word is properly applied to them. I am reminded that during the second world war the Germans referred to the French resistance as “terrorists”.
Graham Andrews
Spokane, Washington, US

• I would like to give my appreciation and commend George Monbiot for his most excellent article. It was terrific: a pleasure to read and digest.
Allan Cameron
Christchurch, New Zealand

Briefly

• There were recognisable aspects to the story about a prime minister who “divides and rules”, who is “a very polarising person”, and who “needs enemies and is always creating them” (Hollowing out democracy via ‘endless cynicism’, 7 November). So are accounts that “all decisions are made by him”, a prime minister for whom “control is the key word” and who uses “advertising money to intimidate” critics. Hungary and Canada have a lot in common.
André Carrel
Terrace, British Columbia, Canada

• If the figures of the CIA World Factbook are to be believed, then the “significant oil strike” of 50m barrels found in the North Sea (31 October) should satisfy the UK’s million-barrel-a-day oil habit for about a month and a half. Surely this underlines the need for us to ease ourselves off our addiction to fossil fuels sooner rather than later.
Michael Dees
São Paulo, Brazil

• Commemorations of the first world war have already started with Remembrance Day here in Australia (7 November). In spite of the pain and sorrows wars have caused, we still engage in them.

But thanks to the designer of the display of poppies around the Tower of London called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, we still remain cognisant to the beauty of nature and life. Many thanks for the article and photograph.
Rosemary Kornfeld
Mittagong, NSW, Australia

Please send letters to
weekly.letters@theguardian.com

Joseph Boughey

19.10 GMT

Sonia Rolt was one of the most significant early members of the Inland Waterways Association (IWA), and part of its ruling council between 1948 and 1951. She was the only council member who was actually employed in carrying by boat, as opposed to enthusiasts who organised small carrying businesses, or others like Tom Rolt, who were very knowledgable in varied manners.

She understood not only the problems of many boatpeople but also that trade possibilities were confined to limited routes. This did not meet with the approval of Robert Aickman, who chaired the IWA and succeeded in forcing out members who did not agree to campaign for the revival of carrying on all inland waterways. Sonia, along with Tom, found this intolerable and chose to be expelled.

After Tom’s early death, Sonia’s efforts ensured that his works mostly remained in print, and she brought his final volume of autobiography, renamed Landscapes With Figures, to publication in 1992. Without her influence, the extensive commemorations of Tom’s centenary in 2010 would not have come about.

British Prime Minister David Cameron David Cameron has warned that ‘red lights are flashing on the world economy’. Has he finally been persuaded that the Labour government wasn’t to blame for the crash?’ asks Ken Vines. Photo: Alain Jocard/AFP/Getty

David Cameron’s article (Red lights are flashing on the world economy, 17 November) starts: “Six years on from the financial crash that brought the world to its knees … ” I don’t normally welcome people of Cameron’s persuasion writing for the Guardian but, if it has finally persuaded him that the Labour government wasn’t to blame for the crash, perhaps readers can look forward to articles indicating Damascene conversions from George Osborne, Danny Alexander et al, who rarely miss an opportunity to prattle on about the “mess that Labour left us”.
Ken Vines
Yelverton, Devon

• So David Cameron is warning about the world economy. One hopes he and Osborne will not use this as an excuse for insufficient progress on paying down the deficit despite all the suffering their austerity measures have caused. Just as the Brown government faced financial meltdown, Cameron’s government may now face events beyond its control: they expected Labour to apologise for events not of its making so I am hopeful the Conservatives will be apologising for continued problems. I’m also hoping that they may learn from Labour that one does not just talk about being all in this together, but actually takes action to reduce inequality.

I am not a Labour supporter but have been amazed at how the party has been prepared to let the Conservatives blame it for the economic crisis, which was international and which it handled better than most other governments. If there was any blame specific to the UK it goes back to Margaret Thatcher and her deregulation of the banks and other financial institutions.
Eunice Hinds
Bath

• At last, Dave Cameron has admitted that austerity is a failure. The austerity measures implemented across Europe and the globe have failed. The only economies that are succeeding globally are those that did not implement the “slash and burn” policies that we now see having a devastating effect. Austerity measures have devastated society and communities across the UK. Now a report by the London School of Economics and the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex has shown the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Austerity is not working, we need a change.
Duncan Anderson
Immingham, Lincolnshire

• David Cameron wants to put rocket boosters behind the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In doing this he is following the advice of the then governor of the Deutsche Bundesbank, who in 1998 praised governments for preferring “the permanent plebiscite of the global markets” to “the plebiscite of the ballot box”. We seem to be leaving democracy floundering. Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies wrote: “If we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the planned economic intervention of the state. We must demand that unrestrained capitalism give way to economic interventionism.” Perhaps the rocket boosters should be placed behind Cameron.
Alec Murdoch
Edinburgh

• When David Cameron warns of a second global crash, what he really means is that we haven’t fixed the causes of the first one. The banks are still playing double or quits with international financial flows. The wealthy are still removing vast sums from national economies and from consumer markets. Bleeding chunks of the general population have no viable work environment. Consumption is still dependent on low-wage, outsourced exploitation. TTIP demonstrates Cameron is as gullible as was Gordon Brown. Our political leaders sit around larger and larger tables, making promises they have no idea how to keep. In a era of mass communication, established politicians get so much information every day they cannot get their heads around any of it: so ideology becomes a life raft. Technology is making “monkey see, monkey do” of all of us.
Martin London
Henllan, Denbighshire

• It’s a bit rich that Cameron is talking about red lights flashing over the economy when world experts have been warning for at least the last four years that the policies of his chancellor and those of the same political persuasion as our PM throughout the world would lead to just this.
Peter Collins
Bromley, Kent

• The warning lights that have flashed at David Cameron suggest he is playing Hilaire Belloc’s 1907 strategy from Cautionary Tales for Children: “Always keep a hold of Nurse, / For fear of meeting something worse”. It worked for Margaret Thatcher but is the present PM such good casting?
Iain Mackintosh
London

• No wonder the red lights are flashing. If we go into economic meltdown, how will all those hedge funds be able to finance his election campaign?
Brian Morris
Wakefield

NHS hts ospital ward reception ‘In terms of reducing adult deaths and money spent, the evidence is that the NHS is one of the most effective and efficient services in the world.’ Photograph: Pulse/PA

Cutting the NHS staff bill (Report, 13 November) ignores a truth that successive health ministers prefer not to tell. Compared to the other 20 main developed nations, the UK is joint bottom of the league table on GDP health expenditure. Over past 30 years only Ireland, Japan and Spain have on average spent as little. All developed nations face the same demographic pressures, but most spend proportionately more on health than we do. If the public understood that we get our NHS relatively cheaply, most would accept 2p on income tax. In terms of reducing adult deaths and money spent, the evidence is that the NHS is one of the most effective and efficient services in the world. We can’t go on demanding more from a frontline staff facing continued pay restraint without providing more resources across the system.
Professor Colin Pritchard
University of Bournemouth

• I am a consultant health economist and recently found myself working on the better care fund for a clinical commissioning group. I was not remotely surprised by the National Audit Office assessment (£1bn NHS savings plan is unrealistic, 11 November). The savings associated with different components of the scheme were simply being made up. This is a part of a culture in the NHS where it is acceptable to tell NHS England you are going to make savings, even though you do not expect to do so. Challenging the evidence is too much like negative thinking, while going along with the game at least buys time for the NHS. But there was no clear evidence to support the figures I saw. In one case, there might have been some savings to the NHS, but not to the public sector. Part of a hospital was to be redesignated as a residential building so long-term patients would be able to live on housing benefit and other social security payments.
Peter West
London

• The Quality Care Commission’s findings on Colchester hospital (Report, 15 November) are very worrying, but we should also put some of the spotlight on the North East Essex clinical commissioning group. This is the group of GPs set up to commission care for their patients. Surely the CCG which set up multimillion-pound contracts with the Colchester hospital has a responsibility to monitor those contracts and the quality of care? A good indication maybe that the Governments expensive NHS reforms are not working.
Peter John Boileau
Birmingham

Man waving Islamic State flag in Syria A man waves an Islamic State flag in Syria. ‘The government’s latest proposals for dealing with people suspected of going to fight in Syria would extend punishment without trial.’ Photograph: Reuters

The government’s latest proposals for dealing with people suspected of going to fight in Syria (Jihadis face ban from Britain, 14 November) would extend punishment without trial, typical of “anti-terror” powers since the Terrorism Act 2000. A senior police officer could withdraw a passport simply under reasonable suspicion that the person might carry out terrorist activity abroad. As preconditions for citizens returning to the UK, the home secretary could require them to accept prosecution and restrictions on their movement. They would surrender their right to challenge accusations from the state and it would avoid any requirement for evidence that could be tested in a criminal trial. These powers easily substitute racist stereotyping for evidence.

Suspects would face imprisonment or curfew for years, thus plausibly deterring their return home. These powers would offer no way out for those who change their minds. Some British fighters in Syria are horrified and disillusioned about what they have got involved in. They want to return home but fear jail.

The underlying statutory basis is as dangerous as ever. Terrorism encompasses any actions which may pose the threat of “serious damage to property”, in ways “designed to influence the government” for a political cause anywhere in the world. This would include any support for political movements disliked by the UK’s allies. As became clear in the David Miranda case, “suspects” include anyone exposing UK state actions which threaten justice and democracy. The new proposed powers would not protect us from violent attack. They threaten democratic rights, bringing us even closer to a police state.
Jenny Jones Green party, Liz Davies Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, Arzu Merali Islamic Human Rights Commission, Les Levidow Campaign Against Criminalising Communities

We have joined nearly 300 groups from across Europe to serve a lawsuit against the European commission at the European court of justice, challenging the commission’s rejection of our right to have a formal petition – a European Citizens’ Initiative – on the controversial EU-US trade deal known as the TTIP, the Transatlantic Trade & Investment Partnership). The TTIP threatens public services, environmental and food protection, workers’ rights and online privacy. The commission refused to sanction even the collection of signatures, arguing that an ECI can only be directed at a legal act being introduced and not work against one that is being negotiated. Our legal challenge disputes this reading of EU legislation. Given that ECIs were conceived as a method of bringing the work of the EU closer to the people of Europe, this decision makes a mockery of their original intent. We call once more for the TTIP to be stopped, for transparency in trade negotiations and for the EU bureaucracy to start listening to its citizens.
Nick Dearden Director, World Development Movement
Christine Blower General secretary, NUT
John Hilary Director, War on Want
Mark Serwotka General secretary, PCS
Paul Kenny General secretary, GMB
Len McCluskey General secretary, Unite
Ron Singer People’s NHS
Diarmaid McDonald Advocacy manager, Stopaids
Blanche Jones Campaigns director, 38 Degrees
Saoirse Fitzpatrick Restless Development
Hannah Lownsbrough Sum of Us

06.02 GMT

Your article on Alan Turing (Turings triumph, 15 November, page 7) mentions Lorenz and Colossus. The Axis developed a more powerful machine, Lorenz, to replace Enigma. Although the Lorenz code was broken at Bletchley by Bill Tutte, the solution was so complicated that it took days to translate a message, by which time the message was out of date. Bletchley attempted to construct a machine to translate a Lorenz message more quickly, but failed to do so. A General Post Office engineer, Tommy Flowers,, seconded to Bletchley from the Post Office Research labs at Dollis Hill, volunteered to construct a machine but was rebuffed by those in charge at Bletchley. Flowers, on his own, then designed and had built a machine to translate Lorenz messages at the Post Office labs at Dollis Hill. Flowers paid for many of the parts out of his own money and Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, was built at Dollis Hill. When Colossus, about the size of a room, was transported to Bletchley they were amazed to find that it could translate messages in minutes rather than days. Bletchley then commissioned Flowers to build other versions.

Colossus did extraordinary valuable work in translating Axis messages until the end of the war. It was regarded as so secret that Flowers was not allowed to mention its existence, and when the war ended could not get funding to proceed further – he had no proof that he had developed anything. For his pains, Flowers was given £1,000 in (part) recompense for his outlay in building Colossus, which he divided among his team at Dollis Hill. And that was all. There is a street named Flowers Close in NW2 and a Tommy Flowers building in Tower Hamlets, but I doubt that there are many who connect these with the man who designed and built the world’s first electronic programmable computer and who helped to shorten the second world war. So why no mention of Tommy Flowers?
Michael H Abraham
London

• As much as Benedict Cumberbatch gives an award-winning performance as Alan Turing in The Imitation Game (Reviews, G2, 14 November), again history and fact are left wanting. No mention of the genius of Tommy Flowers, who built the world’s first programmable computer, Colossus (named Christopher in the film). No mention of the Lorenz cipher, which was more complicated than Enigma. And nothing about HMS Bulldog, which by forcing U-110 to the surface and capturing the code books enabled the Enigma to be deciphered quickly. Films such as Enigma and U-571 (where the Americans capture the Enigma machine before they actually entered the war) have been made about the Bletchley Park codebreakers, but none do all these geniuses and unsung heroes justice. It’s time to put the record straight.
Alan Quinn
Manchester

‘Fantastic achievement’ … The 67P comet as seen from the Philae lander. Photograph: ESA/Getty

Landing Philae on Comet 67P from the Rosetta probe is a fantastic achievement (One giant heartstopper, 14 November). A tremendous scientific experiment based on wonderful engineering. Engineering is the turning of a dream into a reality. So please give credit where credit is due – to the engineers. The success of the science is yet to be determined, depending on what we find out about the comet. Engineering is not the handmaiden of physics any more than medicine is of biology – all are of equal importance to our futures.
Emeritus professor David Blockley, Professor Stuart Burgess, Professor Paul Weaver, University of Bristol

• Surely the comet is too small to be measured in units of Wales; Olympic-sized swimming pools or football pitches would be more appropriate.
John Bailey
St Albans, Hertfordshire

• Having noticed that the successful All Blacks team had players called Bird and Thrush (not to mention McCaw), I think England needs to get the cassowary (Birdwatch, 17 November) to take up UK nationality. This bird is able to kill a human being, and should get across the gain line. Failing that, has Angela Eagle got any relations who could play rugby?
John Richards
Oxford

• I can’t be the only one to smile at the news that workers from Hungary are making us something to eat (Report, 15 November).
Andy Harris
Brough, East Yorkshire

• Like John Dobson (Letters, 15 November) a few years ago I made two batches of sloe gin using pricked and unpricked sloes. While the pricked sloes made a darker drink, the batch made from unpricked ones had the better flavour.
Dave Headey
Faringdon, Oxfordshire

• I’m not surprised Alan Pearson’s recently picked blackberries tasted “a little winey” (Letters, 17 November). In Cornwall we are warned not to eat blackberries picked after Summercourt fair (25 September) as the devil has pissed on them.
Martin Courts
Newquay, Cornwall

Independent:

David Cameron is lying by omission when he says that “the NHS will remain free at the point of use” even if the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) goes ahead. The fact that the services behind the point of use will have been privatised courtesy of TTIP seems to bother him not one jot.

Can we be clear about what TTIP represents? Yes, it includes legislation to ensure the inability to renationalise any privatised industry – some people may shrug their shoulders at that. Far more sinister though is the right of companies to sue governments who bring in legislation which may damage those companies’ interests.

Far-fetched? It’s happening in South America right now, where Philip Morris is threatening to sue Uruguay if the country enacts legislation which the company feels will damage its profits.

Make no mistake, Cameron, in trying to push TTIP through, is representing vested interests and not mine or yours. It is less a piece of legislation, more a full assault on democracy. Get involved, people, before it’s too late!

Alan Gent

Cheadle, Cheshire

Cameron may indeed wish to “fire rocket boosters under TTIP” (report, 17 November) but it’s looking increasingly as if the controversial EU-USA trade deal will be a damp squib.

On Monday, the French government announced that it wouldn’t be signing the deal if it included the mechanism that would allow corporations to sue member states in secret courts for introducing legislation to protect public services, the environment or labour rights. Across Europe, almost a million people have signed a petition calling for the deal to be scrapped.

While Cameron claims that the deal could enhance food and environmental standards, not everyone in his party agrees with him. Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith has said he finds it “hard to imagine that the process will involve any key standards going up. On the contrary, I suspect that we will see a spiral downwards.”

The £10bn benefit that Cameron claims TTIP will bring to the economy is based on research that has been widely criticised.

A more recent peer-reviewed study from Tufts University has suggested that the deal could bring about the loss of more than half a million jobs across Europe on top of lower wage growth and exports.

Polly Jones

Head of Campaigns, World Development Movement, London SW9

This university is brought to you by…

It can only be a matter of time before the looming debt crisis in higher education leads to the financial meltdown of a number of universities (“Tuition fees: three quarters of students won’t be able to pay off their debt”, 18 November).

Fortunately, vested interests exist in every university town which depend for their very survival on the fresh inflow of thousands of new students each September. The prospect of seeing their milch cows going to the wall will compel property magnates to dig deep into their pockets to rescue the local citadel of learning.

This magnanimity is bound to involve considerable renaming and rebranding. So look out for the emergence of the Buy-To-Let Business School, the Property-R-Us Academy, and the University of Platonic Landlord Studies.

Ivor Morgan

Lincoln

It’s lucky men don’t have any feelings

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (17 November) comments on Julien Blanc, an American who “promises to teach men to pull, manipulate and (allegedly) ravage women at will”. She writes: “An internet petition has gathered more than 140,000 signatures calling for this ban [on allowing him into Britain]. I can’t be absolutely sure of this but I expect most of those who have signed up are females.”

In a few minutes of watching the signatures scroll by, I saw that about one third of them were male names. While two-thirds does count as “most” it’s a long way from the 95 per cent-ish her column seemed to imply she expected. It would probably have been easy for you to get the signature list and check the first 1,000 or so for a better figure, rather than going along with her assertion that “men are too scared to do anything about it”.

Oh, well. It’s not as if her misandry can hurt my feelings. As everyone knows, men don’t have feelings.

Chris Newman,

Boroughbridge, North Yorkshire

It is a shame when respected feminists such as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown come out with generalised rallying calls to men. It shows how little acknowledgment there is for the men who are actively trying to embody gender equality and about the huge movement of women and men who are bringing into existence the most level ground between the sexes in modern history.

In my world, both young men and women are appalled by and condemn the actions of these “sexual villains” such as Julien Blanc and Ched Evans.

The point of gender equality is that we rally together, not separately. We don’t need to have a male only “not in our name” parade; we need to have a human “not in our name” parade.

Henry Gibbs

London SW4

Deciding not to vote is a democratic right

The proposals by a group of MPs to address the issue of voter turnout (report, 14 November) make depressing reading. They devalue voting. What would the chartists and suffragettes, not to mention those living in less benign regimes, make of the suggestion that the civic ritual of going to the polling station is too much for people?

The idea that the answer is to make voting physically easier has already been tried with postal voting on demand. This has led to fraud and corruption, and online voting would only worsen the debasement of democracy. People will vote if they feel inspired and perceive the options would make a big difference to their lives. How do the MPs account for the high turnout in the Scottish referendum?

As for compulsory voting, this really does look like saying we have the wrong electorate. Deciding not to vote is an expression of opinion and an important democratic right.

Rupert Fast,

Esher, Surrey

Plain words should apply to all killings

Laurence Williams (letter, 18 November) is surely right that plain words should be used to describe killings like those by the Isis jihadists: “murderers,” he suggests, or “terrorists”. What words, though, would he suggest to describe the US personnel who killed at least 40 wedding guests in a drone strike in Pakistan a couple of years ago? Are they not equally murderers or terrorists?

This is not a trivial point of nomenclature, but raises the much wider issue of the nature and status of killings organised by the state and, indeed, of warfare itself in the 21st century.

Dr Richard Carter

London SW15

Christmas comes early for some pensioners

Christmas comes but once a year, and once again the Department for Work and Pensions has today dropped £200 into my bank account to remind me to get started with the shopping.

If it really was a “winter fuel payment” they would hang on to their money until February or March. It must be the flimsiest cover story in the world for a feelgood benefit.

It’s untaxed and so worth more to higher-rate taxpayers: if you pay a marginal 40 per cent, then you would need to earn £334 to buy the £200 of Christmas gifts now being paid for you.

Mr Duncan Smith, thank ’ee, kind sir!

Trevor Pateman

Brighton

Ukip don’t want to stop NHS privatisation

Edward Thomas (letter, 15 November) thinks that the Ukip leaflet on what they would do in government shows that they are against privatisation of the NHS. It shows nothing of the kind.

I have read it, as I am sure has Ed Miliband. Nowhere in it does it say that Ukip would stop the privatisation currently being imposed by the Coalition Government.

Indeed, previous statements from Ukip suggest that they might be even more enthusiastic than the Conservatives.

David Bell

Standon, Hertfordshire

Why don’t fatal car crashes matter?

You are not alone in this, but why was the death of five people only worth a small paragraph on page 14 (17 November)?

Had this been a train crash the line would be closed for a week with massed ranks of media present and politicians calling for a public inquiry. Why don’t car crashes matter?

Rob Edwards

Harrogate, North Yorkshire

Don’t get shirty with scientist

Poor Matt Taylor, being pilloried for his colourful shirt. All the guy did was display a certain lack of gravitas, which seems highly appropriate for a slow-motion near-weightless landing on a comet. Perhaps all the criticism will just bounce off him.

Hilary Sternberg

Weymouth, Dorset

Times:

Is Libby Purves right or wrong about the need for older workers and army reservists over the age of 50?

Sir, It is a forlorn hope for David Cameron to pin his defence legacy on a pledge to increase the number of reservists by 10,000 to 30,000 within four years (Nov 14). The annual wastage rate in many reserve/territorial units has been running at 30 per cent for decades. To maintain establishment strengths, every unit has had to have an annual recruitment and retention plan. Furthermore, the best recruiters are reservists themselves, not some detached bureaucracy.

A further surprise is that the army, while seeking additional recruits, jettisoned the brand, the Territorial Army, which was known and understood by the public. As many territorials have served with loyalty and distinction in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places, there was little point in changing the name to the Army Reserve.

John Baron’s description of the reserve recruitment plan as a “shambles” seems to be right. Perhaps the government should review the whole undertaking rather than reinforcing failure.

In this time of uncertainty it might also be wise to remember the words of Winston Churchill: “I longed for more Regular troops with which to rebuild and expand the Army. Wars are not won by heroic militias.”

Roger Lowans
(Former TA Commanding Officer)
Bradley, N Yorks

Sir, I am surprised that the army is wasting so much money on recruiting. It has long been known that only two things bring in more recruits: rising unemployment and a new war. Thank goodness we have neither at the moment.

Tom Foulkes
Fleet, Hants

Sir, Nowhere are the services of the over-50s needed more than in the IT industry (“Every Office should have its own Dad’s Army”, Libby Purves, Nov 17). We sit in our allotment deckchairs with our newspapers, fuming about the latest IT disasters, knowing precisely what went wrong, why and how to fix them. Moreover, with the benefit of the education system of the 1960s we are eminently capable of documenting our views in plain words.

We can see, for example, how data processing activities are more and more being automated by consultancy organisations and offered, at great expense, as off-the-shelf customisable apps, only barely accessible through the internet. We can see how IT managers are selected from management school rather than from those on the shop floor with programming skills and computing acumen — the ones derided these days as nerds rather than software engineers. And we can see how computer users — games players, data-entry staff and users of those customisable database apps — mistakenly see themselves as computer experts.

David Jackson
Milton under Wychwood, Oxon

Sir, Libby Purves has seemingly missed the point about older workers. Nicholas Parsons might well give the youngsters at the Edinburgh Fringe a run for their money, but could he do it every day even if he wanted to? How many shopping trolleys could he push across a supermarket car park four or five days a week, a task many pensioners are obliged to do?

Those in the world of entertainment are so far removed from the grinding everyday world of work as to be totally irrelevant to the argument. Short stints of highly paid work which they enjoy doing bear no relation to low-paid and repetitive occupations which sap body and soul alike.

Andrew Harrison
Holmfirth, W Yorks

Sir, As always, Libby Purves talks sense in her article, arguing for the need for flexibility in the workplace when dealing with ageing. Yet we have a government which claims to have abolished default retirement ages, but which still forces all tribunal members (and others) to retire at 70, regardless of an individual’s capability and the value of their contribution.

Clive Fletcher-Wood
Redland, Bristol

Sir, With his many years of military experience, Major-General Scott (letter, Nov 17) might well be offered the Lance Corporal Jones role. But would any current banker be willing to fill the boots of Captain Mainwaring without the inducement of an eye-watering bonus?

Bryan Marshall
Enfield, Middx

A 16-mile tailback caused by a pothole on the M25 is good reason not to expand airport capacity in London

Sir, The Airport Commission (letter, Nov 14) need look no further for a reason why Gatwick should not expand given the 16-mile tailback that occurred after a large pothole appeared on the M25 (report, Nov 15). Why force even more people to endure the misery of this motorway to catch their flights? Encouraging even more passengers to travel from distant parts of the UK to Sussex cannot be sensible. More use should be made of regional airports, which are popular and create jobs where they are needed.

Alan Morriss

Pippingford Park, E Sussex

Sir, Much of the distress suffered by motorists trapped in the M25 incident could be alleviated if detachable barriers in the central reservation could be removed. Why are they not installed every mile or so?

Professor Bob Spence

Whyteleafe, Surrey

Sir, In France when there is a similar problem they divert traffic into a lane in the opposite direction, giving two lanes each way. Why can’t we do that?

Jac Martin

London SW18

My father always said he was the codebreaker sent to see Churchill because he was ‘the most easily spared’

Sir, It is a little harsh of Sir John Dermot Turing (Arts, Nov 14) to refer to the “gang of four” codebreakers at Bletchley Park as “consummate cowards” for sending their youngest member to London with the letter to Churchill asking for more resources.

As my father Stuart Milner-Barry had been born in 1906, he was hardly a put-upon youth at the time. He always said that he was sent because he was the most easily spared.

Alda Milner-Barry

London SW15

The Prince of Wales, and not New York’s Tuxedo Club, invented the dinner jacket

Sir, The DJ was not invented by New York’s Tuxedo Club in 1886 (letter, Nov 14). One of the club’s members, James Potter Brown, was introduced to it in England by its creator, the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII. The aim was to enable him to dispense with full evening dress while at sea during the first royal visit to India in 1875. There was no relaxation of other formalities. Sweating in temperatures of 100F, the party rose to toast Queen Victoria at the end of each meal while the band played the National Anthem.

Lord Lexden

House of Lords

The BBC looked in vain for a replacement for Dick Barton — until it found The Archers

Sir, Dick Barton was not replaced by The Archers (letter, Nov 17). There were two series in between: the adventures of Jackson the explorer, and a circus-based drama. Neither caught on. In the Midlands region the BBC was broadcasting an everyday story of country folk. In desperation Broadcasting House turned to this programme to fill the gap left by Dick Barton, as a temporary measure.

Professor Garel Rhys

Cardiff

The thinking behind sending your children to boarding school — and for having three offspring

Sir, Mike Dyer-Ball (letter, Nov 18), asked why parents bothered to have children they hardly ever saw. For years, I, my brother and sister saw our parents in Palestine and later Israel, only in the summer holidays. When I inquired about the thinking behind producing three children, a number I did not consider ideal, my mother said that at the time it was the thing to do in order to keep the Empire populated.

David Miller

Ilminster, Somerset

Telegraph:

Matt Taylor’s ‘sexist’ T-shirt; violence on television; method in the ‘Leafgate’ madness; human rights risks; and ceremonial applause

The future's so bright: from left; Morwenna Cory, Casey Brill, Sky Dennis, Chloe Yip, Samara Villion, Yemisi Osunsami and Sarah Purdy at the RIGB's L'Oreal Young Scientist Centre

Morwenna Cory, Casey Brill, Sky Dennis, Chloe Yip, Samara Villion, Yemisi Osunsami and Sarah Purdy at the RIGB’s L’Oreal Young Scientist Centre Photo: PAUL GROVER

7:00AM GMT 18 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – This week Matt Taylor, the Rosetta mission scientist, was criticised for wearing a T-shirt that many viewed as objectifying women. Boris Johnson was outraged at the reaction, but he should note that the bulk of the criticism came from individual scientists who were concerned that incidents of this kind may put off women and girls from entering science.

The physical sciences have a skewed gender ratio, largely because they are seen as “boys’ subjects”, but also because scientific establishments are often hostile work environments for women.

Dr Taylor appears sincere in his contrition and, more generally, has himself presented a welcome counterbalance to the unfortunate and inaccurate image of the dull, lab coat-clad scientist.

Dr Niall Deacon
St Albans, Hertfordshire

SIR – The reason for the shortage of engineers and scientists in Britain is that applied maths was replaced by pure maths at secondary level in the Seventies.

Applied maths uses maths to solve problems. It is essential to teaching and learning engineering and the sciences. Pure maths is the study of mathematical conundrums, with no practical application.

This short-sighted policy destroyed Britain’s engineering and scientific tradition and expertise and has produced two generations of mathematically illiterate adults. The skill shortages have had to be made up by migrant workers.

Applied maths should be reintroduced at secondary level and pure maths offered only at A-level and above.

Peter Wedderburn-Ogilvy
Froxfield, Hampshire

SIR – Margaret Stamper makes a valid point. In the late Sixties, when I was reading engineering at university, a lecturer expressed his opinion that most grammar school headmasters’ understanding of engineering was that each student, upon graduating, would receive a blue boiler suit and a chromium-plated oil can.

However, a far worse problem is the proliferation of people who describe themselves as engineers when they are nothing of the sort. The media and public’s exposure to this confuses people’s understanding of what it takes to become an engineer and what they actually do.

This often influences young people to avoid engineering, to the detriment of our nation.

John Farquhar
Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire

SIR – My brother, a professor of engineering, was attending an EU conference. His German counterpart, who was introduced as “Herr Doktor Professor”, asked him how his students referred to him. My brother’s reply was: “Bob.”

Claire McCombie
Woodbridge, Suffolk

Tackling abuse in sport

SIR – It is unfortunate to see discrimination appearing in the arena of sports again, after homophobic abuse was hurled at referee Nigel Owens during the England v New Zealand rugby match at Twickenham.

The Rugby Football Union (RFU) has an obligation to ensure that any such behaviour is swiftly dealt with. A person fearful of being subjected to abuse cannot enjoy equal opportunities, since it puts them off wanting to participate in the game. The RFU must send a clear message that abuse will not be tolerated at any level.

Michael Goitein
London EC2

Television violence

^{Jamie Dornan as killer Paul Spector in ‘The Fall’}

SIR – Michael Deacon’s defence of the BBC drama The Fall justifies the portrayal of sexual violence towards women by saying that it happens in today’s society, so it is acceptable to show it.

Dramas are for entertainment; they are not documentaries. We might also question to what extent the graphic depiction of these crimes stimulates and encourages those with the potential to commit them.

Tim Nixon
Braunton, Devon

Women’s right to choose

SIR – Why is it that some women cannot wait to attack other women over their child care decisions?

The issues are not simple. I do admire those women who stay at home with their children, but I would probably have had a breakdown. Neither path is easy, but as my wise health visitor said to me, “It is good that you know yourself”. We need to stop vilifying each other and work towards a society that can truly offer women a choice.

Jacky Maggs
Chelmsford, Essex

Thanking you kindly

SIR – Having been in the hospitality industry all of my working life, I can confirm that Bernard Powell is indeed in the minority in thanking hotel staff he had never seen.

That said, last week I received a letter from a client of my hotel, thanking “those we never see in the kitchen and those who make our beds”. Perhaps he had read Mr Powell’s letter?

Eric Marsh
Hathersage, Derbyshire

There is method in the ‘Leafgate’ madness

^{Pruning upper branches helps to maintain trees at a certain height (Photo: Alamy)}

SIR – Horticulture is being portrayed as both unskilled and frivolous as regards the pollarding of lime trees in New Palace Yard.

This is a necessary part of the trees’ maintenance in order to keep their shape and size. As a professional horticulturist it saddens me to see such a negative response to the craft.

Andrew Hellman
Tollesbury, Essex

SIR – While I have every sympathy for Annabel Honeybun, the poor “Westminster stripper” employed to remove the leaves, I’m not surprised if the choice of planting isn’t to everyone’s taste.

An avenue of mature lime trees may have a sonorous effect, but a pleached lime allée has long been regarded as a labour-intensive foreign import. Popularised in this country by Sir Walter Scott, it’s a rather grand garden feature that has gone in and out of fashion ever since.

Sadly, there’s no sign of oak outside the House of Commons. Keats’s “green-robed senators” have been relegated back to the forest, it seems.

Carol Lofthouse
London W4

Prison assaults

SIR – Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, promises longer sentences for those who are involved in assaults while in custody.

Surely this will only add to the problem of overcrowding. A far better approach would be to question why such violence occurs. It could be due to pure frustration at the long hours prisoners are locked up, or because courses are continually cut.

Prisoners should have the chance to learn new skills so that they leave with some sense of purpose. Lengthy confinement in a small space only results in boredom and resentment.

G H Crampton
Kingsbridge, Devon

Human rights risks

SIR – Failure to manage human rights issues in complex supply chains could pose significant risks to investors.

Consequently, we call on the Government to ensure that the Modern Slavery Bill, which is being debated this week, makes certain requirements of those who manage supply chains. They must provide evidence of a process for identifying human rights risks, highlight which parties have been involved in this assessment, and detail the actions taken to address those risks, alongside appropriate sanctions. Listed companies should consider the issue as part of their annual reports to shareholders.

Philip Howell
Chief Executive, Rathbone Brothers PLC

Colin Melvin
CEO, Hermes

Abigail Herron
Head of Responsible Investment Engagement, Aviva Investors

Katherine Garrett-Cox
CEO, Alliance Trust

Helen Cadbury
Chair, The Barrow Cadbury Trust

Lauren Compere
Managing Director, Boston Common Asset Management

Helena Viñes Fiesta
Head of Sustainability Research, BNP Paribas

Bennett Freeman
Senior VP for Sustainability Research and Policy, Calvert Investments

Julie Tanner
Assistant Director of Socially Responsible Investing, Christian Brothers Investment Services, Inc

Michael Quicke
Chief Executive, CCLA Investment Management

James Bevan
Chief Investment Officer, CBF Church of England Funds

Andrew Brown
Chief Executive, Church Commissioners for England

Bernadette Kenny
Chief Executive, Church of England Pensions Board

Neville White
Head of SRI Policy & Research, Ecclesiastical Investment Management

Anthony Marsden
Head of Governance & Responsible Investment, Henderson Global Investors

Nick Perks
Trust Secretary, The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust

Sandra Carlisle
Head of Responsible Investment, Newton Investment Management

David Adkins
Chief Investment Officer, The Pensions Trust

Niall O’Shea
Head of Responsible Investing, Royal London Asset Management

Seb Beloe
Partner and Head of Sustainability Research, WHEB Asset Management

Stephen Linder
Secretary, Worcester Diocesan Investment and Glebe Committee

Young linguists

^{A French lesson at Two Waters primary school in Hemel Hempstead}

SIR – I could not disagree more profoundly with Professor Krashen’s letter on language learning among older children and adults.

The greatest weight of evidence suggests that if children do not acquire a language in their early years, it is much more difficult to do so later on. The Department for Education has recently added credence to this by reducing the age for learning a foreign language in the national curriculum to seven (Key Stage 2). My concern is that even this is too late.

Unfortunately the current policy is already under threat, due to a lack of sufficiently well qualified language teachers at Key Stage 2.

Dr Carol Hayes
Staffordshire University

The Government must sort out its aid priorities

SIR – I agree wholeheartedly with William Pender that enshrining overseas aid in law is ludicrous. However, I disagree equally with his contention that such aid ought to be provided only when “it is in Britain’s vital interest”.

While many estimable British charities do a superb job across the globe, there are some situations – the latest being the dreadful Ebola crisis – where government resources are essential. I am proud that our government has sent experts from the British military to assist and I do not begrudge a penny of the taxpayers’ money involved. Indeed, I would be happy to see far more spent in this area.

What I do not want is any of my tax going in “aid” to countries whose governments spend billions on nuclear weapons and space programmes; and I certainly do not want a fixed percentage of Britain’s GDP spent on overseas aid purely for the sake of attaining an arbitrary target.

John Waine
Nuneaton, Warwickshire

SIR – Mr Pender does not go far enough.Instead of sending funds overseas, they should be made available to the industrial and commercial markets in Britain to construct and supply that which is needed by recipient countries, such as hospitals, housing, water treatment and roads.

Thus British workers, British taxpayers and the overseas countries will all be satisfied and the problems of the current system reduced considerably.

Howard Rigg
Ponteland, Northumberland

Jam-packed

SIR – Our health service is struggling, there’s a shortage of housing, the roads are congested, the electricity supply is just about coping, schools are full to bursting; and Greencore wants to import 300 people to make sandwiches.

Neil Matthews
Portishead, Somerset

The final curtain

SIR – I sympathise with Jon Petcher in his dislike of inappropriate clapping.

I recently attended a cremation service when, after the curtain had been drawn and Sinatra had entertained the assembled, there was an outburst of applause. I’m not sure whether it was for Ol’ Blue Eyes or in the hope that the recently departed would oblige with an encore. The curtain remained closed.

Hugh Batkin
Whixall, Shropshire

Irish Times:

Sir, – Your front-page report on November 17th quotes Enda Kenny as saying the protests are “not about water”. It has finally dawned on him. – Yours, etc,

J DOOLEY,

Dublin 14.

Sir, – Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, a leading suffragette, was once arrested for throwing rocks at the windows of Dublin Castle. I wonder if this great lady were alive today, would she too be labelled a “thug” or a “sinister element”? – Yours, etc,

PATRICIA DUNNE,

Listowel, Co Kerry.

Sir, – I understand people’s anger with how outrageous the water charges are, but realistically, if the Government doesn’t tax our water, it will tax something else. The Government will make money from any taxable excuse it can find. If the water protests succeed, this will only lead to the Government imposing an identical amount of taxes on something else or an increased percentage on an already existing tax.

Although I agree with the other hundreds of thousands of anti-water activists, I would hate to witness an unnecessary outbreak of violence from both the Gardaand protesters due to a tax that inevitably will be imposed on the population, regardless of where it is targeted. – Yours, etc,

LUKE CAREY,

Dublin 6.

Sir, – The media storm caused by events in Jobstown and Coolock, and the now daily Government vilification of the parties and individuals involved in any public demonstrations, only serve to show how tame our public response has been to the incessant austerity programme since 2009.

As our Greek brethren have showed, sometimes physical public resistance gets results. Their social and political opposition to the troika’s privatisation drive, which operated at a different level to our water balloons and eggs, has been so fierce that the Greek government has already had to scale back its projected austerity proceeds from €50 billion by 2015 to a “mere” €11 billion by 2016.

While this doesn’t constitute a victory for their anti-austerity alliance, it does reveal the hostile social and political terrain there on which the troika and the Greek government have had to navigate.

In recent months, the grassroots campaign in Greece against the privatisation of the public water utilities, spearheaded by veteran activists from the 2011 Movement of the Squares, has also made major strides in rousing public opinion.

In late May, the movement was aided by a favourable court ruling that blocked the privatisation of the Athens water utility. This ruling marks the first significant victory in a collective public pushback that may yet set a precedent and cause the EU/IMF-enforced privatisation drive to come undone at the seams.

Too little, too late perhaps for us to undo our austerity measures. But the courage shown by the Greeks in the face of a more muscular government than ours shows what can be done. We must stick to our campaigns, keep them within the law, and keep the pressure incessant on our elected representatives and Government parties. – Yours, etc,

AUSTIN STACK,

Midleton, Co Cork.

Sir, – The recent water protests have been described by some politicians as acts of “bullying and intimidation”. Enda Kenny has said that what happened to Joan Burton “almost amounted to kidnapping” (“Treatment of Tánaiste was effectively ‘kidnapping’, says Kenny”, November 17th).

When Mr Kenny states that what happened to Joan Burton “almost amounted to kidnapping”, I do wonder if he thinks that implementing Fianna Fáil policies almost amounts to standing up to the bond holders, or if he thinks that a flat rate water tax without a corresponding decrease in general taxation to reflect the removal of water services from the central budget almost amounts to a usage-based charge.

Maybe he also believes that the way he runs the country through the Economic Management Council almost amounts to a democracy?

The politicians have ignored the will of the people for so long, they are in shock when the people say “enough is enough”.

These protests have been a long time coming and are the direct result of very bad political leadership for many, many years. – Yours, etc,

CIARAN SUDWAY,

Rathfarnham, Dublin 14.

Sir, – I wonder if a large march will make any difference? I cannot help thinking back to the marches in London when over one million citizens protested the invasion of Iraq – they had no effect. However, if the organisers of the water charges protest on December 10th got each marcher to sign a pledge promising to vote in the next general election and not to vote for either Coalition party, then we would be speaking the language politicians understand. Just a thought. – Yours, etc,

Dr JACK DOWNEY,

Limerick.

Sir, – The water protesters in Tallaght threw a water balloon at the Tánaiste. The Government responded by throwing the media at the water protesters. Game over. – Yours, etc,

DECLAN DOYLE,

Kilkenny.

Sir, – The Government seems surprised at the level of protesting at the water charges. I am extremely surprised that it has not happened sooner. – Yours, etc,

DAVID MURNANE,

Dunshaughlin, Co Meath.

Sir, – With Paul Murphy TD’s apparent blindness to Tánaiste Joan Burton being subjected to loutish behaviour in the guise of legitimate condemnation of water charges, perhaps it is time some of our public representatives were ushered into Leinster House and given some firm lessons in how Mahatma Gandhi defined peaceful protest. – Yours, etc,

MICHAEL CULLEN,

Sandycove,

Co Dublin.

Sir – Many international workers in the self-proclaimed “Silicon Valley of Europe” will be stunned that they are forced to join archaic and chaotic queues outside the Garda National Immigration Bureau on Burgh Quay in Dublin (“Our broken immigration system”, Editorial, November 18th).

The scenes belong to a difference era. It is time the Government used new technology and the knowledge base it is so fond of boasting about to introduce a modern, clear and fair immigration system.

It is clear from your editorial and the excellent coverage by your correspondent Carl O’Brien (“A day in the life at the State’s immigration offices”, November 17th) that the policy of forcing the equivalent of the population of Cork city through a single public office has failed. – Yours, etc,

JENNIFER MURPHY,

Ballyvolane,

Cork.

Sir, – The scenes outside the Garda National Immigration Bureau are just one symptom of the failure of successive Governments to honour commitments to bring forward comprehensive immigration legislation.

It is now over a decade since the first consultation took place on an Immigration Residency and Protection Bill; this has been followed by drafts and redrafts but no actual reforms. The Bill remains off the current Government’s list of promised legislation.

Given that there is little possibility of legal measures before the next election, the Immigrant Council of Ireland is attempting to secure changes which do not require laws.

We would like to see the use of new technology to introduce online processes for routine applications and extra resources for frontline staff at Burgh Quay to ease the queues immediately, and perhaps learning from the experiences of the reform of the Passport Office.

There are measures too which could make the system easier to navigate, such as including the introduction of clear rules and guidelines, where often there are none. Such a move would not only benefit applicants but also officials who are caught in a system that is overdependent on discretion.

It remains unacceptable that clients of the immigration system do not enjoy the benefits of the protection of the Office of the Ombudsman. We would like to see this extended or the some other independent appeals mechanism for those whose applications have been rejected.

Our proposals make sense for those on both sides of the counter at Burgh Quay. We continue to work with politicians from all sides to try and ensure the queues will quickly be confined to history. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN KILLORAN,

Integration and Support

Service Manager,

Immigrant Council

of Ireland,

Andrew Street,

Dublin 2.

Sir, – I read the comments of Dr James Reilly in relation to a tax credit scheme for childcare with absolute dismay (“Government officials rule out tax relief for childcare”, November 17th, 2014).

Dr Reilly and his departmental officials contend that any tax credit scheme for childcare may unfairly discriminate against stay-at-home mothers. Dr Reilly and his officials appear to live in a parallel universe where working parents do not face burdens and discrimination in relation to childcare costs. I am a working mother of one. I have a second child on the way. A full 39 per cent of my income goes to cover childcare costs. I have made the difficult decision to be a mother and work to progress my career. For this decision I am financially penalised and discriminated against. I would not face such discrimination if I stayed at home, which, incidentally, I cannot afford to do.

Can Dr Reilly and his officials please look at how they can tackle existing discrimination against working parents so that all parents face a genuine choice as to whether or not to work? – Yours, etc,

REBECCA KEATINGE,

Dublin 8.

Sir, – Carl O’Brien writes that Minister for Children Dr James Reilly is not prepared to introduce tax breaks for parents in relation to the cost of childcare, ruling it out as a measure which seems to favour parents at work over parents at home.

So what is the Minister and his fellow Ministers in Government ruling in to make quality childcare accessible and affordable in Ireland?

Parents can’t pay any more given that they are currently paying up to 35 per cent of their net income if they have two children in centre-based services, in comparison to their European counterparts who are paying on average 10-12 per cent. The solution that is staring this Government as well as previous governments and future governments in the face is real investment in childcare. We can’t have these great expectations for quality, affordable and accessible childcare without the investment to make it happen. According to the OECD, Ireland invests only 0.2 per cent of GDP annually in early childhood education services (when primary schools are excluded) compared to the OECD average of 0.7 per cent.

We know that quality childcare is worth the investment, but we are not willing to make the investment and Ireland is still bottom of the European league table for investing in the provision of early childhood education.

There is huge pressure on early childhood education services to provide a quality service and to meet strict standards, as it should be. But the investment needed is just not there and we must wake up and realise that only quality counts for children in their earliest years, and quality costs. – Yours, etc,

TERESA HEENEY,

Chief Executive,

Hainault House,

Belgard Square South,

Tallaght,

Dublin 24.

A chara, – James O’Reilly (November 17th) highlights the increasing casualisation of the teaching profession. While it is a common assumption that all teachers are in full-time, permanent, pensionable employment, the reality is quite different. OECD studies show that just 73 per cent of Irish second level teachers are in permanent positions (compared to 96 per cent in Denmark and 90 per cent in Norway). This is one of the lowest levels in Europe. The remaining 27 per cent survive on temporary contracts and are often scraping by on part-time hours. Younger teachers such as Mr O’Reilly are in an even more difficult position. OECD statistics show that the majority (52 per cent) of secondary teachers under 30 years of age are on non-permanent contracts of a year or less. They are being offered insecure part-time contracts rather than a dedicated career and risk becoming a highly qualified spailpín class. Far from a “job for life”, these teachers have no guarantee that their job will even exist in the next school year. The implications for teaching and learning in our classrooms are obvious. Schools will have to deal with a high turnover of teachers and the difficulties with continuity that this will inevitably cause. Highly qualified teachers will take their abilities elsewhere and new graduates will be less likely to consider teaching as a career. In this context, Mr O’Reilly’s call for the small number of retired teachers still in the system as substitutes to gracefully step aside and enjoy their retirements is a valid one.

Let a new generation of teachers gain the skills, experience and employment that they so badly need. – Is mise,

KEVIN P McCARTHY,

ASTI,

Killarney, Co Kerry.

Sir, – The culture of entitlement in this country goes from bad to worse. The “Right to Water Campaign” is correct – we are indeed entitled to water but if we want clean, treated water in our taps, someone has to pay for it. Our temperate climate ensures that there are streams and rivers in abundance into which they can dip their buckets if it’s “free water” they’re after. – Yours, etc,

MIKE QUIRKE,

Clonmel,

Co Tipperary.

Sir, – I congratulate the Government on their wise decision to simplify water charges by introducing a fixed payment per head, unrelated to the volume of water used.

To better communicate the radical nature of this policy change, perhaps a snappy new name for the charge is in order. Might I suggest “poll tax”? – Yours, etc,

TOM FARRELL,

Dublin 7.

Sir, – The likely new Irish water charges feel like one of those financial packages one is regularly warned about, designed to suck people in with a low entry charge but which are then subsequently increased once the person is hooked.

The fact remains that for Irish Water to pay its way, charges need to be closer to €500 per year and this is presumably where charges will go with time.

The real issue with Irish Water is that it has been set up with too high a cost base because politicians felt it was easier to hoodwink the ordinary person rather than face up to vested interests by ensuring Irish Water was efficient with a break-even point as low as possible.

In addition, Phil Hogan’s triumphant ride into the sunset on the back of a job supposedly well done is typical of the lack of accountability in our political classes. – Yours, etc,

MICHAEL HARTY,

Blackrock, Co Dublin.

Sir, – I seem to be living in a confused country. There is trouble on the streets over the water tax. Yet the TV tax is now exactly the same amount of money and if you complain about that people think you’re a little odd.

Plus there’s silence from both right and left on the merit of a State-owned, hugely subsidized and inefficient broadcaster charging people €160 for a service that’s far less important to life and health.

Whether you agree with the water tax or not, it’s hard to disagree that you’ll get a lot more value from the water tax than you do from the Tubridy-Finucane tax. – Yours, etc,

HUGH SHEEHY,

Dublin 4.

Sir, – After painstakingly explaining to us that fewer than 1 per cent of babies are born with ambiguous sexual identities, Ralph Hurley O’Dwyer (November 17th) then makes the extraordinary statement that “nature doesn’t draw a line between male and female”. Is 99 per cent clearly identifiable male or female children not clear enough for him? How too does he cope with the fact that those babies (all of them) are products of the contributions of genetic material from identifiably male and female persons?– Yours, etc,

MARIE MacSWEENEY,

Drogheda.

Sir,– Patrick Treacy ( November 5th) used the word “truth”, in relation to marriage, 13 times. If “truth demands” that same-sex couples are to choose a different word and different concept to “marriage”, should couples who choose not to have children, or couples who do not marry for love, or couples who do not share a bed, also choose an alternative word? Perhaps an alternative “truth” is that there are as many marriages as there are couples. Why should one such marriage not be same-sex? – Yours, etc,

EMMA FRIEL,

Leixlip, Co Kildare.

Irish Independent:

So if the thing is falling apart, why not consider a National Government? Preceded by the Members of Dail and Seanad meeting as a consultative Convention for a maximum of a fortnight? With a fixed deadline? All but the most essential ‘normal’ business suspended? Party blunderbusses outside door?

Such a plan will never happen. Or not until it is too late. Because it would break all the most fundamental and unalterable rules of conventional politics. The most important of which is: That rule which says that you do not deal with a crisis – however predictable – until the water is actually sloshing around the kitchen floor.

It may be that the current Government may come up with an interim plan for water which kicks that can down the road. Even as far as the election.

Another plan would have those members of the Government who see themselves participating in politics (and even governance) in the rest of this decade and beyond, arranging a sacrificial retirement junket for Enda and Joan. Well before Christmas.

But it may well be, for better or worse, that public opinion (and common-sense evaluation) have already gone beyond the point of no return. British Prime Minister David Cameron is hammering the economic doom-and-gloom button. But he is not alone. Either in Europe. Or worldwide. What ‘growth’? Many of our own commentators have expressed their unease at the Government’s determination to prematurely sign the death cert for ‘austerity’. Not a popular stance. Certainly not ‘populist’. But maybe the bitter truth.

We have had an electorally-slanted gambler’s budget. What if the grand national recovery strategy goes pear-shaped? How would any Government handle such a situation – politically?

When former Labour Party leader Eamon Gilmore (with a patriotism almost heroic) fell on his sword last May, he offered his heiress presumptive the opportunity to re-write the script for Labour. Nothing too ideological to frighten the old Blueshirts. Just a nuanced gesture towards the possibility that we live in a different world. A world in which there have to be global and European solutions. In which the lead-lined parish pump is not enough.

Maybe – as sometimes happens with toxic addictions – our political culture and those who sail in its decaying hulk have got to hit bottom before they can recover. But as the late great Spike Milligan, or some such iconic figure, may have said about his own mortality, I do not want to be there when it happens.

Over to you, O youth of Ireland! Make my last days happy days!

Maurice O’Connell, Tralee, Co Kerry

Irish Water

The hysteria over water charges is a sight to behold, with no attempt to examine how damaging the effects of giving in to this hysteria are.

The reality is that in November 2010 this country needed an €80bn bailout. That was a result of the country going bust due to the decisions of a small number of its most powerful citizens.

The scale of the problem thus created is highlighted by the fact that, as a consequence, this country needed to reduce its deficit from 32pc of national income to 3pc by 2014. Most of that plan has been implemented. The economy is growing. There are high levels of foreign investment.

Yet there is a group of people who want to use the water charges issue to reverse all that. They want to default on the bail-out. They want to leave the EU and they want to get rid of multinational investment.

The problem is aggravated by much of the Irish media aiding and abetting the hysteria over water charges.

A Leavy, Sutton, Dublin 13

I seem to be living in a confused country. There is – almost literally – war on the streets over the water tax. Yet the TV tax is now exactly the same amount of money and if you complain about that people think you’re a little odd. Plus there’s silence from both right and left on the merit of a state-owned, hugely subsidized and inefficient broadcaster charging people €160 for a service that’s far less important to life and health.

Whether you agree with the water tax or not, it’s hard to disagree that you’ll get a lot more value from the water tax than you do from the Tubridy-Finucane tax.

Hugh Sheehy, Sandymount, Dublin 4

Please, Roy, don’t go!

Don’t go, Roy.

May I – through your newspaper – appeal to Roy Keane not to leave Aston Villa before the end of the season. I have a nice bet to win a substantial five-figure sum that Mick McCarthy’s Ipswich (currently flying high) will win the Championship and Roy’s Aston Villa (inevitably hurtling towards the bottom of the Premier League) will be relegated.

My plea is because in 2008/09 I had a similar double (25/1) that Mick’s Wolves would win the Championship and Roy’s Sunderland would be relegated. Wolves duly won, and Sunderland languished at the bottom when Roy resigned. The little-known Ricky Sbragia took over, galvanised the Black Cats for a few matches and helped them to safety.

For God sake don’t leave again, Roy, or I’ll not get over it.

Brian Morris, Blackrock, Co Louth

Laws must be obeyed by all

“…what did she expect? Garlands, red carpets and flowers?” So said Ruth Coppinger, an ELECTED representative in response to the detaining for two hours of the deputy leader of this country, Tanaiste Joan Burton. I’m no supporter of Ms Burton or her acquiescent Labour Party, but I think any elected representative has to be subject to the law of the land. As far as I know, detaining someone against their will is a criminal offence.We seriously are in new territory where people can think they can take the law into their own hands and still claim moral righteousness is on their side.

There are plenty of laws – water charges being one of them – I don’t agree with, but my only options are to obey them or leave Dodge toute suite. The behaviour in Tallaght was a downright disgrace, pure and simple.

Frank Buckley, Tullamore, Co Offaly

Martin’s Labour leanings

We got an insight – if we needed it – into the mindset of Fianna Fail Leader Micheal Martin on the Saturday Night show with Brendan O’Connor.

He said he was slow to speak out about what was wrong in the Fianna Fail government when in power. He acknowledged that the tax cut was an issue he should have spoken out on; this for me was incredible – no mention that expenditure had got out of control, with Micheal the big spender in those years.

Expenditure had, of course, gone totally out of control in that period, ending with the special increases for all senior civil servants and politicians. Mr Martin and the establishment paid themselves some of the best salaries in the world. Mr Martin was Minister of the largest-spending departments in those years – ie health and education.

He should join the Labour Party because his philosophy is similar to that party – ie represent the interests of the public sector before all else and favour raising taxes before cutting expenditure.

John Murphy, Glasnevin, Dublin 9

A red letter day

Bravo, Mr Editor!

Monday’s letters page is back. A good decision. A good day’s work.

So, on behalf of myself and all my fellow contributors to the page – and all your readers – a warm and genuine heartfelt thank you!

Brian Mc Devitt, Glenties, Co Donegal

Irish Independent

20 November 2014 Recovery

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and Fluff seems to be quietly recovering.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down gammon for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Alan Smith – obituary

Alan Smith was a long-serving Tory stalwart who organised the ill-fated 1984 Conservative Party Conference in Brighton

Alan Smith

Alan Smith Photo: MONITOR PRESS FEATURES LIMITED

5:53PM GMT 19 Nov 2014

Comments

Alan Smith, who has died aged 93, was for nine years secretary of the Conservative National Union, the grassroots wing of the Party; his most public responsibility was organising party conferences – his last being the bomb-ravaged Brighton conference of 1984.

Smith died two days after the 30th anniversary of the bombing, several Tory activists having called to thank him again for the help he gave them in its wake.

The device on the sixth floor of the Grand Hotel exploded at 2.54 am on October 12, the final day of the conference. Collapsing the front of the building, it left five dead and many more injured; Margaret Thatcher had a narrow escape.

From their first-floor room Smith and his wife made for the fire exit with dozens of other senior Tories. As a former Army officer he could not help thinking that “had there been an IRA gunman following up the explosion, he would have had a field day”.

The conference was due to resume in six hours, but there was no talk of cancellation, Smith agreeing with Mrs Thatcher that it must be business as usual.

He was allowed back into the building to retrieve the conference files, plus his watch and ring left on the dressing table. Guests’ other belongings were retrieved several days later .

The party treasurer Sir Alistair McAlpine, Smith noted, “called in some business favours and got M&S opened for fresh clothing and hot drinks. Conference opened on time, and continued amid whispered enquiries about the Tebbits and John Wakeham.” Norman Tebbit, trapped beneath the rubble, was seriously injured and his wife Margaret left paralysed; Wakeham sustained serious injuries, but his wife was among the dead.

“If the applause was a little more fervent and prolonged than usual,” Smith wrote, “it was a reflection of the pride representatives felt in their party, which could shrug off this disaster and get on with the job.”

He had always planned to retire at the end of 1984, “but to finish my political career in such sadness over the death and injury of so many people I had worked with was a traumatic ending I had never expected.”

John Alan Smith was born in Cambridge on February 16 1921. From Cambridgeshire High School for Boys he joined the Cambridgeshire Regiment TA as war broke out. Becoming a colour sergeant in the Sherwood Foresters, he was commissioned into the Suffolk Regiment in 1942, then fought with 1st Bn Royal Irish Fusiliers in North Africa and Sicily. He later became a staff captain in GHQ 2nd Echelon and GSO 2 Intelligence Organisation, AFHQ Italy.

Demobilised as a major in 1946, he was appointed Conservative agent for South-West Norfolk , and later for Huntingdon. In 1968 he moved to London as deputy Central Office agent for the South East.

In 1975 Smith was appointed secretary of the National Union. His tasks included organising the party’s October conference, which then alternated between Brighton and Blackpool – though even before the bombing Smith had arranged for the 1986 event to be held in Bournemouth.

Organising the conference was a fine art. “Fitting ministers, party officers, executive committee members and staff into the 250 bedrooms we reserved was a continual problem for me,” Smith recalled. On the conference agenda, Smith was caught between the National Union, who wanted motions with bite, and the leadership which was set on blandness. Observing one of Smith’s conferences, a Soviet diplomat remarked: “This is just how we do things in the Kremlin. We don’t organise a conference so the delegates can tell us what to do.”

Under Smith’s auspices the party started charging constituency representatives to attend the conference, introduced commercial displays as a money-raiser, and deployed a mechanically operated speaker’s rostrum christened the “Maggie rose”. During these years the conference “fringe” expanded rapidly.

He was appointed OBE in 1984.

Alan Smith married Pamela Hoskin in 1945; she died earlier this year. Their son and two daughters survive him.

Alan Smith, born February 16 1921, died October 13 2014

Guardian:

Derek Robinson was an external adviser to South Africa’s presidential labour market commission. Photograph: Magdalen College, Oxford

Derek Robinson was proud of having been the first economic adviser to an employment minister, Barbara Castle, whom he idolised. At the dinner to mark Derek’s retirement from Magdalen College, Oxford, a seat was left vacant next to him. As the meal started, in walked the frail lady; the college had arranged for her to be chauffeured there.

In the 1990s, Derek was an external adviser to South Africa’s presidential labour market commission, of which I was the research director. In our report to the cabinet and then to Nelson Mandela, we advised that unless there was a strong redistributive strategy from the outset, growth would be sluggish, inequality would grow and labour absorption would be negligible. On the day we presented our findings, the minister of finance, guided by the IMF and the World Bank, proposed structural or supply-side initiatives, and our recommendations were not taken up. Inequality and mass unemployment grew, prompting more social tensions and violence. Derek shared our anger.

George Healy writes: Before the 1992 general election, Derek Robinson set up a meeting involving John Smith, the Labour leader, and Tony Blair, the shadow employment minister. A serious disagreement between Blair and Derek about the role of trade unions may well account for Derek never having been called on to advise the Blair administration.

Your piece (Why do we only worship ‘real’ works of art?, 14 November) refers briefly to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of infinitely reproducible art but doesn’t mention his worry that modern mass reproduction could eventually erode the historical authority of an artwork, jeopardising its traditional testimony as part of a time-tested canon. Indeed, he feared a wider decline of the value of human experience, as once passed between generations through careful storytelling. With today’s instant internet access to countless images and information, a serious debate over a related loss of historical memory and understanding is now growing at last. Great art is not immune to this erosion. It forms a key part of our social memory.
John Chowcat
Wakefield, West Yorkshire

• The piles of glossy art books on sale show that many people enjoy looking at good-quality reproductions of their favourite pictures, even though they would not find it acceptable for the same reproductions to be framed and hung in an art gallery for an exhibition. Many would, however, be happy to hang a good quality reproduction on their walls at home. This surely relates to how we value objects and what we think is worthy of our attention. The bottom line is that we place a much higher value on things that are rare or unique, provided they speak to us in some significant way.
John Gaunt
Lewes, East Sussex

• We shouldn’t be dismissive of reproductions of great works of art, which might make them more accessible to the public and are art in their own right. What we should dismiss are cheap imitations of iconic designs. The government is yet to implement legislation it passed 18 months ago and so it is legal to replicate iconic designs for the likes of furniture. These replicas are often made overseas but their manufacturers use the UK as a shop floor, conning consumers and devaluing the work of talented designers. A great replica of Michelangelo’s David has its own artistic merit. But there are many examples of duplications that are not art. They are only poor-quality forgeries. There should be a stigma attached to them.
Tony Ash
Managing director, Vitra

• I feel the capacity of even the most up-to-date techniques to reproduce original pieces has been exaggerated. I have a screen print by the late Terry Frost on my wall which uses 11 different colours very carefully selected and prepared by the artist. I also have a reproduction of the same work in the complete catalogue of his prints. Even with high-quality scanning and printing processes, the colours in the book are nowhere near the original and lack the brio so characteristic of his work.

Producing a run of 150 prints of an 11 screenprint image is not like pushing the print command and setting a laser printer going. All colour reproductions are reproduced by electronic processes that are essentially a compromise. Any other artistic medium could generate similar caveats.
Murray Marshall
West Grimstead, Wiltshire

• If virtually identical replicas of works of art can now be made, this points to a way of resolving the dispute over the Parthenon marbles: commission the best reproductions money can buy, install them in the British Museum, and send the originals back to Greece. It could be done the other way round; but it seems entirely understandable that the Greeks should want to restore the marbles’ links with a particular historic place and national history. The British Museum, on the other hand, could discharge its wider cultural mission just as well with replicas, as the V&A’s cast display (of objects left where they belong) so well demonstrates.
Hugh Corner
Twickenham, Middlesex

• I once heard Umberto Eco speaking on forgeries. It was about the time that psychiatrist Graziella Magherini was describing Stendhal syndrome. Eco described his own severe bout of it: “I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in Florence.” Stendhal syndrome is hyperkulturemia, manifest in the forms of rapid heartbeat, dizziness, swooning, confusion and even hallucinations when face-to-face with great works of art. Magherini was even providing treatment for it at the Santa Maria Nuova hospital. Given that there are several versions of Michelangelo’s David in Florence: most notably the original in the Accademia and the 20th-century copy outside the Palazzo Vecchio, I asked Eco which was responsible for the greatest number of swoons. His response: “It’s about the same.” So there is a definitive answer to Polly Toynbee’s question.
Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Broadbent
Southsea, Hampshire

• If we removed everything that was not painting from the galleries and museums around the world, there would be a lot of empty space. Photography is the art of the 20th century and the fact that the Tate now has a curator of photography, even though it took until the 21st to get one, proves it, to me at least. There is bad art everywhere. But well-made vintage prints by Ansel Adams, Edward Weston or Irving Penn as well as being wonderful inspiring images are also objects of great beauty.
Neil Burgess
London

• An even better idea is to fill the London museums and galleries with reproductions, distribute the originals throughout the UK and let the “fetishistic” Londoner visit Inverness to see those original Rembrandts for a change.
John Warburton
Edinburgh

Soccer - Sheffield United Filer The Jessica Ennis stand at Bramall Lane, Sheffield. Jessica Ennis-Hill wants her name to be removed from the stand if the club choose to re-sign Ched Evans. Photograph: Anna Gowthorpe/PA

I joined the protest outside the town hall against Ched Evans being reinstated at Sheffield United Football Club on Saturday. Since the protest hit the news, I have seen comments from the public that I have found to be truly infuriating. From “bunch of rug munchers” to “I bet none of them know the offside rule”, the comments have ranged in both wit and distance from the truth. Many people have asked why we hadn’t protested outside the club’s ground. The abuse that Jessica Ennis-Hill has received since taking her stance on the issue is evidence enough of verbal abuse and worse that would have occurred if we had protested outside the club’s ground (Ennis-Hill sent rape tweets in footballer row, 15 November). Sheffield United have since announced that any fan found abusing protesters will be banned from the club for life. While not the exact outcome I was hoping for, it demonstrates that SUFC have, in fact, heard us. I’d like to set the record straight about why exactly I protested. For me, the protest was not about further condemning a potentially innocent man. The fact is that, rightly or wrongly, Ched Evans is a convicted rapist and until such time as this verdict is overturned, I believe that he should not be allowed to play for the club. I did not protest to invite argument about his conviction, but rather to demonstrate my opinion that convicted rapists should not be allowed to continue in a public and influential role.
Stacey Mottershaw
Sheffield

• The key fact is that Evans is unrepentant. If he was to admit and turn away from his wrongdoing, allowing him to return would send a very different message, to “lads” in particular. It would also underline that true rehabilitation of offenders requires remorse and repentance as otherwise the punishment has not served it’s underlying purpose; it could be argued that the offender has not really paid the full price for their crime and so forfeits their entitlement to rebuild their life without restriction.
David Wyatt
London

• A football club has stated it will bar for life any Twitter troll threatening rape. The same club invites for training a convicted rapist who maintains he is guilty of nothing more than “infidelity”.
Angela Barton
Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire

• Even if some of Amnesty’s recommendations are belatedly implemented (Report, 12 November), the World Cup in Qatar will still be played over the blood of the hundreds of migrant workers who have died, having been forced to work in appalling conditions. In contrast to the outrage over Ched Evans, I am not aware of patrons, sponsors, players, and management of the British football teams protesting strongly at this human rights abuse and suggesting that the tournament be held elsewhere. If such a demand was made it might restore my belief in the morality of the football industry. I have yet to be convinced.
Barbara Starkey
St Albans, Hertfordshire

Russell Brand At Protest To Save Social Housing Russell Brand at a protest to save social housing on the New Era estate in east London, which was bought this year by the US-based company Westbrook Partners. Photograph: Jules Annan/Barcroft Media/Jules Annan / Barcroft Media

The New Era housing estate is owned in New York; army recruitment is run by Capita (Reports, 18 November). I seem to remember that the army’s theatre equipment servicing is being sold off. I can’t keep track of how much public provision is now delivered by A4E, G4S, Serco etc, and the various shadowy outfits running probation or schools, or receiving lucrative NHS contracts. What I’d like for Christmas is a Guardian booklet identifying everything that used to be a public service or utility, or social housing or care home, that is now a nice little earner for some private company – along with an assessment of how much public money goes into these “providers”, how well they function, how much they donate to the political parties, which MPs or ministers are sponsored by them, or sit on their boards, or are married to their CEOs, and by how much we subsidise their low-paid employees. We need to know who owns Britain, who sold it, and how much it is costing us.
Richard Gravil
Penrith, Cumbria

A plane prepares to land at Gatwick. Photograph: Gareth Fuller/PA

Heathrow’s chief executive, John Holland-Kaye, believes that if we expand the most expensive, noisiest and most indebted airport in Europe, and reduce competition in the process, then ticket prices for consumers will decline (Letters, 17 November). I wonder how many economists would agree. He also believes we should reinforce Heathrow’s dominant position in the freight market, a legacy of its previous position as the effective controller of airport capacity in the London area. In the wake of an inquiry into competition and the national interest in the sector just five years old, this is indeed ambitious. Competition delivers lower fares, increased choice and better service, and improves resilience, both in terms of the economy and in terms of national security. Competition in the airport sector is one of the great successes of recent aviation policy – and one we should reinforce, without nostalgia for the previous monopoly.

He also makes much of the larger economic benefit the Airports Commission says an expanded Heathrow would bring, though the commission itself advises us to treat these numbers with caution. More to the point, any analysis of economic benefits is only worthwhile if the airport can actually be built, not overwhelmed by its cost, complexity and environmental impact, as Heathrow is sure to be. In contrast, a new runway at Gatwick can be open by 2025 at a fraction of the environmental cost and without a penny from the taxpayer.
Stewart Wingate
Chief executive, Gatwick airport

• Could there have been a sadder and more telling indictment of modern Britain than John Holland-Kaye’s analysis of Heathrow’s future role. He trots out selected statistics and fills the spaces with unsubstantiated assertions to ensure that Heathrow’s predominance over all comers reads like the Saturday afternoon football results – Heathrow 5 Gatwick et al 0. This jingoistic flag-waving is unbecoming around a critical national issue that arguably affects everyone through its environmental, economic, social, commercial, industrial and international aspects. Our country needs a more cohesive, considered and more carefully managed national airport/transport plan than the madcap private enterprise, free market, “we are the champions of the world” envisaged by Holland-Kaye. But then maybe he is merely reflecting his political masters in Westminster.
Tony Beale
Nottingham

A Ukrainian soldier stands guard in Maryinka, near Donetsk, Ukraine. Photograph: Roman Pilipey/EPA

Again David Cameron talks about “Russia continuing to undermine Ukrainian sovereignty” (Cameron threatens more sanctions over Ukraine, 15 November) but the anti-Russian case of the Western countries lacks a key ingredient: do the citizens of eastern Ukraine wish to remain in the post-1991 independence borders of the republic of Ukraine? If not, and the superficial evidence is that they do not, what is the case for compelling them to do so?

The impasse, and the increasingly dangerous future, can only be resolved by a plebiscite in the disputed territory. A plan jointly administered by the EU and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, both of which have considerable experience in this work, for a full electoral register followed by a closely supervised poll could be immediately put into action and delivered within months. Both international bodies have been accepted in previous elections by the countries involved. There would then be a powerful case for no further sanctions and for the suspension of military action on both sides, pending a result, and for serious discussions on the future constitutional position, whatever the result. Without such practical action there appears to be no feasible way of alleviating the suffering of the unfortunate people of the Donbass region.
Michael Meadowcroft
Leeds

Julie Burchill … 'Why does this unimportant writer get so much attention?' Without all this fanfare, Julie Burchill … ‘Why does this unimportant writer get so much attention?’ Without all this fanfare, who would even have been aware of her book?’ Photograph: Tom Oldham/Rex Features/Tom Oldham / Rex Features

The Guardian’s Julie Burchill Support Society has really outdone itself: large articles by Hadley Freeman and Will Self (8 November), and a whole page by John Crace (Digested read, G2, 17 November). How lucky she is to have such influential friends, giving her thousands of pounds worth of free publicity while pretending to diss her book. Why does this unimportant writer get so much attention? Without all this fanfare, who would even have been aware of this book?
Marlene McAndrew
London

• With reference to the article by Harold Evans on thalidomide (15 November), Jacqui and David Morris’s enthralling documentary Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, will be screened on Sunday 23 November at the Bath film festival, with Jacqui and David taking a Q&A after the screening.
Mel Henry
Documentary programmer, Bath film festival

• Turning the page after reading how very grim the original Grimms’ tales were, I see the headline “Man cut up father and used boxed up body parts as TV stand” (13 November). Rather than merely storytellers, might the brothers have been current affairs chroniclers?
Mark Lewinski
Swaffham Prior, Cambridgeshire

• Rather than being appended to Alan Turing’s film, surely Tommy Flowers and Colossus deserve a film of their own? It’s a terrific story.
Cherry Lavell
(Post-Colossus operator, Eastcote, circa 1953), Cheltenham

• With increasingly eventful episodes of The Archers, should Nancy Banks-Smith’s column be weekly rather than monthly (A month in Ambridge, G2, 22 October)?
Dr Rameet Singh
London

• At Cambridge folk festival, a T-shirt on a young woman who I assume studied English: “Like Beowulf, I am impossible to date” (Letters, 15 November).
Peter Lowthian
Marlow, Buckinghamshire

A previous student demonstration against sharp rises university tuition fees, funding cuts and high youth unemployment in central London on 21 November 2012. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

Today we are stepping up our campaign against tuition fees and education cuts with the biggest student national demonstration for years. As student debt soars and staff working conditions deteriorate, it is clear that the marketisation of education is failing students and workers alike.

Last month Germany scrapped tuition fees – proving once again that free education is possible. If the government increased tax on the rich, scrapped Trident or reduced military spending, billions of pounds would be made available to fund education and other vital public services.

Free education is not just about the money. It’s about the working conditions of those who make our education possible, and about democratising and liberating our institutions and the curriculum; funding vocational and further education, living grants and childcare that allows women to freely access learning.

A new movement for free education is emerging on campuses across the country. Today’s national demonstration, organised by the Student Assembly Against Austerity, the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts and the Young Greens, marks the the start of a major wave of action between now and the general election. We are determined to build a movement too big to ignore that puts free, accessible and public education back on the political agenda.
Aaron Kiely Student Assembly Against Austerity and NUS national executive, Shelly Asquith President, University of the Arts London Students’ Union, Amelia Womack Deputy leader, Green party, Piers Telemacque Vice-president society and citizenship, NUS, Maddy Kirkman Disabled students’ officer, NUS, Kelechi Chioba Black students’ committee and disabled students’ rep, NUS, Elaha Walizadeh London women’s officer, NUS, Barbara Ntumy Women’s campaign committee, NUS, Edmund Schluessel National executive, NUS, Dario Celaschi NEC, NUS, Jon Warner National executive, NUS, Mark Soames Convener, Student CND, Shadia Edwards-Dashti Student officer, Stop the War Coalition, Rida Vaquas Under-19s officer, Young Labour, Siobhan MacMahon Co-chair, Young Greens, Sahaya James Student Assembly Against Austerity and South West Young Greens committee, Nona Buckley-Irvine General secretary, LSE Students’ Union, Laura Clayson President, Lancaster University Students’ Union, Candice Armah President, Brighton University Students’ Union, Adria Porta Caballe Campaigns officer, University of Essex Students’ Union, Amelia Horgan Women’s officer, Cambridge University Students’ Union, Liam McCafferty Postgraduate education officer, Union of UEA Students, Michael Segalov Communications officer, Sussex University Students’ Union, Chris Jarvis Campaigns and democracy officer, Union of UEA Students, Bola Tajudeen Vice-president, University of the Arts London Students’ Union, Mia Scott Vice-president welfare and community, Lancaster University Students’ Union, Dave Cocozza Mature students officer, Kent University Union, Fiona Pedebody Environmental officer, Kent University Union, Hannah McIntosh Women’s officer, Kent University Union, Alasdair Ibbotson Communities officer, Stirling Students’ Union, Alice Phillips Equality, liberation and access officer, University of Bristol Students’ Union, Kelly Teesboon Women’s campaigner, Liverpool John Moores University Students’ Union, Thomas Pashby National executive, Young Greens, David Brand Free Education Brighton, Charlie Ebert Richmond University, Carlus Hudson Guild councillor, Exeter University Students’ Union, Jordan Blyth Chair, Teesside University Students’ Union Labour Society, Joey Davison President, LSE Students’ Union Green Party Society, Barnaby Raine Trustee, Oxford University Students’ Union, Tom King LGBTQ officer, SOAS Students’ Union, John Beckingham Co-chair, University of Chester Students’ Union Green Party Society, Charlene Concepcion National structures and procedures committee, Young Greens, Tom Costerton SOAS Student Assembly Against Austerity, Luke Shore Board member, Organising Bureau of European School Student Unions, William Pinkney-Baird Durham University Young Greens, Laura Grossmann Free Education Sussex, Guinevere Carter Faculty representative, University College London Union, Zac Pritchard Chair, University of Worcester Students’ Union Labour Students, Tiffany Chan South London Defend Education, Dan Kiddle Brighton Students Against Debt, Ben Hayes Goldsmiths Student Assembly Against Austerity, Grant Alexander Chapman-Clarke President, University of Portsmouth Students’ Union, Nathan Rogers South London Defend Education, Hope Worsdale Warwick for Free Education, Lauren Charles Greenwich University, Fiona Edwards Secretary, Student Broad Left, and Student Assembly Against Austerity

Independent:

The efforts of the NHS to improve patient safety through greater candour have been hit by the reluctance of trainee doctors to report failings because their anonymity can’t be guaranteed (“Trainee doctors ‘too scared to blow the whistle’”, 19 November).

There are also thousands of NHS professionals without an effective means to report concerns. And this further undermines the NHS’s efforts to improve patient safety.

It’s a travesty that thousands of specialist NHS professionals remain unregulated despite performing procedures and tests on patients that could cause harm.

All staff are able and should raise any concerns they have. But if regulated professionals with a duty to report mistakes and concerns are afraid of speaking out, where does that leave unregulated practitioners or those on voluntary registers to whom the NHS’s duty of candour does not apply?

Amanda Casey
Chair, Registration Council for Clinical Physiologists
Lichfield, Staffordshire

Steve Richards’ excellent article on the problems at the Colchester hospital fails to mention the responsibility carried by the North East Essex Clinical Commissioning Group, set up under the Government’s NHS reforms to commission care for its local population and alongside that given the responsibility to monitor the multimillion-pound contracts placed with its local hospital. If, under government reforms, an NHS commissioning body cannot monitor what it buys from an NHS hospital, what chance do we have when these clinical commissioning groups are placing contracts with an increasing number of private-sector providers?

Peter Boileau
Birmingham

Shame on those who side with terror

Four rabbis and a policeman are murdered in a place of prayer in Jerusalem using knives, guns and hatchets and some members of our political class are unable to condemn this terror attack without reservation.

If murdering innocent civilians was not enough, there were then celebrations by Palestinians giving out sweets and calling for more killings.

The Liberal Democrat MP David Ward tweets that the attack is a result of Palestinians “driven to madness by the failure of the international community to deal with Israel”. On the same day, Baroness Warsi also equated Israelis wanting to pray at a holy site, the Temple Mount, to terrorists killing people in a synagogue.

Such distortions only give succour to those whose aim is not only the destruction of Israel but the wider goal of the spread of fanatical Islamic fundamentalism throughout the world.

The Conservative Party chairman Grant Shapps rightly tweeted that Baroness Warsi was speaking for herself and not the Tory Party. Nick Clegg also needs to distance himself from David Ward. Both of them should lose the backing of their respective parties.

To be seen on the side of terror is not acceptable for any mainstream British politician and is completely irresponsible.

Paul Corrick
Manchester

On Tuesday, BBC News gave extended coverage to the murder of four Israelis in Jerusalem at the hands of Palestinians. When would the killing of four Palestinians by Israelis last have been considered worthy of such coverage?

On Wednesday, they reported, with little commentary, that the Israeli Prime Minister had ordered the demolition of the homes of the murderers, where their families still live. If any Palestinian leader had ordered any such thing the international outcry would have been deafening.

Why is this institutional imbalance so entrenched?

Kenneth Wilson
Renwick, Cumbria

Lack of dining car is food for thought

Simon Calder’s views on Eurostar are extraordinary (“Why I am a Eurostar sceptic”, 12 November). I cannot imagine going back to the hassle of air travel to Paris after the convenience of Eurostar. Nor does he seem interested in the green debate about whether we should still be flying polluting planes when we have high-speed clean-energy trains.

This ought to be one of the main justifications for a more extensive network of high-speed trains within the UK instead of all this stupid negative debate about HS2.

As ever, the Brits think that they know better than our often more successful Continental friends.

My only objection to Eurostar, and one hopefully that Deutsche Bahn may resolve if and when it starts running from St Pancras, is the lack of a proper dining car.

Eurostar offers standard passengers croissants and pot noodles in a miserable snack bar; and first-class passengers get not much more appetising airline-style packaged meals.

Right from the start this seemed odd, especially when the French pride themselves on their cuisine, and Britain had a worthy tradition of dining-car service on long-distance trains.

It used to be one of the great joys of longer journeys to be served good-quality meals while whizzing through the countryside. I do not believe the demand no longer exists.

National Express axed the much-loved London to Norwich dining car before losing the franchise, and Abellio has shown no interest in reviving it. There used to be a nightly stampede at Liverpool Street to the dining car because there were always fewer places than the number of would-be diners.

In an age when companies are falling over themselves to provide luxury goods and services, why are no enterprising rail companies trying to reinvent the dining car?

Gavin Turner
Gunton, Norfolk

Comparing Saudi with Isis is unhelpful

Saudi Arabia’s beheading of those it condemns as criminals may be barbaric (Brian Parkinson, Letters, 18 November). However, the barbarism of Isis is of a completely different order, including “ethnic cleansing” on a large scale; cruel religious persecution; the massacre of prisoners of war; and (without respect of age or sex) of the members of a tribe that resisted its tyranny.

Most international opinion has understandably condemned the gruesome murders of Western hostages, some of whom had undertaken humanitarian work in Syria, and one of whom, Alan Henning, had been found innocent of any crime by an Islamic court before his murder.

We may judge Saudi Arabia’s reliance on capital punishment abhorrent, but to compare its actions with those of Isis is unhelpful.

Western media have certainly “in general” said little about Saudi executions compared with their coverage of Isis’s atrocities, but they have certainly not been silent on the subject.

Ralph Houlbrooke
Reading

Unlike Brian Parkinson, I am very much in favour of capital punishment and find that I can quite easily spot the difference between the illegal killing of innocent hostages and the legal killing of convicted criminals.

Saudi Arabia, it is true, brings the death penalty into disrepute (by including victimless crimes among its capital offences) but then the Saudi regime simultaneously manages to bring prisons, courts, Islam, politics, education and money into disrepute. I hear no one using moral equivalence to attack any of those.

Keith Gilmour
Glasgow

TTIP would stop us taking back railways

Contrary to Alan Gent’s letter (19 November), many of us are immensely concerned that, alongside the wholesale destruction of the NHS, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership will contain legislation that will prevent privatised companies from ever being renationalised.

Given that every poll I’ve ever seen has suggested that an overwhelming proportion of the UK voting public believes that the railways should be renationalised, and I have yet to meet someone who doesn’t think that the water companies would be better in our hands, it seems astonishing that the Labour Party isn’t shouting their opposition from the rooftops.

Except they aren’t in opposition. If they wonder why those of us who used to support them no longer do, they might look at that.

Manda Scott
Clungunford, Shropshire

PR gets my vote to improve democracy

The best way for politicians to get people to vote (“Make polling days Bank Holidays so more people vote, say MPs”, 14 November) is the way they least like.

In the Scottish referendum the turnout was around 80 per cent because everyone knew they had a voice. I first voted 63 years ago and my vote has never counted. I have always lived in a constituency in which one party had clear dominance.

Proportional representation is the only way to give every person a voice. I look forward (with regret) to my vote not counting next May.

John Laird
Darley, North Yorkshire

Will Cupid’s dart hit the bullseye?

I hope that the search is now on for another gay bull to be Benjy’s civil partner.

Peter Forster
London N4

Times:

Sir, Matt Ridley’s piece (“Hurrah for the little-changing face of Britain”, Nov 17) highlights the political traditions that separate Britain and Europe. The history of modern Europe has been obsessed with rationalism, a belief that an ideology dreamt up by political philosophers can be transposed word for word into reality by the implementation of projects from the top down.

Britain, however, has followed a pragmatic and traditionalist approach: change has been adapted and the institutions around us have evolved in order for the status quo to be preserved. This is best illustrated by Professor Michael Oakeshott’s analogy of the ship sailing though the sea “neither starting-place nor appointed destination . . .” and where “the enterprise is to keep afloat on an even keel”.

These two distinct traditions will be majorly important in the debate over our continued membership in what is known on the continent as the “European project”.
James A Paton
Billericay, Essex

Sir, I noted with pleasure Matt Ridley’s ironic nod to Britain’s traditional suspicion of European super-sovereigns. As he points out, Defoe — if he were to time-travel into 21st century Britain — would be “appalled at the degree to which we are subjects of an alien and unelected European nomenklatura”. As I’m sure he is aware, Defoe’s surprise would be all the more given that the monarch of his day was none other than the sturdily Germanic child of the Holy Roman Empire, Georg Ludwig of Hanover, who acceded to the throne following a series of backroom deals by cosmopolitan proto-Eurocrats only ten years earlier.
Tom Gardner
London SW13

Sir, Matt Ridley tells us that there have been no battles in this country since 1714 except Culloden and the Blitz. Once, every grammar schoolboy would have written notes on the 1745 rising and possibly have read Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, and be familiar with Prestonpans: a real battle with infantry, cavalry and artillery deployed, and significant casualties.
Graham Read
Cardiff

Sir, One thing that Defoe would find little changed is class hierarchy, with people oddly proud to call themselves working or middle class (the upper classes don’t trumpet their status). Until we rid ourselves of these terminologies to insult those seemingly in differing strata, we will not advance, the “us and them” society being perpetuated. Countless obituaries remind us of many people’s accomplishments, their backgrounds not hindering them from achieving remarkable goals. Wallowing in class warfare was not something Defoe did. But then, he did have at least 198 pen names.
Carol Godsmark
Chichester

Sir, Matt Ridley’s suggestion that very little has substantially changed in Britain since the time of Defoe is nonsense. Britain’s population has increased ten-fold; its urbanised proportion has changed from 20 per cent to 80 per cent; the slave trade has been abolished and child labour outlawed; and capital and corporal punishment no longer exist. We have the NHS, a welfare system, universal suffrage and a multicultural society, with all their imperfections, and we are unrecognisably tolerant compared with the time of Defoe.
Bernard Kingston
Biddenden, Kent

Sir, Defoe would find a very familiar country. Jonathan Swift I’m sure would feel the same especially about the shenanigans of the present-day financial industry. One only has to read his poem Upon the South Sea Project, describing the disgraceful conduct of financial brokers over the South Sea Bubble, to realise that “plus ça change” applies.
Pete Shea
Old Windsor, Berks

Sir, Matt Ridley reveals perhaps more than he intends when he, a Northumbrian viscount, suggests that Defoe would find “working women” mind-boggling. The economy of 1724 relied just as much on the work of women as does today’s, although, of course, viscountesses might not have been quite so busy.
Nick Ratcliffe
Worcester

Sir, Surely the pronunciation of “Mx” is “Mex” (report, Nov 17, and letter, Nov 19). It neatly covers ex-Mr, ex-Mrs, ex-Miss and ex-Ms.
Ivan K Rowland
London SE23

Sir, In the circumstances, “Mix” seems entirely appropriate.
June Brough
Halesowen, W Midlands

Sir, Mux.
John Dowie
Tunbridge Wells, Kent

Sir, I covered the origin of the tuxedo in my book, Wedding Bells and Chimney Sweeps (letter, Nov 14). Griswold Lorillard, who introduced the jacket to the New York elite, lived on land acquired from the Algonquin Indians that they called P’tauk-seet-dough, meaning “home of the bear”. Phonetically this is “tuxedo”.
Bruce Montague
Hove, E Sussex

Sir, After the G20 summit it should be clear that the Russian takeover of the Crimea is a fait accompli, but that the Russian position in the Ukraine is not, and must not be allowed to be. Crimea, historically part of Russia, could be restored to Russia as part of a bargain with Moscow. The Russians should then remove themselves from all activities in Ukraine. The present crisis is one where “do nothing” is not an option, the history of Georgia proves that.
Richard Hill
Chichester

Sir, Putin’s propaganda is much more effective than that of the Soviets Union. This is a media war, and we should be pumping money into the BBC Russian Service.
Richard Davy
Oxford

Sir, While it may be true that authors benefitfrom the wisdom of a “ruthless reviser”, this was not the case with the original The Duke’s Children by Anthony Trollope (News, Nov 17). Being the last of the Palliser novels, Trollope seems to have intended this work to be a fitting conclusion for the series in the same way that The Last Chronicle of Barset brought together the threads of the Barchester novels. He wrote it as a four-volume novel and it was with disappointment that he learnt that the publisher was only prepared to risk three volumes. There was no editor on hand and Trollope had to tackle the disagreeable task himself. Words, sentences and paragraphs had to be removed. It is, therefore, greatly to his credit that the result should have been so well regarded.

The traditional The Duke’s Childrenis undoubtedly a fine book. However, the extended version, painstakingly re-created by Professor Steven Amarnick and his colleagues, is a revelation that strengthens characterisations and helps us to understand Trollope’s intentions.

As we approach next year’s bicentenary of his birth, I am sure that all Trollope enthusiasts will be looking forward to enjoying this “Lost Chronicle of Omnium”!
Michael G Williamson
Chairman, the Trollope Society

Telegraph:

CQC rankings can’t be relied upon; prosecuting British jihadists; Britain’s economic prospects; and one very confused gardener

Patients in England can now compare the quality of GP surgeries

7:00AM GMT 19 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – I would urge the public to be wary of the Care Quality Commission’s assessment of GP practices.

General practice is a vocational art – it is family medicine and should be practised by kind, experienced doctors. The care provided cannot be quantified and is difficult to assess objectively. Does it really matter if rigid protocols are not in place, notices not laminated, or that there are employees – often staff with years of experience, well known in the community and employed by word of mouth – who do not have formal references?

There is something wrong with a world where doctors are chosen by looking online as one might search for a computer or washing machine.

I would think that practices falling short of the CQC’s requisite standards may in fact be better practices where, in these days of increasing pressure, the staff care more about patients than paperwork.

Dr Kate Mash
Salisbury, Wiltshire

SIR – Having read your article regarding the rating of GPs, I decided to look up my own surgery on the CQC’s website. I was surprised to find the surgery listed under the names of two partners who retired many years ago. If the CQC has inspected this practice, how can they have missed this?

Ian Fraser
Penwortham, Lancashire

SIR – In the Nineties, our practice was advised by the administrators of the Family Practitioners’ Committee to emulate Harold Shipman. According to their statistics, he was an excellent GP.

Dr Thomas L Cooksey
Oldham, Lancashire

SIR – According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain currently has 30.76 million people in work, out of a total population of 64.1 million. The NHS employs 1.7 million workers, according to its website. Therefore, the NHS employs 5.5 per cent of the country’s working population, or just under 2.7 per cent of the entire population. To put it another way, one in every 18 of the working population, or one in every 37 of the entire country works for the NHS. That seems quite a lot to me.

Brian Terry
South Wonston, Hampshire

SIR – The last thing the NHS needs is to have its money spent putting patients’ medical records online. I suggest that patients who want to read their medical records online should obtain copies from their doctors – at a modest charge to cover administrative costs – and then post their details on Twitter. This would circumvent any privacy concerns and prevent further financial waste on another vainglorious IT white elephant.

Richard Motley
Cardiff

British Isil fighters

SIR – Any citizen of this country who, in any way, helps or takes up arms for an enemy of ours is by definition a traitor.

There have always been the strictest laws against this most serious of offences and jihadists returning from Iraq or Syria should be prosecuted under them. New laws to deal with them are not required.

David Whitaker
Chawton, Hampshire

SIR – Under the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870 it is an offence for any British subject to accept any commission or engagement in the military or naval service of any foreign state at war with any foreign state at peace with Her Majesty.

Anyone guilty of an offence against this Act shall be punishable by fine and imprisonment, or either of such punishments, at the discretion of the court before which the offender is convicted.

This law is still in force, and we are currently at peace with the states of Iraq and Syria.

Tim Devlin
London EC4

Say a little prayer

SIR – During bedtime prayers recently my two-year-old daughter and I were saying the Lord’s Prayer together and I was supplying the first part of each line. It was going well until we got to “Give us this…”

“ …day,” she answered.

“ …our daily…”

“Telegraph”– at which point I was unable to suppress a laugh.

It seems she has spent too much time doing the crossword with Grandma.

Madeleine Murphy
Rugby, Warwickshire

Hearty meals

_{MasterChef judges: Gregg Wallace, Marcus Wareing and Monica Galetti. Photo: BBC}

SIR — I am used to unsuccessful competitors on MasterChef describing themselves as feeling “gutted”.

However, I was alarmed to hear one of the judges exhorting them to “cook their hearts out”.

Michael Stanford
London SE23

SIR – Have any of your readers noticed how many restaurants now charge for “side” orders which used to be included in the price of the main course?

They cannot honestly think that I am going to eat a steak on its own.

Carol Thompson
Shepperton, Middlesex

Appropriate apparel

SIR – With reference to the shirt worn by the Rosetta scientist, Dr Matt Taylor, it might be worth noting that his shirt was made voluntarily by his (female) friend.

This is in contrast to the “This is what a feminist looks like” T-shirts worn by Ed Miliband, Nick Clegg and other politicians, which were produced in Third World conditions in exchange for shockingly low wages.

Jonathan Rule
Chester

Economic prospects

SIR – David Cameron has warned that a major European slowdown, along with a Japanese recession and China coming off the boil, mean trouble for Britain.

I take issue with this analysis. It is rooted in the ongoing drought in taxable income going to the Treasury, which exaggerates the excessively high level of government borrowing in relation to gross national product.

This is happening because the upsurge in employment has resulted in the utilisation of low-paid workers who are earning below the tax threshold. But this is good news. We can expand the economy without long-term overheating and without putting interest rates up. This prospect gives a long-term opportunity to rectify our debt imbalance.

British politicians of the Eighties and Nineties would have given their eye teeth for problems like ours today.

Robert Alexander
Edinburgh

SIR – Labour has always claimed the immense deficit wasn’t their fault because there was a global crash while they were in power.

Yet now that our economy is at risk of declining because the world is heading towards recession, Ed Miliband says the current government would be to blame in such an event.

You can’t have it both ways – either the government is responsible or it isn’t.

Gareth Salter
Thorney, Cambridgeshire

Untidy Britain

SIR – How right R K Hodge is about Singapore.

The place just works – the traffic flows, it’s clean, people are law-abiding and I found it a joy to be there last week among such friendly and helpful people.

My previous visit was as a child in the Fifties, when Britain also had those qualities. Why have we lost them?

A L Knight
Bristol

SIR – The verges and lay-bys on the highways in America are generally free of litter, unlike those of Britain.

In America there are regular small signs on highways warning that jettisoning litter will result in a substantial fine.

A few similar signs on British highways would serve as a reminder to both the litterbugs and their families, who could help to enforce the law.

Paul d’Apice
Hillsboro, Ohio, USA

Gone to pot

SIR – I am not sure whether we have global warming, cooling, wetting or drying; but in my garden at the moment I have roses out, a narcissus blooming and artichokes that will soon be ready for the pot.

I am rather at a loss as to what to plant, and for when.

Elizabeth Wood
Hitchin, Hertfordshire

Not enough has been done to hold back the flood

_{Two Somerset residents survey their house during the last bout of flooding . Photo: Alamy}

SIR – The Met Office now predicts another exceptionally wet winter in southern Britain.

While much dredging has been undertaken since the floods of last winter, I am far from sure that the same effort has been put into maintaining, repairing, replacing or even introducing for the first time sluice gates at the seaward end of these waterways. It is all very well improving the flow of water into the sea but unless means are in place to prevent the inflow of tidal water, all such efforts will be in vain.

I should welcome confirmation from the Environment Agency that all necessary work on sluice gates has been completed – confirmation that I know would be equally welcome to the residents of the Somerset Levels.

Chris Rome
Thruxton, Hampshire

Is Band Aid designed to help Africans or Geldof?

SIR – Bob Geldof has been painted as a saint but, as Bryony Gordon writes, in reality he has not given much out of his own pocket – it’s ordinary people who have made the sacrifices, not the exceedingly rich Mr Geldof.

It seems that everything Mr Geldof has done has been primarily to promote Mr Geldof. If this means making snide and incorrect statements about other artists, such as Adele, who preferred not to be involved with his project but made a private donation to Oxfam, so be it.

Mr Geldof’s disregard for the public was best demonstrated by his refusal to stop swearing during a recent radio interview.

Miss Gordon should be praised for bringing this sham to our attention, yet I wonder if the marketing machine that Mr Geldof has in place will do everything it can to discredit her as it has tried to do with Adele.

W R Zeller
Groomsport, County Down

SIR – As a pensioner, I have no spare money; I have problems finding money for the upkeep of the house, and body and soul.

Bob Geldof is worth £32 million. One would have thought that, rather than get the common man to give money on his say-so to charity, he could give away millions of pounds to charity and still remain very rich.

J H Moffatt
Bredbury, Cheshire

SIR – An unwanted side-effect of the re-recording of the charity single by Band Aid is the confrontation of age and the passage of time. I clearly remember watching the original 30 years ago, and smirking at the sad middle-aged among us who claimed not to recognise a single performer in the group. That sad middle-aged man is now me.

Benjamin L C Smith
Hedge End, Hampshire

Irish Times:

Sir, – The Irish people have shown incredible restraint over the six years since the emergence of austerity government in the wake of financial irregularities in the Irish banking system and we need to recognise this as tempers threaten to run out of control in the political struggle over water charges. There are two parties to such disputes in any democracy and two parties against which accusations of blameworthiness can be directed.

Dignified protest about the bailout has been present from the beginning, particularly in the inspiring Ballyhea campaign. I believe that there have now been no fewer than 194 serious but entirely law-abiding protests. But what is the attitude of the political establishment to Ballyhea? Little more at its best, it would seem, than benign neglect or indifference. A government has a duty to respond to peaceful protest. A failure to do so in the long run will lead to protests that are far from peaceful.

In the general election of 2011, the Irish people placed their trust to an unusual degree in Labour on the basis of a manifesto which, for example, opposed water charges.

The receipt of water charges that cannot be paid because of previous austerity measures is a threat in itself to people who try to live without debt. This threat seems to have escaped the notice of political elites that are themselves cushioned from such debts.

Finally, Irish taxpayers are not responsible for the debts of foreign bankers or indeed of Irish bankers. It is a failure of democracy to impose these debts upon them. And indeed they are unsustainable as well as intolerable. – Yours, etc,

Dr GERALD

MORGAN, FTCD

Dublin 2.

Sir, – For the last few months hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland have protested about the water charges and the handling of the issue. The Government and politicians duly ignored them. I believe that out of a sense of frustration some people have resorted to violent protests. I don’t condone violence, in particular the violence of the protests experienced by the Tánaiste in Jobstown and the Taoiseach in Sligo.

However, the Government and our elected representatives need to hang their heads in shame at what they have driven the people to. Listening, engaging with and treating the people with common courtesy would have had a much better effect than totally disregarding the more than 100,000 peaceful protesters. – Yours, etc,

MAURA RYAN,

Achill Island,

Co Mayo.

Sir, – Stephen O’Byrnes’s article is rather odd (“‘Peaceful protest’ over Irish Water is truly a charade”, Opinion & Analysis, November 19th). If there has been such a radical revision of the water scheme, is it not right to assume that protest was justified, and necessary, and that the Government is now acknowledging that its original plan was flawed?

As for his “iPads and iPhones” comment, is it that journalists may use them, but not the demonstrators they are covering? Mr O’Byrnes may as well say that the protesters were “well fed” or had “homes to go to”. As for the lead statement “fomented by extreme left-wing factions . . . to undermine democratic politics”, is that not an adage used by any establishment under pressure?

As for the Joan Burton incident, yes, of course it is bad stuff, inappropriate for this dimension of agitation, and invalid, not least because she clearly has been the most sympathetic voice inside Government of those opposed to the water blunder. Yet if people “lose it” in response to what is felt as unjust, it may be shocking, but isn’t that an occasional feature of politics, and of history? – Yours, etc,

FINTAN VALLELY,

Rathmines, Dublin 6.

Sir, – Capped water charges and deferred bonuses for a fixed period. Can people not see through this ploy? The charge will have to go up at some stage. How else are we going to pay a monopolistic Irish Water’s costs, which include excess staff, gold standard salaries, lucrative bonuses and increments, and all before a drop of water is treated? Surely rationalisation of Irish Water should have been the Government’s priority. At least that way most of the money raised would go to water treatment and delivery. It seems like this is all just a quick fix to get them through the next election. – Yours, etc,

FRANK SMYTH,

Dalkey, Co Dublin.

Sir, – Unlike a significant number of water protesters, I have no issue with paying for water or indeed providing my PPS number, but I do have major concerns that this Government has set up a behemoth to address the infrastructural problems with our water system. The setting up of Irish Water, with its substantial workforce and vague pay structures, nearly guarantees domestic water charges will be considerably higher in the years to come. Why couldn’t water charges just be included in the property tax, distributed to the local authorities and used to improve the infrastructure?

How much will Irish Water cost to run each year? With the new charges now being proposed, will there be any funds remaining to update the water infrastructure? – Yours, etc,

DAVID KELLY,

Donabate, Co Dublin.

Sir, – I am sure that Enda Kenny regrets the “Paddy likes to know” remark (along with many other comments) but he continues to stumble from crisis to crisis.

I understand that Fine Gael finds it galling to be regarded as Fianna Fáil-lite but it took Fianna Fáil a lot longer to lose touch with the people. I don’t mind paying for water but I do mind paying for Irish Water. Irish Water is the manifestation of everything that is wrong with politics and public administration in Ireland and will cause Fine Gael (and its willing partner) to drown. – Yours, etc,

KIERAN LOUGHRAN,

Castleknock, Dublin 15.

Sir, – In the 6th century BC, Pisistratus built the first aqueduct in Athens, allowing a reliable water supply to sustain the large population. He wrote, “Every citizen pays a tithe on his property to a fund for defraying the cost of public sacrifices or any other charges on the state”. He would have fitted meters if they were available! – Yours, etc,

BILL FLEETON,

Killiney,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Can Phil Hogan’s “triumphant ride into the sunset” (Michael Harty, November 19th) be further classified as a not-before-time escape (for us), a brain drain (for the government), or an accident waiting to happen for Europe? – Yours, etc,

MICHELE SAVAGE,

Dublin 12.

Sir, – In “What’s the big idea? It’s time for the State to consider a real democracy” (Opinion & Analysis, November 18th), Fintan O’Toole suggests that the State should consider real democracy. Yet at no stage does he articulate how this “real democracy” would be delivered and what specific aspects of the current process he would change and how he would change them.

There are failings in the current process, but the primary failing has been in how the system has been used by the voters to make choices that they then deny all responsibility for. We hear much of the failure of the political system to curb the mistakes of the governments from 1997 to 2011 yet little about the failure of the electorate to deliver any electoral admonishment to those same governments.

He says that we should have “a real, vibrant, engaged, republican democracy that is capable of using the energies and ideas – social, political, economic – of all its citizens”. As a road map to how this “real democracy” would be achieved, this is as much use as a faded black-and-white picture of an unidentified beach is in planning a summer holiday.

Democracy is the means by which we can exercise the power to make choices about our present and future as a nation and take the responsibility to live with the consequences of them and to learn from them. We have democracy; what we lack are enough people who are interested in exercising it, in stretching it to its full potential, to make it work for the nation and not just themselves. – Yours, etc,

DANIEL K SULLIVAN,

Dublin 2.

Sir, – The Céifin Centre has been promoting debate on values-led change since 1998, and in this time it has published papers from 80 speakers, national and international. As founder and chairman of the centre, I want to concur with Fintan O’Toole’s suggestion that the next big idea needed to transform Ireland might be democracy itself.

The current protests are clearly not just about Irish Water. They are more about a people who have had enough of the failures of top-down leadership. These amount to a systemic failure which we can see not just in the present controversy, but in our hospitals, in our banks and in the church.

Surely the time has come for a movement that will facilitate local leadership to drive the next, necessary transformation that Irish society so clearly needs. As Mr O’Toole so rightly says, “The evidence is piling up that if the people don’t own the system, they’ll break it.” – Yours, etc,

Fr HARRY BOHAN,

Chairman,

The Céifin Centre

for Values-Led Change,

Drumgeely Hill,

Shannon,

Co Clare.

Sir, – Last week we were in the public gallery of Dáil Éireann to lend our support to Maíria Cahill during the debate on her rape by a member of the Provisional IRA. Maíria is a brave young woman who is being subjected to a campaign of demonisation which we know only too well.

It is a strange world when those who made victims of the innocent can then claim that they are now the real victims.

Our son Paul was battered to death seven years ago by a gang who told him exactly who they were. When we said exactly who they were, we were accused of political attacks on Sinn Féin, whose name we had never even mentioned. Worst of all, Sinn Féin spokesmen from their president down publicly accused our son of being a criminal before we even had a chance to bury him. They have never withdrawn those slanders.

The campaign of demonisation against our son, our family and our support group has clearly impeded the Garda investigation and reduced the chances of bringing his murderers – more than a dozen of them – to justice. There was no reason for Sinn Féin to get involved in Paul’s case or in Maíria’s case; it chose to do so for its own reasons.

Truly decent people can figure out who the real victims are in these and many other cases. We hope Maíria and those who support her will stand firm and continue to pursue justice. – Yours, etc,

BREEGE QUINN,

STEPHEN QUINN,

Cullyhanna,

Co Armagh.

Sir, – The Minister for Justice should be encouraged and supported in her legislative efforts to criminalise the buying of sex. Shifting the focus to the buyer, of whom the vast majority are men, allows society to confront the realities surrounding the commodification and the demeaning of sexual relations between women and men.

It also sends a powerful message to a highly lucrative criminal network based on the exploitation of women’s and girl’s bodies. I agree with the statement made recently in the Dáil by the Independent TD Thomas Pringle when he said that “gender equality is not achievable as long as women are for sale”.

Alongside the passing of this important legislation, the Government needs to offer alternatives to women who engage in prostitution by the provision of appropriate health, and social services and opportunities for second-chance education and employment. – Yours, etc,

Dr DES McGUINNESS,

Dublin 15.

Sir, – The Minister of State for Equality Aodhán Ó Riordáin tells us that Travellers are to be declared a distinct ethnic group (“Traveller ethnicity will be reality in six months, says Ó Riordáin”, November 19th).

One strong reason for not doing this is that those who declare themselves to be Travellers are not a distinct ethnic group – they could not be more Irish.

The Census 2011 reveals that self-declared Travellers belong to the lowest socioeconomic category as measured by life expectancy, health, education and workforce participation. To declare them a distinct ethnic group risks perpetuating disadvantage. The Government should promote upward social mobility, equality and integration for all citizens.

Countries such as India that struggle to shed the legacy of a caste system will be shocked by a developed country about to introduce one.– Yours, etc,

SEÁN McDONAGH,

Raheny,

Dublin 5.

Sir, – Frank McNally (An Irishman’s Diary, November 15th) references “Cut-Throat Lane East”, “Cut-Throat Lane West” and “Murdering Lane” in his piece on Dublin life and conditions in the late 1700s and early 1800s. My research indicates Brookfield Road and Old Kilmainham as their modern counterparts.

On this theme, I would add “Hangman’s Lane” (now Hammond Lane), “Gallows Road” (now Lower Baggot Street), and “Gibbet Meadow” (now Mespil Road). – Yours, etc,

OLIVER McGRANE,

Rathfarnham, Dublin 16.

Sir, – The case between Dr Micheline Sheehy-Skeffington and NUI Galway has highlighted, once more, what has been patently obvious in the Irish university sector for many decades now (“NUI Galway ordered to promote lecturer overlooked over gender”, November 18th). Female academics holding permanent senior positions such as senior lecturer, professor or dean are rare in Ireland. Female academics who are parents of young children occupying permanent senior positions are rarer still. What does this communicate to the student population, which, by contrast, displays an equal male-female balance from undergraduate through to post-doctoral levels when overall university intake figures are considered? – Yours, etc,

MARION DOWD,

Dromahair, Co Leitrim.

Sir, – Minister for Children Dr James Reilly apparently believes that no provision can be made through tax credits or tax returns for tax relief on childcare costs because it discriminates against stay at home parents (“Government officials rule out tax relief for childcare”, November 17th, 2014).

There is tax relief on bicycle purchases and public transport through employment schemes. This discriminates against those not in employment.

Did it not occur to Dr Reilly or his officials that the families on one income while one parent is at home are the very families in dire need of tax relief? – Yours, etc,

LAURA EGAR,

Vienna.

Sir, – Frank McNally (An Irishman’s Diary, November 19th) uses a light-hearted approach while raising the important issue of prostate screening. His message is clear and succinct. The late Prof John Fitzpatrick – professor of surgery at the Mater Hospital, Dublin, and a world leader in prostate cancer research – continuously advocated for digital rectal examination (DRE) over blood testing and thankfully, as GPs, we are now in an environment to follow this advice and recommend a DRE in the first instance.

It is a well-tolerated, brief and hugely revealing examination that men should discuss openly with their friends and GPs alike. No embarrassment or comic relief is necessary when considering it. – Yours, etc,

Dr HUGH Ó FAOLÁIN,

Strandhill, Co Sligo.

Sir, – So the Government has published proposals for the 1916 commemoration ceremonies and the relatives don’t like them so they propose to have separate ceremonies of their own (November 15th)?

Oh dear, the irony of it. What better way to remember the men of 1916 than with a split! – Yours, etc,

BRENDAN CASSERLY,

Bishopstown,

Cork.

Irish Independent:

I was taken aback to see representatives of Childline on the ‘Late Late Show’. The reason they were on the programme was because they are in danger of not being able to keep their telephone lines – and staff to man them – going beyond January 2015, due to the lack of funds.

Childline is not funded by the Government and is the only organisation of its kind in Europe that does not have government funding.

Childline is a vital service for children who are being raped, abused and bullied to telephone and connect with an adult who will listen to their pain and be there for them and encourage them to speak to other adults who may be able to help them.

Is this the same Government that is recently taking abuses, rapes and the suffering of adults who were abused as children with such seriousness that they are speaking out about it every other day in Dail Eireann?

The same Government that is meeting with abused people and speaking of their suffering with such eloquence and seriousness?

Is this the same Government that is withdrawing funding from Rape Crisis Centres where people are now on waiting lists for their services?

I find it very difficult to add these two governments together. The one that speaks so seriously about the damage and pain caused to people when they were children, the one that talks the talk but when it comes to walking the walk – by providing services for today’s children – they are cutting funding and, in Childline’s case, not funding them at all.

If only they would act with the same passion by putting their money where their mouths are, then today’s children would have such a better chance of growing into adulthood less troubled and traumatised.

They should all be ashamed of their lack of action. For God’s sake, give Childline the funding it requires.

Anne Hennessy

Callan Co Kilkenny

So what else can go wrong?

The attempted introduction of water charges in its present form was wrong. The type of protest in Tallaght last Saturday was wrong. The point scoring re the Mairia Cahill case is wrong.

The eviction of people from their homes by order of the courts is wrong. The attempt by Taoiseach Enda Kenny to have a friend elected senator was wrong.

The present Government’s continued adherence to agreements signed by the last government with the IMF/EU/ECB is totally wrong.

The present medical card system is not just wrong, it is bordering on a criminal offence against the old and the sick – the poorest members of our society.

The salaries paid to ministers is wrong and disgusting, especially when they attempt to tell the citizens that “we know how you feel”. They then ask our youth to go out and work for nothing while at the same time telling us that we have fully recovered from austerity.

If our country is run by what we see and hear in Dail Eireann then it’s no wonder we are in the mess we are in. Many years ago, during times of poverty, we all escaped and laughed at the antics of the Three Stooges – Curly, Moe and Larry

The patriots of 100 years ago fought hard to relieve us from a foreign power to rightfully allow us to govern ourselves. We’ve repaid them by handing back that power for the sacredness of the mighty euro.

I wonder what the Three Stooges’ next picture will be?

Fred Molloy

Dublin 15

Split over Rising celebrations

So the Government has published proposals for the 1916 commemoration ceremonies and the relatives of those who fought in the Rising don’t like them. So they have proposed to have separate ceremonies of their own.

Oh dear, the irony of it.

What better way to remember the men of 1916 than with a split!

Brendan Casserly

Bishopstown, Cork

No bull, life is great these days

It seems the only one that is happy in Ireland these days is Benji the gay bull.

Kevin Devitte

Westport, County Mayo

Every baby’s life counts

We are families whose children were diagnosed with life-limiting conditions, such as anencephaly, or Trisomy 18 or 13.

Because of this, our children have been labelled as ‘incompatible with life’, a medically meaningless, cruel and hurtful term. We call on all medical, legal and media professionals to immediately cease the use of the phrase ‘incompatible with life’, which is not a medical diagnosis, and which is used to deny the humanity of our children and the value of their lives.

Some of our children’s lives were all-too-short, but they never knew anything but love. We had the chance to hold them in our arms, to meet them and surround them with love, even if only for a brief time, and that meant everything to us. Our children are carved in our hearts forever.

We have listened with concern, then, to the debate on legalising abortion for children with profound disabilities.

We understand, better than most, that receiving a diagnosis of a limited life for your child is a hugely upsetting experience, and that parents need better care at this time.

Most of all, parents need to be given factual information and support. Too often, they are nudged and pushed towards abortion and are denied the precious time that we experienced with our children; a time which helped us to heal.

In particular, we have recently seen commentators claim that we caused our children pain because we did not abort them, while others have insisted that our children were ‘incompatible with life’, and were dismissive of the view that their lives had value.

The first allegation is simply dreadful and has caused huge distress to parents who have already lost their children. Children born with a life-limiting condition are entitled to the best care possible. Our babies were made comfortable after they were born, and those who passed away did so peacefully in our arms. In sharp contrast, abortion ends the life of a child with a profound disability in the same manner as it does for any unborn child, and in this case these are often late-term abortions. Secondly, the truth is that there is no condition, none whatsoever, where a medical professional can say that a child will certainly die before birth.

Some of our children spent just hours or days in their parents’ arms before they passed away. Others defied all expectations and lived for much longer. Kathleen Rose Harkin has just celebrated her eighth birthday with Trisomy 13, often described as a ‘fatal foetal abnormality’, while Elaine Fagan made medical history living for 25 years with Trisomy 18, or Edwards Syndrome.

Over 90pc of Irish parents facing a life-limiting diagnosis continue with their pregnancy. The phrase ‘incompatible with life’, must cease to be used immediately, since it is unhelpful, misleading and hurtful. Our children’s disability may have been profound, but they were alive and kicking in the womb.

These are our most special children. They deserve better than abortion. Their families, like ours, deserve better care and support, following the model of perinatal hospice care. Most of all, families deserve not to be misinformed, and to have their children’s lives respected.

Tracy Harkin

Every Life Counts,

41 Dominick St Lower, Dublin 1

Irish Independent

21 November 2014 Vet

I jog around the park I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and I take Fluff and Kitten to the Vet. I do the Post Office and the Co Op

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down trout for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

The Duchess of Alba – obituary

The 18th Duchess of Alba was a flamboyant Spanish aristocrat who married both an unfrocked priest and a man 24 years her junior

The Duchess of Alba with her third husband, Alfonso Diez Carabantes

The Duchess of Alba with her third husband, Alfonso Diez Carabantes Photo: EUROPA PRESS/GETTY

12:18PM GMT 20 Nov 2014

Comments

The 18th Duchess of Alba, who has died aged 88, was Spain’s richest woman and a regular fixture in Hola! magazine and other gossip publications on account of her forthright character and colourful private life.

In later life, with her flamboyant manner and shock of frizzy hair (sometimes dyed a whimsical red, at other times a snowy white), the thrice-married Cayetana Fitz-James Stuart fascinated and appalled in almost equal measure.

Known for her piping, querulous voice and often outrageous clothes, she was frequently photographed at society weddings and at bullfights. Her passions were flamenco, horses and painting; she became the subject of a television series and a flamenco show based around her life.

Then, of course, there was her status as an exemplar of the plastic surgeon’s art. She always denied needing any assistance to enhance features which had once earned her a reputation as a beauty; and any suggestion to the contrary was considered an intrusion too far by most of the Spanish press. None the less, a website specialising in such matters claimed to have discovered evidence of a facelift, brow lift, rhinoplasties, lip injections, fat injections to the face and multiple injections of Botox. “She overdid it, obviously,” a family friend was quoted as saying.

The Spanish media estimated the duchess’s wealth at between €600 million and €3.5 billion; her landholdings were said to be so vast that she would have been able to cross Spain from north to south without setting foot on anyone else’s property.

According to the Guinness Book of Records, she had more titles than any other person on the planet, being a duchess seven times over, a countess 22 times and a marquesa 24 times. Yet the Duchess always insisted she was not rich: “I have a lot of artworks, but I can’t eat them, can I?” she once said. Apart from thousands of paintings by Goya, Velazquez, Titian and others lining the walls of her numerous palaces, her collection included a first edition of Don Quixote, Columbus’s first map of America and the last will and testament of Ferdinand the Catholic, the father of Catherine of Aragon.

As head of the five centuries-old House of Alba, the Duchess’s privileges included not having to kneel before the Pope and the right to ride a horse into Seville cathedral. It was also said that, owing to her illustrious lineage, she was entitled to demand ceremonial precedence over the Spanish royal family. But she made little use of these historic perks, preferring the delights of a high-rolling lifestyle that began in England where her father, the 17th Duke of Alba, was Spanish ambassador during the Second World War.

^{The Duchess of Alba, c. 1947 (GETTY/HULTON ARCHIVE)}

María del Rosario Cayetana Paloma Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Fernanda Teresa Francisca de Paula Lourdes Antonia Josefa Fausta Rita Castor Dorotea Santa Esperanza Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva Falcó y Gurtubay was born in her family’s neo-Classical Palacio de Liria in Madrid on March 28 1926, the only child of Don Jacobo Fitz-James Stuart y Falcó, 17th Duke of Alba, and Doña María del Rosario de Silva y Gurtubay, 9th Marquesa of San Vicente del Barco. Her godmother was Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain.

On her father’s side, Cayetana was a descendant of King James II of England through his illegitimate son James Fitz-James, Duke of Berwick, born of a relationship with Arabella Churchill, only sister of the Duke of Marlborough. This made her a distant relative of both Sir Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales, descendants of Arabella’s daughter Henrietta Fitz-James.

Other ancestors included Don Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba, known as “the Iron Duke” on account of the ruthlessness with which he put down revolt as governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1567 to 1573, and Doña María del Pilar de Silva, 13th Duchess of Alba, a muse of Francisco Goya.

Cayetana did not have a happy childhood. Her mother died when she was eight, and three years later her father (a fervent monarchist who had served briefly under King Alfonso XIII as minister for foreign affairs in the government of General Dámaso Berenguer) took her to London, where he had been appointed ambassador for the Spanish Nationalist government.

^{The Duchess of Alba on her marriage to Don Pedro Luis Martínez de Irujo y Artacoz, 1947 (REX)}

He was still the ambassador in 1940 when the British government recognised Franco’s regime, and the pair remained in London during the Second World War. In 1945, however, the Duke resigned his post, declaring that the Franco regime was “harmful to the best interests of Spain” after negotiations with the exiled pretender to the Spanish throne, Don Juan de Bourbon, whose claims the Duke had supported, broke down.

During the Spanish Civil War, the Albas’ Liria Palace had been occupied by the communists, and for that reason it was almost completely destroyed by German bombers in 1936. The Duke had taken the precaution of storing its priceless collection of paintings in the cellars of the Prado and the Bank of Spain, but around half the palace’s literary collection was destroyed and many other items were looted. On his return to Spain the Duke set about rebuilding the palace according to the original plans, work carried on after his death by Cayetana. It was largely due to her persistence that the palace remained a private residence.

Cayetana was considered a beauty in her youth and was reputed to have had a lively love life. In 1947 she married Don Pedro Luis Martínez de Irujo y Artacoz, a naval officer and son of the Duke of Sotomayor, in a ceremony at Seville Cathedral which cost an estimated £2 million in today’s terms and was described at the time as “the most expensive wedding in the world”. The ceremony was so grand that there was concern it would overshadow the nuptials of Britain’s future Queen, held a month later in austerity Britain.

The bride wore a white satin gown modelled on the dress worn by Napoleon III’s bride Empress Eugénie. After the ceremony the couple travelled through cheering crowds to the bride’s family’s Seville palace of Las Dueñas in a carriage pulled by mules.

^{The Duchess of Alba in 2011 (REX)}

Cayetana succeeded as Duchess of Alba on her father’s death in 1953, and she and her first husband had five sons and a daughter. However, the father of her fourth son, Fernando, was widely rumoured to have been not her husband but the Sevillian flamenco dancer Antonio el Bailarin, who acknowledged his parentage in posthumously published memoirs. When the information was subsequently repeated in an article in the Spanish magazine Interviú, however, a Spanish court awarded the Duchess €90,000 in damages, describing the offending piece as an assault on her honour.

Her first husband died in 1972, and six years later the Duchess shocked Spanish society by marrying Jesus Aguirre y Ortiz de Zarate, an unfrocked Jesuit priest and freethinking intellectual 11 years her junior who had once been her confessor. It was not so much his dubious religious credentials that were considered scandalous, however, as the fact that he was illegitimate.

Yet their marriage was happy – so much so, in fact, that when Aguirre sent three love poems he had written for Cayetana to Julio Iglesias, asking him to set them to music, the singer refused, considering them too steamy. When, in 1988, the gossip pages reported strains in the marriage, Cayetana, then 62, responded: “We are happy, as happy as before. And, if you must know, we make love every night.” Except that “make” and “love” were not the words used.

After Aguirre’s death, in 2001, it was generally assumed that the Duchess, now in her mid-70s, would live her twilight years alone. But a few years later she was reported to be dating Alfonso Diez Carabantes, a minor civil servant in Spain’s department of social security and a man 24 years her junior. “When you get to know someone and you like them, you end up falling in love a little and I fell in love with him,” she revealed in a magazine interview in 2008.

On several occasions the Duchess’s children, apparently fearful of being separated from some of their inheritance by a man portrayed by detractors as a gold-digger, were said to have blocked the couple’s plans to tie the knot. In 2008 the House of Alba issued a statement saying that the relationship “was based on a long friendship and there are no plans to marry”. In June 2011 the Duchess’s youngest son, Cayetano, announced that his mother could not marry for a third time “owing to questions of historic responsibility”. At one point Spain’s King Juan Carlos was alleged to have telephoned the Duchess to urge her to think again.

The Duchess was resentful of her children’s interference, noting, pointedly, that they had all been divorced; so, by implication, they had no right to give her moral lectures. “I don’t know why my children are causing problems,” she complained on Spanish radio. “We aren’t hurting anyone. Alfonso doesn’t want anything, he’s renounced everything. He doesn’t want anything but me.”

In August 2011, however, the prospect of a damaging rift in Spain’s most prominent noble house appeared to have been averted after a deal was made under which the Duchess agreed to divide up her fortune between her children in advance of her death — and her groom renounced any possible claim to her wealth.

She and Diez then married, and after the wedding in Seville she entertained onlookers by kicking off her shoes and hiking up her dress to perform a flamenco dance outside her palace.

The Duchess is survived by her husband and children. Her eldest son, Carlos Fitz-James Stuart, 14th Duke of Huéscar, born in 1948, inherits the Alba titles.

The 18th Duchess of Alba, born March 28 1926, died November 19 2014

Guardian:

Members of the EU Parliament in Strasbourg ‘Abolish the Strasbourg parliament,’ suggests John Rowe. Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images Photograph: Frederick Florin/AFP/Getty Images

Alistair Darling is right to stress the disastrous consequences of Britain leaving the EU (We’re better together with Europe, so must learn from Scotland, 18 November), and he’s just as correct in saying that those of us who recognise this (at least 50% of the population, according to the polls) need to get much, much noisier about saying so, while stressing the need for significant reform.

However, Mr Darling remains as obscure as most politicians and commentators on what such EU reform might look like. A far greater emphasis on growth, sure – but what would that actually look like? And what about the structural issues that underpin many people’s distrust of Europe? How about the Labour party adopting a policy that says we should: a) abolish the Strasbourg parliament, b) reduce the number of MEPs by a third, c) reduce their ridiculous salaries by a third, d) reduce their even more absurd expenses by half, and e), most important, abolish EU commissioners and make MEPs earn their corn by taking full responsibility for strategy and policy. They would have to elect their own president and allocate areas of responsibility. That might seriously reduce the unpopular movement towards ever-greater integration by ridding us of the unelected bureaucrats and the behind-closed-doors horse-trading about positions of power.

What savings and a huge increase in democratic accountability there would be. I’d then be interested to know what my north-west MEPs were actually doing and voting for, as well as who they had supported for key posts. It won’t happen, I know, but we might be surprised to find how many people across the EU thought it a good idea.
John Rowe
Rochdale

• One might have thought that creating a strong cross-party alliance on EU membership might come in handy in a future referendum, so what purpose is served by comparing the Scottish National party (pro-Europe) to Ukip (anti-Europe)? Labour needs to set aside its resentment of the SNP’s success if it is to win the argument for continued EU membership, and must come up with more convincing arguments than “reform” and “jobs and growth”, which are already EU priorities. The EU is pursuing similar neoliberal policies to those of New Labour, so what reforms does Labour think are now needed to convince British voters that the EU is acting in their interests? The Better Together campaign nearly failed in Scotland because it had no positive vision, and only rescued the situation through last-minute threats and promises that may or may not be delivered. So what is Labour’s vision for Britain in Europe?
Mary Braithwaite
Wye, Kent

• John Major claims that the current British anti-EU hysteria “is not a political ploy to gain advantages and concessions” (Major urges EU to realise that British frustration is ‘no game’, 14 November). But that is exactly what it is.

The chances of Britain leaving are minuscule. Should opinion polls indicate such a possibility in a referendum, the British establishment – which benefits greatly from EU membership – will press the panic button, as it did so successfully before the Scottish referendum. The media will suddenly be filled with daily horror stories of impending doom, economic collapse and isolation outside the EU.

London, the most global city in the world, would be more likely to secede from Ukip-land than accept Britain leaving Europe.
Jakob von Uexkull
Founder, World Future Council

• With all respect to the NUT, the GMB and the other signatories to the letter regarding the commission’s reactions to a proposed European Citizens’ Initiative regarding the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (We demand the right to challenge the TTIP, 18 November), a lawsuit would no doubt be costly and would not get very far. Far better to lodge their protest as a petition, under the terms of article 227 of the EU treaty, and ensure that the voice of citizens is heard where it belongs, in the European parliament. Indeed the parliament has, not surprisingly, registered several on this subject.

Not so long ago more than 2 million people signed a petition to the European parliament against Acta, the anti-piracy agreement, and that did not do so badly, having ensured an animated and well-informed debate in the petitions committee before a landmark vote in plenary session.

It does not help to confuse, as the authors also did, a petition and an ECI, but it is a common failing. The right to petition is a fundamental right of EU citizenship and open to all citizens and residents; the ECI, although defined in article 11 of the Lisbon treaty, is subject to an additional (and in my view too cumbersome) regulation that the commission has entirely respected in its decision. Check out the Europarl web-site; it is quite transparent.
David Lowe
Head of secretariat, petitions committee, European parliament

Peabody Trust housing for key workers in Baron’s Place, London. Photograph: Frank Baron for the Guardian

Nik Wood’s assertion that Peabody is contributing to London’s affordable housing crisis (Letters, 14 November) is incorrect. In fact we are building thousands of new affordable homes for Londoners. We are also investing £150m in improvements to residents’ homes and estates. Housing need extends across all tenures, and while we continue to provide new social housing we also provide intermediate and market rent as well as homes for sale on the open market. We also spend around £4m a year on community investment activities.

The rents on the properties we acquired from the crown estate in 2011 are intermediate rents for key workers capped at 60% of the market rent, with many tenants paying significantly less than that. Despite running these homes at a loss – spending more money than we receive in rental income – we have not applied the maximum rent increases set out in the sale agreement for the last two years. We are cutting rent increases again next year, and have reduced the rent where the level exceeds the local housing allowance limit for the area. In addition, we have invested over £7m on improvements to the former crown estate properties since 2011, with further investment planned in the coming years.

To correct a further inaccuracy, our surplus for 2013-14 was £35m (plus £256m, which is not cash but an accounting treatment that reflects the acquisition of Gallions housing association). Every penny we generate is reinvested to provide more affordable homes, and to enable us to continue our investment in quality homes, services and communities.
Stephen Howlett
Chief executive, Peabody

• We need a moratorium on property speculation in the UK while some sense is injected into the housing market. That might even limit the inevitable rise in the cost of housing benefit to the taxpayer. The application of free market principles to the provision of affordable homes to buy or to rent was certain to hurt tenants (Tenants face Christmas evictions after rent deal revoked, 17 November). The damage began on the day the Thatcher government abolished rent controls and allowed the free flow of national and international wealth into a housing market short on supply. Council estates that need refurbishment are now set for demolition for any reason councils short of funds can cook up.
Here in Tottenham the Love Lane estate must go, they say, to improve a deprived area and make way for a smart walkway from a new White Hart Lane station to the new Spurs football arena. This is not slum clearance but pure exploitation of the housing market by national and international property developers and landlords regardless of the need for affordable shelter of the sitting tenants, leaseholders, and those who bought the freehold since they had the right to buy.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

• If Ed Miliband wants a cause to rally popular support, let’s hear him on the subject of the New Era estate, with an explanation of how social housing came to be flogged to a predatory US-based landlord, and an assurance that such a thing could never happen under a Labour government.
Jim Trimmer
Kingston upon Thames

• I’ve been saying to my WEA classes since 2010 that Labour’s next election slogan should be the winning “housing, housing, housing”.
David L Alfred
Brighton

• There is a world of difference between Holyrood’s and Westminster’s approaches to the housing crisis. Last year, the Scottish government reintroduced a sufficient level of capital subsidy to ensure the future of affordable social rented accommodation both by housing associations and councils. “Affordable” means that someone in relatively low-paid employment or on a limited fixed income could be able to pay rent (of about £72-75 a week) and come off housing benefit. Simultaneously, the Scottish government scrapped the right to buy. The Westminster coalition, however, not only scrapped funding support for social housing in England but also extended the right to buy. And the Scottish government has maximised the use of discretionary housing payments to those seriously adversely affected by welfare reforms. These initiatives appear to have received if not cross-party support then at least only muted criticism from the other parties in Holyrood.
Craig Sanderson
Edinburgh

06.08 GMT

The mayor of London’s view on Oxford Street’s air pollution has not changed, contrary to your report (Mayor chokes on own tweet over Oxford Street air, 14 November). The claim that it is the most polluted street in the world was erroneous and the mayor does not accept it. Letters between the mayor and Joan Walley MP have been taken completely out of context. He has never disputed the King’s College data, but has always been clear that this data was taken out of context and misrepresented repeatedly by the media. King’s College agrees that its data was misrepresented and reiterated this point to the London assembly’s environment committee just last week.

London has considerably lower levels of pollution than many world cities, as any reasonable analysis of international air quality shows, and Boris Johnson takes the problem extremely seriously. He is driving the most comprehensive and ambitious set of measures in the world to improve air quality, including tightening standards for buses, taxis and large vehicles and a new ultra-low-emission zone for central London, which includes Oxford Street and the surrounding roads from 2020.
Matthew Pencharz
Mayor’s senior adviser for environment and energy

Person looking at job vacancies in a newspaper ‘I was sacked from three jobs (for instance, for nibbling at the rounds of cheese when working in a grocer’s), yet each time was able to walk straight into another job,’ writes Dr Neil Redfern. Photograph: David Sillitoe for the Guardian

Reading Ian Jack’s column (Sorry, would-be sandwich makers: you’ll find it much harder to get a job than I did, 15 November) made me reflect on how much has changed with respect to employment opportunities and social mobility over the past 50-odd years. My CV illustrates this point perfectly. I left school in 1959, aged 15 with no qualifications. Over the next year or so I was sacked from three jobs (for instance, for nibbling at the rounds of cheese in the cellar when working as a shop assistant in a grocer’s), yet each time was able to walk into another job with no intervening periods of unemployment. Eventually, still with no educational qualifications, I was accepted for nurse training. I became a state registered nurse, qualifying in 1966. I wasn’t a very good nurse and sought new opportunities. After an uncertain period in which I, among other things, sold brushes door-to-door, worked as a labourer in a steel mill and suffered periods of unemployment, I had a stroke of good fortune in 1968 when, working as a clerk at a sportswear manufacturers, I was accepted for training as a computer programmer. I worked in information technology until 1989, when I went to Ruskin College (John Prescott’s alma mater) to study history. After 30 years, I had found my role. After 25 years’ studying, teaching and researching history, I am now a semi-retired university lecturer.
Dr Neil Redfern
Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire

• While Linda Tirado poignantly documents the pain and humiliation of poverty in the UK (G2, 17 November), she doesn’t go far enough in her analysis of its origins. Of course capitalism needs its winners and losers and of course at the moment the winners feel they can safely condemn the losers. But this is not because Paul Ryan or Iain Duncan Smith are more loathsome than other cheerleaders for the neoliberal bandwagon. There is nothing personal in their attacks but to argue that they mean well is ludicrous. They do what they do because it’s what the system requires. A fear of pauperisation is vital if people are to be persuaded not to reject whatever zero-hours contract or minimum-wage-plus-humiliation job they are offered, and there is no greater cause of fear than not being able to feed yourself or your children. How long before we see the Victorian workhouse making its reappearance?
Tony Owen
London

A road accident sign in London. There are more than a million road deaths worldwide each year, writes the Rev Barry Parker. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

With tragic irony, the road crash that claimed the lives of five teenagers near Doncaster on Saturday night (Report, 17 November) took place on the eve of the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims, as well as the start of Road Safety Week. Instituted by the charity RoadPeace in 1993 and adopted by the UN in 2005, the Day of Remembrance is held annually on the third Sunday of November, and over 30 church services were held all over the UK last Sunday. At the event I attended in Barnsley, just a few miles from the crash site, we were reminded that the grief and trauma felt by the victims’ families and friends are intensified by the fact that in nearly every case such road deaths are entirely avoidable given good conduct, discipline and law enforcement. Small charities such as RoadPeace and Brake can do little to raise awareness of the need for safe roads, which are needed to protect us all as road users. Death and injury are a national and a worldwide tragedy, and governments and statutory organisations have a major role to play. The worldwide toll of well over 1 million road traffic deaths each year indicates we have many miles to go before we can say that this collective agony has been brought under some sort of control. It will be good to hear what our government is doing or plans to do to meet this urgent requirement.
Rev Barry Parker
Leeds

Mylene Klass Does Myleene Klass face a choice between downsizing and paying a mansion tax?

While a Guardian guide to the erosion of public services by private corporations would be very useful (Letters, 19 November), there is some research already out there on who owns Britain and who sold it. George Monbiot’s 2000 book Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain answers many of Richard Gravil’s questions. Our own book The Trojan Horse: The Growth of Commercial Sponsorship updates Monbiot’s work, and has a useful appendix which lists the key “providers” and their role in public services.
Deborah Philips Professor of literature and cultural history, University of Brighton
Garry Whannel Professor of media arts, University of Bedfordshire

• Myleene Klass is clearly very exercised by the possibility of a future Labour government giving her rich friends and herself the choice between downsizing or paying a mansion tax (Miliband bruised in Klass war over tax, 19 November). Presumably she is equally exercised by the current Tory-led government’s offer to those at the opposite end of the financial spectrum of the choice between downsizing or paying a bedroom tax.
Professor Jennifer Jenkins
Southampton

• Hugh Muir should not be surprised by the chatter at the O2 (Notebook, 18 November). The whole atmosphere at the Barclays-sponsored tennis event was crass, from the loud music played at intervals to the dramatised announcements of the players and their obvious embarrassment as each led a small child by the hand while entering the arena. Perhaps next year we can expect cheerleaders.
Ron Houghton
London

• If that really is a photograph of “Sea and sky in harmony at Alnwick” (Weatherwatch, 19 November), global warming has far exceeded even the wildest forecasts. Last time I checked, Alnwick was five miles inland.
John Mathieson
Northampton

• The gender-neutral pronoun in widespread use is not the Esperantesque “ze” (Shortcuts, G2, 18 November) but “they”, used as a singular: ugly but effective.
Guy Dugdale
London

Independent:

Well now, that’s a surprise! Having bought for a song the UK’s favourite postal system with its major USP and time-honoured universal delivery system, the “new” Royal Mail looks set to be gearing up to shear off this encumbrance so as to streamline itself to battle upstarts such as TNT and Amazon, which have the audacity to be cherry-picking its best routes.

Well, the buyers knew this was already happening perfectly well when they bought the business, and they knew that Royal Mail was not just any old parcel delivery outfit.

It’s time they used their privileged power base and (still) massive customer goodwill to do what they are expected to do, and compete professionally with the relative newcomers.

And let’s hope Ofcom does what it’s supposed to do in preserving the universal delivery system at all costs.

Ian Bartlett

East Molesey, Surrey

The threat to the Royal Mail universal service is yet another demonstration that competition does not improve service.

As a scientist I discard or modify hypotheses that do not stand up to observation. Why does the Tory party not do so with its competition myth?

A A Chabot

Birmingham

I would like to add my voice to those that have expressed concerns regarding the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).

This agreement would expose our democratically elected government to non-democratic pressure from unaccountable multinational corporations, which would under its terms have recourse to suing this country over any policy that they felt to be against their interest.

Worse still, any such legal suit would be heard in secret under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation, an organisation that has historically been slavishly supine to the interests of big multinationals.

Almost certainly, it would make reversal of the creeping steps already taken towards privatising our NHS open to challenge from commercial healthcare operators seeing themselves shut out of lucrative opportunities to further milk the British taxpayer; while re-nationalisation of our railways, utilities, or the Royal Mail – which, like many, I still harbour hope of one day seeing – would be nigh on impossible.

We expect the Tories to welcome the TTIP, because it is the party of big business. What I find seriously disquieting is Labour’s apparent acquiescence in this threat to our independence, which is at least as menacing as any posed by the EU.

When will Labour at long last show some backbone and stand up for the rights of ordinary people over powerful corporations, as it was founded to do?

Richard Trotman

Penistone, South Yorkshire

Bring back the era of belles lettres

The news that budget cuts and safety concerns are leading to a decline in the number of foreign exchanges at secondary school level, combined with the appallingly low level of pupils’ foreign language competence reported by the National Foundation for Educational Research, is a sad sign of the growing insularity of UK secondary education (“The foreign exchange trip is becoming passé for UK schoolchildren”, 18 November).

However, there is an alternative to group exchange visits. It is the tried-and-tested foreign pen-friend arrangement. When I was in my final year of primary school, back in the late 1950s, my class teacher, who had been doing some basic French with us, one day allocated to each pupil the name and address of a French school pupil roughly our own age.

Within just over a year, having completed my first year of French at secondary school, I was on my way solo to visit my pen friend, whose family had invited me over for part of the summer holiday period. My pen friend visited my family a couple of years later. He and I still correspond.

Times change, and some parents these days may be nervous about putting 12-year-old offspring on to an airplane to be greeted at the other end by people they hardly know.

Furthermore, letter writing may be tiresome and old hat to many secondary pupils. But the various forms of electronic communication that are now open to them, including Skype, could easily serve as a platform for schools to develop pen friendships with pupils in other countries.

David Head

Navenby, Lincolnshire

An extreme view of an ordinary school

Turning to the inside pages of today’s paper (20 November), which carried the front page headline “Islamic extremism claims top C of E school”, I discovered the headline itself to be extreme. An Islamic Society set up by sixth formers does not constitute a takeover of the school.

I also noted, but was not surprised by, the statistic that despite being a Church of England school 80 per cent of the pupils are Bengali Muslims, accompanied by the comment of your Education Editor that the school was thus “reflecting the make-up of the community it serves”.

Hence my lack of surprise, because all Church of England schools seek to serve the local community as they are parish-based, not faith-based. The Church of England doesn’t have so-called faith schools. Other Christian denominations and other major faiths do have faith schools, but not the Church of England.

The only qualification required to benefit from the ministry of the Church of England, be that baptism, marriage, burial, pastoral care or, as in this instance, education, is that you live in the parish. Every citizen in this country is a parishioner and can call upon the services of the local parish church, by right. That is one of the huge benefits of the Church of England being the Established Church of the land.

Canon Tony Chesterman

Lesbury, Northumberland

No credit for hotels which take liberties

The case of the “hovel allegation surcharge”, in which a Blackpool hotelier attempted to debit an extra £100 from a guest who posted an unfavourable review, not only raises questions of just how critical one can be online – it also raises serious questions over credit card “authorisation”.

When I give an online retailer, an airline or a hotel the “authorisation” to make a deduction, it is for an agreed amount in return for a service. I assume a contract (real or implied) is created for that specific transaction and the agreed amount. I do not imagine I am giving a blank cheque to the retailer to plunder that account.

Recently a hotel in London pre-authorised my credit card for £100 above the cost of the room for “services I might use”. I had to agree, if I was to continue my stay, even though I had no intention of using “additional services”.

The hoteliers in Blackpool may be aggrieved by the tone of the review, but something must be done to protect consumers against retailers who use cards in this way.

Matthew Hisbent

Oxford

If you don’t need fuel subsidy, pass it on

Trevor Pateman (letter, 19 November) is obviously in the fortunate position of not actually needing the £200 winter fuel payment, but according to AgeUK “on average, one older person will die every seven minutes from a cold-related illness this winter”, so for many pensioners the payment is a life-saver.

The money is sent out just before Christmas as presumably a goodwill gesture and doesn’t have to be used straight away to pay for “winter fuel”.

Mr Pateman could donate his payment to AgeUK, giving him a warm glow by helping someone in real need.

Mary Gough

Watford, Hertfordshire

A donnish character, but no professor

Your report on a Cambridge don’s bequest of nearly £1m to the Liberal Democrats (14 November) refers to him several times as “Professor Watson”. George Watson was never a professor. He was a college and faculty lecturer in English, for 50 years a resident fellow of St John’s. He died not “in August”, as your report had it, but in August 2013.

A notable donnish character (who kindly invited me to dinner once, when I had a literary history of Cambridge published), cultured, polymathic and of robust views, he received, so far as I can discover, surprisingly few, if any, obituaries in the national press.

Graham Chainey

Brighton

Paddington’s too much? Oh no it’s not!

The British Board of Film Classification has awarded the Paddington Bear film a PG certificate. Have the BBFC’s members ever been to pantomime? Mild threat? What about the wicked queen, step-mother or ugly sisters? A man dressed as a woman? The Dame. A woman dressed as a man? Principal boy. Innuendo? “Ooer, missus, what a big one!” (beanstalk, pumpkin, cucumber). I despair.

Sue Thomas

Bowness on Windermere, Cumbria

Times:

Sir, The appalling and brutal murders carried out in a synagogue in Jerusalem during morning prayers this week (“Deaths push Jerusalem to brink of holy war”, Nov 19) are to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. The desecration of the sacred, taking life in a house of prayer, is the absolute antithesis of faith and of what we stand for. This attack on people at prayer is yet another example from across the globe of violence in the name of religion, which undermines religious freedom. We appeal to the believers of all traditions to denounce such attacks wherever in our world they take place and to call for an end to religiously motivated violence.

The Most Rev Justin Welby Archbishop of Canterbury
Ephraim Mirvis Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra

Sir, There is, rightly, outrage at the synagogue massacre; there should also be outrage at Benjamin Netanyahu’s response, which will ensure the cycles of “getting even” go on. It seems we are lacking a statesman capable not only of halting this spiral of violence but even understanding it.

Dominic Kirkham
Manchester

Sir, Foreign secretary Philip Hammond calls for peace between the Palestinians and the Jews. Surely he should be calling for peace between Palestinians and Israelis, whether the Israelis be Jewish, Druze, Christian, Bahá’í or indeed Muslim. The tragedy is that a separate state called Palestine would not have such a variety of believers.

Tamara Selig
Stanmore, Middx

Sir, I have found that when someone shouts at me, shouting back rarely makes things better. My daughter is in Israel at present. I would feel more confident about her safety if the Israeli government took a more measured approach to the inexcusable terrorist murders.

James Goldman
London NW4

Sir, Thousands of Israelis, both Jews and Muslims, including the president and heads of both religions, attended the funeral of Zidan Saif, the Druze policeman killed in the attack. In this deeply conflicted part of the Middle East where the positions of the Arab Muslim and Israeli Jewish parties appear intractable, the Druze, a Muslim community living in Israel, should be seen as a model of cooperation on which to build.

Dr R Rosenfelder
London NW6

Sir, Your correspondent Catherine Philp puts the cart before the horse (“Jerusalem braced for holy war”, Nov 20). The conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbours did not begin as “territorial and political,” now “morphing into religious war.” Its origins were always fundamentally religious in nature — the notion of Jewish self-determination in any part of the “Dar el-Islam” [The House of Islam] being a challenge to Islamic jurisprudence.
Israel’s chief rabbinate may have forbidden Jews from entering the Temple Mount, but other rabbis have ruled differently. In any case, it is for each individual Jew to make up his or her mind on this issue. If Christians and Moslems can pray at this site, why not Jews?

Professor Geoffrey Alderman
University of Buckingham

Sir, It is 20 years since Baruch Goldstein slaughtered 29 Muslims and wounded 125 others as the prayed in the Mosque of Abraham in Hebron. His house was not demolished and though some of his supporters in the extreme right-wing Meir Kahane group were briefly held, it was the Palestinians of Hebron who were punished for this atrocity: their movements became ever more restricted, and half their mosque was converted into a synagogue.
As we rush to condemn those who have applauded the synagogue attack in Jerusalem, let us remember that Goldstein’s grave became a place of pilgrimage for Israeli settlers — more than 10,000 visited it before it was demolished by the Israeli government.

Brigid Waddams
Batcombe, Somerset

Sir, I see from your report that spending on lollipop ladies has been cut by more than 40 per cent. The last time I looked I was still a man.

Peter Richardson
Sale, Cheshire

Sir, I write with regard to your report on migration (Nov 19). First, the subject is understated by some media which refer simply to net migration, and second, there is unbalanced criticism of the EU by the failure to make a distinction between immigration from EU and non-EU countries.

For the year ending March 2014 there were 560,000 immigrants of whom almost half were from non-EU countries. The government can do nothing about EU immigrants while we remain within the EU. It does, however, have responsibility for non-EU immigration and it seems to have lost control of this. In the same year, 316,000 people left the UK, making it likely that the UK is less British by almost one million people. No wonder there is growing public concern.
Lord Kilclooney
House of Lords

Sir, The scale and consequences of the failures of Rotherham Council cannot be overstated (“Councils leaving children exposed to sex grooming”, Nov 19), but Ofsted’s contribution should not be ignored either. Since 2005, Ofsted produced 11 reports on safeguarding in Rotherham. In only one report, in 2009, were serious concerns raised and the following year these were said to have been addressed.

An unannounced inspection in 2012 of the council’s arrangements for the protection of children concluded that “the overall effectiveness of local authority arrangements . . . is adequate. Significant improvements have been made since 2009 [...] These improvements have been driven by clear and resilient leadership and informed by a sound and realistic understanding of the needs of the local community”.

The sexual exploitation uncovered in Rotherham took place between 1997 and 2013. Who will shine a light on Ofsted?
John Gaskin
Bainton, E Yorks

Sir, I am baffled by the report that Sir Bruce Keogh will require surgeons’ death rates to be published (News, Nov 17). He is a serious surgeon with a track record of good sense. Why is something so extraordinary going out under his name?

Anyone who has worked in the NHS knows that avoidable postoperative complications are more related to nursing care than anything else, and that surgeons have little control over that.

Clearly a correct diagnosis has to be made, and the correct operation offered and performed by the surgeon. Once the last stitch is in, it’s over to nurses and physios to ensure success. Death rates will reflect the success of the team working together, not the skill of the surgeon.
Alastair Lack
Coombe Bissett, Wilts

Telegraph:

With life expectancy on the rise, the country’s social care system is in crisis

Close up of an elderly lady's hands, affected by rheumatoid arthritis, holding a cup

The number of people over 85 in Britain is expected to double by 2030 Photo: Alamy

6:59AM GMT 20 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – The ballooning figures for life expectancy at birth and at age 65 in England and Wales highlight the fact that the care of Britain’s ageing population needs to be addressed urgently.

The social care system is in crisis, with the number of over-85s expected to double by 2030. It will be the scandal of our generation if we do not act to meet the needs of our ageing population – after all, the younger people of today are simply the older people of tomorrow.

The Grey Pride campaign has called for the introduction of a minister for older people in Cabinet. This would provide someone who can take responsibility for joining up services that affect old people – health, social care, housing, transport.

We call on the three major parties to commit themselves to such an appointment in their election manifestos.

Jane Ashcroft
Chief Executive, Anchor
Janet Davies
Executive Director for Nursing & Service Delivery, The Royal College of Nursing
Professor Martin Green
Chief Executive, Care England
Malcolm Booth
CEO, National Federation of Occupational Pensioners
Nick Bunting
Secretary General, Royal Air Forces Association
Simon Bottery
Director of Policy and External Relations, Independent Age
Denise Keating
Chief Executive, Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion
Nigel Wilson
CEO, Legal & General
Michael Voges
Executive Director of Associated Retirement Community Operators
Bob Green
CEO, Stonewall Housing
David Orr
Chief Executive, National Housing Federation
Stephen Burke
Director, United for All Ages and Good Care Guide
Des Kelly
Executive Director, National Care Forum
Jeff Skipp
CEO, Deafblind UK
Sam Smethers
Chief Executive, Grandparents Plus
Colin Nee
Chief Executive, British Geriatrics Society
Paul Burstow MP
Liz Kendall MP
Dave Anderson MP
Nic Dakin MP
Jason McCartney MP
Dame Joan Ruddock MP
Tracey Crouch MP
Dame Angela Watkinson MP
Nick De Bois MP
Kevin Barron MP
Rosie Cooper MP
Alison Seabeck MP
Hilda Hayo
CEO, Dementia UK

The plight of religious minorities in the Middle East; equality between the sexes; how to save the eurozone; and an English lesson in 1960s chic

An Ultra-orthodox Jewish man puts his head in his hands, inside a synagogue that was attacked by two Palestinians in the ultra-Orthodox Har Nof neighbourhood in Jerusalem. Two Palestinians armed with a gun and meat cleavers burst into a Jerusalem synagogue and killed four Israelis before being shot dead in the bloodiest attack in the city in years.

An Ultra-orthodox Jewish man puts his head in his hands, inside a synagogue that was attacked by two Palestinians in the ultra-Orthodox Har Nof neighbourhood in Jerusalem Photo: JACK GUEZ/AFP/Getty Images

7:00AM GMT 20 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – On the day when four Jewish worshippers were slaughtered at prayer in a Jerusalem synagogue, the Church of England General Synod gathered to debate religious freedom and the plight of religious minorities in the Middle East.

A discussion paper had been circulated in advance, and we had invited a Muslim speaker to address us, in a historic step forward in inter-faith dialogue. Both the paper and the panel discussion upon it were measured, thoughtful and respectful.

The paper described religious freedom as the “canary in the mine”, which served as the measure of all other human rights.

The debate went well, except for one remarkable oversight: on that of all days, not a mention was made of our threatened Jewish brothers and sisters in the region.

I had tabled a question: “Is the canary in the mine Jewish?” but was not called.

Martin Sewell
General Synod Member, Rochester
Gravesend, Kent

SIR – David Blair writes that, in the present perilous situation in Jerusalem, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, will “probably be a stabilising force”.

Not so. Mr Abbas regularly incites violence among the people of Judea and Samaria as well as those Arabs currently living in Israel.

To the West, he speaks moderation, but to his Muslim audience, Mr Abbas calls for more surprise attacks until Israel is vanquished. If anyone wishes to know the truth about Mr Abbas, they need only look at the English translations of Arab newspapers, television broadcasts and cartoons online.

Dr Elizabeth Stewart
Weston, Lincolnshire

SIR – John Kerry, the US secretary of state, blamed the Jerusalem synagogue attack on “incitement” by Palestinian leaders.

Raymond Solomon
Manchester

SIR – I went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land recently, spending six nights in a Bethlehem hotel and commuting to the various Christian sites around Jerusalem and the West Bank before completing the trip in Tiberias. The hostility between the Israelis and the Palestinians was even more palpable this year than on my last trip two years ago, which is hardly surprising given what went on in Gaza this summer.

The thing that depressed me most of all was comparing notes with a pilgrim from Suffolk, who told me his group wouldn’t visit Bethlehem because their guide had told them that “it’s full of Muslims and they’re dangerous”. When asked, he confirmed that the guide was Israeli. I regard this as yet another example of Israel’s determination to starve the Palestinians into submission. I wish I knew the name of the tour company so I could expose its bigotry publicly.

Gabriel Herbert
London W12

Keeping men

SIR – Jacky Maggs argues that we need to stop vilifying women for the choices that they make regarding child care and work – that women need to be given a choice (Letters, November 18). I fully support her aims, but what about a man’s right to choose?

My son is destined to be a wage slave; my daughter, because she is female, will have a choice. We will only have equal numbers of women and men as FTSE 100 CEOs or government ministers when we have the same number of “kept” men as “kept” women.

Men are mainly judged by their careers, while women are judged on a broad range of issues, not all of them positive. Let’s start by judging women and men on the same basis; we will only achieve equality for women when we also have equality for men.

Kevin Ruff
Banbury, Oxfordshire

SIR – Of course no one commented on the way Karl Stefanovic, the Australian television presenter, was dressed. He was wearing his school uniform of dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. If he dared to wear different, brightly coloured clothes or appear without his tie, the wrath of the viewers would have descended on his head.

If the female presenters dressed conventionally and consistently wore a dark skirt suit and a smart blouse, they would attract as little comment as he did. Men in the public gaze only escape sartorial criticism if they conform to the very restricted view of “correct” male dress. There certainly is a gender divide in dress codes, but I would suggest that it is the men who are the victims.

Dr Steven Field
Wokingham, Berkshire

SIR – Cathy Newman envies her male colleagues who do not need to spend “hours rifling through the wardrobe in search of suitable TV attire”. So why does she spend hours? Let her wear a smart suit with a white blouse and her killer heels. Problem solved.

Marjorie Ainley
Bath, Somerset

Heaven’s bacon

SIR – In his recent illuminating article on saffron, Paul Levy refers to “Portuguese saffron desserts… formerly confected exclusively by nuns, [which are] made extravagantly yellow by the incorporation of an unimaginably large number of egg yolks.”

Such desserts were, indeed, originally made in convents and monasteries, where large quantities of egg whites were used for the starching and pressing of the nuns’ and monks’ habits. The leftover egg yolks were then put to good use, resulting in a constellation of celestial desserts, ultra-sweet and sticky, which are found throughout the country to this day. Many of them carry names associated with monastic life, such as “heaven’s bacon”, “nun’s belly” and “angel’s chests”.

Richard Symington
London SW17

Rating bears and birds

SIR – The rating afforded Paddington by the British Board of Film Classification may help the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds when considering the fate of four-and-twenty blackbirds.

Robert Vincent
Wildhern, Hampshire

Litter pickings

SIR – Americans are not necessarily tidier than Britons (Letters, November 19).

Some states, Georgia in particular, employ prisoners to pick up litter from the roadside, sometimes under the supervision of an armed policeman.

Making prisoners useful would benefit society here in Britain.

M D Sparks
Shalford, Essex

35 sleeps till Christmas

SIR – Irena Milloy (Letters, November 17) is wrong in thinking Christmas bedding a new phenomenon.

My reindeer and snowflake patterned bedding is now over a decade old. It is used for no more than 28 days a year, after which it is banished to the cupboard. I expect it to outlast us all.

Dr Fiona Ramsay
Singapore

SIR – My recollection of Christmas arriving early goes back to the Forties when our milkman was also the supplier of our Christmas chicken. To guarantee a chicken on our table on Christmas Day it had to be ordered by July.

Edmund Redfern
Blackburn, Lancashire

It’s all in the hours: how to save the eurozone

^{Olde Worlde business: Ernst Graner’s early 20th-century portrait of a Viennese grocer’s (bridgemanart.com )}

SIR – A recent weekend visit to Vienna on All Saint’s Day brought home to me very clearly why eurozone economies are failing to grow.

It was a national holiday, so I would guess that, during that weekend, the population of the city centre was swollen by perhaps 40-50 per cent: yet, barring an odd coffee shop and chocolatier, the entire city remained closed. Closer inspection of the opening hours of various retail premises revealed that many still close at half past five or six each evening, and have no late-night openings.

With this kind of approach to work it is small wonder that business is bad.

Jan de Walden
London SE1

How the English taught the French to be chic

SIR – My French exchange student lived in the same outfit for 10 days because it was the one rig-out she felt was fashionable. This was 1967 and she wore black needlecord jeans, a rose wool ribbed mini jumper and short leather ankle boots, even when we spent the sunny afternoons at the outdoor lido in Surbiton.

Later I took her to Carnaby Street and she spent all her holiday money on a citrus psychedelic dress – it was Swinging London after all, while the French were still rocking to Johnny Hallyday.

When I got to France we spent our afternoons in an attic “club”, where all the teenagers smoked Kent cigarettes and played moody Michel Polnareff records.

Jane O’Nions
Sevenoaks, Kent

SIR – I was saddened to see that safety rules are to preclude pupils’ foreign exchange visits.

Fifty years ago, aged 15, I travelled alone by train from Birmingham to Landshut to meet up with my German pen friend.

I learnt much from that visit, apart from the ability to better express myself in a foreign language. Most importantly I learnt that not all people were as materially fortunate as me. After my lengthy journey I asked to take a bath – never expecting that this would entail buckets of water being brought to the boil and poured into a tin bath.

It was a salutary lesson, and my pen friend and I remain in contact to this day.

Penelope Cornish
Bromsgrove, Worcestershire

Irish Times:

Sir, – A U-turn, a climbdown, a volte-face, a rowback, a 180, a flip-flop, a back-track, a watered-down version. – Yours, etc,

OLIVER McGRANE,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 16.

Sir, – U-bend or U-turn? – Yours, etc,

TOM GILSENAN,

Beaumont, Dublin 9.

Sir, – Those surviving on a pittance will be charged the same amount for water as those with too much to count. The distribution of money upwards continues unabated. Governance in Ireland, under this Coalition, is now utterly inglorious. – Yours, etc,

JIM O’SULLIVAN,

Rathedmond,

Sligo.

Sir, – What is the logic behind charging an adult living alone €60 for water, while a cohabiting couple must pay €80 each? – Yours, etc,

MIKE BROPHY,

Killiney, Co Dublin.

Sir, – The details of the revised water charges regime outlined in the Dáil yesterday are identical in almost every respect to the information leaked to the media in recent weeks.

As the Government had repeatedly assured us that the Cabinet exclusively was working on this package, it must be assumed that these leaks came from Cabinet members.

This is, of course, very worrying indeed and must be of grave concern to the Taoiseach, who I am sure will order an immediate inquiry – to be conducted by a retired High Court judge, of course. – Yours, etc,

HUGH PIERCE,

Celbridge,

Co Kildare.

Sir, – Watching the “debate” in the Dáil on the changes to water charges, I was struck by the bad manners of our so-called leaders. While the Minister was outlining the changes, Opposition TDs continually heckled him, and when the Opposition spokesman stood up to reply, most of the Government front bench walked out. How are we to have any respect for these people whose manners are worse than a bunch of rowdy schoolchildren? – Yours, etc,

MARK LEACH,

Dublin8.

A chara, – Minister for the Environement Kelly had already begun the predictable buck-passing. Asked if non-payers would be brought to court, he responded that this was a matter for Irish Water! I’m sure the same response will be forthcoming when charges are increased in due course. – Is mise,

GEAROIDÍN O’DWYER,

Killiney,

Co Dublin.

Sir, – Anyone familiar with the unerring ability of Goverment TDs to issue retractions, contradictions and pure spin will probably wait another few weeks to see what else it is going to let fly out of their mouths, before deciding one way or the other.

Once people are signed up, 2019 will roll around quickly enough, the plebisicite will never happen and charges will quickly skyrocket before the whole thing is sold off to some private investor. It will then be too late for the Irish people to do anything about it.

Massive public protests get results and the anti-water charges campaign should keep up the pressure until at least a plebisicite is held and the future of Irish Water as a public utility is secured. – Yours, etc,

NICK FOLLEY,

Carrigaline,

Co Cork.

Sir, – My stance in favour of water charges all along has been because of the conservation argument. Now that we know the details of the water charges payments, it seems the conservation argument has gone out the window. It seems that what my anti-water charges friends were telling me in heated debates was correct, it was just a tax under another name.

What’s the point in conserving water if there is a cap in place? It doesn’t matter how much water you use. We are now being told that the meters will help reduce bills if you use a small amount of water. In reality the reduction will be minuscule and will not be worth the effort. Granted the meters may find a few leaks but if you are effectively not being penalised for them, what’s the point in getting them fixed? – Yours, etc,

THOMAS RODDY,

Salthill, Galway.

Sir, – The big problem is those who won’t pay and those who can’t pay. What is to be done about that? The Government’s answer is political, ambiguous and mealy-mouthed. People won’t be chased for the charge until a year and a month from the start date. The financial penalties seem rather low and will only count, apparently, when the residence is being sold. There is no mention of jail terms and confiscation of income or property. PPSs are not to be asked for and those which have been given are to dealt with by a protocol between Irish Water and the data commissioner.

The honest will wind up paying for the quango known as Irish Water. Those who don’t pay are going to get a lot more time with their money than the honest ones. Eventually, a detailed scheme will have to be designed for those who really can’t pay. This means income assessment, something Revenue and the Department of Social Protection seem reluctant to do. In the meantime, Irish Water will be racking up the costs, which will have to be paid in the future, almost certainly from government income or loans. So expect a big jump in water charges after 2019. – Yours, etc,

LIAM COOKE,

Coolock, Dublin 17.

A chara, – One water meter for sale. Like new. Any reasonable offer accepted. – Is mise,

MICHAEL A CARROLL,

Mount Merrion,

Co Dublin.

A chara, – If we give it a few more months, the Government will be paying us to use water. – Is mise,

LOMAN Ó LOINGSIGH,

Dublin 24.

Sir, – I was interested to read Stephen O’Byrnes’s piece “‘Peaceful protest’ over Irish Water is truly a charade” (Opinion & Analysis, November 19th). Given his former senior role in the now defunct Progressive Democrats, I particularly welcome his call “that the genesis of this ongoing campaign of unlawful behaviour is spelled out by Government, supported by all our politicians”.

Perhaps you would allow similar space and prominence to be given to an exploration of how certain policies, promoted by the PDs and implemented by governments of which that party was a member, contributed to the economic collapse of this country, with catastrophic results for so many, particularly the poor, excluded and marginalised? Might we start with the lack of regulation of the financial services sector, and its implementation of income tax cuts at a time of unprecedented economic growth, and its impact on revenue when the housing and property market collapsed? The list is long; however, I hope the above two items might be a useful start. – Yours, etc,

NESSAN VAUGHAN,

Baldoyle, Dublin 13.

Sir, – What a relief to read such a well-structured article from Stephen O’Byrnes. I agree wholeheartedly and it makes such a change from all the negative media comment we have been subjected to. The complete Irish Water situation has been handled so very badly and it is difficult to believe that the politicians in Government can ever recover from this debacle. Unfortunately, anarchy is rearing its head and I hope the authorities are ready. – Yours, etc,

MARGARET BARRY,

Dublin 9.

Sir, – I wish to protest about the protests. Please can we have some new news! – Yours, etc,

RICHARD FOX,

Kilcoole, Co Wicklow.

Sir, – Stephen O’Byrnes writes, “It is also time that some broadcasters moved beyond their ping-pong presentation of these events, and stopped according a moral and political equivalence to both sides in this national confrontation”. Is he suggesting that The Irish Times should be condemned for publishing his article without warning readers that he is a neo-liberal long associated with the redundant Progressive Democrats? – Yours, etc,

MARTIN WALSH,

Dublin 8.

Sir, – Do you have to afford lobbyists such as Stephen O’ Byrne the opportunity to serve up such drivel in your opinion columns? – Yours, etc,

FERGAL McCANN,

Inchicore, Dublin 8.

Sir, –The opinion piece condemning the “anarchy” of the water protesters by Stephen O’Byrnes describes him as a communications and political consultant. Many people may not be aware that the same Mr O’Byrne and his colleagues in the late and unlamented Progressive Democrats bear a huge responsibility for the economic policies that led to the bankruptcy of this State. The rejection by the people of further impositions to pay for the result of such policies is entirely predictable and justified, while the actions of a few are not. – Yours, etc,

Sir, – I would urge the protesters to heed one of their own slogans, “Enough is enough”. You have made your point; now let it rest, please. – Yours, etc,

JOE HARVEY,

Glenageary,

Co Dublin.

A chara, – In his article on political stability and governability in Ireland (“Losing its grip: why the Irish political system can no longer guarantee stability”, Opinion & Analysis, November 11th), Fintan O’Toole suggests that mass emigration was the price paid for the prioritisation of political stability in post-independence Ireland.

I would argue that political stability was a consequence rather than a cause of mass emigration (which was long-established before the achievement of independence in 1922).

In 1992 the National Economic and Social Council (NESC) published a report by the Norwegian social scientist, Lars Mjøset, which sought to explain why Ireland’s level of economic development lagged behind that achieved by other small west European economies (Denmark, Austria, Sweden, Switzerland and Finland). Mjoset’s main conclusion was that the latter countries, unlike Ireland, had developed strong export-oriented industrial sectors that were primarily owned by indigenous firms and around which were built robust national systems of innovation which drove processes of continuous renewal and expansion.

Ireland, Mjøset argued, did not possess a comparable national system of innovation, and a key reason for this was the impact of continued mass emigration since the mid-19th century. The selective nature of emigration meant those moving abroad were, for the most part, young, energetic, ambitious, and innovative. In essence, those with get-up-and-go got up and went. This was the classic safety valve that systematically removed those who would otherwise have been sources of social disruption and change.

As a result, Ireland was left in the unchallenged control of highly conservative, agrarian-based, social and economic elements profoundly inimical to change. Rather than challenge these entrenched interests, and faced with very limited employment prospects, potential dissidents who might otherwise have sparked innovation and change simply emigrated. One consequence was the phenomenon of political stagnation (as much as stability) described by Mr O’Toole.

It remains to be seen to what extent the current wave of social unrest, in conjunction with the implosion of the Catholic Church, the marginalisation of agriculture and widespread alienation from the established political parties signals a secular transition to a new era of political instability. – Is mise,

Dr PROINNSIAS

BREATHNACH,

Department of Geography,

Maynooth University.

Sir, – The recent death of a two-year-old girl in a road incident in Waterford was tragic (“Fire service criticises ‘ghoulish’ crash photos”, Front Page, November 20th). I cannot begin to imagine the grief that her family is going through. It is deplorable that members of the public that happened upon the scene began capturing videos and photo images of the incident with their phones. Why anyone would stoop to this morbid behaviour is beyond my comprehension. Yet it has has become so widespread that Waterford Fire Services has appealed to the public to let it get on with its work and to show respect and dignity to those involved in accidents. Curiosity is normal; capturing images of dying, injured and distraught victims is not. – Yours, etc,

JOHN BELLEW,

Dunleer, Co Louth.

Sir, – I commend Kathy Sheridan for her clear-headed analysis of the inherently harmful nature of prostitution (“Telling the grim truth about prostitution”, Opinion & Analysis, November 19th). As an organisation that has supported over 2,500 women whose lives have been blighted by their involvement in the sex trade, we can confirm that they did not experience prostitution as “a job like any other”, but rather an existence characterised overwhelmingly by objectification, exploitation and violence meted out by those who bought them and those who profited from their sale.

As we move towards long-awaited legal reform on this issue in Ireland, Ms Sheridan is right to suggest it is time to face the truth of what prostitution really involves and stop pandering to the view of it as a harmless or even glamorous “profession”. This is a view peddled by a privileged minority and only serves to line the pockets of pimps and traffickers, and prop up the belief that men have the right to buy women and girls – usually the most marginalised and vulnerable women and girls. If we are truly interested in achieving gender equality in Ireland then tackling the oppression of prostitution has to be an absolute priority. – Yours, etc,

SARAH BENSON,

Chief Executive,

Ruhama,

All Hallows College,

Drumcondra, Dublin 9.

Sir, – Last Friday I travelled to the “3 Theatre” (formerly the 02) in Dublin to attend the Andrea Bocelli concert. The concert was late starting (which is apparently the norm in Ireland now), latecomers were admitted in their droves without even an apology up to the interval, and the prohibition of recording and filming was not enforced. Am I the only person who gets upset when there is constant chatter from behind in the middle of an aria or orchestral piece? Am I expecting too much not to have to sit next to or behind someone constantly using their iPad or iPhone to take numerous photographs from every angle during every song? Am I asking too much of the promoters of these concerts to enforce their own rules and to leave the latecomers outside? There were so many photographs being taken last Friday the scene was reminsicent of the intermittent flashing of Christmas tree lights. Yet nothing was said other than a general announcement at the beginning of the evening, when many of the latecomers were not even present.

What was worse, people were emailing photographs to their friends and then answering the emails, after having an audible discussion, of course. What is it about Irish society that we can no longer arrive on time, sit, listen and enjoy? Intervals were made for chatting.

The ticket (excluding charges) cost €166 and was paid for in April. This was a most expensive trip; I won’t be spending my hard-earned cash in that theatre again. We as a civilised society lost a lot in the Celtic Tiger, and not all of it money.

Thank heavens for the Gate and the National Concert Hall, where standards are still maintained. – Yours, etc,

MIRIAM MURPHY ,

Cork.

Sir, – Alison Hackett (November 18th) argues that if teachers wish to retain professional status as educators they should assess their students’ work. She cites other professions such as the law and architecture. Would she agree to a system whereby a lawyer would defend a client and then act as judge and jury? Or where an architect would both submit a planning application and then decide whether or not to give permission for construction? Teachers are not only there to assess; they are advocates, supporting students throughout their time at secondary school – encouraging, cajoling, inspiring. The student-teacher relationship is a delicate one that may be ruined by forcing teachers to become the judges of their students. – Yours, etc,

DAVID GORRY,

Naas, Co Kildare.

Sir, – Fintan O’Toole should realise that even little ideas can have big consequences (“What’s the big idea? It’s time for the State to consider a real democracy”, Opinion & Analysis, November 18th). Why not include the banning of smoking in pubs and the charging for plastic bags as big ideas? From little saplings do great oaks grow. – Yours, etc,

JUDITH GOLDBERGER,

Donnybrook, Dublin 4.

Irish Independent:

So all is settled. We have “certainty, simplicity and affordability”. The charging rates have been lowered and set in stone for four years. Irish Water will only be privatised if the people agree in a plebiscite. The Government backbenchers, we hear, are quietly satisfied that the worst is over and that the Government has regained the initiative. Case closed. Panic over.

But is it? The big problem is those who won’t pay and those who can’t pay. What is to be done about it? The Government’s answer is political – ambiguous and mealy-mouthed. People won’t be chased for the charge until a year and a month from the start date. The financial penalties seem rather low and will only count, apparently, when the residence is being sold. There is no mention of jail terms and confiscation of income or property. PPSs are not to be asked for and those which have been given are to be dealt with by protocol between Irish Water and the Data Commissioner.

As usual the Government has chickened out. The honest will wind up paying for the quango known as Irish Water. Those who don’t pay are going to get a lot more time with their money than the honest ones. Eventually, a detailed scheme will have to be designed for those who really can’t pay. This means income assessment – something Revenue and Social Welfare seem reluctant to do.

In the meantime, Irish Water will be racking up costs which will have to be paid in the future – almost certainly from Government income or loans.

So expect a big jump in water charges post-2019. Hopefully, the country won’t be washed up by then. This Government are unlikely to be in power then (not to worry – the pensions are terrific).

Maybe Sinn Fein will be power. It should be interesting to see their policy on Irish Water. There’s one positive note about Sinn Fein in government – enforcement of government policy shouldn’t be a problem.

Liam Cooke

Coolock, Dublin 17

Water charges

When George Bush Senior was president of the US he said that future wars would be about water. Once again, Ireland is to the fore as we set out to do the right thing by starting our own watered-down version in the run-up to the 2016 celebrations.

This is what was really said outside the GPO that day in 1916 (as it all becomes clearer now that we see history repeat itself).

“In the name of Water and the dead generations, etc, etc.” We can now confidently replace Padraig Pearse’s “blood sacrifice” with “water retention”, because he obviously was saying this.

You can take our freedom, but you’ll never take our rivers, which always run free. Oh, they’ve taken them as well?

Robert Sullivan

Bantry, Co Cork

It’s not just any panto… it’s the Irish Water panto.

Tom Gilsenan

Beaumont D9

Almost everyone knows that when you are in a hole you stop digging. However, after half a million water holes, the Government are still at it.

Seamus McLoughlin

Keshcarrigan, Co Leitrim

‘Disgraceful’ scenes in Ireland

Dear God! Am I supposed to be concerned that Joan Burton has been hit by a balloon? Enda Kenny says this is “disgraceful”. Really?

Taoiseach, for your education, this is what “disgraceful” looks like:

It’s the two men I know in their 40s in our capital who killed themselves because their businesses failed in the crash, which was caused by Irish politicians.

It’s doing absolutely nothing, when you’re the leader of the opposition, to hold an inept government to account – even though that’s your absolute duty in a democracy.

It’s failing to pressurise government during the boom years to invest in hospitals, schools and 100-year-old leaky water pipes.

It’s throwing away €80m of our money to set up Irish Water.

It’s the death of my father this year from complications having developed a lung clot after lying on a hospital trolley. (He was in A&E simply to get three stitches in his head after a fall and wanted to go home during all of the first 24 hours. Then he deteriorated, had to go to a ward and then cost the taxpayer a bomb in useless rehabilitation costs for three months, before he eventually died in a room with eight other patients watching him). My father had paid twice over for his medical care (both public and private).

This is a definition of “disgraceful”.

Dr Maeve White

Rathfarnham, Dublin 14

Don’t let Benjy bull leave alone

I note in your pages the exploits of Benjy the Co Mayo gay bull (November 18).

So far, £9,000 (€11,242) has already been pledged to rehome the lucky bull.

A young adult Charlois would weigh about 800kg, at current (well-publicised) low pricing levels (€3.67/kg) this would amount to under €3,000. Considering the amount raised, perhaps there would be enough left over for him to bring a friend?

Richard E Joyce

Monkstown, Co Dublin

Backing continuous assessment

The second-level teacher unions are committed to resisting the compromised proposals for junior-cycle reforms as outlined by the Minister for Education and Skills. Regrettably, they have announced two days of strike.

In a joint statement the Association of Secondary Teachers Ireland and the Teachers’ Union of Ireland continue to raise concerns about the potential impact of 40pc school-based continuous assessment on “educational standards”. They also strongly claim to be taking a stand on behalf of their students and what is best for them.

However, both the National Parents Council Post-Primary (NPCpp) and the Irish Second-level Students’ Union (ISSU) have come out in support of the minister’s proposed reforms, including a level of school-based assessment.

In their own joint statement both parent and student bodies have respectfully asked teachers to return to talks, stating that the minister’s proposed package of reforms is “good for students, good for parents and good for education”.

Therefore, these proposed strikes do not have the support of many parents and students. More importantly, many of the concerns raised by the unions are not supported by research.

Both teachers and union representatives are well aware that research has repeatedly and consistently demonstrated that constructive and formative feedback is essential for promoting learning.

Students need to know what they are doing well, where they are required to improve and how they can improve.

A summative exam at the end of a three-year cycle does not give teachers the opportunity to provide such feedback. On the other hand, the proposed 40pc school-based continuous assessment over years two and three provides teachers with the opportunity to assess their students and help them identify areas where they can learn and develop their skills, as well as hopefully improving students’ overall grade outcome.

Teachers are best placed to provide students with individualised formative feedback that can help them reach their full potential.

Dr Raymond Lynch

Department of Education

University of Limerick

Irish Independent

22 November 2014 Bank

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and I go to the bank.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down vegatables for tea and her back pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska – obituary

Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska was a daughter of Poland’s national hero Marshal Jozef Pilsudsk and flew Spitfires for the Allied cause

Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska, centre, during the war

5:25PM GMT 21 Nov 2014

Comments

Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska, who has died aged 94, was the younger daughter of the pre-war Polish leader and military hero Marshal Jozef Pilsudski; after the German invasion of her country, she fled to Britain, where she served during the war as a pilot in the Air Transport Auxiliary.

Jadwiga Pilsudska was born on February 28 1920 in Warsaw, the younger of two daughters of the Polish “chief of state” by his then mistress Aleksandra Szczerbinska, whom he was unable to marry because his first wife, Maria, refused him a divorce. They married after Maria died in 1921.

Many Poles regard Pilsudski as their greatest national hero – the man who helped Poland regain its independence at the end of the First World War after 125 years when it had been wiped off the map. In the year Jadwiga was born, he led Polish troops to a stunning victory over Russian Bolshevik forces in the Soviet-Polish war of 1919-20. If his later record, as de facto dictator of Poland from 1926 to his death in 1935, remains more controversial due to his internment of political opponents, his vision of a multi-ethnic Poland, tolerant of different peoples and faiths, is one which continues to inspire many Polish democrats.

From their earliest years Pilsudski’s daughters, Jadwiga and her elder sister Wanda, joined him in public appearances. Brought up in Warsaw and educated at a private school, they lived for some time in the Belweder Palace, which now houses a museum dedicated to their father, and at Milusin, a small manor house at Sulejówek (about 12 miles east of Warsaw), that had been given to the Marshal by his soldiers.

Jadwiga’s interest in aviation began in childhood. From building model aeroplanes, she graduated to flying gliders in 1937 and went on to gain her pilot’s licence.

After leaving school in 1939, she wanted to study aeronautical engineering at Warsaw’s Technical University, but her plans were interrupted by the German invasion that September. Shortly afterwards she fled with her mother and sister to Sweden before being evacuated on a special flight to England, where she embarked on a degree in Architecture at Newnham College, Cambridge.

February 1940 saw the foundation of the ATA as a civilian service dedicated to ferrying aircraft around the UK for the RAF, and Jadwiga soon made the first of several attempts to join the new service.

^{Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska with officers during the war}

By the spring of 1942 there was an increasing demand for ATA pilots. British women pilots had been recruited from the early months of the war, and in the spring of 1942 the first American women pilots arrived. They were the largest group of overseas ATA pilots. Excluding those from the Commonwealth, the next largest, and certainly the most colourful, were the Poles. From 1940 there had been a steady trickle of Polish male pilots; among the June 1942 contingent was the young and attractive Jadwiga.

Initially she flew training and light transport aircraft before graduating to fighters such as the Hurricane and Spitfire (her personal favourite). Before transferring to a new aircraft type, pilots spent a brief period sitting in the cockpit to familiarise themselves, and then, using a standard checklist, they took off on their first flight .

Jadwiga, who was described by her superiors as “ of above average skills”, rose to be a second officer and this allowed her to fly Class 4 aircraft, which included advanced twin-engined aircraft such as the Wellington bomber and the Mosquito in addition to fighters and transport aircraft.

^{Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska (second from right) with other ATA pilots during the war}

After two years with the ATA she decided to return to her studies and in July 1944 took leave of absence to enrol at the Polish School of Architecture at the Polish University Abroad, housed at Liverpool University, from where she graduated in 1946. In 1944 she had married Lieutenant Andrzej Jaraczewski, a Polish naval officer, with whom she had a son and daughter.

After the war they remained in political exile in Britain. For a time Jadwiga worked as an architect in the urban and regional planning department of the London County Council, before she and her husband founded a small company producing lamps and furniture of her own design.

She never took British citizenship, instead using a Nansen passport (for political refugees) pending the day when she could resume full Polish citizenship.

Her daughter, Joanna, returned to Poland in 1979 and married the Solidarity activist Janusz Onyszkiewicz (who would serve two terms as Poland’s Minister of Defence in the 1990s). Jadwiga waited until the fall of communism in 1990, when she and her husband and sister returned home, settling in Warsaw, where Andrzej Jaraczewski died in 1992.

With her sister, Jadwiga co-founded the Jozef Pilsudski Family Foundation, and in 2000 they persuaded the state to return the family manor of Milusin, where plans are now under way for the construction of a museum dedicated to their father.

^{Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska in later life (AP)}

For her wartime service in the ATA Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska was awarded the Polish Bronze Cross of Merit with Swords, and in 2008 she was presented with the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta by the Polish president Lech Kaczynski.

Her sister Wanda died in 2001. Her children survive her.

Jadwiga Pilsudska-Jaraczewska, born February 28 1920, died November 16 2014

Guardian:

Professor Janet Beer, vice-chancellor of Oxford Brookes University, is one of only 35 women among a total of 170 higher education vice-chancellors. Photograph: Anna Gordon

Having worked in the field of equality legislation, I reject the suggestion that it dictates to people and controls what they can say or think (Paul Mason, G2, 17 November), as was claimed in a Sheffield University study. From Britain’s first Race Relations Act of 1965 to the 2010 Equality Act, such legislation merely seeks to ensure that members of minority groups are equally entitled to choose where they live, work or are educated, living fulfilled lives without being hampered by other people’s prejudices.

Anyone who wants to throw a private party for redheaded lesbians excluding blond heterosexual men is free to do so, but must never exercise those prejudices when employing people or letting them accommodation. The great achievement of race relations legislation since 1965 has been to make racial prejudice socially unacceptable enough to make people hesitate before expressing it. That some people still display it is regrettable, but must be accepted as part of the diversity of human beings.

I write as the widow of a black Jamaican, with a Ghanaian-born son-in-law and an Irish-Canadian grandmother from Quebec. I am also descended from a Huguenot pastor who escaped from Roman Catholic persecution in France in 1686 eventually to settle in Holland, which entitles me to live in England’s oldest immigrant housing scheme, in Rochester.
Jane Hammond
Rochester, Kent

• The dismal plight of many women in academia makes depressing reading (Low pay, brief maternity leave and few senior roles, Education, 18 November). In higher education in Britain just 35 women are vice-chancellors out of a total of 170, women form only 17% of the professoriat, and nearly three-quarters of the posts paying more than £57,000 are held by men. The plight of pregnant academics and mothers with young children was particularly distressing to read.

Surely vice-chancellors, with their combined IQs, can come up with some solutions to these issues. Is it not time these blatant inequalities in higher education were addressed?
June Purvis
Emeritus professor of women’s and gender history, University of Portsmouth

So Prince Charles thinks he will be well placed to relay public opinion when he becomes king (Report, 20 November). He has a staff of 124, dresses like his grandfather and hires his own personal airliner (at taxpayers’ expense) to fly to Nelson Mandela’s funeral. His favourite pop group is the Three Degrees. I can’t think of anyone better to represent me.
David Gerrard
Hove, East Sussex

• Those writing of the lack of recognition for Tommy Flowers (Letters, 18 November) may be heartened to know that a street in a new housing estate on the site of the Bletchley outstation in Eastcote, Middlesex, appears to be named after the wizard of Dollis Hill.
Andrew Calvert
Eastcote, Middlesex

• Perhaps the council in the New Era estate scandal (Report, 20 November) should compulsorily purchase the estate? Issuing CPOs to landlords proposing above-inflation social housing rent increases might take a lot of “financialisation” out of housing altogether.
Wendy Bradley
Sheffield

• Perhaps your subs, when describing the likes of Kim Kardashian, could bear in mind this limerick: There was a young lady from Madras, / Who had a most wonderful ass; / Not round, plump and pink, as you probably think, / But grey, with long ears and ate grass (Letters, 17 November).
Robert Proctor
Nottingham

• Jonathan Freedland (Opinion, 15 November) did not mention that the spacecraft for the comet mission was built by Airbus Defence and Space UK or that the Open University and Rutherford Appleton laboratory developed a key instrument on board Philae – both major successes for British workers, who deserve our congratulations for their faultless design and manufacturing.
Huw Jones
St Clears, Carmarthenshire

• I suggest that the comet is about the size of Barry Island near Cardiff, but easier to get to (Letters, 18 November).
Wyn Thomas
Swansea

How’s this for an opening line: “We caught a cold when we were coming” (A translator’s incisive essays explore the inner life of fiction, Review, 15 November). It was this howler that prompted my husband, Erich Fried, to make a bid as translator of TS Eliot – or so he told me (and I don’t think he could possibly have made it up). He translated almost anything; I know of only two texts he baulked at: Jesus Christ Superstar (and that wasn’t because he didn’t like the text) and, predictably, Finnigans Wake, apart from about 12 pages. A recent BBC programme credited his translation of Under Milk Wood as making Dylan Thomas famous in Germany, shortly after his death.

Incidentally, Erich translated straight into German poetry at (only a slow-ish) dictation speed. I was painting him while he translated Shakespeare, so I know. It astonished and appalled me in equal measure.
Catherine Boswell Fried
London

David Cameron in Brisbane: what was his gloating over the economies of the eurozone supposed to achieve? Photograph: Glenn Hunt/AFP/Getty Images

George Monbiot’s call for “a government commission on post-growth economics” should be urgent parliamentary business (Growth: the destructive God that can never be appeased, 19 November). All MPs should read the article, and they should tell us how they respond to some relevant questions. Do you realise that economic growth today demands more fossil fuel combustion that exacerbates disastrous climate change? Do you believe the UK could create a steady-state economy? Do you agree that social justice in a steady-state economy would require major reduction in the gap between the rich and the poor? Do you agree that the survival of most of the human race depends on these issues? Are you desperately worried about the world your grandchildren will inherit?

Britain led the world in the industrial revolution with economic growth: could we now take the lead in a steady-state revolution with zero economic growth?
Michael Bassey
Newark, Nottinghamshire

• The G20 in Brisbane was a missed opportunity to reinvigorate the global economy. Instead of stimulating new international action, its red-light warnings have been used by David Cameron to pre-empt criticism of any forthcoming downturn in the UK economy (Cameron fears second global financial crash, 17 November) and dismissed by Ed Miliband as irrelevant to explaining any future UK failures (Miliband mocks PM over ‘excuses’ for borrowing, 18 November). The sad truth is that Britain should have been playing a leading role before and during the G20 to mobilise support for multilateral actions of stimulus and balanced global growth, on which the health of the world economy depends. Global actions of stimulus briefly succeeded in 2009, though sadly were abandoned before they had taken hold on a global scale, though not before they had demonstrated some real success. The global economy grew 4% in 2010. A fuller agenda of what was and is still required was set out in the Stiglitz commission report presented to the UN general assembly, which dealt with both short- and medium-run actions, as well as providing specific proposals for diminishing financial risks and strengthening global institutions. Until such actions are pursued seriously, protecting the UK economy from a global downturn will be whistling in the wind.
Professor Richard Jolly
Lewes, Sussex

• The prime minister’s decision to announce his fears about the instability of the global financial system (Opinion, 17 November) was surprising. What was his gloating over the economies of the eurozone supposed to achieve? I questioned Mario Draghi, chair of the European Systemic Risk Board, in the European parliament on this unhelpful behaviour. He refused to comment. Given the crucial role that confidence plays in the world of finance, it appears that Cameron is himself becoming a systemic risk. I do hope that he is not risking the future of the continent’s financial system merely to score some political points at home.
Molly Scott Cato MEP
Green, South West England

• Red warning lights have been flashing for some time on our fragile recovery, based on the usual housing bubble that has now burst leaving thousands of households in dread of an interest rate rise. Running a country is not the same as running a business or a household, described by one economist as the zombie idea still walking. As the national debt is historically low, it makes sense to borrow at low interest rates to invest in the rising generation, too many of whom have been sacrificed on the altar of the deficit. Our children are tested to death but not educated to have the skills necessary to find employment, and feel they are on the scrapheap. We do not employ them, or house them, but we do lock too many of them up in overcrowded prisons where the suicide rate is rising.Another £30bn worth of cuts will reduce us to consumers of privatised public services rather that citizens in a democracy.
Margaret Phelps
Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan

• Am I the only one to treat the news that the economy is not growing; as good news? We live on a planet with finite resources. I can see no difference between an economy that relies on growth and a pyramid selling scam.
Rod Thompson
Camborne, Cornwall

'Don’t damn all GP surgeries because of your personal bad experience: fdind a new practice' – Corinn ‘Don’t damn all GP surgeries because of your personal bad experience: fdind a new practice’ – Corinne Haynes. Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images

I am a GP, just in from work (8.40pm) after a day at my surgery. Just a normal day, not a late night. And no, I am not a martyr to the NHS. I am just trying to make sure that all my patients are seen, all my correspondence from hospital colleagues is dealt with, all my results are read and filed, all my letters written, all reports I have been asked to do (which are not strictly part of my NHS work, but there is no one else to do them) are completed. Actually, I did not do the last bit. That will have to wait until the weekend, in my own time. Am I smiling now? No, I am seething with rage at Mary Dejevsky’s hatchet job on general practice (Most of us just want a GP appointment and a friendly smile at reception, 19 November).

We get the health service we pay for. In fact, according to international studies, we get more than that: we get extremely good value for our taxes. In GPs we get, in the main, highly skilled and highly motivated people who continue to give all they can despite a fall in their income in real terms of 16%, despite a fall in the proportion of the total NHS income that goes to general practice of a similar amount, despite demands for instant access, telephone appointments and email service, and despite an ever-more-complex and ageing population to care for. We need a real debate on what we want from our health service, and how it is going to paid for. What we don’t need is being told how to do our job when we are more aware than anyone else of the shortcomings of general practice.
Dr Robert Bennett
Oxford

• I was a GP partner until I left at the age of 53. My wife was a GP partner until she left at the age of 49. The stresses of trying to cope with ever-increasing demand with ever-tighter finances proved intolerable. Most receptionists are polite and professional but cannot create additional appointments with clinicians who already have a full workload from the moment they arrive at work to the moment they leave. I would suggest Mary Dejevesky arranges to spend time observing the situation in a medical practice. If she is then able to offer constructive criticism, I am sure it would be welcomed.
Dr Paul Cassidy
Huddersfield

• I read with interest Mary Dejevsky’s column on the difficulties of getting an appointment with “your” GP. Although prior to the 2004 contract individual GP partners were responsible for a registered list of patients, the new contract gave the practice responsibility for a registered population. There has always been a tension between access, continuity and cost. Over the last 10 years, with the shift towards a consumer society, demand for instant access has been greater than for continuity, eroding the central relationship of a patient with a GP. This has been particularly true of the more vocal majority, often with less need, resulting in political moves to incentivise practices to provide quicker access at the expense of those who need continuity of care. Relationship continuity with your GP is important for patient experience, and evidence shows outcomes are improved, particularly in those with complex needs, but in addition it enhances doctor resilience, much needed at a time of workforce crisis with fewer than 25% of new graduates choosing general practice.

In my own practice we have always prioritised continuity and all patients have a named GP. In order to continue to prioritise continuity but still manage increasing demand for access, as well as an increasingly part-time workforce, we have introduced small teams so that if the patient’s named GP is not available the patient sees only one or two other GPs.

GPs have worked out for themselves what is needed, but much is subject to the whims of our political masters, out of our control. The politicians are recognising the importance of continuity, hence the introduction of a named GP for over 75s, and from April 2015, for every patient. I welcome wholeheartedly a return to placing continuity at the heart of primary care, but there will continue to be a tension between access and continuity unless more resources, both in term of money and GPs, are found.
Dr Naureen Bhatti
London

• Mary Dejevsky has misunderstood the information that the Care Quality Commission has published for every NHS GP practice in England. She discovered that a local practice’s “overall score was a presentable five out of six”. For each GP practice, the CQC combines 38 indicators into an overall score. It then uses this to assign a practice into one of six priority bands for inspection. Band 1 is the highest risk and Band 6 the lowest. A practice’s priority band for inspection isn’t an “overall score” and shouldn’t be interpreted as such.
Dr Alex May
Manchester

• I must be lucky where in live, in a Merseyside village: I can nearly always get an appointment on the day I call (if I phone at 8:30am), the staff are pleasant, and I have no problem with repeat prescriptions. But for those who aren’t so lucky, aren’t they being defrauded? GPs are paid per head, so if a practice reaches a situation where it can’t offer an appointment, the GPs need to work longer shifts. It’s as simple as that.
David Garner
Southport, Lancashire

• Like Mary Dejevsky’s husband, I have a long-term condition – and yes, continuity does matter. Yet it can take two to three weeks to obtain an appointment with the doctor with whom I am registered. If I don’t care for that, I can join the telephone free-for-all on the dot of 8am to obtain an appointment with a newly employed salaried doctor I have never heard of. Even this has taken, on one occasion, almost 20 minutes of constantly re-dialling.

My wife has to work abroad for her company from Monday to Thursday, so Friday is her only opportunity for an appointment. She was recently offered one four weeks in advance – and not even with the doctor of her choice.Why should we be denied adequate healthcare because of the failings of our local GP practice?
Rob Stubbs
Wirral, Merseyside

• Perhaps Mary Dejevsky should just change her doctor. My local practice cannot be the only one where one can see the doctor of choice, phone for an appointment whenever convenient, discuss possibilities with a practice nurse or a friendly, knowledgeable, smiling receptionist. Any matters of practice that cause problems can be discussed at a patient participation group. It is great. Don’t damn all GP surgeries because of your personal bad experience: find a new practice.
Corinne Haynes
Nottingham

We write in response to your article about Andy Miller’s legal action against the Daily Mail (Media, 14 November). While we did not comment before publication, we now wish to draw some errors to your attention.

The overall thrust of your article was that the Mail had unreasonably dragged its feet when it could have resolved matters quickly and simply without recourse to the law. We dispute that interpretation.

It is wrong to suggest that Mr Miller initially only asked for an apology and modest legal costs. In fact he always sought damages, and indeed early on was seeking £200,000 – over three times what he was eventually awarded.

Associated always accepted that the article contained an inaccuracy, offered to correct it and made an offer of damages and costs. This was rejected by Mr Miller, who, using a no-win no-fee arrangement and the iniquitous After the Event insurance – in which the premium is only ever paid by the defendant if they lose – embarked on his legal case.

Associated has not appealed against several judgments in Mr Miller’s favour, rather it appealed the initial high court judgment, lost that appeal before the court of appeal and most recently was refused permission to appeal by the supreme court.

The legal action has to date taken five years, not six, since the Daily Mail were first notified by Mr Miller of his claim in July 2009 and we dispute that the costs bill would be anything like £3m.

The costs of this case have been grossly inflated by a punitively unfair system under which, through 100% success fees and ATE insurance, defendants’ costs are trebled, while claimants take no financial risk and have little incentive to settle.

In a case involving damages of £65,000, such huge sums should be of considerable concern to the entire newspaper industry, including the Guardian.
Liz Hartley
Head of editorial legal services, The Daily Mail

Independent:

Times:

The Most Rev Justin Welby Archbishop of Canterbury
Ephraim Mirvis Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra

Dominic Kirkham
Manchester

Tamara Selig
Stanmore, Middx

James Goldman
London NW4

Dr R Rosenfelder
London NW6

Professor Geoffrey Alderman
University of Buckingham

Sir, We welcome the government’s leadership in announcing that it will pledge £720 million to the Green Climate Fund. This new UN fund will channel finance to help developing countries adapt to the effects of a changing climate and invest in sustainable development.

Our organisations see first-hand how urgently this money is needed to help the poorest and most vulnerable people protect themselves from changing climate — which is already disrupting harvests. The need to support at-risk communities and habitats will intensify if emissions are not urgently reduced.

The UK joins countries including France, Germany, Japan and the US in making a significant pledge to the fund. This start-up money paves the way for a global climate agreement next year. However, if the Green Climate Fund is to fulfil its vital role, we urge all governments to continue to honour their commitments and further strengthen their ambition.

Chris Bain
Director, Cafod

Loretta Minghella
Chief executive, Christian Aid

Mark Goldring
Chief executive, Oxfam

David Bull
Executive director, Unicef UK

David Nussbaum
Chief executive, WWF-UK

Sir, Greg Hurst (“Textbook case of sloppy work” Nov 20) unfairly represents teachers as “preparing worksheets rather than refining their teaching and planning stimulating lessons”. Most teachers discover very quickly that textbooks should be used alongside a variety of resources and activities. This does include worksheets, but very rarely in productive classrooms is this the only method employed.

Liam Morgan
Head of history, Shiplake College

Sir, I am at a loss to understand why, with free movement of labour in the EU, our interest rate policy should be determined by the rate of UK employment (“Delaying a rise in interest rates now could come with a high price later”, Nov 19). Tightness of the labour market will depend also on unemployment in the rest of the EU. When labour is short, immigrants come in instead of wages going up. There will probably be ample labour supply from the EU and elsewhere for the foreseeable future. This applies to professionals as well as more general workers. Many overseas universities now use English as the language of teaching. My Dutch granddaughter recently had an English-language viva for her master’s degree in maths at a Dutch university, and earlier attended maths courses in English at the University of Stockholm.
john jackson
Keswick, Cumbria

Sir, I agree with Libby Purves (“There is no justice for those falsely accused of abuse”, Nov 20). Between 2007 and 2010 I was one of a three-person team of barristers employed by the Crown Prosecution Service in London as Specialist Rape Advocates. Our role was to provide pre-charge advice to the police in cases of sex abuse and rape and to take cases to trial once we had sanctioned charges. The idea was that the police would have one person dealing with their case, which was intended to support and reassure complainants while ensuring that weak cases were not prosecuted. Sadly, we were not deemed to be cost effective and the unit was disbanded. The police and prosecution agencies need to work together to ensure that complainants feel free to speak out but also to ensure that any person accused of such a crime has his or her side of events investigated too. It serves no one to allow weak cases to come to court and in my opinion causes further harm and distress to vulnerable victims. We need a criminal justice system that treats complainants and the accused fairly. We also to debate on how we can fund this so that the police have the training and resources to carry out investigations thoroughly and the CPS has the expertise necessary to ensure that weak cases are not put before a jury in the first place.
Sarah Le Foe
London SW6

Sir, The report (“‘You wonder if it will ever end’, says head cleared of child rape”, Nov 20) was unsettling in its description of howJames Bird and his family had suffered as a result of an abuse allegation prior to his acquittal. What was more unsettling was the comment by “a CPS spokesman” that “it was important to distinguish between evidence that a person had lied about allegations, and a jury deciding evidence was not strong enough for a conviction”.

So what happened to the principle of innocent until proved guilty? Until we have a “not proven” verdict, it would be best that (anonymous) CPS bureaucrats adhered to this principle and even, perhaps, accept that they are capable of mistakes.
Richard Rigby
Long Melford, Suffolk

Sir, Libby Purves draws readers’ attention to the effect of false allegations of sexual abuse on the lives of the accused and their families. Sadly false accusations of sexual abuse, domestic violence and drug abuse are rife during divorce proceedings in the UK Family Court. They waste court time, cause damage to already vulnerable children and are costly to defend, both emotionally and financially. The perpetrator is rarely penalised by the court and cannot be named.

Family Court reform is long overdue. The perpetrator of such serious perjury should be “named and shamed” at the conclusion of the case and costs awarded to the accused.

This might dissuade divorcing couples from resorting to serious false allegations and allow the Family Court to focus on protecting genuinely “at risk” children.
Rita Kubiak
Stratford-upon-Avon, Warks

Sir, Although it is appalling that abused children were not always believed in the past, the pendulum is swinging too far in the other direction.

I was recently in a dentist’s waiting room, alone, reading a magazine. A mother and her daughter came out of the treatment room. The woman went to pay and the child wandered into the waiting room. I looked up, said hello, and went on reading. The child ran back to her mother and I heard her say “Mummy, that lady asked me if I wanted some sweets but I said no.” The woman then told her she was a very good girl.

Had I been an elderly man, and in another setting, the outcome could have been very different.

Elizabeth Clarke
Sheffield

Sir, Libby Purves draws attention to the consequences of our focus on the predominance of “victims”. It would appear that an allegation of sexual assault amounts to a statement of fact, ie, the facts are as the “victim” states them to be. It is an inconvenient fact that the allegation might be open to interpretation, unsupported by evidence and, experience tells us, could be a lie. It is dangerous to make the “victims” views the sole arbiter of action,which seems to be the current trend.
Jim Howard
Newton Abbot, Devon

Sir, How times have changed (“Bring in law to protect under-12s home alone”, Nov 15). I was left alone in our house in Byker, Newcastle upon Tyne, just after the war when I was aged 6-8 years. I had my little dog, Rex, with me. Once I played with a lighted newspaper and a towel over the fire caught light. Sometimes I sat in a corner shop doorway with another lad until the pubs closed; we were safe as houses. I think.
Bill Oxley
Appleton, Warrington

Telegraph:

Benefits and EU migration; the harmful NHS Bill; why pubs are closing, and Sir John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite who lets his hair down on screen.

David Cameron is likely to come under pressure on the subject of Europe

Amid fears that more disaffected MPs will defect to Ukip, on the eve of the Rochester by-election, strategist says David Cameron ‘would want to recommend leaving’ if a better deal could not be agreed for Britain Photo: Getty Images

7:00AM GMT 21 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – David Lidington, the minister for Europe, says that Norway and Switzerland have to accept free movement of people from the EU without having a vote to influence policy (report, November 20). The British Government’s guidance for people moving to Switzerland says: “If you apply for welfare benefits, you will lose your right to remain in Switzerland.”

That sounds like the right kind of freedom of movement to me.

Guy Lachlan
Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire

SIR – There will always be fundamental irreconcilable differences between our British view of the freedom of movement of people into our country and the view of the rest of the European countries.

We are an island nation which has defended its shores throughout history and, until the open-door policy under the last Labour government, this had given us a feeling of security and control.

The opening of our borders coincided with the rise of international terrorism and the failure of immigration controls to identify thousands of illegal migrants entering and disappearing in our country.

England’s population density of 419 people per square kilometre is the highest of any of the main European countries, and compares with Germany at 233, Italy 192, Denmark 125, Poland 124, France 111, Portugal 109, Spain 92, and Greece 81.

To continue to allow unhindered access to this country is unacceptable, and if the EU decides to make this its bottom line, then it will persuade many of us who up to now have been reluctant to consider an exit from Europe that there is no other option.

Brian Storey
Longstowe, Cambridgeshire

SIR – Should British EU renegotiations go badly, Oliver Letwin “would want to recommend leaving”. Why the weasel words? Surely he would either recommend it, or he wouldn’t. Who or what might stop him? Is he sending us a coded message about David Cameron’s real intentions?

R A McWhirter
Zurich, Switzerland

SIR – Mr Letwin cannot guarantee that renegotiation with the EU will be successful. However, I can guarantee that we will be told that it has been successful.

Mr Cameron is determined Britain will stay in the EU. His record is such that one cannot believe a word he says to the contrary. Unsuccessful renegotiations will be massaged in the same way as the debacle over the EU’s “surprise bill” for 1.7 billion.

David Pound
Charwelton, Northamptonshire

SIR – “EU must change or we quit” says your headline on Mr Letwin’s remarks. I have a better idea: we quit now and rejoin if it does change.

Brian Gilbert
Hampton, Middlesex

Harmful NHS Bill

SIR – As NHS doctors, we are deeply concerned about the misguided and potentially disruptive National Health Service Bill being debated today.

The Bill’s proponents claim it will remove competition from the NHS and guard against “privatisation” by repealing key clauses of the 2012 Health and Social Care Act.

We believe this would be a backwards step for patient care, reorganising the NHS in a top-down way at a time when it needs to be looking ahead to the huge challenges of the future. These were set out in the NHS England Five Year Forward View, and we urge all politicians to support it rather than using the NHS as a political football.

Suggesting that GP commissioners have a “privatisation agenda” is an ill-informed attack on the clinical leadership which improves services and helps patients.

Dr Michael Dixon
Chairman, NHS Alliance
Dr Jonathan Steel
Dr Barbara Rushton
GP and Chairman, South Eastern Hampshire CCG
Dr Ivan Camphor
GP and medical secretary of the Mid-Mersey Local Medical Committee
Dr Jude Mahadarachi
Dr P Charlson
Dr Gillian Francis
Dr Andrew Hardie
Dr Priyada Pandya
Dr John Mosley
Mr Sheo Tibrewal
Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon
Professor Simon Taylor-Robinson
Consultant Hepatologist

Parental blushes

SIR – Paddington is rated PG. Having been to see the film Mr Turner, which has a 12 rating (with accompanying adult), I wonder how anyone could feel that the gratuitous sex scene would be suitable for any age.

Annie May
Macclesfield, Cheshire

Hit and miss exchanges

SIR – I took part in four foreign exchanges in the Seventies. After graduating, I took a postgraduate degree in France, which would have been impossible without the knowledge absorbed through exchange.

The language skills I learnt have been enormously useful throughout my professional life.

N R Clift
London EC2

SIR – The day my German exchange arrived in 1976, Field Marshal Montgomery died. Throughout her visit, the television, radio and press were filled with Second World War stories, endless images of tanks, battles and Nazis.

These days, I speak passable French and Italian but no German.

Hilary Bentley
Alderney, Channel Islands

Why pubs are closing

SIR – Even if the Small Business Bill is passed, I do not believe it will make a noticeable difference to the rate at which pubs are closing. The proposed legislation affects tenants of companies that own more than 500 pubs, so it will have an impact only on a small proportion of pubs.

But replacing beer ties with higher rents could actually be a positive development. In the current system, tenants pay breweries or pubcos for every pint served. The more beer that is sold, the higher the payment. Should the legislation go through, causing breweries and pubcos to offset their loss of income by charging higher rents, every pint sold in excess of the expected sales will result in extra profit for the publican.

The fact is that there are too many pubs. Supply outstrips the demand, so inevitably some publicans struggle to make a living. If the Government is simply trying to stem the alarming rate at which pubs are reported to close, it would do better to ensure that the economy remains buoyant.

Larissa Lowe
Thomas Eggar solicitors
Crawley, West Sussex

Online GP errors

SIR – Readers should be aware that information in the Care Quality Commission ranking of GPs online is not always to be trusted.

My own practice was downgraded because the CQC thought that none out of 68 patients asked in the latest GP Patient Survey was able to obtain an appointment or speak to a GP or nurse. The correct figure (available on the GP Patient Survey website) is 63 out of 68 patients, which, at 92 per cent, is the second best score in the county. As they say: garbage in, garbage out.

The Care Quality Commission calls this process “intelligent monitoring”, but I’m not sure that “intelligent” is the word I would use.

Dr Jonathan Sleath
Hereford

A Pre-Raphaelite lets his hair down on screen

SIR – At a recent screening of Effie Gray, I was interested to see portrayed a long-haired and bearded John Everett Millais (above right).

The John Ruskin portrait by Millais, which was shown being painted in the film, is dated 1853-4. Contemporary representations of Millais by William Holman Hunt in pastel and chalk (left), and a medallion by Alexander Munro both show him clean-shaven with short hair. He appears similarly in photographs. On the other hand, the more hirsute Barbizon artist Jean-François Millet sported a fine head of long hair and full facial adornments. Was this artistic licence?

Martin Adlam
Winforton, Herefordshire

Potholes and a dearth of buses outside London

SIR – This week, many south-western roads and fields have been flooded. In Devon, most roads are filled with potholes.

The Dawlish railway line has yet again been under siege by storms and the new sea wall has been damaged.

Urban councils receive 40 per cent more funding per head from the central government than rural councils do, which means that Devon county council has to choose to prioritise services for the needy above road maintenance.

Londoners enjoy a massive per-head public investment in transport, and have more transport links available to them than anywhere else in the country. In 2011, for example, the per capita subsidy for Londoners was £2,730, while in the South West it was just £19. The North will get a billion-pound boost from HS2 and HS3.

Is it any wonder that the rest of Britain feels oppressed by the metropolitan elite?

Linda Hughes
Newton Abbot, Devon

SIR – While motorists will surely welcome a new government initiative to improve Britain’s roads one would hope that this £15 billion will not be spent entirely on widening motorways and brand-new road schemes.

Throughout the country, the majority of existing roads are in a deplorable state and urgently in need of major repair.

Richard James
Nailsea, Somerset

SIR – “They walk between stations in Paris” is the excuse for terminating HS2 at Euston and not St Pancras for onward travel to Europe.

The distance between these stations – five furlongs – is too short to take the Undergound or bus and too long for some with luggage to walk, possibly in the rain. Some form of free shuttle, light railway or covered travelator would be helpful.

Stuart Robertson
Aboyne, Aberdeenshire

Bank fine? Not fine

SIR – Royal Bank of Scotland has been fined millions of pounds for its computer failings.

Because of the bail–out in 2008, the taxpayer owns two thirds of RBS. Thus the taxpayer pays the fine.

Those responsible pay nothing. It’s a meaningless paper–shuffling exercise.

Ian Anderson
Wick, Gloucestershire

Gnashing sachets

SIR –I’d like a ban on all sauces produced in sachets.

They are nearly impossible to open without the use of your teeth, and then produce a most unsatisfying smudge of your favourite condiment. I am not sure about their green credentials either.

Sam Kirkaldy
Sevenoaks, Kent

Irish Times:

Sir, – When the original water charges were announced the Government went to great lengths to inform the public that the charges had been set by an independent regulator. Much play was made of the word “independent”. The new water charging regime was determined by the Government not the independent regulator. Why do we need a regulator when the Government for political reasons takes unto itself the role of setting the water charging arrangements and tariffs. Sadly the “independence” of the regulator is another casualty of this great water debacle. – Yours , etc,

DONAL O SULLIVAN,

Blackrock, Co Dublin.

Sir, – If memory serves, the justification given by the Government for water charges was to conserve this wonderful natural resource by charging per unit, encouraging us to be economical in its use. It now seems the new charges are to pay the salaries at Irish Water. – Yours, etc,

BILLY HYLAND,

Naas,

Co Kildare.

Sir, – The news that local authorities will be obliged to pursue council tenants who do not pay their water charges should not unduly worry anyone, if past experience is anything to go by (“Council tenants face rent increases and possible eviction if water bills not paid”, November 20th).

In the 1980s and early 1990s, Kildare County Council levied water and refuse charges. There was a well-organised campaign of non-compliance, and such was its scale that the local authority was reluctant to take people to court. It threatened to have the charges levied against the property so that in the event of a sale they could be recovered.

Of course, this never happened, which meant that those of us foolish enough to have paid them effectively made a “voluntary contribution” to the authority’s coffers. If this was the experience when it pursued money it was owed, it’s hard to see a more enthusiastic response when it’s someone else’s money. – Yours, etc,

BRENDAN McMAHON,

Naas,

Co Kildare.

Sir, – We have a known cap on charges to 2019 and a promise of a future cap beyond. Against that background, one has to ask the question why we are spending millions of euro on water meters and their ongoing installation, which is a red rag to a bull to the general public when their value and use are rendered obsolete by these new proposals. – Yours, etc,

DEREK MacHUGH,

Foxrock, Dublin 18.

Sir, – The row about water charges puts me in mind of a trait that has been shared by successive Fine Gael leaders. That of naivety. From Fitzgerald to Bruton to Kenny, Fine Gael leaders have steadfastly believed in the decency and good sense of the Irish citizen and legislated accordingly. They all came a cropper as a result. Fianna Fáil leaders like Haughey and Ahern have always had an instinctive understanding of the Irish people. They knew that we don’t want to pay more for decent public services – we want disposable income and lots of it. And, boy, did Bertie oblige us. As the health service stagnated we gorged ourselves on treats – drink, restaurants, holidays and cars. We all drank at the trough and we loved it.

With regard to Irish Water, Enda Kenny needs to understand what Fianna Fáil leaders have always understood: disposable income matters to the Irish; public services do not. – Yours, etc,

CONOR O’MAHONY,

Dublin 4.

Sir, – Colm McCarthy writes, “There are numerous industries in Ireland which must inevitably be operated as monopolies. These include electricity transmission and distribution, the gas network and the water industry” (“Water charging arrangements will prove to be temporary”, Opinion & Analysis, November 20th).

Equating finite, concentrated, fossil fuel and a renewable, widely distributed resource like water in this context is guff of the highest order. A citizen may haul water from a well with no more capital than the price of a bucket; comparing this to drilling rigs, gas wells, pipelines, pumping stations and the capital-intensive infrastructure required to extract, process, move, store and deliver fossil fuel is laughable.

In Ireland tens of thousands of households provide their own water individually, or collectively as part of community-owned cooperatives. In France, 36,681 communes provide drinking water and manage waste water. Only in Ireland, and perhaps North Korea, would public administrators and academics think that the best way to deliver a widely distributed, renewable resource to a widely distributed population is by an “efficient” centralised monopoly. The real surprise is not that Irish Water turned into another HSE but that anyone thought any other outcome was likely. – Yours, etc,

KEVIN SWEENEY,

Kilnaleck, Co Cavan.

Sir, – This week, Senator Paul Bradford warned us, “We must not give in to mob rule now of extreme left-wing socialists who look back to a panacea of the Soviet Union and North Korea”. Noel Coonan TD then warned us “we are facing what is potentially an Isis situation”.

And they say Leinster House is a dull, humourless place! – Yours, etc,

WILSON JOYCE,

Chapelizod, Dublin 20.

Sir, – Has the Government calculated how much it will cost the exchequer to administer the €100 rebate or has it not thought that far ahead? – Yours, etc,

BRENDAN BUTLER,

Malahide, Co Dublin.

Sir, – “Taoiseach tells Ministers to go out and sell revised water charges to public” (Front Page, November 20th). Good luck with that one, lads. I just hope you’re not on commission. – Yours, etc,

DERMOT O’SHEA,

Churchtown,

Dublin 16.

Sir, – I refer to Kathy Sheridan’s article “Telling the grim truth about prostitution” (Opinion & Analysis, November 19th). As a “much-loved daughter of middle Ireland” myself, I strongly oppose the views expressed and the overall tone of the piece.

Poverty drives women into the industry, and it is this which we “lefty liberals” must seek to eradicate, not consenting adults having sex. It’s very clear that Ms Sheridan finds sex work distasteful, to put it mildly. However, this debate is not about how any one person feels about the trade, it’s about the right to work in safety, a right currently denied and which will continue to be denied under the new legislation.

The further assertion made that “significant numbers are drawn in as children under 18” is false, and used by abolitionists around the world. Last year Turn off the Red Light repeatedly claimed that there were 19 victims of child prostitution in the Republic of Ireland. The then minster for justice Alan Shatter told them to stop using that figure because it simply was not true.

Finally, Ms Sheridan speaks of those who can’t be doing with “peer-reviewed studies”. I find that assertion ironic, because the evidence from around the world points to decriminalisation as a preferred model to protect the most vulnerable in the industry. That evidence comes from the World Health Organisation, the UN Aids body, and medical journals, to name but a few.

It’s clear from recent communications from Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald’s office that it is her intention to press ahead with the criminalisation of clients. Were this to happen, those who are already vulnerable will suffer all the more, as I explained to the Minister in person last week. In the end, good law must never be based on an ideological sending of a “message”, rather it should be based on evidence. Evidence which is in abundance. – Yours, etc,

LAURA LEE,

Ayrshire,

Scotland.

Sir, – I’ve never watched Love/Hate so I’ll have to accept Kathy Sheridan’s description of episodes from it. Certainly, if the State hadn’t made the disastrous mistake of criminalising recreational drugs – if drugs were taxed, controlled and regulated, with addictive drugs available to registered addicts to be taken in a controlled setting – fewer people of whatever social class would be forced into prostitution to pay for them. And it’s undoubtedly true that prostitution – like indeed many other lifestyle-choices – is not a path that most people would want to encourage members of their family to go down.

The proposed “Swedish model” legislation will hurt people who have no economic alternative to selling sexual services, as well as customers who may get caught in the net. (Significantly, it will offer some disabled people, who may have no other outlet for physical intimacy, an unpalatable choice between criminality and perpetual celibacy.)

The example Kathy Sheridan gives of the illegality of the trade in human organs is not well chosen, since if the proposed legislation were applied to that trade, it would result in the absurdity that I would be allowed to sell my kidney, but someone suffering from kidney failure would be arrested for trying to buy it!

This is a complex area and the discussion needs to take full account of the complexities. The debate should of course objectively weigh up the relevant evidence, but it should also focus on the central issue of the limitations of law regarding voluntary, private relations between adults, without being sidelined into other issues. – Yours, etc,

PAUL O’BRIEN,

Dublin 8.

Sir, – Prostitution is a gender issue, a class issue and an ethnic issue. It is overwhelmingly men who buy sex, and mainly poor women from impoverished regions of the world who are involved in prostitution. As someone who for many years has been involved in researching prostitution and violence against women, my concern is that forthcoming Irish legislation must challenge the subordination and degradation of women, especially in relation to those from disadvantaged groups.

The flow of foreign women into Ireland for the purpose of prostitution started in the early 2000s, and coincided with the Irish prostitution industry moving from street to indoor prostitution. What we now have in Ireland is a highly lucrative, internet-based, indoor prostitution trade worth an estimated €180 million. The networks of control are highly internationalised. Irish indigenous criminals are linked to eastern European, central European and African gangs. These networks ensure a highly ethnicised prostitution sector in Ireland. A staggering 51 separate nationalities of women are involved, with between 800 and 1,000 women engaging in prostitution at any one time.

Prostitution is not only about payment of money for sex. It is about economic and sexual power and the ability to give commands and control women. It assumes that men are entitled to have their sexual needs met through the paid bodies of women, and that there should be a special group of women available for this purpose.

The psychological, physical and emotional damage that prostitution causes to women is well documented.

The prostitution industry is based on inequalities between women and men. Such inequalities arise from poverty, the increasing sexualisation and pornographication of female bodies in popular culture, and from histories of violent abuse in both childhood and adulthood that underpin many women’s entry into the sex industry.

Prostitution is, therefore, both a cause and consequence of gender inequality. Criminalising the purchase of sexual acts, decriminalising those who sell, and providing specialist support to women to be able to leave prostitution are measures that directly address gender inequalities. – Yours, etc,

PATRICIA

KELLEHER, PhD

Beara,

Co Cork.

Sir, – As the immigration debate returns to the forefront of American political debate, I note that you refer in several of your reports to “undocumented” Irish people in the United States (“Obama paves way for illegal Irish immigrants to visit home”, Front Page, November 21st).

Do you also refer to migrants who are illegally resident in Ireland as “undocumented”? “Undocumented” is a euphemism that seeks to obscure the fact that the people being described are illegal immigrants.

There is lots of room for debate about whether the immigration policies of the United States – or of Ireland – are just. But weasel words never help. – Yours, etc,

NIALL STANAGE,

Washington, DC.

Sir, – I see the Taoiseach has called on the US president to allow undocumented Irish immigrants to return home on visits pending a new immigration and citizenship system being established. Perhaps as an encouragement to Mr Obama, Mr Kenny he would do the same for undocumented immigrants into Ireland. – Yours, etc,

PETER MOONEY,

Cabra, Dublin 7.

Sir, – The Taoiseach hopes US president Barack Obama will help the undocumented Irish in the United States by allowing them a path to citizenship and the right to travel back and forth to Ireland in the meantime. If that is the case then there would be no difference between the privileges of an illegal immigrant and a legal one.

Why is there an expectation that undocumented Irish should have such “rights” when they wilfully violated the law by immigrating illegally to the US in the first place? Like Ireland, there is no guaranteed right for anyone born outside of the US to live there but only through the application process put into place. The Taoiseach and I would surely agree that Ireland’s borders and immigration processes should also be respected.

The Taoiseach could also do a great deal of service to Irish citizens by holding them to a higher standard than lawbreaking. While it is easy to feel sorry for those who can’t travel home to their native land for a friend’s wedding or a family funeral, let us not forget their irresponsibility in not thinking things through long before overstaying a 90-day holiday visa. – Yours, etc,

JACK KELLY,

Haddonfield,

New Jersey.

Sir, – In light of the US decision to seek to regularise the lives of thousands of undocumented Irish living in America, can our Government be inspired by this and regulate the lives of asylum seekers in our country who have for years been left living in limbo awaiting a decision about their case, living in unsuitable accommodation, without the right to work and having to survive on less than €20 a week? – Yours, etc,

COLM O’BRIEN,

Tallaght,

Dublin 24.

Sir, – Regarding Frank McNally’s droll piece about the use or non-use of the humble comma (An Irishman’s Diary, November 21st), I’m reminded of that classic newspaper account of a documentary about country music legend Merle Haggard, which contained this quite ambiguous sentence: “Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall”. I think the use of the Oxford comma in that particular sentence would have eliminated any misunderstanding about the relationship between Messrs Haggard, Kristofferson, and Duvall. – Yours, etc,

PAUL DELANEY,

Dalkey,

Co Dublin.

Sir, — Further to Ronan McGreevy’s report “Call for Dublin’s Spire to be renamed ‘An Claidheamh Soluis’” (November 16th), why rename a superfluous monstrosity which is neither inspiring or enlightening? – Yours, etc,

MICHELE SAVAGE,

Dublin 12.

Irish Independent:

Every now and again you hear someone say that a person ‘needs a hug’. It’s become a sarcastic put-down, depicting a needy or over- precious, self-involved mini-me mentality.

Given the battering we as a people have taken, no one should be surprised at the need for a little TLC. In fact, the Civil Defence should be on every street corner handing out comfort blankets and we should be getting envelopes with happy pills – remember the iodine? The default position for most of us when put under pressure is to pull up the drawbridge and retreat behind whatever emotional shield we can find. As REM sang, ‘everybody hurts sometime’. But where do we go to find the strength to keep on keeping on?

The voice from the pulpit has spoken over the heads of the people for too long, it now bounces back with a hollow ring. Pope Francis is trying very hard but the old guard are holding him back. The Dalai Lama is also living proof that rocky is the road of the peace maker. Perhaps we have become too used to being followers. If we just reached out more to each other – having first reached into ourselves – we might find the connections to the real truths that give meaning to our private struggles. We are the culmination of the efforts of all who have gone before us, and our children need us to lay down safe and peaceful paths.

Didn’t some long-haired bohemian from another time say love thy neighbour; and then there was that Scouser who said ‘all you need is love’.

A smile, a baby’s gurgle, a child’s reaching arms, a hand-shake or even a friendly greeting can be enough to lift a leaden heart. So let none of us say we can’t do our bit.

M O’Brien

Greystones, Co Wicklow

When will Kenny see ‘reason’?

I have spent the last two days listening to my Government implying I am not being “reasonable” with respect to the current water charges issue. My husband and I both work full-time so we can afford to run our modest family home and pay for the significant mortgage shortfall on the apartment we unfortunately bought in 2008 before the property crash (which the government and banks directly caused). Is that not reasonable to Mr Kenny?

We pay property tax and tax on any rental income on a property we do not want, but which we cannot sell due to negative equity and the fact that the Government has done nothing to help us and people like us. Is that not reasonable to Mr Kenny?

I have my child in full-time childcare which breaks my heart every day. I also cannot give my child a brother or sister as we cannot afford the childcare costs it would incur with us both having to work to meet bills. Is that not reasonable to Mr Kenny?

I spent eight years gaining an advanced education in order to contribute to this economy and earn enough money to support my family. Despite a recent salary increase, I receive only €60 per month extra take-home pay due to the significantly increased PAYE and USC I must pay. I still cannot afford to pay into a pension fund despite being in my 30s now. Is that not reasonable to Mr Kenny?

And now, because I am refusing to spend what very little disposable income I have on yet another tax for water charges – which I already pay for many times over in the array of other taxes I pay – Mr Kenny and his Government imply that I, and others like me, are unreasonable. Shame on them. Enough is enough. It is Mr Kenny and this Government who are not being “reasonable”.

Elaine McSherry

Dublin 24

Time to call off the protests

The anti-austerity, anti-water charges groups have succeeded in their campaign. They have to be credited with harnessing the public anger and forcing the Government to make the changes recently announced.

But now they should fold up the tent and get off the stage.

We have to be honest and recognise that we have to pay something towards the provision of clean, drinkable water. There is no pot of money available through higher or alternative taxes. They have won the war; let them keep their powder dry for future battles.

Eamonn Kitt

Tuam, Co Galway

New package, same charges

With great fanfare, the Government announced the new water charges on Wednesday.

At first glance, I thought it was good, with the cost being reduced to €3.70 per 1,000 litres, plus the payment of the €100 ‘conservation grant’ – but how that is going to encourage conservation, I have no idea.

On a quick calculation I estimated that I would be paying less than originally envisaged, when the first charges were announced – or so I thought. Then later, I realised that they were abolishing the 30,000 free litres for each household and the water charges tax relief announced in the last Budget.

So, I re-calculated and found that if a two-person household used 70,270 litres in a year, this would cost €260, less the ‘conservation grant’, meaning a net cost of €160.

Then I calculated the same usage under the original charges, allowing myself the free 30,000 litres, and charging the remaining 40,270 litres at €4.88 per 1,000 litres and arrived at a sum of €196.52, less tax relief of €39.30, giving me a net cost of €157.22.

Unbelievably, the new charging structure is costing households more, where they only use up to 70,270 litres, and it is the same result for single-occupant households where they only use up to 43,240 litres. The way the new charges were announced, you would have thought that every household was going to have lower charges. Not so, and this Government thinks it has all been put to bed now.

Frank Fitzpatrick

Portmarnock, Co Dublin

At least we can still have a bath

So convinced am I that Enda is right, I did it. So convinced am I that Leo has the health of the nation back on track, I did it. And so convinced am I that Michael will have money gushing back into the economy, I did it.

Yes folks, I stared down my own financial demons, ripped off the financial shackles that held me down so long, looked to the future with confidence and, and . . . had a bath. On behalf of the Irish people, I would like to thank the Troika for bringing us back to the Promised Land.

Eugene McGuinness

Address with editor

Balance so lacking in the media

The hysteria being promoted by the Irish media in relation to the water charges in a country that has had an €80bn bailout and is, as a consequence over-borrowed, shows the Irish media in very bad light.

The lack of any balance in the coverage of the Irish water issue is nearly as damaging to the health of our democracy as the failure of most of the Irish media to challenge the decisions of the powerful during the boom, since those decisions eventually bankrupted the country and necessitated the bailout.

A Leavy

Sutton, Dublin 13

Pledge to protect our children

I was delighted to see the Taoiseach found time to meet Louise O’ Keeffe, who won her long struggle for justice in the European Court of Human Rights. After listening to her interview on ‘Prime Time’, I do hope Mr Kenny and his Government take on board every word this brave lady had to say and come up with some positive answers before Christmas, as promised. Remember, this is about protecting vulnerable children in our schools.

Brian Mc Devitt

Glenties, Co Donega

Irish Independent

23 November 2014 Postoffice

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and I go to the Post Office.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down nothing for tea and her tummy pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Trevor Pharo – obituary

Trevor Pharo was a sales executive better known as Bingo the Clown, who brought slapstick and custard pies to Bognor Regis

Trevor Pharo as Bingo The Clown (right) with fellow clown Doni.

5:16PM GMT 21 Nov 2014

Comments

Trevor Pharo, who has died aged 60, was a south coast sales executive who became better known to younger customers as Bingo the Clown.

As Bingo, Pharo made clowning history in 1985 by staging the first ever International Clown Convention, when, for a weekend, the staid seaside town of Bognor Regis became “Clown Town”. Local policemen wore red noses and some 100,000 visitors turned up to watch a huge street parade, led by Bingo, and enjoy seminars in slapstick, tumbling and custard pies given by masters of the craft.

The conventions continued for about a decade until funding ran out, attracting the support of stars such as Ken Dodd, Jeremy Beadle, and Norman Wisdom, who opened the 1988 convention. One year the local council estimated the event had attracted 200,000 visitors and as many as 700 clowns, 300 of whom had flown in on a specially chartered flight from the United States.

Bingo was the first British clown to entertain Arab audiences in Kuwait, and he made numerous stage and television appearances, most notably at the Children’s Royal Variety Show at the Victoria Palace Theatre in 1988.

But his career was not without controversy. In 1989 he was accused by his fellow clown Bluey (alias Blue Brattle) of bringing their calling into disrepute after he had appeared in clown costume on Kilroy to discuss whether clowns were paid enough. He was said to have infringed the rule that a clown should never be serious when wearing motley, though some of his colleagues appear to have reacted badly to his suggestion that some involved in the business were more interested in profits than entertainment. Pharo brushed off suggestions that he should hang up his red nose. “Of course I’m serious from time to time – even if I’m in full make-up,” he said. “I can’t forever be dropping my trousers.”

Trevor Pharo was born at Croydon, Surrey, on April 6 1954 and fell in love with the circus when Billy Smart’s came to town in 1972. After leaving school he helped Smart’s by persuading shopkeepers to put circus posters in their windows and, while working as a graphics and printing supplies salesman, eventually founding his own business, learnt the rudiments of clowning from Billy Gay, the circus’s advance publicity manager who doubled as a clown.

He began to take on weekend clowning jobs at children’s parties and local carnivals and amusement parks. As his reputation grew, he travelled abroad and appeared on stage and television.

He raised large sums for charities, including the Variety Club of Great Britain, the Anthony Nolan Trust, and the children’s charity Dream Flight, giving up his own holidays to accompany planeloads of children, many terminally ill, on a “holiday of a lifetime” to Florida. In 2000 he was presented with an award at an international clown convention for his charitable work.

^{Trevor Pharo (left) with circus proprietor, Gerry Cottle}

In 2009, to raise money for a care centre in Brighton for people with HIV/Aids-related illnesses, he promoted two “adults only” nights of entertainment under the big top of Zippo’s Circus. The shows featured some of the circus’s top stars, led by ringmaster Norman Barrett, alongside a line-up of local cabaret regulars . Music was provided by the Brighton and Hove Gay Men’s Chorus and the “alternative” panto star Robert James, “the Naked Singer”.

Trevor Pharo’s marriage to his wife Angela was dissolved, and in September this year he married his partner, Ian Bromilow, with whom he had lived for 25 years and who survives him with two sons and a daughter of his first marriage.

Trevor Pharo, born April 6 1954, died November 8 2014

Guardian:

The Occupy London tent protest outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Photograph: Jack MacDonald for the Observer

“Bankers keep cheating, but where are the protests?”, (leader). The Occupy movement was one, though smartly driven from the temple-yard of the Stock Exchange on to the cobbles outside St Paul’s.

The occupiers were right and the problem is not limited to banks. Will Hutton half-acknowledges this when he says: “The [banking] industry structure should never have been allowed” and adds: “Companies (in general) are seen by too many people, notably shareholders, as just instruments for self-enrichment.” (“Banking is changing, slowly, but its culture is still corrupt”, Comment.

“Just”? The confusion is at the heart of company law. The banking industry is no more or less committed to customers and community than the food industry is to consumer health or the fossil-fuel extractors to green hills and valleys. Bankers and CEOs are not uniquely greedy, but their job description puts company success and shareholder profit before any other social or environmental interest. The directors’ prime duty under the Companies Act of 2006 is to the success of their company “in a way that benefits the shareholders”.

They must merely “have regard” for other factors – employment, customers and suppliers, community, environment and long-term consequences. Where the choice is between clear-cut profit margins and such a range of ill-defined variables, it’s obvious which side the bosses’ bread is buttered on. Until these social and environmental “regards” are hardened up as duties, clearly defined and structured into company law and practice, no amount of top-down tinkering will redress the legacy of inbuilt injustice or clean up a “corrupt” culture that is just being true to itself.

Greg Wilkinson

Swansea

Your leader asks why there are no pickets outside the banks, no protests from “ordinary citizens under the economic cosh”. I think I know why: those ordinary citizens have been sold the lie that their economic woes are due to the profligacy of the last government, nothing to do with bankers. Over the page, Will Hutton reminds us how laissez-faire bank regulation facilitates the cheating. If the last government attracts any blame, it is for under-regulation rather than overspending. Is that too nuanced for today’s political debate?

John Filby

Ashover

Derbyshire

There always has been and always will be fraud in financial services but there are ways of making it less attractive to the fraudsters. Really swingeing fines on the banks, fines of, say, 10 times what they have gained would concentrate directors’ and shareholders’ minds. The perpetrators of the frauds ought to face long prison sentences, sequestration of their assets and a lifelong ban on working in financial services. As a last resort, the bankers ought to face having their businesses taken over by the government. That ought to concentrate minds.

Posted online

Not much point in transferring your money from a bank to a credit union – the credit unions all have accounts with the banks. They are not, at present, big enough to be their own banks.And nowadays it is almost impossible for someone to operate without a bank account. Wages, pensions, benefits are all paid into bank accounts. The days of the pension book you took to the post office, or the little brown envelope you got each payday, are gone. The banks have us by the short and curlies and they know it.

Posted online

'Britain Needs A Pay Rise' National Demonstration in London The Britain Needs a Pay Rise demonstration in London. Photograph: Dave Evans/ Demotix/Corbis

Sarah Kwei made a number of important and valid points in her comment piece (Comment). However, I believe a subhead declaring that “It’s the community, not work, that’s the new site of protest” did her arguments a disservice. Journalism and academia have been dominated by ideas of fragmented power and the end of workplace organisation for a decade and more. It is true that we can see a decline in union influence since the 80s but this is not because of the new character of work but because (sadly) of the character of too many trade union leaderships.

Business unionism, so encouraged by those who argued that the working class and workplace organisation have ceased to exist, has allowed big business and their political representatives in the three main parties to drive down real wages and shift the tax burden from the wealthy on to working-class people. My union, the Rail Maritime and Transport Workers Union (RMT), continues to organise successfully in the workplace. The £50K paid to train drivers by many train-operating companies is well publicised but RMT has also fought and ended zero-hours contracts for cleaners on the Tyne & Wear Metro and continues to organise subcontracted cleaners on London Underground behind a demand for £13 an hour.

Where trade unions get out and organise marginalised workers, victories can be won. But I also agree wholeheartedly that a new collaboration between trade unions and community movements is needed. Years ago, that collaboration manifested itself through the Labour party. Those days are gone.

Jared Wood

Political officer, RMT London Transport Regional Council

London NW1

Why I choose not to vote

Barbara Ellen describes me as “bone idle, ill-informed and immature”, (“Democracy matters – use your vote”, Comment).

Her wrath is directed at non-voters, a section of the community that I am very happy to inhabit for several reasons and is based on the assumption that, should I be unimpressed by all of the candidates I should choose one out of a sense of duty. She conveniently ignores the multitude of politicians who shamelessly abstain from voting on parliamentary debates and bills. I venture to suggest that a minority of these non-voters have genuine reservations, but the majority are abstaining due to nothing more than moral cowardice.

Rather than condemning those of us who weigh up the options and then act accordingly, perhaps she could reflect on the historical consequences of compulsory voting that have resulted in the plethora of elected monsters who have wreaked evil, misery and devastation on our planet.

Andrew Thompson

Cardiff

Landowners need to lay off

Catherine Bennett’s interesting article “The countryside is too vital to leave to its greedy owners” (Comment) argues that large landowners claiming special knowledge of the land are despoiling it with profitable ugly developments. However, as the accompanying picture shows, they have already ruined the landscape itself by ripping out beautiful old hedges and trees and cultivating huge, bleak fields of monocultural grass. Somehow, we need a radical and mandatory programme of land restoration for now and the future.

Tricia Cusack

Birmingham

The other face of Bristol

As a Bristolian born and bred, I did not recognise my city in your article (“Networked and superfast: welcome to Bristol, the UK’s smartest city”, News). I do get tired of seeing Bristol portrayed almost exclusively in pictures of the suspension bridge, and hearing how the small group of ex-Bristol University alumni, living in Clifton, are making the city swing. There are acres of deprived 50s council estates. The congestion in the city is worse than London and the air quality in many places fails to reach EU standards. Our public transport is a joke. Our council is among the worst in Britain. Our mayor is a tech whiz but he is also presiding over the wholesale destruction of green spaces and prime food-growing land to build an overbridge for the Metrobus scheme. This ill-planned scheme is opposed by most Bristolians except those who will benefit financially. As for super-connection, I live well within the city borders and have to go outside the house to get a mobile signal. The article reinforces the impression that Bristol is a wealthy city, making it hard to attract government help. In fact, there are huge inequalities in quality of life, housing and income.

Jane Ghosh

Bristol

Driven to heavy sarcasm

Your front-page revelation that the coalition “has helped the rich by hitting (the) poor”, News, has totally disillusioned me. I had imagined that the bedroom tax, cuts in benefits, tighter jobcentre rules, zero-hours contracts, increased VAT and the remorseless fragmentation of our national health and education services, were all part of the coalition strategy to improve everybody’s lot. We are, after all, all in this together, aren’t we?

John Merrigan

East Molesey

Surrey

Emily Thornberry: lost her shadow cabinet job over a tweet. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

Before the Rochester picture affair is allowed to fade, it badly needs some deeper consideration (Labour rocked by ‘sneering’ blunder, 21 November).

A house draped in statements of national allegiance, upstaged by a big white van representing a way of earning a living, is clearly an arresting image, and Emily Thornberry responded accordingly. Her caption was factual, minimal and comment-free. The household concerned decided to put this striking image into the public domain, so can have no complaint. The result was an instant witchhunt conducted by a political party leader who aspires to run the country.

The image was real. The politician who “naively” acknowledged this particular aspect of reality had to be humiliated and disowned. Labour had to get desperate about its survival before it would admit that there were aspects of UK reality it had been systematically denying. Now it is revealing how quickly the preference for avoiding even talking about reality has reasserted itself. It is Thornberry who is sane and reasonable, and all the rest who are deranged.
Dave Bradney
Llanrhystud, Ceredigion

• Why shouldn’t Emily Thornberry, MP for Islington South, declare publicly that she considers St George’s flags to be awfully low-brow and probably indicative of closet BNP voters, that Islington is just so much more multicultural and tolerant, and that it’s vastly preferable better to live somewhere where one can get organic Ocado deliveries all day long? The public are crying out for authenticity in politicians.
Jeremy Brier
London

• From Gordon Brown’s “bigotgate” to Emily Thornberry’s tweet, Labour has consistently ignored concerns about the squeeze that mass immigration has had on jobs, schools and hospitals. Those of us whose generations of family have worked to pay for these resources might justifiably feel frustration at their current disintegration. The flag wavers are not all bigots and racists. Many are just frustrated that UK passports seem to have been handed out like cheap candy.
Lucie Payne
Sutton, Surrey

• Poor Emily Thornberry. I taught with her mother Sally in Guildford in the early 1970s. Money was scarce in the Thornberry household on the Park Barn council estate: socialist ideals were not. She will bounce back.
John Mair
Oxford

• Could Emily Thornberry be persuaded to defect to the Green party and cause a by-election in Islington?
Rev Richard Syms
Knebworth, Hertfordfordshire

• I attended my first Green party meeting this week. How refreshing to spend almost all the time discussing nuclear power, housing, public transport and the environment instead of the minutes of the last meeting and matters arising. And then to do so well in Rochester.
Richard Bull
Woodbridge, Suffolk

• It seems inconceivable that the Lib Dems’ support should have disappeared entirely in Rochester and Strood. A lot of the Lib Dem vote, and a large part of the Labour vote, undoubtedly migrated temporarily to the Tories in an attempt to prevent the election of the Ukip candidate. The swing from Tory to Ukip may have been much greater than the figures suggest.
Terry Graham
Grasmere, Cumberland

• The rise of Ukip and the likely advent of regular coalition government are symptoms of the inability of the first past the post system to deliver representative parliaments. When only the marginals, one-sixth of seats, determines the outcome, it is inevitable that significant parts of the electorate will be disenfranchised. They’ve now put in motion a process of change that will end in proportional representation.
Richard Cohen
London

• Almost 80% of the electorate of Rochester and Strood did not vote for the successful Ukip candidate. Time for electoral reform?
Patrick Billingham
Brighton

• Ukip’s plan to quit the EU to give the UK more control over immigration takes no account of the fact that history has a habit of repeating itself. At the moment we’re doing better economically than other EU countries, particularly those in the eurozone.

But one day the position will no doubt be reversed with high unemployment in this country forcing workers to look for jobs abroad as for example happened in the 1980s. But with the UK out of the EU there won’t be a repeat of Auf Wiedersehen, Pet.
Roger Hinds
Coulsdon, Surrey

mozambique beach letters Very few programmes ever feature the magical beaches of Mozambique. Photograph: Gary Cook/Alamy

I must compliment you on Why I had to turn down Band Aid (19 November). Most people talk or write about Africa as though it were a single unitary state and appear to be unaware that there are 54 countries (or 58 counting the islands) in this very large continent. It is also very apropos that you point out that that seven out of 10 of the world’s fastest growing economies are in Africa.

I first went to Africa in 1966 for a six-month shoot on part of a documentary series for CBS-TV in New York, travelling down the east of Africa from Cairo to Cape Town and missing out only Somalia. I was ashamed of my ignorance and became angry at educational authorities for having virtually nothing in the curriculum I studied about African history. This was aggravated even further when I recently discovered Max Hasting’s statistics in All Hell Let Loose on the Commonwealth troop losses in the second world war: British losses were approximately 340,000. Commonwealth losses were 550,000.

Of course, most of the programmes that I worked on in Africa over the next 45 years were about famine, disease or war, so I have contributed to this image of Africa. Very few programmes ever feature the magical beaches of, for example, Angola and Mozambique, or the ancient heritages of Ethiopia, Benin, Mali, among others. It is further interesting that Paris has a museum solely for African art (well worth a visit) while London has none.
Christian Wangler
London

06.00 GMT

Michael Abraham pays tribute to Tommy Flowers, who designed and built the Colossus computer (Letters, 18 November). I would add another hidden hero on the engineering side: Harold “Doc” Keene, who worked for the British Tabulating Machine Co in Letchworth and turned the Turing’s ideas into useable machines, the Bletchley Park/Letchworth Bombes.

There are other omissions. The worst is that of the Polish mathematicians Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rózycki and Henryk Zygalski, who were streets ahead of the British when it came to deciphering Enigma messages at the beginning of war. They passed on their discoveries.

Mention might also be made of Gordon Welchman, a fine cryptographer in his own right, who set up the management system for dealing with the vast number of Enigma decrypts, and Colonel John Tiltman, who made the initial breakthrough in decoding Lorentz messages.

The Lorentz machine wasn’t replacement for Enigma, which continued in use throughout the war. It was used for “secure” communication between Hitler and his senior military commanders. Colossus wasn’t a programmable computer in the modern sense and didn’t translate Lorentz messages. It used statistical techniques to suggest the most likely wheel settings that allowed the German text to be recovered. The translation was carried out by human beings.
Ken Vines
Yelverton, Devon

• Alan Turing and his fellow mathematicians are rightly being celebrated for the enormously valuable contribution they made during the second world war at Bletchley Park, not least in the new film The Imitation Game. Their efforts would, however, have been for nought had it not been for the many talented linguists – among whom both of my parents – who translated their decrypted letters into meaningful messages that made sense and which could be turned into usable military intelligence. We need to celebrate both the mathematicians and the linguists for their remarkable contributions. Here, as in many other contexts, we need to draw on the assets of talented individuals from across the intellectual spectrum.
Helen Wallace
London

Independent:

It is to be commended that Charlie Gilmour is taking Chris Grayling to task (“Mr Grayling, how do you account for these prison suicides?”, 16 November). But the emotional and mental health problems that prompt self-harm start much earlier.

Children in custody will have experienced abuse and domestic violence, have learning or speech and language difficulties and untreated mental health problems. One fifth of them will have self-harmed and 11 per cent attempted suicide before they went into custody. These children need care, therapy and a regime that assists in their rehabilitation if they are not to continue to offend.

It is therefore of great concern that the plans to spend £87m on a “secure college” are being pushed through parliament. How can an establishment, designed to be a cheap option and holding more than 300 children aged 12 to 17, hope to address these complex issues? In particular, we learn that the secure college will allow force to be used to ensure “good order and discipline”. A 14-year-old boy committed suicide in custody because he had been restrained for this purpose.

All the evidence tells us that warehousing children in a large establishment is more likely to increase the risk of self-harm and suicide, and will do nothing to reintegrate these children back into society.

Pam Hibbert, OBE

Chair, National Association for Youth Justice Professor Dame Sue Bailey

Chair Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition Peter Hindley

Royal College of Psychiatrists

Your editorial, “Summits need tact, not insults” (16 November) was spot on. President Putin was humiliated, whatever genuine opprobrium his actions in Ukraine may deserve, and he won’t forget it when it comes to negotiating with the perpetrators.

Wars can be started by the ego posturing of heads of state, and they can escalate in no time at all. There never was a greater need for intelligent, mature statesmanship which recognises the underlying causes of conflict and seeks constructive ways to remedy what has become an unnecessarily dangerous situation. A little more mindfulness and a lot less Bullingdon.

Sierra Hutton-Wilson

Evercreech, Somerset

Your editorial alludes to the deal struck by China and the US over climate change but fails to mention that China’s emissions will rise until 2030. Since 1990, annual emissions of carbon dioxide have risen by 60 per cent globally, and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has now passed 400 parts per million. Irreversible climate change will kick in at 450 ppm, a level which will be reached in 20 years, about the same time that China’s emissions will peak. This deal is nothing more than posturing by the planet’s two biggest polluters.

Dr Robin Russell-Jones

Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire

Joan Smith was wrong to characterise the Catholic Church as opposing human progress (16 November). At the time of Galileo’s arrest, the correct model of the solar system was a matter of genuine debate. Galileo was badly treated but his dispute was (largely) as a result of a personal argument when he implied that the Pope was an idiot for believing the orthodox view.

The orthodox view had been developed mainly by Greek philosopher Ptolomy (not the Bible). It had held up to scrutiny for hundreds of years. Opponents of it had not been able to demonstrate that the Earth rotated at the enormous speed it would be required to (our experience is that we live on unmoving ground).

Adam Huntley

St Albans, Hertfordshire

I’m not much interested in football. The playing field is so uneven nowadays. However, I do enjoy another game called “The Rooney Count”. Before you open a newspaper, you guess how many photos of Mr Rooney will be inside. It’s always exciting and unlike football, involves minimal cost. Last week The Independent on Sunday managed six. I’d guessed seven. Never mind, better luck next time. It’s almost as exciting as “The Cumberbatch Count”!

Pete Butchers

Meldreth, Cambridgeshire

Times:

Despite claims by the government that it wants to protect the countryside, its planning reforms have facilitated development in rural communities

West’s broken promises have played part in Ukraine drama

THE former US assistant secretary of state James Rubin omits any mention of the West’s role in his article “Putin has exploited our weakness in Ukraine — and now the Baltic states are in danger” (Focus, last week).

He ignores Mikhail Gorbachev’s recent observation that Russia feels betrayed by the West breaking its promise that German reunification would not lead to an eastward expansion of Nato. This went ahead, moreover, despite Russia giving America invaluable territorial access for its war in Afghanistan. Then came Ukraine’s tilt to the West.

It is not clear Ukraine is our responsibility. It was part of Russia’s domain for a large period during the 20th century and it is not a member of Nato, whereas a number of the Baltic states now are. Georgia and Ukraine may be one thing, but attacks on Nato allies are different. We know that — and Putin knows we know.
Gordon Bonnyman, Frant, East Sussex

CHANGING ITS TUNE

Rubin asserts that this “is what happens when a bully is not confronted right away and becomes drunk with his own apparent success”. Was this not Anthony Eden’s argument about the former Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser? America’s response was to pull the rug from under our currency until we gave Nasser a free hand. Has America changed its spots?
David Drury, Swanage, Dorset

Planning rural blight from Westminster

THE housing and planning minister, Brandon Lewis, says “countryside protection” is at the heart of what this government is doing to reform planning (“Countryside alliance”, Letters, last week).

I live in rural Somerset and I can assure him that nothing is further from the truth. Lewis has been in his job for just a few months and demonstrates his lack of understanding of the reality outside his Westminster bubble.

Here we have opportunist, land-grabbing housing developers putting in planning applications for large unsightly estates on prime agricultural greenfield sites with the near certainty that local authorities are unable to stop them. Any refusal will be appealed against by developers, which know that councils are unable to afford the cost of appeals.
Robin Lea, Congresbury, Somerset

OFF PLAN

Our parish of 500 houses, two pubs, one village shop/post office and one junior school is facing planning applications for 200 homes. The issues involved are complex and include the relaxation of planning consent, the removal of a local development plan, poor transport links, insufficient infrastructure, farmers selling up and so on.

It was therefore interesting to read the minister’s gift of local determination and his recognition of environment protection. What guff.
Howard Day, Swadlincote, Leicestershire

US general in the line of fire

AS TWO senior officers who served with General Sir Nick Carter in Kandahar in 2009 and 2010 we are appalled at the portrayal that the retired US general Daniel Bolger has given of operations in southern Afghanistan under the new chief of the general staff’s leadership (“British Army chief ‘cost lives’ ”, News, last week).

The Nato International Security Assistance Force’s (Isaf) policy of “courageous restraint” was controversial, but it was specifically designed to protect the civilian population whose trust and support we were trying to win.

This required a subtly different kind of courage from our soldiers on occasion, but British and US troops were never denied the right of self-defence or prevented from accessing the considerable support available in southern Afghanistan, as suggested by Bolger. Far from General Carter residing in a “well-appointed command post” we frequently stood in for him as he ventured into the population centres, holding countless meetings with our Afghan partners and getting a real feel for the situation on the ground.

We never saw Bolger on the ground in Kandahar, and therefore the authority with which he appears to speak on the relationships that existed between Isaf headquarters in Kabul and its HQ in Kandahar should be treated with much scepticism. We believe he has made his assertions on the basis of third-hand information.
Major-General Richard Davis, British Army, and Lieutenant-General Ben Hodges, Commanding General, US Army Europe

APPLIANCE OF SCIENCE

I am lucky to have lived through an extraordinary period of space endeavours (“One giant step”, Focus, last week). The grainy pictures of the first moon landing in 1969 are something I shall never forget, and the Rosetta mission was driven by scientists — many of them British — to find why we are here and how. I hope through such ventures, God will be taken out of the equation.
Harvey Clegg, Woodbridge, Suffolk

BEAUTY COUNTER

Simon Green, senior lecturer in space science at the Open University, states: “The cost of Rosetta pales into insignificance next to what people spend on shampoo and mascara”. But at least they have something to show for the outlay.
Terry Slater, Harlow, Essex

SMELL TEST

Why is the cost of space exploration always compared with expenditure on female products such as mascara rather than male products such as aftershave?
David Greenwood, Barnet, London

Fifa deserves red card for whitewash

THE Fifa scandal surrounding World Cup bidding continues unabated (“Fixer’s World Cup offer to England”, News, and “Fifa’s whitewash can’t hide stain of corruption”, Editorial, last week), and there is now surely no doubt that this inept and seemingly corrupt organisation is totally unfit for purpose.

If the world of football had anything about it, it would ensure that Fifa in its present form is abolished and replaced by a totally new organisation run by an executive with no connections to the past. Unfortunately, one suspects that there are far too many people at the top of world football with their snouts in the trough to take this necessary action for the benefit of the game.
Bob Watson, Baildon, West Yorkshire

ON THE MONEY

The mention of a “Fifa ethics judge” is rather like referring to a “Nazi equal-opportunities officer” or a “mafia non-violence committee”. The most honourable thing English football could do would be to leave Fifa, but with money holding the central place in the game that it does, this is never going to happen.
Colin Jordan, London W4

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

I write as director of the largest West Midlands pathology service, a six-year member of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence cancer services and a former president of the Association of Clinical Pathologists.Your front-page article “Surgeons told to publish deaths”(News, last week) is detrimental to patients. A surgeon faced with a patient destined to die without an emergency operation, where that procedure carries an 80-90% risk of death, will now not try. As a 63-year-old, can I expect that the surgeon will consider his “position” before considering my own as a very sick patient whom he could save, albeit by operating at risk of an increased death rate? Should I die in such circumstances, it should not be wrongly attributed to the surgeon who tried their best in such dire circumstances.
Professor Archie J Malcolm,Shrewsbury, Shropshire

TIME RICH

I am not sure which is more shocking — that a con artist should issue a death threat (“ ‘Try to find your £380,000 watch and you’ll die’ ”, News, last week) or that anyone would pay that amount for a watch when a smartphone has more “super complication” than a Patek Philippe timepiece and tells the time more accurately.
Mark Solon, London SW12

COUNTING INDIA’S WAR DEAD

The claim that in the First World War “1.2m Indians fought in the mud in Belgium and France and they died in vast numbers” is misleading (“Let every school saddle up for a war course”, News Review, November 9). The 1.2m figure is the total number of men who served in the Indian army anywhere in the world, including India itself, during the war. For the western front the figures are roughly 90,000 soldiers (of whom almost 9,000 gave their lives) and 50,000 non-combatants in labour units. At least 5,000 have no known grave.
TA Heathcote, Author of The Military in British India

GRAMMAR LESSON

Your data on the domination of some grammar schools by children from ethnic minorities is deliciously ironic (“White pupils fail to make grade for grammar school”, News, last week). Those middle-class, professional and media folk who have been so condescending and laid-back about immigration will soon feel the impact of migrant competition on their children’s careers and prospects. Something about sowing and reaping?
Peter Richards, Poole, Dorset

BREAD LINE

I have spent 35 years in food production and expected more from your article on the employment of Hungarians in a UK sandwich factory (“Feeding the sandwich generation”, Focus, last week). Where was the mention of the benefits the sandwich industry has for our farmers, bread makers and packaging companies, and of the tax they generate? Britain leads the way in large-scale modern food production. Look at any manufacturer of chilled food, from fruit packing to ready meals, and it will be filled with hard-working, tax-paying foreigners without whom Nigel Farage would not get his Christmas turkey and sliced salmon next month.
Stephen A Minall, Radlett, Hertfordshire

MUGABE DEATH

May I correct an error regarding the cause of death of Sally Mugabe, the first wife of Robert Mugabe (“Power rival feels Mrs Mugabe’s claws”, World News, November 9)? I had intermittently attended Sally for 12 years up to her death. She had been on kidney dialysis for 10 years and died of an infection in 1992. There was no question of cancer, as was reported.
Dr Roger Gabriel, Emeritus Consultant Renal Physician, Guildford, Surrey

FIGHTING FIT

What a shame The Sunday Times has fallen for the myth of body mass index (BMI) being an indicator of obesity (“Britain’s (not so) light infantry”, News, last week). When I was serving in the army I attended my annual medical check and, despite being successful in whatever fitness test I undertook, I was horrified to see that my weight classified me as obese. I was told by the military medical orderly that the BMI was “just for civvies”.
Mark Newnham, York

EXERCISING RESTRAINT

Is it so outrageous to suggest that exercise is a more effective and beneficial solution to the claimed obesity crisis than trying to control fast-food portion sizes? That said, a little common sense would be a far more useful solution to many of today’s problems than the ever-increasing effort to regulate our lives.
Hamish Hossick, Broughty Ferry, Dundee

Corrections and clarifications

In last week’s newspaper the masthead “UK’s top 600 primary & prep schools” and pages of the Parent Power supplement in News Review headed “Britain’s top 300 primary and prep schools” should have read “England’s top 600…” and “England’s top 300… ” respectively. We apologise to our readers in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for the misleading nature of the headlines.

The article “Let every school saddle up for a war course” (News Review, November 9) attributed the claim that “1.2m Indians fought in the mud in Belgium and France and they died in vast numbers” to Michael Morpurgo. This is incorrect and was added during the editing process. We apologise to Mr Morpurgo for this error.

Complaints about inaccuracies in all sections of The Sunday Times, should be addressed to complaints@sunday-times.co.uk or Complaints, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. In addition, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) will examine formal complaints about the editorial content of UK newspapers and magazines. Please go to our complaints section for full details of how to lodge a complaint.

Birthdays

Zoë Ball, broadcaster, 44; Miley Cyrus, singer, 22; Joe Eszterhas, screenwriter, 70; Kevin Gallacher, footballer, 48; Shane Gould, former Olympic champion swimmer, 58; Bruce Hornsby, musician, 60; Sue Nicholls, actress, 71; Diana Quick, actress, 68; Robert Towne, screenwriter, 80; Kirsty Young, broadcaster, 46

Anniversaries

1924 Edwin Hubble publishes discovery that Milky Way is not the only galaxy; 1963 first episode of Doctor Who; 1990 Roald Dahl, author, dies; 1996 hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane crash-lands, killing 125; 2002 rioting over the country’s hosting of the Miss World contest leaves 215 dead in Kaduna, Nigeria

Telegraph:

Irish Times:

Irish Independent:

Madam – My stance in favour of water charges all along has been because of conservation. Now that we know the details of the charges it seems the conservation argument has gone out the window. Now it seems that what my anti-water charges friends were telling me was correct – it is just a tax under another name.

With a cap in place on charges, it seems it doesn’t matter how much water you use. We are now being told that the meters will help reduce bills if you use a small amount of water. In reality the reduction will be minuscule and will not be worth the effort. Granted the meters may find a few leaks but if you are effectively not being penalized for them, what’s the point in getting them fixed.

€500 million worth of meters will effectively be a white elephant of epic proportions compared to the €50 million spent on e-voting machines.

While I have not taken part in any protests so far I am seriously thinking of taking part in the next nationwide protest on December 10. Let’s derail this out of control speeding train before there is an almighty crash,

Thomas Roddy,

Galway

Give with the hope of reward

Madam – This Christmas Irish people should reach out to neighbours with charitable donations. I know of a man who, over many years, helped others anonymously. He never spoke of these good deeds but many had cause to be grateful, for the blank envelope found in the post box.

Just put some money in an envelope and post it to someone in need. There are millions of euro leaving the State on behalf of the Irish people every single day. It is time to look after our own needy.

Harry Mulhern,

Dublin

Show respect for dead and injured

Madam – The recent death of a two-year-old girl, who was killed in a road traffic accident in Waterford, was tragic and heart-rending. I cannot begin to imagine the grief that her family are going through.

It is deplorable that members of the public that happened upon the scene began capturing videos and photo images with their phones.

Yet it has become so widespread that Waterford Fire Services has appealed to the public to let them get on with their work and to show respect and dignity to those involved in accidents. Curiosity is normal; taking pictures of dying, injured and distraught victims is not.

John Bellew

Dunleer, Co Louth

Good friends are worth a lot

Madam – What a truly poignant piece from Eleanor Goggin – “A friend through thick, thin and laughter” in the Sunday Independent (16 November). I was in tears after reading it.

We have all had these best friends, in childhood, school, college and later years and they are more than worth their weight in gold.

I can totally empathise with Eleanor’s description. My friends and I have been through so much together over the past 25 years including parents’ deaths, ill-health, etc, and I can honestly say anything to them. We can sit in silence reading or laugh hysterically at the most stupid things. We all put up with each other’s oddities.

My thoughts are with Eleanor and her friend’s family. I am going to make a point of touching base with some of my closest friends, for you never know the day nor the hour.

Mary Quinn,

Dun Laoghaire,

Co Dublin

There’s a need for new politics

Madam – What I found most revealing about last weekend’s water charges demonstration was that it was timed to coincide with a group of adults receiving graduation certificates – people improving their lives through hard work and application.

We now see that the hard-Left offers a politics of perpetual adolescence – angry with “the system”, but never offering a viable, or affordable alternative.

We also have a huge number of people – myself included – who will never again vote for any of the big three parties who have ruled this State since independence.

Their tribalism and cronyism, along with their contempt for the taxpayer, make their version of “democracy” too far from what’s required in the 21st century.

The vacuum in Irish politics needs to be filled by responsible politicians – and a responsible electorate.

We need grassroots democracy, a genuine “public service”, elected mayors with real clout, balanced budgets and an end to generations of welfare dependency in an economy still able to attract large numbers of immigrants.

A real republic would be a fitting tribute to the 1916 generation, and leave a far better legacy for the generations to come.

Over to you, Independents with vision.

Gerry Kelly,

Rathgar,

Dublin 6.

Protests can get hijacked

Madam – As we witnessed in Jobstown last week, peaceful protests can be hijacked by other less savoury elements.

I believe politicians calling for a “show of anger” should bear this in mind in relation to the planned protest on December 10.

In my humble opinion, and I hope I am wrong, I think there is a good chance that every Garda-hater and malcontent will see this event as an early Christmas present.

I have visions of the “Love Ulster” debacle, when similar elements showed their own particular version of protest.

If this turns out to be the case on December 10 the aforementioned politicians should start preparing their respective speeches.

Pat Burke Walsh,

Ballymoney,

Co Wexford

We need a strong leader

Madam – While watching the disgraceful behaviour of a sinister element to the water charges protests, and the total disrespect for our democratically elected ministers, it behoves the Catholic Church to come out strongly, and show their utter abhorrence at this sordid show of violence and anarchy.

Shame on those thugs, and also on those who abused Mairia Cahill and all the other victims. Where is the voice of reason, before we step over the precipice. We need a strong leader now more so than ever.

Una Heaton,

Limerick

Change can come quick if we want it

Madam – Isn’t it surprising how quickly this government acted to rein in its more extreme tendencies – once its own future prospects were put in jeopardy, regarding the protests over Irish Water?

May we all live long enough to witness a few more epiphanies!

Richard Dowling,

Mountrath,

Co Laois

Should we leave EU to mark 1916?

Madam – The debate about how we should commemorate the 1916 Rising is just beginning. No doubt it will be used and abused by politicians to justify every point on the political spectrum.

Perhaps the best way to truly recall the memory of the men and women who paid the ultimate price for the right to self-determination would be to hold a referendum about our support for the disgraceful usurpation of the Irish people by our so-called EU partners.

The Irish people should be afforded an opportunity to assert our support or otherwise for the forced bailout of the European and international private banking system and the German-dominated political institution (the EU) that imposed such cruel terms on this nation. It is timely, on the centenary of our most significant historical moment, that we take courage and consider leaving the EU, a body that will never again respect this nation’s right to equal treatment.

The wording of the referendum is partly in place, courtesy of Thomas J Clarke, Sean Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, PH Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, James Connolly and Joseph Plunkett.

“We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people.”

Declan Doyle,

Lisdowney, Kilkenny

Water charges made worm turn

adam – Enda Kenny spoke of a democratic revolution on his accession to power but, as we have seen, this was not the case. The bailout is over, the Troika has come (though it pops over every now and again), but the same vested interests and people at the top of the pile sail serenely on.

Politicians, developers, bankers and regulators lost us our independence and our sovereignty; our children took the emigrant boat/plane again; and our shops and industries closed by the thousand. We bailed them out, but got little thanks for it.

Finally, in the shape of the water protests, the Celtic worm has turned. I think most of us were too terrified by the suddenness of the bust to be angry at the time, which explains why there were so few protests during the height of austerity.

We were left in a parlous position of needing to be bailed out, we saw that our leaders in the political and banking sectors literally were clueless and we were afraid.

Now that fear has somewhat subsided, and has been gradually replaced by a slow-burning anger.

With this anger, the chimera of Enda’s democratic revolution is gradually taking shape. The water protests saw ordinary people tell those in charge that we won’t take any more. The problem is both financial and philosophical.

We are already paying for water, and if leaks need fixing, then use this money to get them fixed. It should not take a new monopoly, complete with inbuilt bonus culture (and we saw where that got us in the financial sector during the Celtic Tiger), to do this job.

Nor should this company, which is set up to manage water, immediately pay millions to consultants to tell them how to do their job!

Given that all of this boils down to “fix the leaks”, it is no wonder that people are angry.

This will not just be water under the bridge for this government. The Irish people showed Fianna Fail and the Greens what they thought of them in the last election – and election 2016 is coming soon. What a fitting date to begin a real democratic revolution.

Dr Eugene O’Brien,

Dept of English,

Mary Immaculate College

University of Limerick

Let’s put the children first

Madam – In last week’s Sunday Independent, Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, James Reilly speaking about Sinn Fein and abuse allegations said: “If we are to address the failings of our past, which we know are many, we must recognise we have a duty to put children first. This means all of us all of the time. Otherwise we will fail our children again.”

I say, forget the pomp and ceremony of commemorating 1916. Instead use the €26m to get the children’s hospital started, and I mean started – bricks-and-mortar started. A united Ireland that so much blood has been shed for is increasingly a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic population. Let’s drop the romantic sentiment, do our duty and put children first. They are after all, always going to be our future.

Cut through the red tape, bureaucracy and let’s face it, egotistical bullshit, and use the opportunity to put the children of Ireland first. For once.

Anne Lawlor,

Marino, Dublin 3

Things could get worse – wake up

Madam – Gerry Adams spends much of his time in his native jurisdiction, ie, Northern Ireland, where he keeps busy preparing his people for the British general election, coming up soon.

Anyone who finds the spectacle of an “Irish republican” TD gearing up to campaign for potential MPs in a British parliament somewhat confusing, can be assured that under the guise of SF being a “national party”, we only need to think for one minute to realise Gerry’s outfit are indeed a partitionist political entity. Of course this is something they abhor in our own legitimate democracy here in Eire.

They accuse others in Leinster House of being what they represent more than anyone in politics, themselves. And we wonder why an American journalist might get bamboozled as to exactly who and where we are?

The current mantra of Sinn Fein in what they used to call disparagingly the “Free State,” is ‘tax the rich’, whatever that means. The ‘rich’ already are paying. The propaganda SF issues in polite circles is to portray concern for the hard-pressed payers of tax while the perceived rich are ‘getting away’ with murder, if you’ll pardon the pun.

There is a distinct lack of clarity when they speak of the unspeakable “rich”, but among many of their supporters this simply means anyone who has a small business; someone who owns a nice car, or indeed everyone with a job already paying tax but not known to vote for Sinn Fein.

A lot of the ‘thinking’ among the Shinners’ rank and file is that their time has come and the taxing to extinction of the movers and shakers in business, and the supposed well paid, means more for themselves as they contemplate the revolution with a few extra special offer cans on their sofas from the un-Irish local supermarket, while watching ‘Match of the Day’ wearing Liverpool and Chelsea shirts.

Wake up Ireland,if you think things cannot get any worse than they are now.

Robert Sullivan,

Bantry, Co Cork.

We’re still waiting, Mary Lou

Madam – Last week, in Dail Eireann, Mary Lou McDonald stated “anyone associated with the abuse of a child or the cover-up of abuse must face the full rigours of the law”.

A week later and I have not heard of her mentioning her party leader who has admitted he was aware of his brother’s abuse of his niece and took no action?

Cal Hyland,

Rosscarbery, West Cork

Why do we keep knocking Bob?

Madam – Please, Please, Madam, tell me it was a big mistake to publish Declan Doyle’s letter “Give ‘em your money, Bob” (Sunday Independent, 16 November).

I will not even go into the reasons why, they are so obvious.

Why, oh why Madam, do we so often, try to knock really good people in this country?

(By the way, thank you so much for publishing my letter about the wonderful school choirs – I was just sorry it was so close to Mr Doyle’s rubbish.)

Brian McDevitt,

Glenties, Co Donegal

Bob is a real leader with Band Aid 30

Madam – I am sure I am not alone when expressing my disgust at one Mr Doyle in the Letters Page (Sunday Independent, 16 November), having a go at Bob Geldof and Band Aid 30 re-doing Do They Know It’s Christmas.

Geldof is someone who tries to make a difference when others wait for someone else to do something. He’s an example to us all.

Why would anyone who is mourning the loss of their daughter be bothered to launch another campaign this time to help Ebola victims? This is the mark of the man, taking action rather than moaning that something should be done.

John Walsh,

Waterford

Sunday Independent

24 November 2014 Sharland

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and Sharland comes to call.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down fish for tea and her tummy pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

Squadron Leader Terry Bulloch was a bomber pilot known as ‘The Bull’ who was the leading U-boat hunter of the Battle of the Atlantic

Squadron Leader Terry Bulloch in front of his Liberator aircraft

7:25PM GMT 23 Nov 2014

Comments

Squadron Leader Terry Bulloch, who has died aged 98, was a pilot in Coastal Command who made the greatest number of sightings and attacks against German U-boats during the Battle of the Atlantic. By the end of the war he had been credited with sinking four, twice the number by any other pilot.

Due to the lack of long-range aircraft in 1941 and early 1942, sinkings of Allied shipping by German U-boats in the mid-Atlantic had reached alarming proportions. The introduction into RAF service of the American-built B-24 Liberator finally closed this “Atlantic Gap” and gave added protection to the essential convoys sailing from North American ports to the United Kingdom.

In December 1942, Bulloch, known throughout Coastal Command as “The Bull”, was in charge of a small detachment of No 120 Squadron in Iceland and, by this time, he had already developed a reputation as one of the most determined and successful U-boat hunters. On December 8, he and his crew took off from Reykjavik in their Liberator to fly a convoy patrol; 16 hours later they landed after one of the most remarkable operational wartime flights by an RAF aircraft — its like would never be repeated.

Two large convoys had left Halifax in Nova Scotia and were approaching an area where naval intelligence estimated that a U-boat “Wolf Pack” of 14 submarines was lurking in wait (post-war analysis established that there were 22). Bulloch intercepted convoy HX 217 and took up a position astern to counter a known U-boat tactic of shadowing a convoy whilst others from the pack converged.

The weather was poor but Bulloch’s amazing eyesight picked up the wake of a surfaced U-boat and he dived to attack. The submarine commenced a crash dive but it was too late and Bulloch straddled it with six depth charges. There was a great upheaval of water and oil, wreckage and bodies soon floated to the surface. A Norwegian Navy corvette escorting the convoy investigated and confirmed the sinking.

Soon after this success, Bulloch spotted two more U-boats and he attacked one with his two remaining depth charges forcing the submarine to dive. This was Bulloch’s twenty-second sighting of a U-boat (he had attacked twelve) far more than most squadrons had achieved, or ever did. However, this unique flight was not over.

Before it was time for him to depart, Bulloch and his crew sighted another five submarines. With no depth charges remaining, he dived and attacked each with his four Hispano 20mm cannons. On every occasion he forced the submarines to dive and abandon their attacks.

^{Squadron Leader Terry Bulloch, seated centre, with his outstanding Liberator crew}

A second Liberator arrived to relieve Bulloch and it continued the attacks forcing five more U-boats to dive. The attackers had been thrown into disarray and their positions revealed to the escorting naval forces who engaged them. Just two of the 90 ships were lost from the convoys.

Bulloch was awarded a Bar to a DSO that had been gazetted four weeks earlier. Some of his outstanding crew were also decorated, including a DSO to his navigator and a DFM to the flight engineer.

The national press in the UK and in Canada gave extensive coverage to the events, with headlines of “The Bull gets a U-boat” and “Sub smashers win 5 awards in big convoy fight”. An official Coastal Command report concluded, “the convoys were brought safely to port in the face of the most determined opposition yet encountered”.

Terence Malcolm Bulloch was born February 19 1916 in Lisburn, County Antrim and he attended Campbell College Belfast where he was the piper sergeant major in the Officer Training Corps and an excellent rugby player.

He joined the RAF on a short service commission in 1936 and trained as a pilot before flying Ansons in Coastal Command. By early 1940 he had transferred to No 206 Squadron to fly the twin-engined Hudson, patrolling the French, Dutch and Belgian coastal areas, including a number of hazardous trips during the evacuation of the BEF from Dunkirk. He attacked and damaged a German floatplane forcing it to land on the sea where he then bombed it. He also bombed the Channel ports being used in Hitler’s preparations to invade England in September 1940.

At the end of the year, he was awarded the DFC, which was soon followed by a mention in despatches.

Rather than have a rest, Bulloch joined the RAF’s Ferry Command in Canada and flew four-engine bombers across the Atlantic to British airfields. On one occasion, flying a B-17 Fortress, he took just over eight hours to reach Prestwick in Scotland, a record flight across the Atlantic at that time.

With the arrival of the B-24 Liberators, some of which Bulloch had delivered, No 120 Squadron was formed at Nutts Corner, Belfast and Bulloch joined as a flight commander.

On October 21 1941, Bulloch made the squadron’s first attack against a U-boat but abandoned it briefly to attack a shadowing Focke Wulf 200 Kondor aircraft that was shadowing the convoy he was protecting. The Kondor left the area rapidly and Bulloch resumed his hunt for the submarine. He spotted a periscope and dived to attack with three depth charges. The attack was inconclusive and he was credited with a “damaged”.

Over the next nine months of patient patrolling, Bulloch made six more U-boat sightings. He damaged U-59 as it returned to Brest and, two days later, he seriously damaged U-653, forcing it to return to Brest where it spent six months being repaired.

In September he was in Iceland and on October 12 he achieved his, and the squadron’s, first confirmed “kill”. His depth charges virtually blew U-597 out of the water and it was last seen tipping vertically before disappearing.

^{Bulloch’s attack on the U-boat U-597 which he sank}

Over the next two weeks he sighted and attacked four more submarines and on November 5 he sighted another two. Attacking one of them from bow to stern, his aim was accurate and his depth charges destroyed U-132. He was awarded a Bar to his DFC, the citation commenting, “his power of leadership is outstanding”.

After his memorable sortie of December 8, he became an instructor but took the opportunity to test new equipment, including a battery of eight rockets fitted to the nose of his aircraft. He was attached to No 224 Squadron and, on July 8 1943, he was on patrol near Cape Finisterre when he spotted the conning tower of a submarine in the wake of a fishing boat. He attacked and fired his eight rockets in pairs from fifty feet. He pulled up and re-attacked with his depth charges. U-514 outbound to South African waters was destroyed with all hands.

At the end of his tour, Bulloch refused to be rested and he joined a long-range transport squadron flying converted Liberators across the Atlantic. Later he flew with a special RAF transport squadron on routes across the Pacific. Towards the end of the war, he was seconded to BOAC and after his release from the RAF in July 1946 he joined the airline as a captain. He had logged over 4,500 flying hours by the time the war ended.

Bulloch joined BOAC’s prestigious Trans-Atlantic service and was to spend almost all his long career with BOAC and British Airways (BA) flying over the ocean he knew so well. Initially he flew converted bombers and progressed to the elegant Constellation and the less elegant Stratocruiser. He shunned all offers to be a training captain or to take on managerial duties. He simply wanted to keep flying and he spent many hours at the controls of the jet-powered Boeing 707 before moving on to the Boeing 747.

^{Squadron Leader Terry Bulloch}

On reaching BA’s retirement age, he had flown across the Atlantic 1,113 times. His passion for flying had not diminished so he joined the Portuguese National Airline (TAP) and took command of a Boeing 707 and continued to fly routes across the Atlantic. He finally retired in 1974.

Bulloch was a man of few words but he had a great determination to attack the enemy and, when not flying, which was rare, he spent many hours studying the enemy’s tactics and capabilities. He insisted on total dedication and professionalism from his crew and he was an inspiring captain. Some thought him too forthright and terse but his knowledge, courage and skill, not to mention his unique record, were greatly admired. He had little time for authority and less for paperwork and bureaucracy but he was a man of compelling honesty and integrity.

After so much travelling for almost 40 years, in retirement he devoted himself to his garden and to his local golf club at Denham.

A colleague wrote his biography, Coastal Ace (1986).

Terry Bulloch first wife, Joan, died in 1969. His second wife, Linda, who he married in 1974, survives him.

Squadron Leader Terry Bulloch, born February 19, 1916 , died November 13 2014

Guardian:

Independent:

Heavens above! Emily Thornberry is the product of a working-class council estate. The true test of what she thinks about ordinary working people is to be found in the fact that after she joined the middle classes as a barrister, she joined the Labour Party, not the Conservatives. Her downfall, prompted by her tweeting a photo of a home decked in England flags, is her characteristically English wry sense of radical humour.

The “white van man’’ is a recent much-loved icon of an ironic English humour, which stretches from Hogarth to Mock the Week. Ms Thornberry’s image of the house, the van and the large St George flags is worthy of Hogarth. It signals her evident dismay that the voters of Rochester had fallen under the spell of a disingenuous, camouflaged, neo-Thatcherite tribute party, led by an enterprising former public schoolboy and former City trader, which has the £ sign in its title, suggesting a new country to be called “Poundland”.

Ms Thornberry was highly effective in dealing with Tory propagandists. Ordinary working- and lower-middle-class people need her badly to put the Labour Party case for a fairer and more rational Britain that represents their interests – something in which she clearly believes – rather than the pantomime pretences of Thatcherite Ukip.

On behalf of all working- and middle-class Britain I say, come back Emily Thornberry, we have need of thee!

Robert Faber

London N2

In his self-congratulatory column in Saturday’s Independent, Nigel Farage seems to have confused listening to the concerns of voters with pandering to their prejudices.

The problem is that politicians lack the courage to tell people the truth: that immigration has generally been beneficial for this country, that immigrants, especially those from the EU, are net contributors to our coffers, and that leaving the EU would be an economic disaster.

Quite why people think that having a pint of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other is qualification for high political office is beyond me.

While Mr Farage’s simplistic pronouncements may garner votes in the short term, in the long term they will leave voters feeling even more disillusioned, a situation that could be avoided were leaders of other parties prepared to engage in proper debate.

Ian Richards

Birmingham

Amid all the discussions about which parties will gain or lose however many seats in next year’s election, and therefore who is likely to enter a coalition with whom, I have not yet encountered any discussion of the possibility that the only two-party coalition to command a majority in the House of Commons might be Labour and Tory.

What three-party coalition can be envisaged? Tory, SNP and anything? The SNP has already ruled out any deal with the Tories. Tory, Ukip and Lib Dem? You can’t see the last two together. Labour, Lib Dem and SNP seems at least plausible.

Tim Marshall

Carlisle

Analysis of the by-election in Rochester and Strood in terms of the whole electorate of the constituency shows that about two people in ten supported Mark Reckless, three in ten voted for other candidates and five in ten didn’t vote at all. This can hardly be construed as massive support for Ukip. Instead, it raises questions about the state of democracy in Britain today.

Maybe the Conservatives and Labour now regret their stance in the 2011 referendum on voting reform.

Mike Williams

Mathry, Pembrokeshire

Ukip sells the dream that we can turn back time to a green and pleasant land when Spitfires ruled the skies, before we sold off our major industries, and when we reaped the resources of our empire. But it’s all gone. It’s not coming back.

S Matthias

London SE1

I have just been listening to a phone-in on the radio. When a caller was asked why they supported Ukip, the reply was: “People in other EU countries don’t know what it is like to have their children in a classroom where no one speaks any English”. Quite.

Paul Devine

Goring on Thames, Oxfordshire

More wind farms may mean fewer pylons Alistair Wood (letter, 22 November) says he doesn’t object to wind turbines as such, but does object to pylons. I am afraid the horse has bolted from that stable a long time ago.

The 275 and 400kV super-grid was built in the 1960s, as I recall. He may find it comforting that wind and other renewable sources are less intense sources of energy than conventional power stations and, if distributed widely, could reduce rather than increase the need for National Grid connections. Indeed, some countries are encouraging local renewable generation, which could reduce it yet further.

I am puzzled by the suggestion that green arguments come from “town and city dwellers”. As it happens, I live in a village considerably smaller than Llanymynech, but that’s not the point. Climate change (and most of the other negative impacts of fossil fuel and nuclear generation) hits the countryside worst, and country dwellers should be (and many are) at least as concerned as city dwellers.

The pattern that I do see is that the most extreme Nimbys are those who have moved from town to country for the nice views and don’t want them spoilt.

Derek Chapman

Warnford, Hampshire

Bonuses merely incentivise risk

As a shareholder, I was recently invited to approve a remuneration package for a chief executive of £1.5m salary plus a bonus package that amounts to more than six times the annual salary. We need to bear in mind that the bankers and captains of industry who receive the bonuses are not entrepeneurs – they do not risk any of their own money, only ours.

Bonuses are wrong for three reasons. Firstly, most brain workers, including many of the employees of the company concerned, do not get offered a bonus and are expected to do their very best for their employer out of a sense of pride and integrity. If this incoming chief executive needs to be bribed with a massive bonus to behave likewise is he or she really the right person for the job?

Secondly, as leader of the team, how can the chief executive with a huge bonus demand, with a straight face, 100 per cent effort from his or her subordinates who are not on bonuses?

Worst of all, bonuses skew risk analysis. If the chief executive perceives that the only way he or she has a chance of making their bonus target is by taking wild risks, then there is no downside in taking them. If the risk fails, the chief executive is no worse off. Contrast the position of an entrepreneur who does risk his or her own money.

Yet we have seen our Tory Chancellor doing his very best to thwart a small effort by the European Union to curb this pernicious practice.

Tony Somers

London SW5

Wear your charitable giving with pride

Just about every week I disagree with Janet Street-Porter and today (22 November) is no exception. Every year I used to give to the Poppy Appeal but didn’t wear a poppy, but then the penny dropped – maybe people seeing my poppy would be reminded or prompted to give themselves.

She says: “Charitable giving has become another way of showing off, incorporating pointless records, wrist bands and ephemera.” Maybe that ephemera and showing off might just raise more money.

Steve Brewer

Leeds

Safer Cars don’t mean safer driving

I read with interest the article relating to vehicle technology and safety improvements (“En route to even greater safety”, 18 November). The final paragraph observes: “Vehicle safety may have improved enormously, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”

I spent 30 years as a traffic patrol police officer, and have been involved in many aspects of road safety since, including speed awareness courses.

I would make the observation that the “work to do” should relate to our skills as a driver, the weakest link in the chain. Generally, our skill base is low, we seldom take additional driver training, we drive at inappropriate speeds, and fail to take responsibility for our actions.

By all means make our vehicles safer, but is it not time that more focus was placed upon the driver’s skills?

Richard Bratton

Bedford

Did Canada get lost under the snow?

I see that the snow storms sweeping North America are only affecting the USA (“‘Historic’ early freeze sweeps across entire United States”, 20 November). Looking at your maps they stop at its northern border. I assume that the land above wasn’t affected? Or is that country of so little consequence it was not worth mentioning?

David Postlethwaite

Swanage, Dorse

Times:

Sir, Richard Kemp argues that a lifting of the restriction on women serving in infantry units will damage the fighting capabilities of the armed forces (“Female soldiers just lack the killer instinct”, Nov 18). He presented a popular mythology regarding women and combat.

The move to overturn the ban on women is long overdue, particularly given the track record of service women in Iraq and Afghanistan, generously acknowledged by Kemp, as well as experiences from other nations. Airing such tired opinions highlights the similarity of this argument to unsubstantiated claims and stereotypes cited in previous objections to ending discrimination based on race and sexuality. Diversity in all forms represents a positive force for modern militaries.

The link between the armed forces and society can only be strengthened when the armed forces better reflect the society from which they are drawn.

It is beyond time to move the debate from whether women should be permitted to serve in all sectors of the military to how this can best be achieved.

The Ministry of Defence and the single services will need to foster a positive environment in order to recruit, motivate and retain the calibre of women they desire, and I recognise the difficulty in addressing the many impediments to integrating women into combat units.

The greatest challenge, however, lies with military commanders who will need to have the courage to overcome the prejudice and the bias of previous generations.

Vix Anderton
Research Fellow, Royal United Services Institute

Sir, Once again the matter of female military fighters in the British armed forces is raised without even Colonel Richard Kemp facing a most unpleasant fact: is anyone in policy making authority prepared to reflect on what would, particularly and undoubtedly happen (Islamic State style) to any captured females?

Female fighters may be cleared, formally or informally, to take their personal chances, but the effect on the fighting ability and morale of male force members — who will instinctively want to defend their female comrades — will be totally destructive.

Keep the ladies well away from the battlefield, please.

Roger Draper
Ruislip, Middlesex

Sir, Colonel Richard Kemp’s concern that women lack the killer instinct does not seem to apply in Vienna where you report that an ice-cream parlour proprietor shot dead two lovers as they didn’t live up to her requirements (News, Nov 18).

Dr John Doherty
Vienna

Sir, I was about to launch a broadside against Richard Kemp’s rampant sexism and sweeping generalisations, but faced with compelling evidence that many young men have far too much of it, I’m relieved that at least one of the sexes supposedly lacks the killer instinct.

Hillary Crowe
Telford, Shropshire

Sir, If Colonel Richard Kemp is correct and frontline combat remains overwhelmingly based on hand-to-hand combat requiring the killer instinct found only in “few women”, then how does gender relate to the skills needed to direct air strikes? I am sure there are examples to support his view but are they really the general picture?

Richard Titchener
Maldon, Essex

Sir, Richard Kemp’s article is an insult to the memory of those women of the Second World War who fought in the SOE, in the Resistance and at Stalingrad.

Dr Shirley Summerskill
London NW6

Sir, A potential female soldier at interview when asked if she could kill a man, replied “Eventually”.
Don Evans
Inverness, Highland

Sir, For proof that some females have the killer instinct, just go to court martial records. There you will find examples of female service personnel who have been convicted of inflicting actual and grievous bodily harm (and worse) on their male colleagues.

Robert Steel
Salisbury, Wilts

Waxwings stay ahead of bad weather

Jack Hill/Times Newspapers

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Waxwings stay ahead of bad weather Jack Hill/Times Newspapers

Derwent May

Published at 12:01AM, November 24 2014

The annual invasion of waxwings from Scandinavia is beginning. These birds, about the size of a starling, get their name from a red blob like sealing-wax that they have on their wing. But this is not their most conspicuous feature, which is their jaunty, swept-back crest. They are also striking in other ways, with pinkish plumage, a black mask and bib, yellow bars next to the red blob on their wings, and a yellow-tipped tail. They are also very tame birds, coming down to feed on cotoneaster and other berries in the bushes that adorn roundabouts and supermarket car parks. They gobble up the berries very fast. Only a few of them, mostly ones and twos, have been seen so far, and these have been in Scotland and the eastern counties of England, though some had reached Wiltshire by yesterday. In the winter of 2008-09, there was an enormous invasion of them, which reached most of the country. A survey has been conducted at supermarkets in some years to see which had the most. Morrisons has generally been the winner. It is too early to say if there will be enough waxwings this winter to make a poll worth while.

Sir, After his party was beaten in Rochester, Matthew Parris (Opinion, Nov 22) again demonstrates that he has the nasty party instincts at heart. To effectively accuse 16,867 Ukip voters in Rochester of being identifiable with fascist blackshirts (there was even a picture of Mosley) is deeply offensive. I lost close family fighting Hitler’s fascists as did many in the Medway town’s front line.
Peter Mason-Apps
Knowl Hill, Berks

Sir, Labour continues to fight a class war while its core supporters are more concerned about loss of national identity (leading article, Nov 22).

This has as much to do with the influence of Brussels as immigration, and Ukip has exploited this to great effect. Emily Thornberry’s tweet merely makes matters worse.
Bernard Kingston
Biddenden, Kent

Sir, Why is Nigel Farage always photographed with or near a glass of beer? How about a nice cup of tea for a change?
Estelle D Davis
Leeds

Sir, Anybody having difficulty in pronouncing “Mx” (report, Nov 17, and letters) has not spent time reading Superman. I remember these comics in the 1960s, when there was a trickster from a different dimension called “Mr Mxyzptlk”. It gets worse. The only way to send him back to his own dimension was to trick him to say his name backwards. “Kltpzyxm”.
Dr Nigel Heard
Great Barrow, Chester

Sir, Daniel Finkelstein’s son is certainly many decades younger than me so I was puzzled by his reported use of the word “skills” to express approbation (Opinion, Nov 19). In my boyhood in the early 1940s “skill” — in the singular — did the job of the all-purpose “cool” relied on by today’s teenagers to express admiration of possessions and achievements. Was it local to my circle of friends? And what other such terms have been and gone over the years?
David Brancher
Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

Sir, If M Hollande’s “discreet” dalliance merits two pages, and a leader column too (Nov 22), it is alarming to contemplate the consequences had he been indiscreet.
Lindsay GH Hall
Theale, Berks

Sir, You ask “How does Monsieur le President do it?” (Leader, Nov 22). The same way as our very own Prince of Wales did it.
Peter Bradshaw
Liverpool

Telegraph:

The Government is not fulfilling its National Plan for Music

All together now: children learn the ukulele at Llandogo primary school, near Monmouth

All together now: children learn the ukulele at Llandogo primary school, near Monmouth Photo: Alamy

6:59AM GMT 23 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – In 2011 the Government announced an inspiring initiative, the National Plan for Music, to ensure all children, whatever their background, would get a good music education and the opportunity to learn an instrument.

However, this promise is not being met and recent studies show serious cause for concern. A sector-wide report from the exam board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) revealed that 40 per cent of British children from more disadvantaged backgrounds who have never played an instrument said they had no opportunity to learn at school. A Paul Hamlyn Foundation review this summer found that in primary schools, only half of music teachers surveyed said they had the necessary resources. Research for James Rhodes’s Don’t Stop the Music television series chimed with these reports, and identified significant problems with teacher training, funding and progression opportunities – issues often raised by the sector.

Music has proven benefits for children – building confidence, teamwork and discipline, and encouraging improvements in literacy and numeracy. But music can easily be undervalued in an already crowded curriculum – a situation worsened by the lack of attention paid to it in regular Ofsted inspections.

The Government must fulfil its commitment and end the inequality of opportunity in school music.

Yours faithfully,

Letters: EU membership does more harm than good to British business

23 Nov 2014

James Rhodes

Concert Pianist and Champion of the Don’t Stop the Music campaign

Professor Colin Lawson
Director, Royal College of Music

Russell Hobby
General Secretary, National Association of Head Teachers

Julian Lloyd Webber
Founder of In Harmony

Sting

Jeremy Newton
CEO, Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts

Richard Hallam
Chair, The Music Education Council

Anthony Bowne
Principal, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance

Professor David Saint
Principal, Birmingham Conservatoire

Katherine Zeserson
Director of Learning and Participation, Sage Gateshead

Professor Joe Wilson
Director of Curriculum, Leeds College of Music

Deborah Annetts
Chief Executive, Incorporated Society of Musicians

Jem Shuttleworth
General Manager, The UK Association for Music Education – Music Mark

Sarah Alexander
Chief Executive and Artistic Director, National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain

Ian Maclay
Managing Director, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Christopher Warren-Green
Music Director and Principal Conductor, London Chamber Orchestra

Marianna Hay
Artistic Director and Founder, National Orchestra for All

Janie Orr
Chief Executive, EMI Music Sound Foundation

Dr Mary Bousted
General Secretary, Association of Teachers and Lecturers

Alison Balsom

Kathryn Tickell

Maestro Vladimir Ashkenazy

Bob and Roberta Smith, Artist

Professor Graham F Welch
Chair of Music Education, Institute of Education

Kevin Brennan MP (Lab)
Shadow Minister for Schools

Lord Lipsey
Chair, All-Party Parliamentary Group on Classical Music

Lord Aberdare
Member, All-Party Parliamentary Group on Music Education

The EU’s political crisis; the use of medicinal methadone; the choices facing migrants in Calais; hidden cost of payday advertisements; and Sainsbury’s Christmas spirit

UK economy expected to show growth in third quarter

The burden of EU regulation can prove costly for British businesses Photo: ALAMY

7:00AM GMT 23 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – Juergen Maier, the chief executive of Siemens UK, says membership of the EU is good for business, but his reasoning appears to be as fallacious as that of business leaders who once forecast economic disaster if Britain failed to join the Economic and Monetary Union.

Despite Mr Maier’s attempts to downplay the burden of EU regulation, the economist Professor Tim Congdon estimated last year that it was costing British business £150 billion annually. Jeremy Warner observes that the EU is failing – paralysed by political crisis and a malfunctioning monetary union.

Shouting from the sidelines will not bring European prosperity, says Mr Maier. Nor it, seems, will the EU.

D R Taylor
Everton, Hampshire

23 Nov 2014

SIR – Mr Maier implies that, if we were to leave the EU, British exporters would have to worry about “complying with 28 different reels of red tape”. However, he also asserts that Norway is able to trade with the EU through a “fax democracy”, implementing Brussels regulations from a distance.

Of course, Norway has no say in the formulation of those regulations, but, based on Britain’s inability to resist the EU’s relentless onslaught on the City of London, one wonders what having any real influence actually looks like.

Norway and Switzerland have struck deals with the EU because they have things the EU needs – fish and rail and road transit routes, respectively. But Britain’s trump cards are even stronger. Apart from being the only practical transit route for most trade between the Republic of Ireland and continental Europe – with roads currently provided toll-free, courtesy of British taxpayers – Britain is also the EU’s biggest export market.

If, as we are constantly reminded, three million British jobs depend on our EU membership, how many more on the continent must depend on Britain – because we buy far more from them than they buy from us? I’m sure they won’t want to upset that apple cart in a hurry.

Tony Stone
Oxted, Surrey

SIR – Is there no end to EU interference? Mr Maier thinks the union is good for business, but this cannot be the case when one has to read thousands of pages of regulations. Small businesses stay small to remain exempt and avoid the hassle.

Hazel Prowse
Camberley, Surrey

SIR – I was pleased to read that a great number of British businesses wish to renegotiate the terms of the European Union.

Those in business know that in order to achieve success they need to be better than their competitors. Therefore, they also need the freedom to accomplish this. Being tied to a large organisation like the EU, with its various obstructions and petty rules, prevents real competition.

Unless we leave the EU we will fail, as so many of the businesses in Europe are doing currently. Let us remember that trading with other countries is one thing, but to be ruled by them is something else entirely.

B E Norton
Royal Wootton Bassett, Wiltshire

SIR – Christopher Booker – one of our Britain’s best investigative journalists – reveals a curious dichotomy between his call to leave the European Union and, on the same page, his mention of parents who have turned to Brussels in their hour of need, claiming that their children were wrongly removed from them.

According to Tatyana Zdanoka, a member of the European Parliament committee that recently heard evidence of such cases, Britain is “unique in Europe in the secrecy of its family courts”.

The EU is about much more than economic benefits; it is also a partnership of shared social values. The case of family courts is a poignant example of this.

Clifford Russell
Hallwood Green, Gloucester

Tax should be about percentage of income

SIR – It is all very well indicating that 0.01 per cent contribute 4.2 per cent of income tax, whereas the poorest 9 million contribute less than 4 per cent. But this, of course, ignores National Insurance, VAT, fuel tax and other unfair imposts, such as hospital car park charges, which bear down most on the 9 million.

It’s not what you pay, so much as what you are left with to live upon, that counts. If you are earning £2.7 million and are left with £1.35 million then you can still live pretty well, despite a 50 per cent tax levy.

This is not a plea for higher taxes necessarily, just for more balance and fairness on all sides of the political spectrum.

Alan Miller
Silsoe, Bedfordshire

Asylum in France

^{French police escort migrants back to the camp in Calais}

SIR – The executive director of Doctors of the World UK confirms that migrants in Calais would rather perish than return to their country of origin (Letters, November 16). There is a simple solution: they should apply for asylum in France where they are now resident.

France has many historic ties with the Middle East and was given a mandate for Syria after the First World War.

Hugh Foster
Farnborough, Hampshire

Medicinal methadone

SIR – The Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, urges the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) to look again at its findings on rehabilitation and encourage addicts to “practise abstinence” rather than being “parked for years on methadone”.

The ACMD recently advised against putting a time limit on prescriptions of opiate substitutions, while emphasising the need for patients to receive talking therapies and other recovery support.

For many people who are dependent on heroin, medication like methadone can help them to become stable enough to rebuild relationships, improve their physical and mental health, stop committing crime and seek employment.

Evidence strongly suggests that imposing an artificial time limit on opiate substitution medication would lead to significant unintended consequences, such as relapse and more deaths from overdose.

Overcoming addiction is never easy or straightforward, nor does “recovery” look the same for everyone.

Dr Marcus Roberts
Chief Executive, DrugScope
London SE1

Careless driving

SIR – Your article on the inability of courts to pass appropriate sentences for careless driving will strike a chord with most lawyers.

The problem lies in the way politicians react to loud campaigns by pressure groups instead of thinking things through. Courts impose prison terms on people whose momentary lapse – of which any of us could be guilty – leads to a death, whereas those guilty of seriously careless driving get away with a fine simply because, by sheer chance, no one dies.

If we punished according to the degree of bad driving rather than the often arbitrary outcome, we might restore some faith in this aspect of criminal justice.

John O’Donnell
Preston, Lancashire

GCHQ is no Bletchley

SIR – David Blunkett invokes the spirit of the Bletchley Park code-breakers in support of the GCHQ’s call for more co-operation from communications companies. This is a misguided comparison at best.

Bletchley Park workers decoded field military signals leading to real tactical military advantage at a time of world war and potential invasion. In peacetime, GCHQ monitors all of our phone calls, browsing data and emails, without parliamentary oversight.

Even so, it has been taken by surprise by all recent major geopolitical events, including the Arab Spring, the Russian resurgence and the rise of Isil.

P D Kirk
London W2

Payday advertising damages families

SIR – According to a survey by the Children’s Society, one in three children aged 10-17 sees payday loan advertisements regularly. These make borrowing money seem easy and fun to children, which increases the pressure on parents to take out high-interest loans.

As credit repayments take up a larger proportion of income, families can find themselves cutting back on essentials. Children can suffer anxiety and bullying as a result of their family’s financial problems.

Children should learn about borrowing and debt from their school and family, not from irresponsible payday loan advertising. The law should be changed to ban these advertisements from television and radio before the 9pm watershed.

When the Consumer Rights Bill is debated in the House of Lords this week, we hope fellow peers will support our amendment.

Rt Rev Timothy Thronton
Bishop of Truro
Lord Mitchell (Lab)
Lord Alton (Crossbench)
London SW1

Undiluted worship

SIR – We have many beautiful cathedrals and churches, some in lovely settings. These, with their wonderful history, their celebration of special occasions and their music and hymns, should be the stars of BBC’s Songs of Praise (Letters, November 16). The splendid Remembrance Sunday service from Aldershot, featured on the programme, was an excellent example of this.

Please can we have our Songs of Praise back, undiluted?

R M Watkinson
Norwich

Far from Ghent

SIR – Perhaps Alan Titchmarsh’s article (The heart of the matter, Lifestyle, November 16) best illustrates the dangers of learning poetry by heart without looking at the content.

The “Aix” he recalls from Robert Browning’s poem is of course Aix-la-Chapelle, not Aix-en-Provence.

Hugh Rivington
Brettenham, Suffolk

Wind ensemble

SIR – During a practice with my barbershop acappella chorus group, prior to performing at the Birmingham Symphony Hall (Letters, November 16), we were given one last piece of advice: to take care with our diet during the week before the performance.

We were told that if anybody broke wind while we were on stage, it would be heard at the back of the hall.

Cath Klaces
Broughton, Flintshire

Christmas spirit

SIR – There is some criticism of Sainsbury’s four-minute Christmas television advert, which is based on the 1914 game of football played in no-man’s-land between young combatants from opposing trenches during the First World War.

Despite its underlying commercial purpose, surely its theme of peace, friendship and giving is to be applauded – particularly at Christmas.

John Ley-Morgan
Weston-super-Mare, Somerset

Live and let diet

SIR – If one has to cut down on calories, sugar, salt, fat and alcohol, why would one want to live to 120?

Donald A Wroe
Bouth, Lancashire

Irish Times:

Sir, – On December 2nd, we are being asked by our union to go on strike relating to something that we are already practicing in our school. St Joseph’s College, Lucan, is a pilot school for the Junior Cycle. Over the past three years we have not only changed our approach to student learning but also introduced ongoing assessment for students at Junior and Leaving Certificate levels. If I were to assess the new changes according to the way we give feedback to our students, I would say “Two Stars and a Wish”.

Star one: Ongoing assessment gives immediate positive feedback to students in September and throughout the term. The teacher can assess the learning and any student who is struggling with learning can be helped. Confidence grows and the outlook of the student improves.

Star two: Students must be responsible for their learning – they learn about deadlines, drafting and redrafting and self-evaluation. Students are so engaged in learning that discipline problems no longer feature.

Wish: Teachers need more time to collaborate on assessment and the work that this involves. The day of taking a bundle of exams home to correct by yourself has now passed.

I trust teachers assessing the students; the students trust their teachers. The parents have faith in the teachers; teachers are professional and expert. We also trust the State Examinations Commission, which will monitor this assessment. We have waited for decades for change in assessment. Should memory be the only skill we continue to value in our students? – Yours, etc,

AUDREY DOYLE,

Principal,

St Joseph’s College,

Lucan, Co Dublin.

Sir, – All that teachers seek, within the complex set of relationships which frames their professional lives, is the gold standard of external assessment which removes even the slightest risk of their being suspected of conferring any unfair advantage or disadvantage on any student at an important moment in their life. – Yours, etc,

BARRY HENNESSY.

Donabate, Co Dublin.

Sir, – We wish to make it clear that while the second-level teacher unions are seeking to maintain State certification and external assessment, we are in favour of changes to enhance the Junior Cycle and support the introduction of new forms of assessment, as long as these assessment components are externally marked.

We agree with the Minister for Education and Skills that project work, portfolio work, practical work and other methods of evaluating student learning are vital elements of a modern assessment system. We also agree that broadening assessment in this way may help to reduce the pressure associated with having only a terminal written exam. However, in order to maintain the integrity of our State certificate, we believe all State exams, whether written or practical, should be externally assessed.

Forcing teachers to grade their own students for State certification will have a negative impact on the student-teacher relationship and will lead to inconsistencies between schools, thereby undermining educational standards nationally.

Currently, a number of Junior Certificate subjects have practical exam components that are externally assessed. For example, the Junior Cert science exam contains a significant practical element which is externally assessed. Other subjects such as CSPE (Civic, Social and Political Education), home economics, music and art also include significant practical elements which are externally assessed. This means that students’ work in these exams is subjected to a rigorous and standardised external assessment process overseen by the State Examinations Commission which ensures consistency, fairness and objectivity for every student.

Just like parents and students, teachers want an improved education experience for our Junior Cycle students. However, teachers are deeply concerned about the negative impact of the Minister’s current proposals. Such far-reaching change cannot be easily undone, so we must get it right from the start. We regret that we must resort to strike action in order to stand up for education. However, we have exhausted all other avenues to date.

We believe a solution exists which meets the need for improvement of the Junior Cycle, but which protects education standards, is student-centred, and which does not undermine the integrity of our State exams system. – Yours, etc,

PHILIP IRWIN,

President, ASTI,

Thomas McDonagh House,

Winetavern Street,

Dublin 8;

GERRY QUINN,

President, TUI,

Orwell Road,Dublin 6.

Sir, – Senator John Crown has asked Minister of State Kathleen Lynch TD to look into the recent decision by the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland (NMBI) to increase the retention fee paid by nurses (“2,000 nurses, midwives protest over rise in registration fee”, November 18th).

This increase means the fee has risen by 80 per cent in just two years. Nursing has been the only health profession to be targeted for such an increase.

Having been a nurse for many years, working both in Ireland and abroad, I am used to paying the annual retention fees that allowed me to practice as a registered nurse.

However, when working in the UK, and the US, I was not only expected to pay my retention fee, but also to provide evidence of my ongoing relevant education and competence.

I understood that ensuring I and all of my nursing and midwifery colleagues were competent to practice was the key reason for paying retention fees, and we were happy to pay for this service.

However, the NMBI requests the annual fee but does not check the competence of the nurses and midwives they register as regards being fit to practice.

Rather, they use fees to hold fitness-to-practice inquiries, after a professional incident has occurred. A case of too little too late. I am astonished that the professional competence assurance scheme, which is a statutory duty of the board that was set up by legislation three years ago, has still not been implemented.

Why would nurses or midwives feel they should pay anything for this lack of service? –Yours, etc,

JANE BISHOP,

Toronto, Canada.

Sir, – This week Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney, in answer to a Dáil question from Maureen O’Sullivan TD, dismissed the introduction of mechanical lure coursing as a humane alternative to using timid wild hares as bait for the chasing greyhounds. The hare coursers have told him that it doesn’t work because the greyhounds, they claim, lose interest after following the lure “once or twice”.

On the say-so of the hare coursers, Mr Coveney will not countenance this humane alternative to hare coursing, which does in fact work, and says he has no plans to ban live hare coursing.

The coursers’ claim that greyhounds will not consistently follow a mechanical lure is totally absurd, as presently greyhounds pursue a mechanical lure, time after time, on the greyhound tracks. And in Australia, where live hare coursing has been banned for decades, mechanical lure coursing is now successfully used. And there have been drag coursing events held here in Ireland, one of which was in Listry, Co Killarney, in March 2013, where we filmed greyhounds enthusiastically following the drag. We sent this footage to the Minister, clear and unequivocal evidence that drag works successfully, but our evidence it seems fell not only on deaf ears, but closed eyes. So there is absolutely no excuse for the barbarity that is live hare coursing in this day and age. The Australians and others accepted the ban and moved on to mechanical lure coursing, and the sky didn’t fall in.

The ban on smoking in public places wasn’t countenanced at first and there was much resistance but today nobody yearns for smoke-filled pubs.

Replacing live hare coursing with a mechanical lure would find favour with the vast majority who respect and cherish our Irish hare and who would be more than happy to see the end of a despicable blood sport that brings shame on our country. – Yours, etc,

AIDEEN YOURELL,

Irish Council

Against Blood Sports,

PO Box 88,

Mullingar, Co Westmeath.

Mon, Nov 24, 2014, 01:04

First published: Mon, Nov 24, 2014, 01:04

Sir, – Ian Kenneally’s excellent article “Press was intimidated in War of Independence” (Weekend, November 15th) has outlined the intimidation suffered by the Irish Independent during the War of Independence. May I point out that its great rival in the daily newspaper market at that time, the Freeman’s Journal, was also the victim of republican violence? This was arguably an even greater outrage since it occurred after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty and was clearly designed to subvert the democratic will of Dáil Éireann in regard to the Treaty.

On March 29th, 1922 (in the hiatus between the signing of the Treaty and the outbreak of the Civil War), the Freeman’s Journal’s printing plant was destroyed by a raiding party of anti-Treatyite IRA because they objected to an article about a convention of their military council held two days earlier. The Freeman responded in a spirited fashion. A much reduced version of the newspaper was produced on Gestetner machines as a stop-gap in the following weeks, until it resumed normal production on April 22th.

With hindsight, many anti-Treatyites came to recognise that it had been a bad mistake to attempt to suppress the Freeman. The effect of that and other similar occurrences was to associate the anti-Treaty side with military dictatorship and censorship – to give the impression that, as the prominent republican Todd Andrews later wrote, people “were liable to be pushed around at the whim of young IRA commanders’”. This tended to strengthen popular support for the Free State government.

The destruction of the Freeman’s plant cast a long shadow. As late as 1976, in a speech about the Criminal Law Bill introduced by the then Fine Gael-Labour coalition government, the parliamentary secretary to the taoiseach, John Kelly, referred to it when dismissing a claim by Charles Haughey that a section of the Bill could give rise to press censorship. That claim, Kelly opined, was “brazen unscrupulousness” – and then he said this: “I may recall that on only one occasion since the Treaty was a newspaper literally put out of action because its politics were unacceptable – in 1922, when the printing works of the Freeman’s Journal were smashed up . . . This thoroughly fascist act was not committed by anyone in the Cosgrave tradition, but by the ‘Republicans’ from whom Mr Haughey’s party proudly trace their descent.” – Yours, etc,

FELIX M LARKIN,

Dublin 18.

Sir, – Conradh na Gaeilge is concerned about the lack of Irish in the official Ireland 2016 website. Its criticism would be more appropriately directed at the ghosts of the signatories of the 1916 Proclamation.

Apart from the perfunctory cúpla focal in the heading, Poblacht na hÉireann, the document is entirely in English. Only two of the seven signatories, Seán Mac Diarmada and Eamonn Ceannt, have their names in Irish. The president of the provisional government, who was the most prolific language revival advocate, signs himself “P.H. Pearse”, and this is the form he uses in the bulletins issued during Easter Week.

But then, English has always been the predominant language of Irish nationalism. – Yours, etc,

JOHN A MURPHY,

Emeritus Professor

of Irish History,

University College Cork.

Sir, – I would never have viewed myself as a political protester, but rather as a human rights protester. I protest when I see injustice.

This Government and previous ones have consistently hammered the less fortunate, the vulnerable, the sick and disabled people. These groups have finally declared “enough is enough”.

The water protesters are ordinary people who have woken up. They see capitalism favouring only the rich and foresaw Irish water being privatised to favour the top echelons of society.

It is the water protesters who have “seen the light” and it behoves any government of whatever hue to take notice when people say “enough is enough”. – Yours, etc,

Dr MARGARET KENNEDY,

Greystones,

Co Wicklow.

Sir, – I suggest that Ireland and the rest of the European Union follow Sweden’s example in recognising the state of Palestine while there is still a Palestine left to recognise. – Yours, etc,

KAREN McDONNELL,

Ballyvaughan,

Co Clare.

Irish Independent:

The culture of our schools and the teaching profession have changed dramatically over the last 15 years.

Second-level education is focusing on the life skills that our young people will require in the future – resilience, self-management and management of information, among other things. We are trying to move away from a ‘schooling’ which promotes over-dependency among students to an education which promotes independent learning and more student engagement.

To that end, teachers are engaging in new teaching methodologies, new technologies, curriculum reform, inspections, school development, evaluation and improvement initiatives.

Schools are looking at different ways of tracking student performance and learning outcomes. Focused opportunities for continuous professional development are more widely available and teachers are engaged in whole-school planning and development. We have begun teaching the new specification in Junior Cycle English.

A change in our approach to assessment is part of the change in culture and is happening on the ground in classrooms in primary and secondary schools. It is teacher led, and it too is contributing to the growing professionalism of teaching, and to improved learning outcomes for students. It is in line with best international practice.

It is a truly vibrant and dynamic time to be involved in education. Our classrooms are active, fun learning environments – different in many ways to when I started my teaching career.

The concerns of the teaching unions need to be addressed but I hope that they can meet the challenges of these new and most welcome developments in Irish education and not allow them to be bogged down in negative discourse.

Patricia Gordon

Principal

Stratford College

Rathgar, Dublin 6

Have the helicopter ready, Enda

It’s 25 years since the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu went to the balcony of his party headquarters to address his people, and finally realised that they weren’t waving in joyful support, but in rage. Even then, as his summary court martial was under way, and later as he was taken to be shot, he was utterly convinced that the liberators, and firing squad in particular, were in big trouble for defying the almighty leader.

Enda Kenny is no Ceausescu, but he is desperately out of touch with a people that aren’t willing to bow down and kiss his feet everywhere he goes.

‘The best little country in the world to be rich and tax avoidant’, is a political philosophy that seems to have comforted Enda Kenny as he patrols the stock exchanges and glossy high-tech company product launches of the world. But, back home, under the austerity balcony made by this coalition government, the general population are seething with anger. They can’t and won’t be silenced .

Enda won’t face a literal firing squad here, but he should get his metaphorical helicopter ready. The people are not cheering Enda, they’re enraged and they won’t be going away.

Declan Doyle

Lisdowney, Co Kilkenny

Coalition is still drowning

The Government is drowning in the water charge controversy. People are not fooled.

Why did the Government not just fix the leaky pipes instead of installing meters? It is not bothered by the wastage, be it wastage of water or wastage of money. It is clear to the people that Irish Water is a vehicle to raise money to pay back bondholders.

It is also being set up so the Government can raise funds by privatising this utility in the future. This is perhaps the greatest fear amongst the people.

Perhaps the best way of commemorating the 1916 Rising would be to enshrine the protection of the water supply in the constitution of a country that was so hard fought for at that time!

Killian Brennan

Malahide Road, Dublin

Voting in SF will reverse progress

If the people of Ireland think they have problems because of water and property taxes, well I am sorry to say they have an even greater problem after the recent opinion poll.

How in the name of whatever god or no god could 22pc of people think we would be better off with a Sinn Fein government?

Can any of you 22pc tell me what would be better about Sinn Fein if they were in power?

This is a party with no realistic politics and an ambiguous point of view on the investigation of sexual abuse (and does this mean that, by default, the 22pc of the population who expressed support for Sinn Fein in that poll hold the same view?)

This is a party with no room for dissent – no member of the party has ever publicly questioned Gerry Adams about his membership of the IRA.

Mr Adams must be laughing at the Irish people and the fact that he can behave in the way he has over the years, and even more so in the last 12 months, with all of his ridiculous comments, eg his remark about the old IRA holding a gun to the head of the editor of the Irish Independent.

I for one would not live in the country under the present Sinn Fein leadership.

When you are asked your opinion by a market research interviewer, remember this is a serious question – not “who do you think will win ‘The X Factor’” – so please answer it seriously .

Do the people who expressed a preference for Sinn Fein in the poll really think Gerry Adams is a future leader? Would they send him to Europe to discuss our economy with Angela Merkel?

We would be a laughing stock.

Our economy was in ruins in 2011. Now it’s in a far better place. We have all suffered, and continue to suffer a bit, but we are in a far better position now and the future is brighter.

Even the unions have realised that, as they have started talking about pay increases.

Please, people of Ireland, don’t blow all the good work now.

Sinn Fein does not deserve to be anywhere near Government.

Name and address with Editor

Don’t hike deposits – cap loans

It would be lunacy to ask potential buyers to amass a deposit of 20pc for a house, but, in the case of an apartment, the buyer would have to save at least 25pc.

This would force young people to move further away from the city and would unfairly depress apartment prices.

Instead of asking for crazy deposits, why not limit the amount loaned? If this action was taken, it’s likely that the market would correct itself over time.

Instead of asking for 20pc/25pc deposit, ask for 10pc (on a house or apartment) and instead of offering the couple €300k, offer them €250k, which they will be under less pressure to repay. The proposed system is favouring couples who have access to family money.

They will always have an advantage, but it does not give the rest of the young prospective homebuyers any hope.

Eamon Ward

Co Wexford

Joe Schmidt for Taoiseach

I would just like to say thank you to Joe Schmidt for what he has done for Irish rugby. I would like to wish him a speedy recovery too, and would like ask if, when the World Cup is over, would he be prepared to run for Taoiseach?

T G Gavin

Dalkey, Co Dublin

Irish Independent

25 November 2014 Clinic

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and take Mary to the clinic.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down dessert for tea and her tummy pain is still there but decreasing.

Obituary:

The Venerable Richard Ninis – obituary

The Venerable Richard Ninis was a long-serving archdeacon whose zeal for parish reorganisation earned him the nickname ‘Dick the Knife’

Richard Ninis: the potential unpopularity of his parish reforms was mitigated by buffet suppers hosted by his wife, dubbed 'Jane the Fork'

Richard Ninis: the potential unpopularity of his parish reforms was mitigated by the buffet suppers hosted by his wife, dubbed ‘Jane the Fork’

4:55PM GMT 24 Nov 2014

Comments

The Venerable Richard Ninis,who has died aged 82, was Archdeacon of Lichfield from 1979 to 1998, having previously been Archdeacon of Stafford, also in the Lichfield diocese. Happy to be described as “a fixer, a mover and a shaker”, at the time of his retirement he was the longest-serving archdeacon in the modern Church of England .

His appointment as an archdeacon came at a time when a serious shortage of clerical manpower and money was demanding radical pastoral reorganisation throughout the Church. He had already had experience of, and developed an enthusiasm for, the creation of team ministries .

There was ample scope for this in the sizeable Lichfield diocese, embracing largely rural Shropshire and industrial Staffordshire. Ninis set to work with an enthusiasm fuelled by a vision of a reformed and renewed church life.

Successive diocesan bishops were more than ready to let him carry the burden of anger and distress often aroused in parishes about to lose their resident priest, and before long he was referred to as “Dick the knife”. Later it was mischievously suggested that, on seeing the three spires of Lichfield Cathedral, he had recommended the merging of the front two and the redundancy of the third.

Potential unpopularity was, however, often mitigated by face-to-face contact with a kind personality who cared deeply for the clergy and their parishes and worked long hours to produce the facts and figures on which responsible decisions might be made. Generous buffet suppers hosted by his wife (dubbed “Jane the fork”) at his home in the Close at Lichfield also helped.

Invariably Ninis was able to demonstrate that reorganisation was the only constructive way forward. Although not every scheme proved successful, his efforts over so many years played a large part in securing the survival of the parochial system in Lichfield diocese.

Richard Betts Ninis, the son of a Somerset farmer, was born on October 25 1931. While reading Agriculture at Lincoln College, Oxford, he felt drawn to Holy Orders, and after graduating he prepared for ordination at Lincoln Theological College. The curacy at All Saints, Poplar, which followed (1955-62) proved to be highly influential. The already large East End parish was extended further and some of its many curates, including Ninis, were designated team vicars with responsibility for particular areas.

^{Richard Ninis with his wife Jane}

When the rector of Poplar, Mark Hodson, moved to become bishop of Hereford in 1961, he invited Ninis to follow him as vicar of St Mark’s church, Hereford, with responsibility also, from 1966, for the neighbouring rural parishes of Upper and Lower Bullinghope, Grafton, Dewsall and Callow.

Thus experienced in the leadership of a multiple-parish benefice, Ninis was appointed diocesan missioner in 1971 and made a prebendary of Hereford Cathedral. An important new responsibility was that of planning officer for the Church’s ministry in the growing new town of Telford, straddling the diocesan boundaries of Hereford and Lichfield. A team ministry, rather than several separate parishes, was prescribed.

Greatly impressed, three years later the Bishop of Lichfield invited Ninis to become Archdeacon of Stafford – a title changed to that of Archdeacon of Lichfield following a reorganisation of diocesan structures in 1979. As canon treasurer, Ninis was by tradition responsible only for the cathedral’s treasures, not for its finances. But he was never going to be constrained or seek the protection of this tradition, and the arrival of a new dean, John Lang, charged with the task of overhauling the cathedral’s creaking administration, led to a fruitful partnership.

Later Ninis was responsible for the creation of an attractive bookshop at the west end of the cathedral; the introduction of a preparatory department in the cathedral school; and the raising of a significant part of a £4 million appeal for the cathedral’s music. His sermons, it was noted, rarely lacked reference to the stewardship of money.

From 1978 to 1990 he was also chairman of the council of the Derbyshire College of Higher Education, playing a part in its development to become the University of Derby, of which he was vice-chairman from 1992 to 1998 .

Richard Ninis retired to his native Somerset in 1998. He is survived by his wife, Jane, whom he married in 1967, and three children.

The Venerable Richard Ninis, born October 25 1931, died October 15 2014

Guardian:

Prince Charles is given a tour of the National Heritage Garden by Raymond Blanc at Belmond Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Great Milton, Oxfordshire, on 21 November 2014. Photograph: Eamonn M. McCormack/Getty Images

As a foreign outsider, I view British politics from a neutral viewpoint. The problem of Prince Charles’s letters to ministers (Last act in nine-year battle to see content of Charles’s letters, 22 November) points out the very knot of your political system – a system that is only superficially different from the one that has ailed western countries for centuries. Having got rid of kings and princes, such countries claim that democracy is now the prevalent regime. This is a big lie. The will to replace monarchies manifested – and still manifests – the merchant and financier class’s eagerness to suppress all possibility of intervention on the part of a monarch acting as an arbiter in favour of the other classes, more particularly the lower middle class and the lower classes.

That Prince Charles should feel it his duty to wish to intervene in British politics shows that he is fully aware of what is wrong with the present political system. In the UK as well as in France, Italy, Spain, the US, Switzerland and so on, the prevailing system is by no means democracy (elections are a farce) but plutocracy, ie a gathering of bankers, financiers, multinational and deep-state leaders supported by such global institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, the European Central Bank, Nato, the European Union etc, all of them subservient to Washington. Prince Charles’s attitude bears witness to his deep sense of the good he could do to the British people. The hullabaloo his attitude causes demonstrates that the plutocracy intends to defend what it calls globalisation (“a sophisticated system of plunder”, John Pilger justly calls it) and its prerogatives to the bitter end.
Michel Bugnon-Mordant
Fribourg, Switzerland

• Your article (The reign of Charles III, 20 November) said Prince Charles is known for his “meddling”. However, I’m grateful that the Prince of Wales takes the time to meet MPs and write letters to them. He is a voice of reason when he tries to put a brake on governments promoting genetically modified food. His views on GM crops, architecture and more natural farming methods are more in tune with most ordinary people’s opinions. No one now denies that Prince Charles was right about the ugly 1960s and 1970s tower block “architecture”. Unlike government ministers, he doesn’t have to curry favour with the prime minister to safeguard his career, or bow to the demands of industry and other powerful vested interests. We are fortunate to have a prince who doesn’t just sit back and relax, but is concerned about health and the environment.
A Wills
London

• Prince Charles’s friend Patrick Holden asks how many of us go back to our desks after dinner and remarks that this poor overworked man even writes at 35,000ft (on the royal jet, of course – nothing so dull as a scheduled flight). Well, my husband does, as do millions of other workers who come home to the domestic necessities of life before eating a meal and then returning to essential work for the following day. Maybe Mr Holden and His Royal Highness should abandon some spirituality and worry less about things he obviously knows little about.
Janet Mansfield
Aspatria, Cumbria

• I’m interested to know what form Prince Charles’s “heartfelt interventions” in public life will take. Given his London base, perhaps he would be interested in helping out the London residents of the New Era housing estate by using his not inconsiderable private fortune to buy out the new American owners and thereby giving the present residents back their homes and security (How New Era went from tight-knit community to a global investment, 22 November). It would be a huge statement of the concern he claims to have for the people of this country.
Julia Hall
Morebattle, Scottish Borders

• Admirers of Prince Charles are keen to highlight his interest in organic farming and education, but his views on fur are less well known. In his diaries (entry for 7 March 2006 in Decline and Fall), Chris Mullin records a conversation with John Gilbert, who told him of a time at the MoD when there was a debate on the future of the Guards regiments wearing bearskins. The prospect of artificial bearskins being used resulted “in a letter of protest from the heir to the throne”. Much to Gilbert’s credit, the letter went unanswered.
Tim Wood
East Cowton, North Yorkshire

• Let us not forget that Charles (Speak up, Your Highness. But be ready for the backlash, 21 November) will also be the future King of Australia. I for one hope he shares his dislike of anything post-1967 with us antipodeans, for I can think of no better individual to reinvigorate the cause for an Australian republic.
Richard McKenzie
Melbourne, Australia

• If Prince Charles wishes to make “heartfelt interventions”, he should relinquish the succession and write letters to the Guardian like the rest of us.
David Parker
Meltham, West Yorkshire

Hand shake ‘Strong trade unions must have a central role in a fairer, safer, more secure workplace,’ says Stephen Cavalier. Photograph: Alamy

Seumas Milne (Austerity has clearly failed, 20 November) rightly points out the destructive economic and social effects of an insecure workforce, through zero-hours contracts, the exploitation of migrant workers and the lack of secure and stable jobs.

The workplace relationship needs to be rebalanced, so that everyone at work is treated with dignity and respect, producing a more positive and productive working environment. Strong trade unions must have a central role in a fairer, safer, more secure workplace. Under this government, insecurity, limited rights, economic uncertainty and a lack of legal protection have all become part of a day’s work for too many people in the UK. Huge numbers of workers feel disempowered, disenchanted and disengaged.

That’s why in parliament last week we discussed with MPs and trade unionists our idea for a workplace pledge for every worker, based on the principle of giving rights at work which are fair, clear, understood and enforced. The workplace pledge would provide a framework for tackling and reversing the current trend towards ever greater insecurity, while providing a tool to help rebuild strong, union-organised workplaces.

Every worker, on day one at work, would receive a pledge that sets out their rights and how to exercise them. Key to this would be a fair rate of pay, transparency of pay rates, an end to zero-hours contracts, a safe and secure workplace, an end to employment tribunal fees and a voice at work with the right of access to an independent trade union to advise and represent.

By establishing a pledge to be honoured by all employers, we could tackle exploitation and establish enforceable collective standards applicable to all, bringing an end to the casualisation and undercutting that has such damaging and divisive effects.
Owen Smith MP Labour, Pontypridd, and shadow Welsh secretary, Stephen Cavalier Chief executive, Thompsons Solicitors Hugh Lanning Labour parliamentary candidate for Canterbury

Prison bars ‘Assaults, fights, and self-harmings are not all equally violent,’ argue Professor Nicholas Baigent and Dr Magda Osman. Photograph: Martin Godwin

The report of Her Majesty’s chief inspector of prisons on HMP Elmley claimed that “there was a rising level of violence” (S46, page 19). Hyping this up somewhat, the headline on the online version of your article (Spate of suicides and ‘mini-riots’ in jail lays bare extent of prison crisis, 12 November) referred to a “Surge in violence at Elmley jail…”. In fact the statistics in the chief inspector’s report do not justify such claims of a surge in violence.

These claims are about changes in the total, or aggregate, level of violence. For a start, assaults, fights, and self-harmings are not all equally violent. The information in the chief inspector’s report falls very far short of what would be required to support claims about increases in total violence. Totals of occurrences are given for some violent acts, and rates of growth are reported for some that have the most serious consequences (eg death).

However, the report does not rule out that, while occurrences of the highest levels of violence have increased, occurrences of lower levels of violence are dramatically falling. Then, whether the overall or total level of violence increases will depend on the weights given to different levels of violence (because not all violent acts are equally violent), and for this reason claims of a surge in violence are not justified by anything in the report.

We strongly suggest that HM chief inspector of prisons records and publishes the number of occurrences of violence of different levels and a weighted sum of all occurrences with explicit weights. Only then will we know if total violence is increasing, or even surging. Some agencies such as the Institute for Economics and Peace already do this. See their Global Peace Index for 2014.
Professor Nicholas Baigent
London School of Economics
Dr Magda Osman
Queen Mary, University of London

06.00 GMT

Your two correspondents (Engineers, linguists and other heroes, Letters, 22 November) rightly appeal for more praise for others at Bletchley Park during the war. Alan Turing was certainly not the only golden pebble on the Bletchley beach. More than a third of my book Bletchley Park: An Inmate’s Story was composed of nearly 50 short biographies of most of those whose work led to cryptographic successes and of those whose study of decrypted German messages provided commanders in the field with vital intelligence. Sadly I could not include those like Peter Calvocoressi and Mavis Batey and others who were living when my book was published in 2008 and have died since. Now in my 101st year, I cannot complete the biographical record. But I hope that somebody will.
James (Jimmy) Thirsk
Hadlow, Kent

Stethoscope The medical innovation bill could pose a threat to patient safety, say Dr Michael Powers QC and Dr Anthony Barton. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

As joint editors preparing the fifth edition of Clinical Negligence, we join the concern voiced about the medical innovation bill (Attacking critics is no way to fix the Saatchi bill, theguardian.com, 19 November): at best, because it is legally unnecessary it does nothing to promote medical innovation; at worst, it is a threat to patient safety. Lord Saatchi’s emotive and insulting language does not advance his arguments. We sympathise with him, but sympathy for any single individual is no basis for passing bad law that could affect us all.
Dr Michael Powers QC, Dr Anthony Barton
London

• Theresa May chose a well known aria from the Queen of the Night as her top record for Desert Island Discs (A different politician, but the song remains the same, 22 November). May is informed enough to know that the Queen is the scheming villainess of the opera and, given her name, she might also have heard that the character could represent Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. So, musical ignorance or a hidden message?
Dr Judith Wardle
Witney

• Lovely photo of Cerys Matthews receiving her award at Buckingham Palace (Medal citizen, 22 November.) Would this be the same palace which we were urged to storm in the song on Catatonia’s album Equally Cursed and Blessed, the lyrics of which included the line “You can stick your OBE”?
Jim Naylon
Stonesfield, Oxfordshire

• Given your propensity for the rehabilitation of politicians and journalists released partway through their prison sentences, when we can expect to see Andy Coulson’s first article appear?
Fred Pickering
Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire

Independent:

Three crucial issues are misrepresented in the increasingly hysterical “debate” about EU immigration into the UK.

First, Eurosceptics claim that EU immigrants are “taking British jobs”. In reality they are taking jobs that Britons could have, but won’t do at the wages on offer. This is not only the case at the bottom of the scale: 2,300 Polish doctors have come to work in the UK, but in the last year alone over 500 British GPs took their skills abroad.

A second assertion is that the cost of accommodating immigrants damages the British economy. In fact the UK’s vaunted “economic success” depends on a constant supply of labour prepared to work hard for low pay. Any restrictions the government manages to impose on economic immigration will hurt employers first, and the rest of us later.

Finally, eurosceptics endlessly point to Norway and Switzerland as countries which can make their own rules, free of EU red tape. The reality is that both countries maintain their access to European markets only by accepting all aspects of EU freedom of movement regulations – as well as 95 per cent of other EU regulation.

Both are signatories to the European Convention on Human Rights, and both belong to the Schengen agreement abolishing borders and passport controls within Europe.

Eurosceptic politicians know that most of their claims about EU immigration are demonstrably nonsense. Nevertheless, they appear to be prepared to spout whatever they think might maintain their party in government or themselves in jobs. Where is the genuine leader, of any party, who will cut through the obfuscation and win the arguments by telling the truth? Voters do not like to be taken for fools.

John Brand
Edinburgh

I wholeheartedly agree with Ian Richards (letter, 24 November) in that the economic benefits of immigration are undeniable and that the country would be in a sorry state were we to leave the EU. However, Ukip is capitalising on the areas of the country that have seen inward migration on a massive scale with no corresponding increase in local spending. The Government would do well to remember that there are costs at a local level associated with immigration, as well as benefits.

The people in these areas have raised valid concerns about provision of housing, sanitation, education, and medical and dental services, and have long been decried as racist by the media and politicians.

While I am in no way supportive of Ukip in general, I applaud the fact that the immigration issue is actually now being discussed and that there’s a chance of people’s concerns being properly addressed rather than ignored.

Alan Gregory
Manchester

First they came for the immigrants from outside Europe.

Then they came for the (almost non-existent) EU immigrants who come here just to claim welfare.

Now they’re after the EU working poor (getting rid of tax credits for hardworking immigrants in menial jobs).

I’m an Irish immigrant who’s worked hard and paid taxes here for almost 20 years. I wonder when it will be my turn.

David Clarke
Edinburgh

Young, poor and unrepresented

Your headline “The young are the new poor” (24 November) is impossible to disagree with. Even more sadly, the problems of the young can only get worse. Their prospects are dire as your article details, and all indications are that future demand for unskilled or semi-skilled labour can only get less.

Technology will ensure that work can be done, and therefore profits made, with less and less involvement by human beings. Can anyone imagine employers not taking this chance with both hands?

Only a complete rethink of social and financial conditions will even begin to solve the problems that loom, and there are no signs that any political party has even considered them, much less begun to work out a solution.

Bill Fletcher
Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Andreas Whittam Smith (20 November) raises some very pertinent questions in his excellent piece on the widening wealth gap.

Of course it cannot be right that chief executives and other board members of most public companies “earn” 120 times the average salary of their full-time employees. Why does no political party rail against this “conspiracy in the nation’s boardrooms”, which rewards custodianship rather than entrepreneurism?

Of course, investment in deprived areas would raise the overall economic output of this country. Why does no political party understand this?

Yes, correcting gross inequality is an obvious political programme in search of a political party.

It is a sad fact of modern British politics that the main parties are increasingly appealing to the fringes of the political spectrum.

Having spent the last two weeks on jury service, I am reminded that the vast majority in this country are decent, hardworking and right-thinking people, broadly at the centre of the political spectrum, who no longer have any political party representing their views on what makes for a just and equitable society.

Nick Eastwell
London SE10

Tweet from inside the Westminster bubble

As Premiership footballers are failing to realise, tweeting gets you into trouble. If Ed Miliband has saved Emily Thornberry from being hounded by the press, he has done her a favour. Her failure to realise the tweet would get into the papers and round the political world underlines a bigger problem – the lack of reality of the political class.

As Hazel Blears MP has pointed out, the number of politicians who have no experience of life is rising. They live in the Westminster bubble and hob-nob with each other in a world of gossip and chit-chat.

Maybe discovering someone with the English flag on their house seemed worthy of attention in the world Ms Thornberry lives in, but who in the real world would pay it a moment’s notice?

If the political class thinks tweeting is a good idea, what chance do they have of understanding anything serious – such as the rise of the SNP and Ukip?

Trevor Fisher
Stafford

We often and rightly go by appearances, even though sometimes they lead to error

If, in an election with Ukip as front-runner, a Labour politician sees a house decked with English flags, she may well sigh and judge the residents Ukip supporters; she may even tweet the image, showing what she is up against. Isn’t it time that politicians and the media grew up, instead of blowing up every possible interpretation of every action?

Peter Cave
London W1

Emily Thornberry may have been contemptuous of White Van Dan, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that she was prepared to work hard to improve his lot. Was it Charlie Brown or Snoopy who said “Humanity’s all right. It’s people I can’t stand”?

Jim Vickers
Redcar, Cleveland

Polite Jewish response to incitement

In a predominantly Jewish area of London on Saturday, a group of protesters appeared unannounced handing out anti-Israel leaflets with a Palestinian flag behind them and with anti-Israel slogans around them.

While their action was potentially inciteful to the local community, people accepted their right to free speech and argued politely. No protection was needed. The most extreme form of challenge took the form of neatly tearing up the leaflets and handing them back to the protesters (so as not to litter the pavement).

I wonder how pro-Zionist and Jewish protesters would fare down in Tower Hamlets, in east London, with an Israeli flag draped behind them and pro-Israeli slogans and leaflets?

Stephen Spencer Ryde
Finchley, London N3

Hit the bosses, not the banks

We have had yet another spate of fines for the misdeeds of banks. A substantial proportion of the fines diminishes our pensions, as pension companies are major shareholders of the banks.

The directors of banks are responsible for whom they employ and the actions of their employees. Is it not time that company law was amended so that directors, rather than their companies, would be directly penalised for the behaviour of their employees?

Roger Booth
Birmingham

Hamilton wins, Britain loses

It was good to see Lewis Hamilton proudly waving the Union Flag after he won the Formula One world title.

Perhaps he will follow this up by moving back from Monaco and start paying taxes in the country of which he seems so proud.

James Gibb
Ampthill, Bedfordshire

Times:

Far from being ‘prisons of the mind’, the vast majority of faith schools passionately uphold respect for others

Sir, Far from being, as your headline puts it, “prisons of the mind”, Catholic schools are envied precisely for the excellence of their teaching and performance across all disciplines (Janice Turner, Opinion, Nov 22). In professions such as science and philosophy, where independent minds and openness to ideas count most, Catholics excel.

Yet because fanatics have manipulated some Muslim “faith schools”, Janice Turner thinks that faith schools are particularly vulnerable to fanaticism. But Muslim fanatics manipulate secular schools as well; and pupils of Catholic “faith schools” are the least likely to engage in the tragic sectarianism that centuries of political manipulation have caused and fostered, sometimes deliberately, in Northern Ireland.

Catholic parents pay the taxes that fund their schools. Must their children be forced into schools, secularist in principle, where their faith is treated as “something other people do”?

Tom McIntyre
Frome, Somerset

Sir, If Janice Turner wants all schools to be diverse communities that provide a high standard of education while promoting respect for others, she should rejoice in the vast majority of faith schools that passionately uphold these values. Instead, by hijacking a serious issue in an attempt to advance her own anti-religious agenda, she undermines the very principles she claims to advocate.

David Culley
Bristol

Sir, Rachel Sylvester (“Ministers take sides in Tory culture clash”, Nov 18) misses the point when she claims that some Tories are “complaining about the promotion of equality”. Our letter to Nicky Morgan, the education secretary, highlighted the serious challenges to freedom of religion, both legal and philosophical, inherent in her new regulations.

The state requiring faith schools to actively promote things that are antithetical to their faith undermines the entire ethos of these schools, as well as striking a powerful and disconcerting blow against the freedom of conscience.

The regulations also mark a complete volte face from decades of previous Conservative policy of offering schools, families and communities more freedom from state-enforced orthodoxies.

Sir Edward Leigh, MP
House of Commons

Sir, Rachel Sylvester misses out a key player in the story of getting the drains unblocked in No 10. The person who persuaded the PM to go into “Dyno-Rod mode” on the GCSE religious studies criteria was Stephen Lloyd, the MP for Eastbourne, who is chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on religious education. What he understands is the key role that good religious education plays in preparing young people in all our schools to live successfully in a world where faith and belief are, for better as well as for worse, at the top of the news on a daily basis.

Dr Joyce Miller
Chairwoman, Religious Education Council, London N1

Sir, Is it not time for an urgent national debate about the place of religious studies in schools, whether state, faith or private? Janice Turner calls for the minimisation of the subject in the face of fears about partisan teaching and social unrest. Whether such dangers are justified or not, there is no doubt in my experience that a model of religious studies that has philosophy (and not dogma) at its heart is a popular one, and as such can enable a truly open society to flourish.

This is something which politicians of all persuasions might embrace, not least because students want to explore ideas, religious and atheist alike, and to be taken seriously as members of society. Any new plans for the subject and the curriculum should surely take this into account.

Esmond Lee
Head of Religious Studies, Trinity School, Croydon

A checklist can save a child’s life — and so too, it would seem, can a procedure more suited to reviving lambs

Sir, Atul Gawande’s article “How a checklist saved a little girl’s life” (Opinion, Nov 22) reminded me of an event in the late 1970s, when an infant fell into the garden pond of one of my neighbours. On hearing an anguished scream followed by pleas for help, I and an elderly neighbour dropped our gardening tools and struggled over the hedges and fence that separated us from the commotion.

The three-year-old girl was at the bottom of the pond; I jumped in, pulled her out and passed her lifeless body to my neighbour. He lay her down, got hold of her ankles, lifted her up and began, in a lunatic fashion, to swing her around his head. Horrified and paralysed, the child’s mother and I watched as, moments later, water poured from the child’s mouth and nose, and she gave a loud cry.

I asked my neighbour where he’d learnt to do such a thing. He said he’d been a shepherd for 30-odd years, and when lambs were born “dead” it was the standard way of making them breathe and of ridding their mouth of birth debris. But for the grace of this old shepherd, Aaron, that child would not be alive today.

Anita Menzies

Southport

Surely it is time that players should use words in common usage, not ones that no-one has ever heard of

Sir, The Scrabble dictionary may have promoted domestic tranquillity (leader, Nov 24) but it has severely damaged the game. Instead of being one of skill and ingenuity, the game has now become one of memory: the winner is whoever can memorise enough obscure words from that wretched volume. At least half the words on the championship-winning board (Nov 24) would not figure in any reasonably well-educated person’s vocabulary. How many people have used, or even heard of, diorite, gapo, kon, kaw, talaq, umu, ventrous, or xenic? Not to mention all those highly dubious two-letter words such as al, de, et, si, or xu?

Could not the publishers of the Scrabble dictionary take a leaf out of the compilers of concise dictionaries, and produce a list of words in common usage?

Julian Le Grand

Bristol

What are the real implications of GPs being on first-name terms with their patients?

Sir, I paternally encourage my doctor to be on Christian name terms with me (“Chummy young doctors are bad for your health”, Nov 24) so as not to emphasise the social differences between us.

John Hatton

Nailsworth, Glos

How can anyone really think that French motorway service stations are something for Britain to aspire to?

Sir, I am amazed that anyone still thinks that French motorway service stations are superior to their UK counterparts (Nov 24). The worst meal we have ever encountered was in a service station near Orleans. Wanting something that would be relatively quick, we ordered two omelettes — and watched as the server opened the freezer, took out a bag, put it in the microwave and then emptied it onto a plate.

We have had a house in France for 20 years, and for several years now have found the quality of everyday eating establishments (especially pubs) in the UK to be considerably better than it is in France.

Gill Walker

Ilminster, Somerset

Telegraph:

Letters: A Tory’s vote for Ukip could mean propping up Labour with the SNP

The danger of voting Ukip; women proving themselves in the police force; protecting children from the cyber-threat posed by webcams without passwords.

A UKIP supporter waves to photographers outside party headquarters in Rochester

A UKIP supporter waves to photographers outside party headquarters in Rochester Photo: 2014 Getty Images

7:00AM GMT 24 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – I hope that voters currently deserting the Tories and supporting Ukip in

by-elections will think seriously about the outcome of continuing to do so at the general election.

With the collapse of Labour in Scotland and loss of Tory seats to Ukip, there is a real possibility that the next government could be a coalition of Labour and the SNP. The thought of Ed Miliband as PM is bad enough, but the price the taxpayers of England would have to pay for his SNP support is even more concerning.

R W Mansell
Lincoln

SIR – There may be truth in your warning that those voting for Ukip could help put Mr Miliband into No 10. Whether this is true or not, there is one certainty about the general election: if we continue to vote the same, we will just get more of the same.

Terry Lloyd
Darley Abbey, Derbyshire

SIR – Nigel Farage’s battle cry is: “Vote for Ukip, you get Ukip.”

Then what? On the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme yesterday, Ukip’s first elected MP (Douglas Carswell) disagreed with a statement on immigration made by the party’s newly elected MP (Mark Reckless). Confusion already in the ranks.

Elaine Nobbs
Pyrford, Surrey

SIR – What worries me most about Thursday’s events is the spectre of the further Americanisation of our politics, with Ukip playing the fundamentally negative Tea Party role, preventing the major parties from developing and proposing sensible, moderate policies which might have cross-party appeal.

The crassness of Emily Thornberry’s actions will increase the sense of a culture war, pitting the elite against the common man, and therefore her departure is to be welcomed. However, I cannot help but feel the Conservatives are reaping what they sowed in their opposition to voting reform in the 2011 referendum; our system rewards the largest minority and, unless the major parties stop acting like preening public schoolboys at a debating competition, next year’s general election may just see Ukip benefit from this, to the detriment of all of us.

Andrew Jukes
Eye, Suffolk

SIR – The saddest aspect of Emily Thornberry’s ill-judged Rochester tweet is not her alleged sneering at white van man, but that the white van man apparently didn’t even know there was a by-election in Rochester and Strood.

In the aftermath, the white van man apparently was happy to be hijacked by the popular press to make a cynical and wholly ignorant point about democracy in distasteful publicity shots outside Emily Thornberry’s home.

Charles Foster
Chalfont St Peter, Buckinghamshire

Women in the police

SIR – Isabel Hardman says she sees less and less sexism in the workplace. As a WPC, from 1972 I served in three police services for 25 years: on foot duty; in the Criminal Investigation Department; and in the Mounted Branch.

When women were first accepted into specialist roles within the police, of course they were scrutinised. At that time, there was a real fear among men that, in violent situations, a woman might burst into tears and run away, or seek protection of her male colleagues. A weak link would have made the men more vulnerable to attack.

Was it really unreasonable to ask any police officer: “Are you able to do this particular task to the required level of expertise?” Both men and women were exposed if they were not up to the task.

An ability to laugh at oneself and with others was as essential as being able to keep calm in volatile situations.

There was no concept of a “nominal woman” in the Mounted Branch; when I applied, I simply was expected to meet the requirements of the role. Once I had proved that I was equal to men in terms of ability, fitness, loyalty and courage, then I was totally accepted and respected within the great family that is the police service. Surely that is equality.

I think there will always be disgruntled people who have chosen the wrong career paths and blame the organisation for their lack of success.

Margaret Hopkinson
Theydon Bois, Essex

Christmas too soon

SIR – As a member of a number of social and sporting clubs, I am frequently invited to Christmas celebrations. Some of these are held as early as November, mainly because they would not otherwise fit in with all the others. I decline to attend any of them on the grounds that I am keeping my taste buds fresh for the real thing. Thus, I am branded a curmudgeon and a killjoy.

Chris Harding
Parkstone, Dorset

Breakfast of champions

SIR – My dad always had a decent breakfast before work: bacon and two eggs with bread fried in lard. At the weekend he added fried tomatoes and mushrooms.

Alas, he died of a heart attack, just two weeks before his 97th birthday.

Harvey Clegg
Woodbridge, Suffolk

The new cyber-threat

SIR – It is common practice for many networked products, such as webcams and routers, to have either no password set or a published default password set when they are first installed.

To protect their security, users need to ensure that these devices are correctly set up and, where applicable, new passwords or Pins are set. This basic cyber-hygiene helps protect the safety and privacy of children, and it is particularly important where devices such as webcams are installed in bedrooms.

As more consumer devices are networked as part of the emerging “Internet of Things”, this issue will become more pressing.

Manufacturers or suppliers of those networked devices should consider whether there are ways of encouraging the user to set a password or new password when the devices is first installed. This might, for example, involve disabling the device until the password has been set.

Hugh Boyes
Institution of Engineering and Technology
London WC2

Recycling too much

SIR – In my area, paper and card for recycling go into large red bags. We have two newspapers a day, plus freebies and cardboard. Our bag is always full.

Last week, the paper got wet, and was therefore heavier than usual, and the council-issued bags don’t close at the sides.

Last Monday we were reprimanded for recycling too much paper, had our red bag taken from us, and were told to use plastic carrier bags in future.

It was only after a great deal of argument and my pointing out that we have been told not to use plastic bags that I managed to have a red bag reissued.

We are keen recyclers and composters, but there is a limit to how much paper we can mix into our garden waste.

Gillian Lurie
Westgate-on-Sea, Kent

Floral tribute

SIR – Our 21 prolific Silver Jubilee roses have given us and our neighbours great pleasure over the 32 years since they were planted.

Could this year’s output of 1,061 blooms be a record?

Margaret Finlay
Bowdon, Cheshire

SIR – On Saturday I thought I would surprise my wife and bought her some oriental lilies advertised in the florist’s window as “£6 a bunch”, plus some freesias.

When I got home, my wife quite rightly said it was difficult to make an arrangement with two lilies. Since when did two constitute a bunch?

Brian Lee
Saffron Walden, Essex

French leave

SIR – In the spring term in 1958, I was 21st out of 21 in my form in French. At Easter, I went on an exchange to Paris and Aix-les-Bains.

At the end of the summer term, I was fourth in French in my class. The following year I returned to Aix: I had fallen in love at 13 with my exchange boy’s cousin, Marie-Christine.

Alas, I broke my right leg in three places on my first day skiing and, strangely, my most abiding memory of that time is being offered a whole boiled artichoke by a lovely nun in hospital.

Simon Edsor
London SW1

Honouring India’s war dead on the South Downs

The Chattri memorial was built where a ghat, or funeral pyre, once stood above Patcham

SIR – General Lord Dannatt and others call for all Britons to remember the contributions of soldiers from across the Empire in the First World War. Indian sacrifice is certainly remembered in Brighton, where some 12,000 Indian soldiers – wounded and sick from the Western front – were treated at three hospitals in 1914-15.

Each June we hold a service at the Chattri war memorial at Patcham, which stands in memory of all Indians who fell in the First World War, but is particularly associated with the 53 Hindu and Sikh soldiers who died in Brighton hospitals (their 21 Muslim brothers in arms were buried at Shah Jehan Mosque in Woking).

In 2010 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission belatedly erected a Cremation Memorial adjacent to the Chattri. This memorial lists the names and regiments of the men who were cremated on the site.

Tom Donovan
Brighton, East Sussex

SIR – The “Remember WW1” campaign is an admirable attempt to honour the memory of the war dead.

Sadly, an institution that also aims to prevent our forgetting what happened 100 years ago, the Imperial War Museum’s library, is under threat of closure due to funding cuts. The letters, records and diaries available to ordinary people to study all aspects of British and Commonwealth involvement in conflict since 1914 should not be closed.

Rohaise Thomas-Everard
Dulverton, Somerset

Why St Pancras cannot be the HS2 terminus

SIR – Stuart Robertson may be surprised to learn that there was a proposal for an automated people mover (APM) between Euston and St Pancras stations published by HS2 Ltd at the behest of the Government in 2009. However, it was subsequently decided that an HS2-HS1 rail link would be preferable, and the APM was cancelled.

A report issued in June 2013 by GreenGauge 21, the non-profit group that investigates high-speed rail, showed that the uptake by international passengers of a rail link would be very low and, in fact, it would be of more use to domestic passengers – for example, those travelling from Birmingham to Stratford or Old Oak Common to Ashford. The Government has now cancelled the link altogether, but has not reinstated the APM which is needed.

Euston was not plucked out of the air. Twenty-nine options for a London terminus were considered. All were eliminated for practical reasons, including St Pancras. Anyone who thinks that it can be built at the latter should tell us how 11 1,360ft-platforms can be built there without demolishing the British Library.

John Brandon
Tonbridge, Kent

Irish Times:

A Chara, – In his critique of the Irish education system and the quality of its teachers, your education correspondent (Joe Humphreys, Weekend, November 22nd) fails to mention a number of significant factors which cannot be measured by test results or performance – levels on international comparisons of education performance.

As the American educator and writer Diane Ravitch comments, “when we reflect on why education matters we think of virtues that are not and cannot be measured: character, curiosity, responsibility, persistence, generosity, compassion, creativity, moral courage”.

Good teachers and good schools constantly strive to promote these virtues and often with insufficient State support. My colleague, who teaches in a mixed first/second class with 35 students, would love to find herself in class tomorrow morning with that “average” number of 24.

I would like to invite any commentator, journalist or politician to gather that number of people in to a small room for a day and keep them merrily on task, from nine o’clock in the morning until three o’clock in the afternoon, not forgetting the 10-minute break mid-morning and the half-hour break for lunch – unless of course it is your yard-duty day.

It is not an easy task. And it requires huge investment and expertise. – Is mise, etc,

COLIN QUIGLEY,

Trim,

Co Meath.

Sir, – I have heard many promises that the new Junior Cert will avoid “teaching to the test”.

The statement is just put out there without any evidence.

No examples of how this happens are ever presented. A teacher teaches the curriculum which appears on the Junior Cert. I can’t see many predictive patterns in English Junior Cert.

I teach the entire curriculum safe in the knowledge that I don’t know exactly what is coming up.

But if there are patterns in the existing Junior Cert that lend themselves to “teaching to the test” any chance the media might dig them out, rather than trotting out clichés?

At present I don’t write Junior Cert papers. I don’t have access to them. Under the new proposed system I will decide project/test work. I will be the author, or perhaps, part of a committee of authors. Not only that but I will correct it too.

It would be terrific to live in a world where a teacher would not redraft student work or where a student might not enlist the work of others to redraft their work but sure as day follows night – it will happen despite all the well wishing in the world. – Yours, etc, BARRY HAZEL, Bray, Co Wicklow. Sir, – The Chicago public school system which educates 400,000 students each year made available all the data from its standardised annual tests of students in elementary and secondary schools from 1993 to 2000 to an academic study.

It used algorithm methods to determine if teachers cheated when administering these exams to their own students. The findings proved that 5 per cent of teachers had cheated.

This figure was considered conservative as the algorithms only detected egregious cheating.

The main reasons determined for cheating varied from career enhancement, self-esteem, and concern for their students.

No wonder teachers are concerned about the independence and fairness of the Junior Cert. Continuous assessment is very much a part of every teacher’s and school’s armoury but a once-off national standard test should be administered independently.

Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan should also know what every business person in the country knows about change management – it only works if the people it affects at least have a say in its development but, preferably, if they think it was their idea in the first place.

Why were the teachers not properly consulted?

Listen to the teachers. Listen to the parents . – Yours, etc, PATRICIA CRISP, Ballsbridge, Dublin 4.

Sir, – Apparently my 92-year-old mother will be in good company (“Relatives to play key role in 2016 Rising commemorations”, November 13th) as there are many sons and daughters of 1916 Volunteers still kicking up their heels well into their 80s and 90s and even some centenarians.

These “children” of the 1916 men and women are a direct living link to the spirit and ideals of 1916 as set out in the Proclamation. They are national treasures. They have something to say on how they would like the 2016 national commemorations to go ahead and how they would like their parents remembered beyond 2016.

Has anyone remembered to ask them? And will they take note and act? Fast. – Yours, etc,

MAEVE O’LEARY

Melbourne,

Australia.

Sir, – The elephant in the room is the huge increase in property tax that will fall into the Government’s lap in January 2016, only 14 months away, as a result of vastly increased property values over the past 18 months.

The 15 per cent reduction in the charge is a tiny concession in a market where prices have risen by over 60 cent in many areas. We are tied into paying these charges as, unlike in the case of water charges, provision has already been made to deduct this tax at source from wages, pensions, and unemployment benefit if we do not voluntarily pay up.

Property tax should cover provision of infrastructure for services to our homes.

This windfall to Government coffers should be ring-fenced and invested in upgrading the water service and fixing the leaks in our long neglected water system, leaving us to pay minimal charges for water provision.

– Yours, etc, ANNE-MARIE MOCKLER Marino, Dublin 3.

Sir, – As a recent climber of Carrauntoohil mountain I am not sorry to see the cutting down of the cross.

Structures such as the cross have no place on top of such a beautiful mountain. It was out of place and a blot on the landscape.

Before people go charging up to restore the cross I hope they remember to apply for planning permission as I am sure there are a lot of like minded people who would like to object. Keep crosses off the tops of mountains and leave mountain tops joyful and spiritual places to be. – Yours, etc, COLM O’BRIEN, Old Bawn, Dublin 24.

Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 01:05

First published: Tue, Nov 25, 2014, 01:05

Sir, – Following on from the various contributions to the debate about prostitution in you pages we would like to offer three points to this debate. We are two feminist scholars with expertise in the areas of prostitution, trafficking, migration and public policy.

First, the experiences of women (and men) in the sex trade are diverse. There are victims and there are those who do not see themselves as victims and do not seek help or protection.

Second, the so-called Swedish model does not work. It has reduced on-street prostitution significantly, but off-street activities have apparently grown. Migrant women are still showing up in the sector. There are profound difficulties in implementing the law to do with resources and the kinds of evidence needed for prosecutions.

Third, evidence from states the world over shows one thing: the desire to regulate prostitution through the criminal justice system systematically displaces and reproduces the activity in ways in which the seller of sex invariably comes off worst in the long run. Good public policy, likely to reach its goals, is much enhanced when it draws on evidence-based research and begins by conceptualising the problem in the round.

The problem is not simple and the solution is not either. – Yours, etc DR EILÍS WARD, NUI Galway. DR GILLIAN WYLIE, Trinity College Dublin. Sir, – The most oppressive element of sex work is the shortfall in our society that still leaves some people cornered in situations where they have no honest and viable economic alternative to selling sexual services whether they are comfortable with that or not.

There is no justification for “end demand” legislation aimed at destroying the market for sexual services until we, as a society, have first thoroughly ensured that we are not continuing to leave people cornered with no honest and viable options. – Yours, etc,

GAYE DALTON,

Donard,

Co Wicklow.

A Chara, – The news that Minister for Business and Employment Ged Nash intends to carry out a study into the prevalence of zero-hour and low-hour contracts and their impact on low-paid employees is welcome but research alone is no substitute for robust legislation to outlaw these ultra-exploitative practices.

Such zero-hour contracts are nothing more than the latest cynical use of the recession to further undermine working conditions and wages. They are an attack on the dignity and rights of workers.

Workers on these contracts are not guaranteed employment from one week to the next, have no guaranteed weekly hours or weekly income and are unable to take on other work as they have to be on constant call from employers.

Workers on zero-hour contracts are unable to get mortgages, plan family life and many have worries about putting food on the table. Employers use these contracts to keep staff in a permanent state of insecurity, cut wages and avoid paying pensions and holiday pay.

Over one million workers in Britain are contracted to this insecure form of employment and a recent study suggested that the practice is far more widespread than official figures estimate.

In Ireland, workers have at least some protection under the Organisation of Working Time Act 1997. But there is evidence, that despite legislation, many companies are using zero-hour contracts, predominantly in non-unionised workplaces in the service industries.

Even though several of these companies are large multi-nationals raking in millions of euro in profit, the State is in reality subsidising their low pay and exploitative practices through increased social welfare and family income supplements at an estimated cost of some €280 million per year.

Outlawing zero-hours contracts would immediately help improve the lives of thousands of low-paid workers.

It would save the taxpayer millions in reduced social welfare spending and boost consumer spending in the economy. – Is mise, etc, KEVIN P McCARTHY, Headford, Killarney, Co Kerry.

Sir, – Breda O’Brien (Opinion November, 22nd) makes reference to the proposed adaptation of the concept in Article 38 (1) of the German Basic Law into the Irish Constitution by way of the draft 34th Amendment of the Constitution (Members of the Oireachtas) Bill 2014, as a means to impose a relaxation of the rigid whip system.

However, in the Bundestag, the binding guidance of fraktionsdisziplin (political party caucus voting cohesion) still applies and is effectively adhered to by German party parliamentarians.

In reality, Article 38 (1) is only invoked on relatively rare occasions and certainly would not, for example, allow a parliamentarian to be safeguarded from internal party discipline upon persistent opposition to the policies of that party, which seems to be a major rationale for the introduction of the aforementioned bill.

In order to satisfactorily alleviate the rigidity of the whip system, a better resolution would be to replicate the modus operandi within the UK House of Commons, where one-line and two-line whips are regularly granted.

There is no constitutional amendment necessary to adopt such a practice into the Oireachtas.

The main obstacle to this, however, would be the fact that Opposition and media criticism of one-line and two-line whipped votes lost by the Government would persistently permeate, as is the case in the UK whenever a government bill is defeated as a result of “backbench rebellion”.

Allowing a greater culture of agreed bilateral authorship on new legislation to prevail in the Oireachtas would be the strongest antidote to such an intrinsic dilemma. – Yours, etc, JOHN KENNEDY, Goatstown, Dublin 14.

Sir, – I notice that the 20 per cent housing deposit proposal by the Governor of the Central Bank Patrick Honohan is unfortunately coming under fire.

The opponents are apparently pushing for some sort of insurance scheme to cover half the deposit.

This is on the lines of the misguided “Help to Buy” scheme in the UK which contributed significantly to the escalation of house prices, especially in the Greater London area.

Have the opponents of the Central Bank proposal forgotten so quickly that the crash of 2008, and the consequent suffering of our people, was caused largely by irresponsible lending and an unsustainable borrowing frenzy?

The recent unsustainable increases in house prices can only lead to one thing – a further crash and more suffering.

The Central Bank is simply attempting to avoid the excesses of the past.

The 20 per cent deposit would be to the advantage of those wishing to purchase a home.

It would stabilise or even reduce house prices. What on earth is wrong with that? – Yours, etc, PJ DRUDY , Emeritus professor of economics, Trinity College Dublin,

Sir, – It is beyond my comprehension that Wexford Opera House, a regional theatre, will achieve national status.

I speak from experience. I’ve attended more than 130 of Wagner’s operas live in performance in all major cities in Europe, as well as other operas and concerts. I’ve attended numerous Wagner Festivals at Bayreuth. I’ve also attended Wexford Festival Opera.

Recently, the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre was sold by Nama to a third party, instead of being taken by the State and converted into an opera house.

The Grand Canal theatre has all the appearances of an opera house, and it is located in the capital city. It has seating capacity for 2,111 patrons.It does not need to be exclusively for opera. Wexford Opera House seats up to 750 and while it’s beautifully appointed, it doesn’t otherwise cut the mustard. If Minister for Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht Heather Humphreys goes ahead with this plan, Ireland will still be the only country in the Europe not to have an opera house in its capital city.

It’s a very disappointing decision. – Yours, etc, CHRISTOPHER McQUAID The Wagner Society of Ireland, Tallaght, Dublin 24

Irish Independent:

Politicians and some sections of the media have recently been telling me why, for the first time in my 50-odd years, I recently walked in protest against the Government. Apparently I was there because of a “lack of communication” and I was suffering from a “lack of clarity” on the issue of Irish Water.

Allow me the space to “clarify” and “communicate” with those politicians who apparently have the insight – some might call it arrogance – to be able to inform me of my motivations for protesting. The charge for water can’t be seen in isolation, because this new tax (and it is a tax) comes out of the same wage packet as all the other taxes heaped upon us by this Government under Enda Kenny. The Government was given a mandate by us to stand by their promises to reform the body politic and protect this country and economy from the predations of the international financial community and the so-called ‘austerity’ programme proposed by the EU.

Not only did Kenny’s Government fail to do this, it actively conspired with the banks and the EU to implement these same measures.

Can we now ignore all the years of accumulated emotional and political baggage around the 1916 Proclamation? Just look at what it says: “We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible . . . The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally.”

Are we not entitled to this, after so many years of self-serving politicians paying lip-service to such high ideals? And to those who would scoff at such an idea, who would dismiss such talk as pipe-dream idealism, I would say that without idealism, without those dreams, we forsake a vital part of our humanity and have truly been defeated and become soulless slaves serving an inhuman economic machine.

Most founding states rightly begin by stating such noble aspirations and measure their success by how close they come to achieving them – in much the same way that, as individuals, we aspire to embody all the noble human virtues. We accept these virtues may be impractical or even unattainable, but it is the holding dear of, and the struggle to remain close to, such ideals which gives our lives real purpose.

These ideals of citizenhood are not the property or sole province of any race.

They don’t get votes in an election. But their protection and promotion nourishes the soul of a nation. I refuse to give up on these high ideals.

As things stand, the quality of our political leadership is summed up in a few lines from the poem ‘The Secret People’ by GK Chesterton:

“They have given us into the hand of the new unhappy lords,

“Lords without anger and honour, who dare not carry their swords.

“They fight by shuffling paper; they have bright red alien eyes;

“They look at our labour and laughter as a tired man looks at flies.

“And the load of their loveless pity is worse than the ancient wrongs.

“Their doors are shut in the evening; and they know no songs.”

This is why I recently walked the streets of my town in protest.

Kevin Power

Dungarvan, Co Waterford

Lessons from the Celtic Tiger

The first serious signs of economic growth since the death of the Celtic Tiger do not call for unconditional celebration, as economic recovery does not imply equitable distribution of the fruits of growth.

Many economists see inequality as the price we pay for growth, whilst others find little overall relationship between inequality in wealth and rates of growth.

What seems more obvious to me is the negative impact of the relationship between levels of individual wealth and access to political power and to productive resources.

Governments have to trust their civil servants and advisers in making economic decisions.

They work with the very inexact science of economics, where significant margins of error characterise their efforts. By the very nature of the job, governments can get things badly wrong.

There are two separate threads to economic life.

On the one hand, we have the finance sector involved in gambling with money; on the other hand, we have innovative entrepreneurs creating new businesses, new products and jobs to go with them.

Though the small to medium-sized enterprises (here I include farming) form the backbone of the economy, rewards in the finance sector are increasingly disproportionate and undeserving.

This arises from the concentration of political and market power in the finance sector, rather than from the sector’s greater contribution to economic growth.

In the Celtic Tiger years, the wealth of the country was hijacked by the ineptly regulated failing banks, with the collusion of some senior politicians and business barons, leaving a carcass for the rest to pick over.

This is the setting where our young people feel powerless and at a loss as to know where their lives are taking them.

Many leave the sorting house of school with little hope of employment or a place in third level institutions.

This is a very debasing world, where so many struggle to preserve their dignity and self-confidence.

Philip O’Neill

Oxford, OX1 4B, England

Politics is still a man’s world

I note that in her article (Irish Independent November 24) Justice Minister Frances Fitzgerald didn’t mention the name of one other woman in the entire world who provides an example of the type of female leadership she is talking about when she called for more women in politics.

There have been plenty of female leaders in all sorts of different countries – particularly in countries were equality is vastly below any western country – yet when it boils down to it, are any of those women any different to the men they replaced. Are the lives of women in India, Pakistan or elsewhere any better for having had women leaders?

In the case of Ireland, what type of woman does she mean when she says she is creating a ‘talent bank’ of women to serve on state boards, presumably for positions that are never advertised and appointed following a public and transparent process?

Some change that’ll be, and what’s the bet that all of the women chosen will just happen to have links with Fine Gael and Labour.

Perhaps the reason the Irish public is not as keen, as Ms Fitzgerald would like, on choosing candidates based on their gender, is because there is no evidence, in the Irish context at least, that the women who do get through the political system turn out to be any different to the men.

The various women who held senior office over the last two or three decades are as responsible for the mess the country is in as any of their male counterparts who protect us from more women like Heather Humphreys.

Desmond FitzGerald

Canary Wharf, London

Irish Independent

26 November 2014 Vet

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework and take Fluff to the vet.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down nothing for tea and her tummy pain is still there.

Obituary:

Paul Vaughan – obituary

Paul Vaughan was the presenter of the BBC’s arts show Kaleidoscope whose velvety tones on serious programmes saw him hailed as ‘the first invisible star of television’

Paul Vaughan

5:23PM GMT 25 Nov 2014

Comments

Paul Vaughan, who has died aged 89, became one of the most familiar voices on radio and television as presenter of the long-running arts magazine Kaleidoscope on Radio 4 and narrator of the television science flagship series Horizon on BBC Two.

Vaughan’s velvety tones made him, in the view of one critic, “the first invisible star of television”. He was also greatly in demand as a voice-over artist for television and radio commercials and trailers. “When God speaks,” observed another commentator, “he uses Paul Vaughan’s voice.”

Launched in April 1973, Kaleidoscope under Vaughan’s conductorship became emblematic of the Radio 4 soundscape of the day with its informed but informal tone of arts coverage. Originally broadcast live and late at night, in order to include first night reviews from the West End, the programme marked a change of pace from the stately progress of other arts shows: the opening week featured an interview with Joan Baez, studio discussions about quasars and Picasso, and music from Diana Ross.

Inevitably on a live, reactive programme, there would be glitches. Vaughan recalled the unavailing scramble to contact Stephen Spender in 1973 on the day W H Auden died and having to make do with a drunken Laurie Lee, who could manage only “a little grief-stricken sob” for the listeners before falling silent.

Vaughan’s voice sounded perfect on heavyweight programmes such as Horizon, possessing just the right degree of neutral authority that lent his commentary a kind of oracular power. He was also in constant demand for corporate presentations, voicing films and videos for staff training, promotions and for drumming up business.

For television and film commercials, his voice was used to sell a range of products and services from credit cards and toothpaste to building societies and disinfectant. Perhaps the most famous of the slogans he intoned was for a mobile phone company – between 1994 and 2008 it was Vaughan who assured us that: “The future’s bright — the future’s Orange”.

The younger of two brothers, Paul William Vaughan was born on October 24 1925 in Brixton, south London. His father, chief clerk in the counting house at the Greenwich Linoleum Company, became secretary of the Linoleum and Floorcloth Manufacturers’ Association, the industry’s trade body, a position that would eventually suggest the title for his second son’s first volume of memoirs, Something in Linoleum (1992). In 1934 Vaughan père moved his family to New Malden in Surrey and a house on the Kingston bypass.

^{Joan Baez, a guest on the first episode of Kaleidoscope (REX)}

Young Paul immersed himself in the culture of suburbia (it became a lifelong fascination) and attended Raynes Park County School, where the flamboyant headmaster, John Garrett, became a major influence in his quest for self-improvement. Garrett knew W H Auden, persuaded him to write a school song, and hired the painter Claude Rogers to teach Art and the Marxist Rex Warner to teach Classics. Paul Vaughan’s fellow alumni included two other future Radio 4 broadcasters, Derek Cooper and Robert Robinson.

As a teenager, Vaughan became a talented amateur musician, playing first clarinet in the Worcester Park orchestra and later second clarinet in the Wimbledon Philharmonic (Colin Davis played first). He read French at Wadham College, Oxford, his studies being interrupted in 1944 by conscription into the Queen’s Royal Regiment. He returned to Oxford three years later to complete his degree.

In 1950 Vaughan joined Menley and James, pharmaceutical chemists, which occupied hangar-like premises on Coldharbour Lane, Camberwell, that had once been an ice-rink and before that had served as headquarters of the Edwardian theatre impresario Fred Karno. Among the firm’s products were Mother Siegel’s Syrup (for dyspepsia), Antidipso (for alcoholism) and Dethblo (for ringworm). As assistant export manager, Vaughan found himself with time on his hands, and after enrolling on a correspondence course for writers was amazed to have his first article, about Victorian toy theatres, accepted by The Lady magazine.

After five years at Menley and James, Vaughan was appointed an assistant public relations officer with the British Medical Association, then a conservative-minded body with an aversion to personal publicity for its members. Vaughan’s boss defined public relations as “the art of explaining away”; some of the doctors he encountered would joke about the term “PR” because it was medical shorthand for “per rectum”.

In such unpromising circumstances Vaughan again managed to scratch his scribbler’s itch, producing a short history of the BMA called Doctors’ Commons (1959).

In October 1958 Vaughan had made his broadcasting debut with a two-minute report on the BMA’s annual clinical meeting in a World Service radio programme called New Ideas. The experience finally persuaded him to strike out on a media career, and he resigned from the BMA, taught himself shorthand, joined the Press Club and the National Union of Journalists and decided to go freelance.

^{Laurie Lee: he gave a drunken soundbite to Vaughan (PA)}

Filing stories about the state of British medicine to a thrice-weekly American magazine called Medical Tribune kept him afloat for six years. During the early 1960s he bought a portable tape recorder and supplemented his income with radio features for the Today programme on the BBC Home Service, and contributions to the World Service series Science and Industry, later renamed Science in Action. In 1969 he became a reporter for Radio 4’s innovative science series New Worlds, and covered Britain’s first heart transplant operation before moving across to the presenter’s chair.

From there, in 1973, Vaughan was invited to present Radio 4’s new arts and science magazine series Kaleidoscope. The science element was discarded after a year, and the programme became a fixture – in a variety of slots – for a quarter of a century until 1998, when a new network controller replaced it with Front Row.

In 1970, while working as deputy editor of a glossy monthly magazine called World Medicine, Vaughan was auditioned (along with Tony Benn, who had briefly been employed as a BBC World Service producer) to replace Christopher Chataway as narrator for BBC Two’s documentary science series Horizon. He remained the voice of the programme for 20 years.

Vaughan’s second book, a paperback guide to birth control for the Family Planning Association which, daringly for 1969, carried explicit anatomical drawings, was followed by The Pill on Trial (1970). Vaughan traced the story of how the contraceptive pill came to be developed, reviewed the evidence on its safety, and discussed its impact on sexual customs and on the growth of world population.

Vaughan was disappointed when the book failed to sell well. He admitted that another medical journalist may have had a point when he told him: “Women who aren’t on the pill don’t care. Women who are don’t want to know.”

Following the success of Something In Linoleum, Vaughan published a further volume of memoirs, called Exciting Times in the Accounts Department (1995).

Paul Vaughan married, in 1951, Barbara Prys-Jones. The marriage was dissolved, and in 1988 he married a BBC producer, Pippa Burston, who survives him, with their two sons and the two sons and two daughters of his first marriage.

Paul Vaughan, born October 24 1925, died November 14 2014

Guardian:

19.41 GMT

Rather than accusing Emily Thornberry of displaying the patronising attitude of the metropolitan elite towards the working class, is not Tristram’s Hunt’s education policy a better example (Private schools have done too little for too long, 25 November)? Our children, or in my case my future grandchildren, will benefit from being taught by their social betters, who will bring their “world-beating educational attributes” to our state schools. This reflects the ingrained prejudices of the metropolitan elite, who know that state education is markedly inferior to private education and that only by their constant interference will the state education system be dragged screaming and kicking into a better place. It is the mindset of a Michael Gove who sees the main obstacle to good state education as being the teachers with their anti-aspirational attitudes, naive child-friendly educationists, and never a lack of resources or the constant ill-informed micro-management of schools from whoever is the current education secretary.

What I find most offensive is Hunt’s total disregard of what is good in state schools. This is something I feel very strongly as I went to a secondary modern school (a school barred from entering students for the GCE exam, as it was thought an inappropriate education for the children of the manual classes), but thanks to the efforts of my aspirational teachers I got a place at a Russell Group university. A much simpler solution would be to treat the private schools as the businesses that they are, so ending their charitable status, which confers a virtual tax-free existence, and use the new tax revenue to fund a levelling-up of state schools.
Derrick Joad
Leeds

• Tristram Hunt was himself privately educated, and yet he seems to be in blissful ignorance of what private schools are actually doing these days. Most private schools do this already, and not so that we can get away with tax relief. In York, we do it because the state sector cannot provide enough Latin teachers; we do it because we want to improve the experiences of all children in York; we do it because we have each come to trust our colleagues on the other side of the imaginary “Berlin Wall”. People work best together in education if the political climate encourages sincere and respectful dialogue, rather than pantomime caricatures and ominous threats. Should he ask nicely? Yes: because it works.
Leo Winkley (@LeoWinkley)
Headmaster, St Peter’s school, York

• Tristram Hunt joins the list of those who wrongly imply that private education is a financial burden on the state and thus can be financially sanctioned in the cause of its social aspirations. In fact, whatever its social merits or demerits, private education is a substantial contributor to state finances.

The Treasury earns in excess of £4bn per year from the present system. This could be used to provide state bursaries to increase the number of private school places by more than 50%, contributing significantly to the social mobility we all support. Alternatively it could be used to increase spending on the 8 million state pupils by 25%, greatly improving the quality of state provision at a stroke.

The 500,000 or so pupils in private education save the state £800m in education costs per year (at £1,600 per head). Charitable status of these schools costs the state £100m. Even after taking £165m for business rate relief, the system is in credit to the tune of £535m. In addition, some £3.5bn will have already been levied in UK income and other taxes on the £7bn earned to pay for private education.

The oligarchs’ offspring (ie foreign students) account for less than 5% of the total of private students. They are not in any way a burden on us taxpayers but net contributors to our balance of payments.
Christopher Rance
London

• Tristram Hunt does not go nearly far enough in his efforts to breach the Berlin Wall between private and state education (Labour’s assault on private schools, 25 November). The removal of tax breaks and the requirement to share expertise and run joint programmes will do little to overcome the huge disparity in outcomes and opportunities for those educated in the different sectors.

In its efforts to create a fairer and more equal society, Finland, which has one of the highest-achieving education systems in the world, abolished private schools in the 60s. The effect has been to significantly narrow the attainment gap between rich and poor children.

Labour needs to be bolder than this if its commitment to social equity is to be believed. Watering down the status quo is no longer an option.
Fiona Carnie
European Forum for Freedom in Education

• “Labour’s assault on private schools”? The business rate relief claimed through “charitable status” is only a tiny part of the huge state subsidies – exemption from income tax; corporation tax; capital gains tax; VAT; stamp duty; donations and legacies. Parents also benefit from covenants and insurance policies and exemption from VAT on school fees. Generals and diplomats also receive hundreds of millions of pounds to send their children to private schools, all courtesy of the taxpayer.

Taking away one small part of the huge state subsidies to private schools is hardly an “assault”, and no doubt lawyers, consultants and lobbyists will strive might and main to evade it. To say that Mr Hunt has laboured mightily and brought forth a mouse would be extremely generous. Once again Labour politicians have quailed at the prospect of simply abolishing charitable status outright. This is the equivalent to an “assault” from one of Ken Dodd’s tickling sticks.
Richard Knights
Liverpool

• Parliament makes the laws. The courts interpret and enforce them. Right? Yet you report that “Labour had advocated depriving independent schools of charitable status if they did not meet a clear public benefit test, but a 2011 court case brought by the Independent Schools Council in effect closed that route”. Please tell me why parliament can’t pass a new law opening up that route.
Chris Birch
London

• Tristram Hunt’s call, that private schools should do more to help state pupils or lose £700m in tax breaks, is a welcome initiative. But it is puzzling that he said nothing about the principal cause of the often superior performance of private schools. His mantra should be “class size, class size, class size”.

The HMC school website claims that “HMC independent schools have some of the lowest student-staff ratios in UK schools, one teacher for every 9 pupils compared with one teacher for every 22 pupils in the state sector. Significantly smaller class sizes are proven to improve academic achievement as the ability to spend more time with each child allows teachers to get to know their personal strengths, weaknesses and learning styles, ensuring that their individual needs are met.”

There you have it. Come on, Tristram, address the real issue!
Neil Holmes
Bromsgrove, Worcestershire

• I can’t believe that, in a time of austerity, we have been handing over millions in tax breaks to private schools.
Alex Hallatt (@arcticcircle)
Frome, Somerset

• Labour should go much further and utilise this private sector accommodation for children in care. Few places are already set up to facilitate children on such a scale.
Vaughan Thomas
Norwich

• I would be embarrassed for Tristram Hunt if he really believed that the Labour proposals he sketches out would significantly affect what he recognises as the “corrosive divide of privilege”. They won’t, and he must know that.
Michael Sheldon
Norwich

• It’s all very well for Labour to tinker with private schools, but whatever they do short of abolishing them altogether, they will re-create themselves in other forms. Private education is a necessary institution in the replication of the dominant elite. Through a specious narrative of being better than their state counterparts, they guarantee the passage of the elite’s children into the next generation. This cultural self-accreditation is pernicious, and Labour should finally resolve to tackle it head-on.

But don’t hold your breath. At least half of the shadow cabinet is part of this very same elite.
Tim Gay
Barnstaple, Devon

• A voice from the wilderness at last. “The division between state and private education damages our society, stifles opportunity and, by wasting talent, inflicts damage upon our economy,” writes Tristram Hunt. Wow! What insight. So what’s the action he suggests? “We will encourage [encourage?] each institution to reflect the skills, traditions and educational needs of their locality”. How clueless can you be? Has he looked around and seen where Harrow, Eton, Westminster and the rest are located? Get on your bike, Mr Hunt, and go and experience where the unequal quality of opportunity is driven in to the heart of struggling – but proud – local working-class communities. You will need to do much better than that

If words can be followed by more thoughtful action, we may, at last, be on to something. But I do not hold my breath.
Leon Winston
(Chair of governors at an academy school), Shaldon, Devon

• It is good that Tristram Hunt does not support the bursary approach, which allows public schools to cream off a token handful of the state sector’s best pupils. However. the continued existence of an education system where the rich and powerful have little or no interest in, or knowledge of, the state sector in which 0ver 90% of us are educated is a disgrace. Public schools do not just reinforce class barriers, they actively create them, and deserve no state encouragement at all. Forget business rates – a Labour government should put an end to the laughable concept of charity that benefits only the very best off in society, and the Charities Act 2011 should be amended accordingly. A commitment to universal access to a world-class education system – now that would be something.
Paul Jeremy
Brighton

Obama Discusses His Immigration Plan At Visit To Las Vegas High School Barack Obama speaks about his executive action on US immigration policy, 21 November 2014. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Israel’s increasing insistence that it should be defined as a Jewish state (Report, 24 November) has serious and unforeseen consequences for world Jewry as well as for the 20% of its citizens who are not Jewish and will therefore see more of their rights eroded. The more stridently Israel proclaims its Jewishness, the less it can complain when its illegal and inhuman actions, in Gaza and elsewhere, are described by outsiders as Jewish actions, tarring Jews everywhere with the same brush, and increasing rather than reducing the likelihood of antisemitism. Is this really what Israel wants?
Karl Sabbagh
Author, Palestine: A Personal History

• With Obama firing on all cylinders with executive action (Report, 22 November), how long must we wait for the US to recognise the state of Palestine?
Benedict Birnberg
London

• Bhasker Bhadresha writes (Letters, 25 November), “In the 60s, 70s and 80s ‘Paki-bashing’ was a common pastime among white people”. That is so absurd a statement as to merit the word “fantasy”. I write as someone who participated in anti-fascist demonstrations in each of those decades, along with many other white people.
Dr Harry Harmer
Eastbourne, East Sussex

• Re Owen Jones’s comment that “toddlers have been repeatedly observed attempting to help struggling adults without being prompted” (24 November). Severely disabled, I use a stick. Walking in the garden with my four-year-old neighbour, she asked me “shall I hold your stick?” Not quite there practically, but her altruism and desire to help were very clear.
Michael Somerton
Hull

• Christina Wakeford (Letters, 25 November) may have started some hares running. I remember how Professor JL Austin wrote about starting hares by splitting them. Not such a pleasant image as her Pilates teacher brought to mind.
Richard Fortin
Hooksway, West Sussex

Prison Officer locking a gate ‘I can assure you, for those on the receiving end, it certainly felt like an increase in the total amount of violence,’ Nick Hardwick says of HMP Elmley. Photograph: Mark Harvey/Alamy

Guardian headline writers can answer for themselves, but Professor Baigent and Dr Osman (Letters, 24 November) are absolutely wrong to imply our inspection report into HMP Elmley that you reported on 12 November “over-hyped” the level of violence.

It is not possible to exactly assess levels of violence in a prison in the way they want because it depends both on what prisoners report and on what the prison itself records. Neither tells the full story. We come to our judgments based not just on the official data, but also on what prisoners themselves tell us and what we ourselves observe.

Your correspondents refer to just the summary of our report. If they read the report as a whole they would see that recorded incidents indicated that there were 60% more fights and assaults in April 2014 than there had been in April 2013 and that reflected a steadily rising trend. The number of serious incidents had increased sharply over the same period; incidents of concerted indiscipline had increased; incidents of self-harm and suicide had become more frequent; 92 prisoners had self-harmed in the six months before the inspection; and there had been five self-inflicted deaths since the previous inspection.

We compared that data with what prisoners told us. In a representative survey, 56% of prisoners told us they had felt unsafe at some time in the prison and 25% said they felt unsafe at the time of the inspection; 44% said they had been victimised by other prisoners. This compared with 39%, 14% and 23% respectively at the last inspection. When we spoke to prisoners and staff individually, they said the same. Inspectors witnessed vulnerable prisoners being harassed without staff intervention. I can assure you, for those on the receiving end, it certainly felt like an increase in the total amount of violence.

On the basis of that combined evidence, we concluded that “there was a rising level of violence and the number of serious incidents had increased sharply”. It was a sound judgment and the recommendations we made as a result need to be acted on.
Nick Hardwick
HM chief inspector of prisons

Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who worked at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary during the second world war. Photograph: Hulton Getty

“Geordies like to talk … allow at least 10 minutes just to buy a newspaper,” advises Harry Pearson (The UK’s best city: in praise of Newcastle upon Tyne, theguardian.com, 22 November). Wittgenstein worked as a lab assistant in Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary during the war. His Jesmond landlady said he was chatty in the morning, to the annoyance of the other lodgers, but morose in the evenings. From the poem “Geordie Henderson replies to the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein” (Mugs Rite, Bay Press, 1996), by the recently late poet, eccentric and bibliophile Mike Wilkin: “Div aa knaa oot more / aboot him? Fella, arl else / aa remember, is that / the only gala time / aa got im near a pint, / knaaing he was a Delphi / Oracle, aa askt him / if the Magpies would ever / climb back to the Shangri-La / of Division One. And he wrote / doon arl magisterially / on a raggy beer mat / (which is clagged-up / in wor netty yet!) / “Whereof one cannot spowt / Thereof one must say nowt.”
Joan Hewitt (@TurkishBathsNCL)
Tynemouth

Modi has his blind spots

Since Narendra Modi is one of the most powerful Indian prime ministers to have emerged in recent years, and with his visit to the UK in 2015 having just been announced, it was with a sense of incredulity that I read of his apparent belief in the scientific achievements of ancient Hindu peoples (7 November). Using Lord Ganesha’s elephant head as an early example of plastic surgery and Karma’s birth “outside his mother’s womb” as evidence of reproductive genetics are extraordinary enough, but as part of his speech to a gathering of doctors and other professionals it simply beggars belief. Beyond this, doesn’t it also imply that the gods of the Mahabharata were somehow the works of man?

This Hindu nationalist clearly has his blind spots, as is becoming more evident in his dangerous exclusion of Muslims from decision-making in government. We in the west should take care about becoming too close to Modi and the lucrative trade deals he so temptingly offers.
Lesley Hampshire
Shanklin, UK

What are the EU’s options?

Federica Mogherini, the EU’s new foreign policy chief, has expressed doubts about the effectiveness of economic and financial sanctions on Vladimir Putin’s behaviour (7 November). So then what are the EU’s options to counter Russia’s aggression against Ukraine?

A) Do nothing, be nice to Russia and hope that Putin comes to his senses;

B) Impose limited sanctions against individuals in Putin’s inner circle, and escalate them to companies and business sectors;

C) Supply Ukraine with lethal and non-lethal military aid to help Kiev beat back the terrorist thugs;

D) Send in Nato troops and air power.

Well, we know that option A had no effect on the Russian invasion of the Crimea; meanwhile Russia continues to support the Donbass rebels even though the EU has already made concessions to Russia on implementation of its accord with Ukraine. We also know that option D is basically a non-starter. And so if option B is not doing the job, that must mean, and one can only hope, that Mogherini is seriously considering option C.
Morris Ilyniak
Toronto, Canada

Building cyberpeace

If Nato is on frontline of cyberwar (7 November), who is building cyberpeace? The Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) – known for its unarmed mission in Ukraine – has almost twice as many member states as Nato, including both the US and Russia. For more than a year the OSCE has been developing cyber-security confidence-building measures to de-escalate cyber-conflicts. This contrasts with Nato’s new Enhanced Cyber-Defence Policy, which includes retaliatory action under the common defence principle.

Europeans should work toward a world where security is something that we all share, and not something we seek for ourselves at the expense of others.
Andrew Lane
Quaker Council for European Affairs
Brussels, Belgium

The age of loneliness

George Monbiot hits the nail on the head in his column Dehumanising people requires euphemism (31 October). Nineteen Eighty-Four has been absorbed into the fabric of our society with very few of us even noticing. Working in personnel consultancy in the late 1970s, a few of us were even then resisting the use of the term human resource management but it seems in vain.

Since then, the commodification of natural assets, including people, has continued apace. A further aspect is the use by the military of such terms as collateral damage to justify the accidental slaughter of innocent civilians in their inhumane quest to eliminate every potential enemy or latent threat with the use of disproportionate – and increasingly remotely controlled – weapons of personnel destruction. We are distanced from the consequences of our actions not simply by weasel language, but by robotics.

Newspeak is now the accepted official language of politicians, the military and business leaders alike. Margaret Thatcher infamously claimed that there is no such thing as society. Her followers have adopted the same mentality in their unspoken attempt to ensure that her pronouncement becomes truth. The media is complicit in its language, as well as its evident desire to bring about this very outcome.

What can we do to counter this progressive assault on common human values? I shall continue to heckle those who promote the devaluation of human culture and our natural inheritance, but however many of us do so, on its own this can scarcely be sufficient. It must become an essential component of our educational curriculum to question the use of demeaning and immoral language by our leaders.
Noel Bird
Boreen Point, Queensland, Australia

• George Monbiot writes that our present age of loneliness has left us bereft of love, and that “there is no such thing as society, only heroic individualism”. The word “heroic” is perhaps unfortunate; the term “selfish individualism” is perhaps a better fit, because the “great deed” of real heroes, says Joseph Campbell, is not to achieve money and fame, but to discover “unity in multiplicity and then to make it known”, thereby helping to amend what Monbiot calls our “social isolation”.
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada

• George Monbiot’s article about the social needs of humans is well taken. However, he clearly didn’t do well in biology class. Stating that we humans have a lot in common with bees when it comes to socialisation is really not a good analogy.

First off, not all bees are social; some live solitary lives, such as the carpenter bee, which is perfectly happy to bore holes in people’s porches and not be bothered with community activities. Moreover, honeybees, which live in hives, have a social order more like that of the Hindu caste system or the early Hawaiian kapu system: not, I think, what Monbiot had in mind for 21st‑century humans.

Otherwise, his article was a valuable discussion of what is missing in modern life: ie, a sense of community beyond ourselves and our families.
Leonard A Cohen
Northampton, Massachusetts, US

• George Monbiot is the new George Orwell. Just as Orwell slated the political hacks of his time for masking the inhumane acts of his time in cloudy euphemisms, so Monbiot fearlessly calls the corporate and military hierarchies of the world to task for reducing their underlings and victims to landfill by the use of inhuman abstractions. Strange how our commanders manage to see themselves as above and separate from the “biomass”. The mangling of language makes it easier to defend the indefensible.

Orwell was able to distance himself from “the squalid farce of leftwing politics” (his words) without ever aligning himself with the right, which has so enthusiastically, and for the most part ignorantly, taken him up as a mascot since his death. It is my hope that our George, having transcended the brutal standards of the class in which he was raised, does not fall into the double standards of the self-deluding left.
Frederick R Hill
Eschol Park, NSW, Australia

Briefly

• Oliver Burkeman’s column (14 November) on FOMO, or Fear of Missing Out, recalls what is said to be a national characteristic of Singaporeans: kiasu, or fear of losing (out). I have had students boasting of this rather negative trait, which has made Singapore tour groups in China and the antipodes very unpopular when it takes the form of piling buffet plates high with food, much of which is left unconsumed. Perhaps the promotion of Burkeman’s life-changing JOMO, or Joy of Missing Out, is the solution?
Alaisdair Raynham
Truro, UK

• The News in brief item on the Royal Mail recruiting for Christmas post (24 October) took me back to those days 50 years ago when it was the norm to have lads doing the rounds: trudge through snow and slush with the khaki shoulder bag, but the occasional perk, a tip and even a sherry on the doorstep. And our first-ever pay packet.
E Slack
L’Isle Jourdain, France

• The 10 million stateless people mentioned by the UN refugee agency (14 November) could be deemed citizens of the world and issued with a United Nations international passport. Possession of such a passport would give them automatic priority when emigrating and seeking residence in any nation.
Henry Collins
Cronulla, NSW, Australia

• In your 7 November issue, you state that The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) is “part of the UN”. As a former IOM staff member, I can confirm that it is not, and never has been, part of the UN system. For the record, it was founded specifically to carry out certain activities not open to UN bodies.
David Stieber
Coppet, Switzerland

Independent:

Times:

Sir, It is a sine qua non that we British resolve our disputes through combat (“Shocking cost of divorce for children”, Nov 24). Criminal matters may be best served by trial by jury but, as a family therapist and mediator, I submit that family law needs a major overhaul.

For most people the law is expensive, time-consuming and, crucially, damaging to children.

Couples who try mediation before they go to court find that it helps them to compromise, and to put the needs of their children over their own need to win. Those who don’t are often caught in a legal whirlpool with lawyers who believe that experts and evidence can persuade a judge that “who is right” can be adjudicated successfully. It is hardly surprising that children suffer collateral damage.

In court, I meet many lawyers who want to do what is right for families but I also see those who simply want to win — and who appear to have little idea of the impact their conduct and actions have upon children.

A debate is overdue. Let’s start with an investigation into the effect of divorce upon children in a range of other jurisdictions.
PRW Richardson
Welwyn Garden City, Herts

Sir, Your report mentions that the effect of divorce is of growing concern to schools. Aged 11, my form master approached me with “I hear you’ve had upsetting news at home, young sir. From what I know of you, you are manly enough to work through it. But if ever you need help, I’m here.” No more was said about it for the remaining seven years of our excellent relationship, apart from quizzical glances and reassuring nods and winks. Admittedly I have no alternative outcome against which to measure the benefit that I gained from this good man, but the conclusions of the survey commissioned by Resolution — having to report such negativity and alarm, connecting divorce so directly with bad behaviour and impaired education when decent human nature should be able to cope with the challenge — is a disappointing commentary.
Keith Robinson
Littlewick Green, Berks

Sir, Mental health clinicians can help families to recognise and minimise the effect on children, and they assisted many families from all parts of society until legal aid was removed for divorce. Now, we only help those who can afford to fund themselves. This study shows that the cost to children far outweighs the cost of providing legal aid for all.
Dr Judith Freedman
Consortium of Expert Witnesses to the Family Courts

Sir, The conclusions of the Resolution survey are based on answers to closed questions given by just 500 children, and not on large-scale demographic data. No inquiries I have made have turned up any conclusive data on the oft-made link between educational attainment and divorce. Laying the blame for society’s ills at the door of divorce is dangerous and retrogressive and small-scale surveys such as this, even if commissioned in good faith, may lead to further demonising of
one-parent families.
Dr Diane Bebbington
London SW19

Sir, It is sad that research is only now showing the impact that divorce has on children. My brother and I were permanently affected by the gruelling and acrimonious divorce of our parents in 1963. Our education suffered with poor exam results, our ability to trust was damaged and the course of our lives redirected. Divorce is a course of action that should be discouraged, never made easy.
Jennifer Latham
Wedmore, Somerset

Sir, Disputes between parents should be resolved swiftly to minimise the impact on everyone directly affected by a divorce. Court should be the last resort. Reforms introduced in April mean that both parties must attend a mediation intake assessment meeting before being able to issue court proceedings. Contact and residence orders have also been replaced with child arrangement orders; this change in terminology is designed to guide parents to think about their children rather than concerning themselves with unhelpful labels such as who has “residence”.
Stuart Ruff
Thomas Eggar LLP, Chichester

Sir, If John Betjeman would have approved of HS2’s termination at St Pancras (letter, Nov 24), then he would have bridled at Philip Hardwick’s monumental entrance to Euston being dubbed an “arch”.
Euston’s Greek Revival entrance was a Doric propylaeum.
Professor Emeritus A Peter Fawcett
Sheffield

Sir, You give EUOUAE (Scrabble leading article, Nov 24) as “a cry of Bacchic frenzy”. EUOUAE is not a word; it is an abbreviation, found in Gregorian chant books, and reduced to the salient vowels, of “saeculorum, Amen”, the last words of the doxology, “for ever and ever, Amen”. It indicates to the singer which psalm tone is being used.

I will now always think of pious religious communities in orgiastic frenzy under pretext of praising the Almighty.
Father David Sillince
Southampton

Sir, It seems that we patients must respect the status of doctors (“Chummy young doctors”, Nov 24), even those young enough to be our grandchildren, by refraining from addressing them by their first names. But what about the other way round?

For the past 20 years I have been called Kathryn, or luvvie or darling or sweetheart, or whatever takes their fancy. It’s unacceptable — but it is a losing battle. My health, however, would be improved by old-fashioned respect.
Kathryn Dobson
Liverpool

Sir, My late husband, a surgeon, liked to quote, “Never make friends of your patients or patients of your friends”.
Elan Griffith
Newport

Sir, Mr Hatton (letter, Nov 25) seems a little hard on his doctor. Our doctors here in Fressingfield are quite decent chaps.
Peter Demetriadi
Wingfield, Suffolk

Sir, Alastair Lack’s assertion (letter, Nov 21) that avoidable post-operative complications are the fault of nursing staff is puzzling. Surely a surgeon does not absolve responsibility of the patient once the “last stitch is in”. As a registered nurse, I feel that his statement is a disservice to the individuals in health teams (including physios, nurses and, yes, doctors), who strive so diligently to ensure that their patients recover safely.
Victoria Burch
Kings Newton, Derbyshire

Sir, Mick Hume (Thunderer, Nov 24) stayed just shy of explicitly endorsing Ched Evans being allowed to train with Sheffield United after his release from prison for rape. But his condemnation of the media’s “obsession” with “what footballing folk say” is an attempt to diminish a serious issue.

It is not a sign of “obsession” when a furore erupts over a person in a position of power who says or does something despicable; nor is it “ridiculous” when the chairman of Wigan Athletic is threatened with being “hounded out” for allegedly using antisemitic language.

Most importantly, however, these incidents are not a result of “attempting to dribble through moral minefields”. We have every right to expect human decency from those who have immense financial and cultural power.
Eleanor Cassidy
London W4

Telegraph:

Letters: Boris should take a leaf out of Amsterdam’s book

Learning from Amsterdam’s drugs policies; living beyond our means; sexism in the police force; and getting fed up of EU rules and regulations

Gone to pot: a 17th-century Chinese meerschaum hashish pipe in a Dutch collection

Gone to pot: a 17th-century Chinese meerschaum hashish pipe in a Dutch collection Photo: Jeff Rotman / Alamy

7:00AM GMT 25 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – Boris Johnson recently dismissed the “progressive” approach to drugs by countries such as the Netherlands as outdated. He said parts of Amsterdam city centre are “sleazy”, and went on to praise the war on drugs that conservatives have been waging in Britain and America.

First, the sleaziness he is referring to is overwhelmingly caused by groups of drunken English bachelor parties dressed up in mankinis in the red light district.

Secondly, the war on drugs, of which Mr Johnson is so proud, has led to wide racial disparities in arrests, prosecutions, sentencing and deaths. Black Americans are sent to state prisons for drug offences 13 times more often than other races, even though they only comprise 13 per cent of regular drug users.

The drugs war in Britain has cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of pounds, with no effect on the level of drug use. Most Brits believe the decades-long campaign by law enforcement agencies against the global narcotics trade can never be won. Nick Clegg has publicly said it is “unwinnable”.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, recently came under fire for trying to bury two critical drug reports in which scientists concluded that British politicians can learn from experiences and policies in countries such as the Netherlands.

Amsterdam has always been a bastion of tolerance and freedom, with room for everyone to be whoever they want to be. There are some rough edges here and there, but that is not something Amsterdam is ashamed of. I would rather live in a city with this reputation than one known for its increasing disparity between rich and poor.

Coen Pustjens
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

It’s not just immigration that is the threat, but Britain’s rising annual deficit

SIR – Debate continues on immigration, the health service, education and welfare, but no one in a position of influence seems to have quite pulled it all together yet.

The fact is that even after four years of Coalition government “austerity”, we are this year spending about £100,000,000,000 more than we earn. If my helpful letter from HM Revenue and Customs is to be believed, we are spending it mostly on health, education and welfare, the very services whose costs relate in large measure to the numbers of people using them. In other words, even those of us paying our full whack of direct and indirect taxes are, by providing these services, living beyond our means. And the cost of these services continues to rise. Of course it does as, under our present polity, our population inexorably increases.

So it matters not if new arrivals pay their taxes, are “hard working” or willing to take on jobs that others already here won’t do, because their numbers alone make our existing problems more acute. This is not necessarily an argument for turning off the immigration tap, but it is one for looking at the problem in its entirety.

We cannot go on spending, taxing and increasing our numbers at the levels we do. The political party (or coalition) that grasps this nettle and tells the electorate in coherent terms what it wants to do about it and then gets on and does it, would at least have earned a cross on the ballot paper.

Stephen Wikner
Pinner, Middlesex

SIR – Michael Howard made immigration one of the key planks of the Conservatives’ 2005 general election campaign. They lost.

Hugh Payne
Hitchin, Hertfordshire

SIR – The disillusionment with our present system of government, manifested by the increasing popularity of Ukip, is not difficult to explain.

Over the past 20 years our politicians have failed to regulate the banks, which is the primary cause of our present financial difficulties.

They failed to control immigration, to the extent that many of our cities have changed out of all recognition.

They led us into a disastrous war in Iraq, on false premises.

They failed to maintain our power-generation, so that we now have to import electricity from other countries.

They dumbed down our education system, so that we no longer produce enough young people with appropriate qualifications for our modern industries.

They failed to build enough houses to accommodate our growing population.

They led us into ever-closer union with Europe, without consultation.

Is it a surprise that ordinary people are looking for a change?

John Russ
Ware, Hertfordshire

SIR – David Cameron is determined. Determined to win back the Rochester and Strood constituency; determined to claw back sovereign powers from Brussels; determined to deal with immigration.

It’s a pity that he cannot convert that determination into concrete results.

Sandy Pratt
Dormansland, Surrey

SIR – In March 1962, as a young reporter, I stood inside the Orpington council chamber some time after midnight and heard the Liberal by-election victor Eric Lubbock cry: “If we can win here, we can win anywhere!” This might sound familiar to Nigel Farage.

The now Lord Avebury lost the seat in 1970. It has remained Tory ever since.

Peter Willoughby
Tonbridge, Kent

SIR – The last time I pulled up at the traffic lights next to a white van the driver was listening to Allegri’s Miserere.

Anne Weizmann
Caversham, Berkshire

Uneven airport tax

SIR – English airports make valuable contributions to the regions we serve, providing connections for local economies, supporting jobs, driving inward investment and promoting inbound tourism.

Continued calls for devolving the rate of Air Passenger Duty to both Scotland and Wales risk distorting the UK-wide level playing field on which we currently operate. This would jeopardise up to £1.2 billion in output and more than 2,500 jobs in the North East and South West of England alone over the next decade, according to economic impact assessments carried out by the air transport consultants, York Aviation.

David Cameron, the morning after the Scottish referendum, stated a wish for a settlement “fair to people in Scotland and, importantly, to everyone in England, Wales and Northern Ireland as well”.

Advocates for devolving Air Passenger Duty who point to economic benefits do not mention that these would come at the expense of neighbouring English regions.

We urge all parties to rule out the devolution of Air Passenger Duty. It is a tax that should be reformed UK-wide.

Paul Kehoe
CEO, Birmingham Airport

Robert Sinclair
CEO, Bristol Airport

David Laws
CEO, Newcastle International Airport

Papal plot

SIR – Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor would like to dispel any misunderstanding arising from Austen Ivereigh’s book on Pope Francis. He would like to make it clear that no approach to the then Cardinal Bergoglio in the days before the Conclave was made by him or, as far as he knows, by any other cardinal to seek his assent to becoming a candidate for the papacy.

What occurred during the Conclave, which did not include Cardinal Murphy-O’Connor because he was over 80, is bound by secrecy.

Maggie Doherty
Press Secretary to Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor
London SW1

Police confessions

_{Ken German recalled life as a bobby in Confessions of a Copper. Photo: Channel 4}

SIR – Tom Rowley wondered what the interviewees would make of Channel 4’s “one-sided” Confessions of a Copper. I took part in what I believed to be a documentary on social change in the police. I am proud of serving for 32 years in the Bedfordshire police force. In my interview I described many positive aspects of the integration of women officers, but this was edited out.

Police in the Seventies were indeed sexist and racist, but that reflected British society. After two high-profile cases, they made efforts to change. I was responsible for training my force in community and race relations. Most were professional enough to accept the need for change, even if they objected to being branded as racists.

The old-time coppers featured in this programme were not representative of the honest, hard-working ones I served with.

Carole Phillips
Retired Police Superintendent
Newton Abbot, Devon

Benefits of volunteering

SIR – Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, is right to encourage volunteering. Giving time to our communities not only helps others, it also enriches and expands the life of the volunteer, increasing productivity, health and wellbeing.

I see volunteering as part of the work of the City of London. Giving something back keeps us mindful that we are all part of the same community and that every City person needs to be a citizen.

Alan Yarrow
Lord Mayor, City of London
London EC4

Give Gandhi a statue, despite Indian partition

SIR – Damien McCrystal argues that Gandhi’s insensitivity to Muslims led to India’s partition.

Muslims have done far better in Hindu-dominated, secular India than any non-Muslim minority has in Muslim-dominated Pakistan. Muslims have led India’s armed forces, been the chief justice of the Supreme Court and excelled as artists and film stars. India has had two Muslim presidents since independence in 1947.

Arvind Singh
Glasgow

SIR – The statue of Gandhi in Tavistock Square is perfectly good. Parliament Square is getting rather crowded.

Jeremy M J Havard
London SW3

SIR – What is our world coming to if we cannot celebrate a man who demonstrated the power of peaceful protest on the grounds that it might provoke terrorists?

Alan Shaw
Halifax, West Yorkshire

Slice of life

SIR – My wife asked the Waitrose bakery section to slice her seeded loaf. This is no longer allowed because of the risk to those with food allergies.

Dr Paul Turnbull

Alverstoke, Hampshire

Iron hand in glove

_{Beware of the Marigold. Photo: Alamy}

SIR – Brussels wants to interfere with our rubber gloves (report, November 24). I am unaware of injuries caused by Marigolds.

During the German occupation of Guernsey it was verboten to cycle two abreast. There is something very weird about the European pysche.

Lady Coward
Torpoint, Cornwall

Princely formula

SIR – Prince Harry addresses the racing driver Lewis Hamilton as “mate”.

How should Mr Hamilton reply?

Professor Ged Martin
Youghal, Co Cork, Ireland

Irish Times:

Sir, – Frequently on top of Carrauntoohil I pondered on its cross. I assume those who erected it were honouring God, but were, ironically, altering the mountain they believed God created.

It was not a pretty cross but it was iconic.

Knocking it was an act of absolute vandalism, an extreme form of censorship and an affront to the efforts and beliefs of those who – with good intention – erected it.

When I next stand beside it – re-erected – I will be happy to see it as a noble symbol, standing against an extreme absolutism. How ironic is that? – Yours, etc, GERRY CHRISTIE, Tralee, Co Kerry. A dhuine usail, – Would Colm O’Brien (Letters, November 25th) be intolerant of structures on the Rock of Cashel or Croagh Patrick too, or even Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro? – Is Mise, BARRY O’CONNOR, Cannonstown, Newbridge, Co Kildare.

Sir, – Dr Eilís Ward and Dr Gillian Wylie boldly state in their letter (Letters, November 25th) that “the Swedish model doesn’t work” and as evidence say that there are still indications of some trafficking in Sweden.

There may well be some truth in that but there are plenty of other sources that show that Swedish laws have made a significant difference to reducing both trafficking and prostitution in that country.

Writing in the New Statesman in the past week, Rachel Moran reports that comparative official figures between Denmark and Sweden show much higher rates of both in Denmark.

Some will argue that just because the Swedish model does not solve all problems it should not be implemented. The alternative is to maintain the status quo.

The German magazine Der Spiegel reported last year that there are about 400,000 women involved in prostitution in Germany but only 44 of them are officially registered with the authorities, as German law allows.

To base a law on the minority “who don’t see themselves as victims”, is to leave the vast majority exposed to exploitation. Germany’s laws are, as Der Spiegel pointed out, are now being viewed as a pimp’s charter.

The Swedish model is not perfect but it is far and away the best proposal on offer. – Yours, etc, KIERAN McGRATH, Child Welfare Consultant, Kilmainham, Dublin 8

A chara, – Kathy Sheridan’s article (“Telling the grim truth about prostitution”, Opinion & Analysis, November 19th) was a welcome contribution to the ongoing debate about the situation of prostitution in Ireland, a discussion which has regrettably been dominated by distorted representations of the reality.

Ms Sheridan highlights certain myths which are central to the pro-sex work argument, including the “boys will be boys” justification, and the question of women freely choosing to enter prostitution.

These myths are perpetuated within an overall framework of denial.

We are in denial about the pervasiveness of patriarchy and its impact on our society. We are in denial about the clear links between gender inequality, the relentless commodification of female sexuality in our culture, and the demand for commercial sex; we are also in denial about the exploitative nature of prostitution which supplies this demand.

Prostitution is a symptom of gender inequality in this country, with women from economically-marginalised backgrounds making up the majority of those who are affected.

It is no coincidence that the Nordic countries are consistently ranked among the most equal societies in the world in terms of gender.

It is essential that we understand prostitution in the wider context of gender attitudes in our country, and challenge the denial that perpetuates the “happy hooker” image that pro-sex work advocates would have us believe is the norm; in reality, it simply doesn’t come close to the grim truth about prostitution. – Yours, etc, RUTH KILCULLEN, APT (Act to Prevent Trafficking), St Mary’s, Bloomfield Avenue, Dublin 4.

A chara, – While John A Murphy’s contribution (Letters, November 24th) to the discussion on how best to commemorate the centenary of 1916 is welcome, it seems he is rather missing the point.

Yes, Pádraig Mac Piarais did use the English version of his name when signing the proclamation as did four of the other six signatories, and yes, it is also true that no Irish language version of the proclamation was issued during the Rising.

Conradh na Gaeilge’s criticism of the lack of recognition for Irish in the Government’s plans for the centenary is, however, based on the well-documented interest many of the leaders in 1916 showed in our national language prior to the Rising.

The role Irish and Conradh na Gaeilge played in motivating them to ask questions about the condition of Ireland, better understand our heritage, imagine the Ireland they wanted to construct for the future, and in giving them the confidence to think outside the colonial box has often been the subject of academic debate, and will hopefully be the subject of much public discussion in the run up to the centenary.

We will certainly be doing our utmost to stimulate this discussion, and trust the Government will grant our language the central role in the commemorations it undoubtedly deserves. – Is mise, CÓILÍN Ó CEARBHAILL, Uachtaráin, Conradh na Gaeilge, 6 Sráid Fhearchair, Baile Átha Cliath 2.

Wed, Nov 26, 2014, 01:06

First published: Wed, Nov 26, 2014, 01:06

A chara, – You published two thought-provoking articles relating to violence in Ireland. Jennifer O’Connell (“Bill Cosby story highlights troubling societal attitudes to consent,” November 24th) wrote about the issue of rape and consent; Úna Mullally wrote about men as hidden victims of violence (Opinion, November 24th).

Census 2011 reported that in 2008, 81.8 per cent of homicide victims were men; 79.9 per cent of serious assault victims were men; 88.1 per cent sexual assault victims were women.

The UN estimates that deaths resulting from intentional homicide amounted to a total of 437,000 in 2012. Every one of these crimes is abhorrent.

On the same day, another story, too late for your print edition, sounds a jarring note for me: Katie Taylor’s fifth world boxing title.

All the reaction I have heard so far is universal acclaim. It is generally seen, it seems by most, as an outstanding achievement. What I say will be, I am sure, an unpopular minority view, but I know I am not alone, and it should have some voice.

The idea of two human beings, men or women, physically beating one another for sport – I find this abhorrent. Yes, they undertake it voluntarily, but I still find it abhorrent.

The fact that the participants wear protective gear and that the referee can intervene alleviates harmful results, but it does not change the essential picture.

People may say that it is not the intention to inflict harm; but then I hear a commentator on radio speak admiringly of a blow to the head given by Katie Taylor to Yana Allekseevna in the third round. It is perhaps the nearest thing we have today to the gladiatorial contests of the past.

We may admire the skill and prowess and dedication of Katie Taylor, but it is misdirected.

President Michael D Higgins offered his congratulations: “All of us are so proud of her.” Not all.

I realise many will see my opinion as ungracious, but I hope for the day when all such “sports” are found unacceptable, although it probably will not happen in my lifetime. Amid all the acclaim for Katie Taylor’s achievement, perhaps you would also allow some space for whatever minority of your readers who may wish to have a contrary opinion expressed. – Is mise, etc, PÁDRAIG McCARTHY, Sandyford, Dublin 16.

Sir, – I concur with the remarks of Mr McQuaid’s letter in yesterday’s Irish Times. I have just ceased my friends’ membership of Wexford Fetival Opera after 37 years.

My memories of the 100-plus performances attended in the old and more recently in the new opera house are most positive.

However, while it is beautifully appointed, giving the Wexford Opera House national status is rather fanciful. There are opera houses throughout Italy in rural areas such as Pesaro which host summer festivals most successfully and with seating capacity even more than Wexford, but the prime opera houses are in Rome and Milan.

We are the only capital in Europe not to have an opera house. We promote this country on the world stage as on a par with others regarding financial services and conference centres so why not an opera house? Minister for Arts Heather Humphreys, please note. – Yours, etc. ANN McLOUGHLIN, Nutley Avenue, Dublin 4.

Sir, – The Government has just promised that high-speed broadband is to be made available to every house in the country. People don’t believe these ridiculously optimistic proclamations any more.

I was in the midlands last Saturday and couldn’t get a good signal on my radio to listen to the Ireland v Australia rugby match! We’ve a bit to do before any promises about broadband will be believed. – Yours, etc,

BRIAN CULLEN,

Rathfarnham,

Dublin 16.

Sir, – Surely, the most equitable way for mortgages to be approved is on the basis of affordability not some random deposit figure (Letters, November 25th). For example, is it okay if someone borrows the 20 per cent deposit as a personal loan or gets it from a friend. Is it equitable if their parents can just give them the deposit? Does that make them more financially responsible than someone who lives within their means and is applying for a mortgage within their salary range but can’t afford to save a 20 per cent deposit, while meeting all the other costs of modern life in Ireland?

Isn’t the better way to cool down the housing market, not by stamping out demand with artificial deposit ranges from a bygone era that makes no sense in the current market, but to approve loans on a case-by-case basis according to what the customer can afford.

Perhaps Prof Drudy should have a chat with his children or grandchildren and compare and contrast their financial reality now with his financial reality when he was their age. Things have changed. It’s long since time that the rules for mortgage lending should be set by the generation who are actually applying for and paying mortgages. – Yours, etc,

DESMOND FITZGERALD,

Canary Wharf,

London.

Irish Independent:

For many, the water charges seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But everyone has their own epiphany. A point is reached when you just realise that enough is enough and that you have to do or say something.

I reached this point last Monday when I was charged €100 by Galway Co Council for a letter stating that the road outside my property was in its charge.

I queried this fee that same day and asked to speak to a supervisor. No one was available so I asked for an email address. I duly emailed the person asking for a justification for this exorbitant charge. I have not received a reply. This was the final straw for me.

During the previous week I had read Donna Hartnett’s letter in the Irish Independent and I cried because I was relieved that I wasn’t the only person feeling as she did. Then I read about the expenses our TDs are claiming. How can our politicians justify the immorality of claiming up to and above €200,000 in expenses?

Donna Hartnett spoke about the squeezed middle, the people who have to pay for everything, the people who are assumed to be well off because they have jobs. These are the people who are keeping this country going, the people who have to find €50-€60 to pay the GP when a child is sick. These are the people who work so hard that they are miserable and their children are miserable. We don’t complain because it is not in us to complain.

We don’t live in a Third World country, we are the privileged. But injustice is injustice no matter what part of the world you live in, and Irish society has become very unjust. The gap between rich and poor seems to be getting wider.

This is why I would encourage people to go out and protest on December 10. Water charges may not be the biggest issue for you but if you feel that an injustice is being done to you, your family, your neighbours or your friends, get out there and let your voice be heard.

There are still many issues out there that have not gone away. There are still children with special needs who are not getting the therapies they need because of cutbacks, or because staff are not replaced when they go on maternity leave. Just ask anyone who works for or is a client of the Brothers of Charity services or other service providers.

Protest about the issues you feel are important. Demand that our politicians be accountable, demand that our county councils be accountable to and respectful of the people they serve.

And we don’t need Paul Murphy or any ‘professional’ protesters telling us how we should protest. We are tired of being treated like submissive fools. Politicians, dismiss us at your peril!

Mary O’Donovan

Ballymoe, Co Galway

Socialists’ utopia is a pipe dream

With the rise to prominence of the Socialist Party’s Paul Murphy, an anti-water charges TD, it is worth a visit to his party’s website.

Alongside their ideological rhetoric there are mawkish historical articles, one of which refers to Vladimir Lenin’s Russia as “the most democratic form of government ever embarked on”.

However, the reality for Russian peasants was that after Lenin’s revolution came a prolonged epoch of famine and poverty.

Hard-left politicians have gained a newfound popularity, which is partly due to us being led by a detached Government that is out of touch with public sentiment.

The Socialist Party, has, by concentrating all its efforts on the single issue of water charges, propelled itself to the centre stage of a campaign that mobilised an austerity-weary citizenry.

The populist policies of the hard-left create a fanciful image of a utopian society but they are hardly the basis for a sustainable economic future. Those who may consider switching their allegiances to the hard left should familiarise themselves with the historical failures of Marxist ideology.

History has shown that nowhere in the world has there ever existed a utopian Marxist society – simply put, economic policies that stifle private enterprise and individual creativity have ruinous consequences.

John Bellew

Dunleer, Co Louth

Immigrants just want equality

I am just a normal person living a normal life in this country. I was in Ireland for college and now I’m working here. I always thought Irish people have this great tradition of hospitality and generosity. But I’m afraid I can’t say that anymore.

I don’t know whether you walk or drive pass Burgh Quay every morning. But thousands of people do, and I recommend that you try it some time. There is a great view out there, hundreds of people waiting outside the Irish Naturalisation & Immigration Service (INIS) office, waiting for their visas. Or should I rephrase that – hundreds of foreigners. The freaking queue runs for three blocks. Excuse my language, but I can’t accept the truth.

We are just people who want to go home this Christmas. We’re just people who want to meet our family. And we are just people who have been standing outside the INIS office since 3:30am, in this cold weather, in the rain!

I certainly cannot believe this is how you treat foreigners in this country, and I certainly could not believe I was being treated in this way.

I work hard and I pay my tax. I paid nearly €30,000 every year when I was in college in Ireland, and now I am being treated like a refugee. No, worse – refugees don’t need to pay for the service, but we do.

I don’t know whether Irish people feel shame when they see this as they walk by. I don’t know whether other foreign investors or businessmen feel depressed seeing this when they drive by.

But I know I feel terrible standing out there on the street.

We don’t expect more than anyone else, we just want to be treated equally.

Tianqi Guo

Address with Editor

Marginalising women is unfair

Desmond FitzGerald tells us that having more women in the political system would not be “any different” to the present situation in which nearly 90pc of politicians are male (Letters, Irish Independent, November 25).

In this democracy, which is supposed to be representative, the fact that more than 50pc of the electorate are female and yet since independence women have had a representation in the Oireachtas in single figures in percentage terms says it all.

The reason why we should have more women in the most important decision-making forums in our democracy is not, as Mr FitzGerald implies, that they are better.

The reason is that marginalising the talents, interests and perspectives of the half of the electorate that are women is inefficient and unfair.

A Leavy

Sutton, Dublin

Don’t protest, just get on with it

The silent majority in this country are too busy getting on with their lives to protest. There are still enough driven people in this country for whom rising taxes is just an incentive to work even harder. We are still a very wealthy country.

JP McCarthy

Annascaul, Co Kerry

Water meters: get the facts right

Would politicians and journalists, including those on RTE s ‘This Week’, please get clued up on the meaning of:

(a) estimate cost

(b) budget cost

(d) contract price

They need to do this to avoid making further idiotic and erroneous comments on the projected cost of the installation of the water meters.

Martin Glynn

Dublin

Irish Independent

27 November 2014 Better
I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to do the housework.
Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down rabbit for tea and her tummy pain is still there.

Obituary:

Frankie Fraser – obituary
Frankie Fraser was a south London gangster who knew no language but violence and spent half his life behind bars

Frankie Fraser at Repton Boxing Club in 2005 Photo: REX FEATURES
7:40PM GMT 26 Nov 2014
Comments
Frankie Fraser, who has died aged 90, was a notorious torturer and hitman for the Richardson gang of south London criminals in the 1960s; he spent 42 years behind bars before achieving a certain cult status in later life as an author, after-dinner speaker, television pundit and tour guide.
His enduring nickname “Mad Frank” derived from his violent temperament which caused him to attempt to hang the governor of Wandsworth prison (and the governor’s dog) from a tree, and to be certified insane on three separate occasions.
At least two home secretaries considered Fraser the most dangerous man in Britain, an image which, in old age, he only half-heartedly sought to dispel. Although he was never convicted of murder, police reportedly held him responsible for 40 killings, but the bluster and bravado of a media-savvy gangland relic almost certainly inflated this tally, the actual scale of which remains unfathomable.
Physically slight at only 5ft 4in, and invariably wearing a smile and – in retirement – a sharp Savile Row suit, Frankie Fraser was nevertheless a ferocious and brutal hatchet man. His gangster “boss” Charles Richardson remembered him as “one of the most polite, mild-mannered men I’ve met but he has a bad temper on him sometimes”. Tony Lambrianou, a one-time henchman of the rival Kray brothers, was also a fan. Fraser, he recalled, “was more than capable of doing what he threatened”.
What Fraser invariably threatened was violence. Indeed, his criminality was closely bound up with what one criminologist described as an overt – almost Samurai – vindication of violent action in pursuit of inverted honour. He shot, slashed, stabbed and axed. An early nickname –“Razor Fraser” – reflected his penchant for “shivving” his enemies’ faces with a cut-throat blade.
An unregenerate villain of the deepest dye, Fraser satisfied the public appetite for vicarious thrill-seeking with a series of self-exculpatory memoirs in the 1990s that launched him on a twilight career as a celebrity criminal. But his greatest moment of national notoriety came a quarter of a century earlier, during what the media billed as the Torture Trial (in fact a series of trials) in 1967 that became one of the longest in British criminal history.
The two Richardson brothers were convicted, and the elder, Charles, sentenced to 25 years. Fraser, tried separately, was jailed for 10.
Charles Richardson was a criminal businessman who reputedly specialised in various tortures administered at secret “courts” at which he presided, sometimes robed like a judge, a knife or a gun to hand. Those who had incurred Richardson’s displeasure were wired up to a sinister black box with a wind-up handle that administered severe electric shocks to the genitals. Then they were turned over to Fraser.
So it was in January 1965, when a club owner called Benny Coulston was hauled before Richardson for swindling him out of £600 over a consignment of cigarettes. The Old Bailey jury heard, in grisly detail that still resonates 50 years on, how Frankie Fraser tried to pull Coulston’s teeth out one by one with a pair of pliers.
Shortly afterwards, Fraser kidnapped Eric Mason, a Kray gang member, outside the Astor Club in Berkeley Square, with even direr consequences. When Mason demurred, Fraser buried a hatchet in his skull, pinning his hand to his head. Mason was found, barely alive, wearing only his underpants and wrapped in a blanket, on the steps of the London Hospital in Whitechapel. “Eric wasn’t a bad fellow,” Fraser later explained, “but that particular night he was bang out of order.”
Fraser spent practically half his life behind bars. He was moved from prison to prison more than 100 times because he was virtually impossible to control. In 1945, when he was 21, he assaulted the governor at Shrewsbury prison with an ebony ruler snatched from the governor’s desk, for which he received 18 strokes of the “cat”.
On the morning of Derek Bentley’s execution at Wandsworth in 1953, he spat at the executioner Albert Pierrepoint and tried to attack him. Fraser spent a lot of time in solitary confinement, tormented by prison officers who would spit in his food. Because of Fraser’s behaviour in jail over the years, he forfeited almost every day of his remission.
He saw himself as an innovator, claiming to have invented the “Friday gang”, robbing wages clerks carrying money from banks; he would use a starting handle to beat his victims and to deter any watching “have-a-go heroes” in the street. He also claimed to have been the first bandit to wear a stocking mask. He was so attired when, in 1951, he attacked the governor of Wandsworth prison, William Lawton, as he walked his pet terrier on Wandsworth Common.
Fraser considered that Lawton had meted out cruel and vindictive punishment to him at Pentonville in 1948, and to avenge himself Fraser assumed the role of hangman. “I just waited, caught up with him, knocked him about and strung him up with his dog,” Fraser remembered. “What saved him I think was the branch; it was supple and it bent.” Although Lawton survived, the dog died.
Francis Davidson Fraser was born on December 13 1923 in Cornwall Road, a slum area of south London on the site of what is now the Royal Festival Hall. The youngest of five children, he grew up in poverty in the Elephant and Castle and Borough, areas teeming with moneylenders, prostitutes and backstreet abortionists. There was American Indian blood in him; his grandfather had emigrated to Canada in the late 19th century and married a full-blooded American Indian woman.
His parents were honest and hard-working, but Frankie and his big sister Eva, to whom he was closest, soon turned to crime. When he was 10, the pair stole a cigarette machine from a local pub, hauled it to some waste ground and jemmied it open. As a young woman, Eva became an accomplished hoister (shoplifter).
Young Frankie attended local schools, captained the football team, and acted as bookie’s runner to one of the teachers. As a reward, he was shown his examination answers, “and that’s how I come top”, he later boasted.
Fraser was just 13 when he was sent to an approved school for stealing 40 cigarettes. While still a teenager, in the spring of 1943, he took part in a daring raid to free an Army deserter from a squad sent to collect him from Wandsworth Prison. Two people were left dead.
He built a reputation as an enforcer and strongman for various gang leaders, including Billy Hill, self-styled “King of Britain’s Underworld” in the 1940s and 1950s and, in the 1960s, the Richardson brothers. At the same time Fraser was concerned to protect his West End “business interests”, chiefly the installation and operation (on an exclusive basis) in the clubs of Soho of one-armed bandits, or fruit machines, then growing in popularity. Fraser’s partner in this endeavour was Bobby Warren, an uncle of the boxing promoter Frank Warren.
Fraser owed his success in the fruit machine business to Billy Hill, whose patronage Fraser courted when he attacked and almost killed Hill’s gangland rival Jack “Spot” Comer. But Hill was already an admirer: a picture taken at a party to launch Hill’s ghosted autobiography in 1955 shows Fraser draped artistically over a piano.

Jack ‘Spot’ Comer showing the scar on his face left by Frankie Fraser and Alf Warren (GETTY)
By 1956, Fraser had racked up 15 convictions and had twice been certified insane. Despite this, or possibly because of it, newspapers of the day were tipping him as Spot’s natural successor. With Warren at his heels, Fraser ambushed Spot in a Paddington street, knocking him to the ground with a shillelagh. Both Fraser and Warren received seven-year sentences. “It sounds like the worst days of Prohibition in Chicago rather than London in 1956,” complained Mr Justice Donovan, but words were wasted on Fraser. “Nothing ever got to Frankie,” wrote Charlie Richardson. “He was a rock.”
On his release, Fraser joined Richardson’s brother Eddie in a company called Atlantic Machines, installing fruit machines at some of Soho’s most profitable sites, with Sir Noel Dryden recruited as the respectable frontman. A machine costing £400 could quickly recoup its cost if well-sited, and Fraser’s company offered club owners 40 per cent of the take rather than the standard 35 per cent as an inducement to install their machines. Fraser had no problem dealing with rival operators whose business was dented as a result.
In August 1963, invited to take part in the Great Train Robbery, Fraser pulled out because he was on the run from the police.
On the night of March 7 1966 Fraser and Eddie Richardson were badly hurt in a brawl at Mr Smith’s club in Catford, the incident that broke the Richardson family’s grip on south London. Fraser was seen kicking Richard Hart, a Kray associate, as he lay on the pavement outside. When the police arrived, they found Hart lying under a lilac tree in a nearby garden. He had been shot in the face.
Hart’s killing was avenged within 24 hours when Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell, the Richardsons’ chief lieutenant, at the Blind Beggar pub deep in Kray territory on the Mile End Road, using a 9mm Mauser semi-automatic pistol at point-blank range.
Frankie Fraser was tried at the Old Bailey for Hart’s murder, while six others, including Eddie Richardson, faced lesser charges. The judge, Mr Justice Griffith-Jones, complained of attempts to nobble one of the jurors, but in the case of Fraser, who was tried separately, he directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty. There was no evidence that Fraser had fired the fatal shots, and although he claimed to have been “fitted up” for the killing, he was convicted of affray and sentenced to five years’ imprisonment. He was still serving his sentence for the Catford affray when he was handed a further 10 years for his part in the Richardson torture case.
In 1969 Fraser led the Parkhurst prison riot on the Isle of Wight and found himself back in court charged with incitement to murder. Although he was acquitted, a further five years were added to his sentence. Fraser was defended by a young solicitor called James Morton, who later became an author and wrote a history of London’s gangland in 1992.

Fraser in 1997 with his then girlfriend Marilyn Wisbey, daughter Of Great Train Robber Tom Wisbey (REX FEATURES)
The book upset some of those mentioned in it, and Morton was dismayed to arrive home one evening to find a message from Fraser on his answering machine, demanding to speak to him urgently. Morton was relieved that, rather than remonstrating, Fraser wanted him to write his life story. Mad Frank: Memoirs of a Life of Crime appeared in 1994, with two further volumes following in 1998 and 2001.
These recollections, while often disordered and jumbled, nevertheless shed light on Fraser’s shameless and unrepentant defiance of the liberal consensus. He appeared on pop records and in television documentaries, toured his one-man show of criminal reminiscences (flexing a pair of gilded pliers), and found himself invited into bookshops to sign copies of his memoirs. He regularly led conducted tours of East End crime scenes, invariably ending up in the Blind Beggar pub where Ronnie Kray shot George Cornell dead.
Fraser treated his various brushes with death as an occupational hazard: his thigh bone was shattered by a bullet fired during the melee in Catford, and part of his mouth was shot away in an incident in May 1991 when someone botched an attempt to assassinate him outside a nightclub in Farringdon. Questioned by police, Fraser reportedly gave his name as Tutankhamen (gangland slang for “shtum”) and asked “What incident?”

Fraser in 2009 (REX)
In the summer of 2013 it emerged that, at the age of 89, Fraser had been served with an Antisocial Behaviour Order (Asbo) after another “incident”, this time at his care home in Peckham, south London.
He claimed to have no regrets about his criminal life, apart from being caught. “Because of the type of person I am,” he wrote, “in the life I led, you learn to shrug off adversity better than people who’ve worked hard all their lives.”
Frankie Fraser’s wife Doreen, with whom he had four sons, died in 1999. For a time he was engaged to Marilyn Wisbey, daughter of the Great Train Robber Tommy Wisbey, with whom he briefly ran a massage parlour in Islington, in which Fraser made the tea.
Frankie Fraser, born December 13 1923, died November 26 2014

Guardian:

Theresa May speaks at the Royal United Services Institute in London on 24 November 2014, when she announced a new counter-terrorism bill to provide security services further powers to deal with threats to national security. Photograph: Will Oliver/EPA
You are wrong to say that plans to block Britons from returning to the UK raise no issue of principle (Editorial, 25 November). What could be more fundamental to British citizenship than the right to be in the UK? The state has the power to arrest, charge and imprison British people for crimes. Passports can be withheld. But the right to come home – even if only to face justice – is sacred. Exile is the shameful tool of our colonialist past. Parliament has no power to enact it without the express, deliberate, consent of the British people.
Simon Cox
Migration lawyer, Open Society Justice Initiative
• David Cameron and Malcolm Rifkind lazily scapegoat Facebook over the activities of Lee Rigby’s killers (Report, 26 November). Probably less well known is the unbroadcast footage of the men at numerous peaceful anti-war protests. Given the media has spent a decade and a half denying a voice to protesters and even the basic existence of these events, and a generation of elected political representatives has refused to recognise the strength of anti-war feeling, perhaps we should not be surprised if a minority of people have turned to violence?
Instead of learning from this, Britain’s political elite thinks that yet more repression is the answer. Muslim reprisals were predictable from the entire history of British colonialism. Even the head of MI5 warned of inevitable retaliations, but now establishment politicians are blaming internet companies? And they wonder why voters turn their back on them.
Gavin Lewis
Manchester
• When Jordan Blackshaw, a young man with no previous record, posted a message on Facebook facetiously proposing a riot in the sleepy market town of Northwich, the authorities were on to it in an instant and he was jailed for four years (Report, 17 August 2011). When Michael Adebowale, an al-Muhajiroun activist and former drug dealer who heard the voices of spirits in prison, posted his intention to kill someone on Facebook, nothing happened.
Could it be that the threat to the lives of pedestrians and commuters in this country is of less consequence to the authorities than even the possibility of a threat to the political system and private property?
Peter McKenna
Liverpool
• The government’s plans “to order universities to ban extremist speakers from their campuses” (Terror bill requires universities to ban extremist speakers, 25 November) face the obvious problem that there is no consensus on what constitutes “extremism”. Or am I the only person left who still considers Thatcherism an “extreme” position?
Trevor Curnow
Professor of philosophy, University of Cumbria
• If a lecturer, in say international relations or Middle Eastern politics or conflict studies has the temerity to suggest that American, British or Israeli foreign policy may be the cause of terrorism and extremism, is this inciting terrorism or extremism? If they point to the role of our ally Saudi Arabia in inciting extremism or terrorism, should they be dismissed? Should their reading lists be purged of concepts such as imperialism or blowback? We are on a slippery slope that leads where Brecht forecast … Then they came for me.
Clive Tempest
Westbury on Severn, Gloucestershire
• The way to counter radicalisation in colleges et al is to engage them in dialogue and win the argument/debate, not to push them underground where they will become more attractive to students. Failing to have a reasoned answer to extremism is admitting defeat.
David Wheatley
Margate, Kent
• University students are intelligent enough to listen to radical speakers and make up their own minds about what is being said. Would that our politicians were intelligent enough to see that limiting any kind of free speech is a limitation of all.
Malcolm Brown
Kingston, Surrey
• With the proposed counter-terrorism and security bill in the news it is surprising that the most effective and obvious way of curbing terrorism is rarely mentioned. That, of course, is to stop killing Muslims. The military historian and former US army colonel Andrew Bacevich informs us that our American allies have bombed or invaded 14 Muslim countries since 1980-81.
We have participated in making war with Iraq and laying waste the state, killing many of the inhabitants. We have participated in the killing of tens of thousands of Afghans, whose land we have now invaded five times since 1838. We cannot stop terrorism by killing Muslims.
Jim McCluskey
Twickenham, Middlesex

‘We are repeatedly informed that the UK is one of the richest nations on earth,’ writes David Pugh. But the figures are misleading. Photograph: Alamy
Many contributors bemoan UK’s inability to distribute wealth fairly and provide world-class public services (Owen Jones, 24 November). We are repeatedly informed that the UK is one of the richest nations on earth. But when wealth statistics are used, they almost always refer the UK’s ranking of sixth in GDP tables, while omitting to define it correctly as GDP (nominal). While this is correct, UK is ranked sixth (2013 figures), it is also misleading, implying that we are richer than we really are. To put the UK’s relative wealth in a better perspective, you should consider GDP (PPP) – purchasing power parity – and more pertinently, GDP (PPP and nominal) per capita.
For GDP (PPP), UK is ranked 10th (World Bank and IMF figures 2013). For GDP (PPP) per capita, UK is ranked 28th (IMF) and 26th (World Bank), with a figure of approximately $36,200 per person. For GDP (nominal) per capita, UK is ranked 23rd (IMF) and 26th (World Bank), with a figure of approximately $39,300 per person. It is GDP (PPP and nominal) per capita, that represent the monetised productive output per head of the nation, and which largely generates the wealth to distribute and spend on our private and public services. Ignoring the tiny tax havens and oil states that lie above UK, we are still behind Norway, Switzerland, Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Singapore, US, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Ireland, Belgium, Iceland, Germany, France and New Zealand. It is this relatively poor productivity and productive output in UK that leaves us struggling to match world-class standards of affluence, fairness, health, education, social services etc), most of those countries listed above have fairer distributions, higher overall living standards and better public services. The UK economy, and it’s workforce, needs to increase productivity if it is to generate the wealth necessary to compete with the countries that rank above us in GDP per capita, and hence provide the greater equality and better services most of them provide.
David Pugh
Bristol
• Owen Jones’s generous views about bankers would not have been shared by JM Keynes, who said after the Wall Street crash of 1929 that he was rather in favour of the huge sums of money paid to financial people. He’d noticed that many of these individuals were by nature domineering, if not downright psychopathic, so by paying them big money you tied them into Wall Street or the City and this stopped them drifting off into their natural habitat of organised crime.
David Redshaw
Gravesend, Kent

A Turkish woman demonstrates on International Women’s Day in 2011 in Ankara. Turkey’s prime minister Recep Erdogan has said Islam defines the role of women in motherhood only. Photograph: Adem Altan/AFP/Getty
Your article (Inside Islamic State’s oil empire: how captured oilfields fuel Isis insurgency, 19 November, theguardian.com) puts forward claims about Turkey that are mutually exclusive with the facts about the fight of Turkish security forces against smuggler groups that are in the Turkish headlines almost daily. In response to the advance of Daesh [Islamic State] towards towns along our Syrian border, additional army units were deployed to combat illegal border crossings as well as armed Syrian or Iraqi smuggler groups. Thanks to the efforts of the Turkish forces, 78m litres of oil was captured in 2013 before it could be smuggled. The figure is 62m litres for the first eight months of 2014. Members of the Turkish security forces lost their lives during the fight against smuggling.
Turkey has been vocal on establishing a comprehensive strategy against clearing the Daesh threat. Turkey and the UK have an outstanding level of cooperation against terrorism and we call on the international community to get together and start implementing this strategy to bring peace to the war-torn region.
Abdurrahman Bilgiç
Turkish ambassador in London
• The Turkish prime minister, Recep Erdoğan, is wrong to claim that the feminist movement rejects motherhood or that Islam defines the role of women as motherhood only (Report, 25 November). Feminism is about the empowerment of women and establishing and defending equal rights in society. The early history of Islam provides examples of the central role women played in agriculture, business and trade and war. Often characterised as a devout Muslim, Mr Erdogan shows a distinct lack of knowledge of the history of Islam which, at the time of its advent, provided radical ideas regarding the rights of women in Arab society in marriage, divorce, education and inheritance – centuries before other cultures adopted these ideas. This at a time when it was not uncommon in some tribes to kill daughters at birth. The teachings of early Islam aimed to instigate a revolution that its modern interpreters, in their quest for powerful, patriarchal structures, conveniently forget.
Mr Erdoğan uses tired and discredited millennia-old arguments, wrapped in faux reverence about the place of motherhood in Islam, to undermine the hard-fought and as yet incomplete struggle for equality for women in modern societies. He may do better to implement Turkey’s constitution, which provides equal rights to men and women.
Aamir Ahmed
London

A sign with avian flu advice at the entrance to a UK farm. ‘Local vets are a trusted source of key information and this is fundamental to ensuring robust disease control,’ writes John Blackwell. Photograph: Paul Mogford/Apex
On the same day as you describe apparent manoeuvrings by the supermarkets to try to avoid the proper exposure of the extent of campylobacter infections in chickens (Tesco director may face scrutiny over lobbying about chicken report, 26 November), you also report that ministers are considering the supposed “elimination of the burden” on farms by reducing health inspections (Coalition plans reducing avian flu farm checks). Does no one in government believe in joined-up thinking, or is it totally in hock to the food industry?
Dr Richard Carter
London
• BVA understands the pressures on public spending and the need for efficiencies and appropriate lessening of the regulatory burden on business, including the agriculture sector. However, we cannot overstate the importance of any cuts or changes being carefully considered from a fully informed perspective and with an eye to long-term consequences, not simply short-term expediency. Cuts cannot come at the expense of animal welfare and health, which if compromised can have serious consequences for human health and for food production.
Defra works closely with vets and is aware of the critical role vets play in disease surveillance – Defra’s own survey highlights that local vets are a trusted source of key information to their clients and this is fundamental to ensuring robust disease control and eradication strategies. Our message to Defra is: don’t downgrade the role of vets in food safety and animal health and welfare. It is important to stress that any attempt to reduce regulation by the government should not increase risk by reducing the pivotal role that vets carry out in public health and food safety, alongside animal health and welfare.
John Blackwell BVSc MRCVS
President, British Veterinary Association

1956, San Francisco, California, USA. L to R: Bob Donlin, Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, Robert LaVinge, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, stand outside Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. Photograph: Allen Ginsberg/Corbis
At last an article that deals with issues which lay “like seeds beneath the snow”, to quote Colin Ward (Bohemia isn’t lost. It has just gone underground, 25 November). A conspiracy of silence seems to grip the media when grappling with the idea that those who don’t vote are apolitical/apathetic. My constituency is the elephant in the room – political philosophies of anarchism and pacifism. For 50 years we the undersigned have been involved with peace and freedom as described above. As activists and interpreters and poets. We believe in direct democracy, nonviolent civil disobedience and campaigning. We believe in a non-nuclear, non-military neutral society. We are part of a tradition as shared by Godwin and Shelley, Thoreau and Tolstoy, Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, and Emma Goldman’s Individualism, Herbert Read and Alex Comfort’s books, and Chomsky and Bookchin’s ideas. Poets like Snyder and Rexroth, Adrian Mitchell and Lawrence Ferlinghetti (now 95 ). We may be “underground” but we are a considerable minority needed even more in our surveillance, “privatised” society. We are the seeds beneath the snow looking forward to the “withering away of all governments”.
Dennis Gould and Jeff Cloves
RiffRaffPoets 1970

In an effort to honour those men from our village in north Essex who gave their lives for their country, we have been disappointed to find that, whereas most charity giving organisations will look favourably on funding nearly anything to do with war memorials, such as renovation, adding names etc, there appears to be none willing to assist with funding for construction of a new war memorial. Our village has no memorial and dearly wishes to have one. Most villagers have contributed towards one and plans are ahead to raise even more funds. But there is a limit to the amount that can be raised from such a small population and so we cannot raise the full amount required, yet we are determined to build one. Surely there are organisations which will look favourably on us?
Lt Col (retd) Michael Estcourt
Colne Engaine War Memorial Committee

A sign at Griffin Park, Brentford. Photograph: David Levene
Why has the Guardian has got itself in such a tizzy about the Prince of Wales writing to government ministers (Report, 25 November)? Surely we should be concerned with whether the government ever took any notice of what he wrote?
David Thornton
Newcastle upon Tyne
• I feel compelled to point out the absence of certain acknowledgments in the article about the making of Illuminatus! (Make it wilder!, 19 November), starting with the lead photograph, which featured Pru Gee, mother of Daisy Eris Campbell, Ken being her father. Pru was, in fact, hoisted atop a forklift truck for this breathtakingly beautiful scene. The photograph was one of a series of production photographs taken by Alan Bell, commissioned by the National Theatre. Illuminatus! was co-written and co-directed by Ken Campbell and Chris Langham, who should be given equal credit. For the record, the production starred Neil Cunningham, in a glittering performance as Hagbard Celine.
Richard Adams
London
• When Ian Jack (Saturday, 22 November) bemoans the length of modern films, it should be remembered that when people went to the cinema in the 1950s and 60s, for their entrance fee they would see two films plus a news feature. The main film would last an average of 100 minutes, the second feature perhaps 86 minutes, and then advertisements maybe eight to 10 more. Single film screening means when a film is now made it has to be long enough to justify people spending the £10 or £12 ticket price. This time is padded out by adverts and promos, and can extend these up to 30 minutes. The problem is, that few stories can justify the length of time the market dictates, hence the extended special effects. These will get louder and of course longer.
Charles Cronin
London
• Not all football terrace chants are brutish (Is Britain’s beautiful game really so nasty?, 24 November). Last Friday at Griffin Park, Brentford’s supporters celebrated a last-minute victory against their west London rivals by adapting the tune of Knees Up Mother Brown with the joyous ode “Bees up Fulham down”.
Richard Tippett
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
• This seems to me to be tinkering with the problem of social division. Why doesn’t the Labour party stop faffing around and remove the charitable status from private schools? And while they’re about it get rid of selective schools: grammar and faith schools.
Maggie LeMare
Birmingham

Thurston Hopkins, left, with Peter Sellers in 1956. Photograph: John Chillingworth/Getty Images
Thurston Hopkins was one of the few surviving photographers from what came to be referred to as the “golden age” of reportage. Arguably it was his background in fine art and illustration that meant he saw the world as much through the sensibility of a brush as a lens. This, combined with his sensitivity towards his subjects, meant that he was destined to become a star of Picture Post.
As friends for nearly 30 years, he and I often wrote to each other – on life, the universe and everything, not just photography – and his letters were a work of art in themselves. Composed on a battered manual typewriter with various letters missing, they would be awash with handwritten additions, Tipp-Ex and notes in the margins, and were often hilarious, whether intentionally or otherwise. Thurston had many ways of bringing his gift for connecting with people into play.

Independent:

Tristram Hunt is trying to fix the wrong thing (“Head of Hunt’s old school accuses him of ‘offensive bigotry’ ”, 26 November). The needs of the 93 per cent of the children in England whose parents do not pay for their schooling are not best served by going after the 7 per cent in independent schools whose parents do.
While he is right to urge more and more partnership working, he is wrong to underplay how much good cross-sector work is already going on. In adopting this combative mode, he is in danger of repeating the mistakes of so many before him, and turning the conversation on improving education into a slanging match. The best way to encourage independent schools to share is to engage them in positive dialogue, rather than issuing threats and ultimatums.
Leo Winkley
Head Master, St Peter’s School, York

Two recent news items have coincided which raise the issue of the ongoing charitable status of private schools.
The head of an expensive establishment commented that the soaring fees being charged are being driven by the popularity of what they offer to the offspring of “oligarchs”. It is difficult to see why taxpayers are allowing charitable status to be extended to the education of ultra-rich foreign students.
Simultaneously, Ed Miliband has stated that if returned to power he will seek ways of forcing the private sector into increasing its support for state schools.
Both issues could be addressed more simply by requiring these schools to charge VAT on the fees paid for non-British students. If the headteacher is right, then this would have little effect on the demand for places.
Such a plan might also require that these enterprises, since they are in fact businesses, should forgo any VAT relief due on the costs they incur in buying goods and services.
Monies so raised could be applied to any purpose, including the improvement of the state sector of education.
Tim Brook
Bristol

The argument by the head of King’s College School in Wimbledon that an “endless queue” of rich families from outside Britain is pushing up fees is puzzling: do these rich parents refuse to send their children here unless the schools charge high fees? Pity the poor headteachers that have to accept such blackmail.
Paul Burall
Drayton, Norfolk

If the Labour Party was serious about bridging the gap between state and independent schools, they could advocate a simple policy of “state before private” in any publicly funded employment. Why should privately educated citizens take positions in the Civil Service, armed forces, judiciary and the BBC?
I cannot understand why these people wish to detach themselves from “normal” citizens until they are almost adults and then assume their right to govern us. Those who support the public services should be ruled by their peers.
I S Maclean
Darlington

Perhaps if we referred to them as “charity schools” instead of “public schools” we might get somewhere – especially if we could rely on broadcasters to then use the same disdainful tone when referring to them that they adopt when referring to other state benefits and their recipients.
Sue Holder
Aberaeron, Ceredigion

Reasonable man driving a cab
What a shame that Brian the Cabbie has to mix with “bullies and braggarts” like David Mellor. Brian sounds like a reasonable and temperate man, who seems to have conducted himself with dignity and great restraint; David Mellor sounds like a waste of space who, despite his education and power, did not.
Well done to Brian: I doubt very much whether I would have behaved nearly as well as he did under the circumstances.
Susan Bittker
Edinburgh

My uncle was better off in an institution
The proposal to close all units caring for people with learning difficulties and transfer their residents to community care is being made for the best of intentions, but a “one-size-fits-all” solution may not be the best for all people with learning difficulties (“NHS report: the ‘evils’ of institutional care must end”, 26 November).
Following a severe brain infection as an infant (this was before MRIs were invented so no one is sure whether it was meningitis or encephalitis), my uncle was left with severe and profound learning difficulties. By his teens his behaviour was violent to the point of being unmanageable, and his family was left with no option but to place him in an institution.
It is true that some of the places he lived over the years were grim, and I am sure there was neglect. But finally he ended up in an institution (long since closed) with caring staff, where all residents had their own bedrooms and sitting rooms to call home, a shop and lots of activities for them to do, and where the residents, all of whom had severe learning difficulties, could have as much independence as they were capable of, but where carers could help them with all those tasks that they were unable to do (in some cases washing and dressing), and where those with challenging behaviour were safe and protected. When my uncle passed away a few years ago, it was in an institution he called home, living with residents and carers he called friends.
Far too often we see stories in the press of elderly people, relying on home carers, being left unattended, of not receiving the care they need, and even dying because home carers don’t visit. Yet it is being proposed to add more vulnerable people into this same system, and leave them to the mercies of underfunded home carers out in the community, or relying on families for care, at a time when government cuts have decimated welfare provision and disabled services. For some (such as my uncle), community care would be utterly inappropriate, and would leave them at greater risk.
Rather than blanket closing of all institutional facilities, surely it would be better to adopt the best practices of the good homes, and strictly and ruthlessly enforce them, so that whose who cannot be cared for in the community still have a haven they can call home.
Name and address supplied

Windfarms leave a concrete legacy
I completely agree with Alistair Wood’s letter of 22 November, but I would like to add a comment regarding the term “temporary turbines”.
One existing large wind farm in mid-Wales is to be upgraded by replacing the existing turbines with much bigger turbines. The developer has said that he will construct new concrete pads for the new turbines and that while the old turbines will be removed the old concrete pads and associated roadways will not. Presumably this process could continue until the whole of Wales is covered in concrete.
When a windfarm is built in an important and beautiful area such as mid-Wales the developer should be forced to deposit a sufficient sum to “make good” once the life of the “temporary” windfarm has come to an end.
Steve Elliott
Shrewsbury

Blokish salutation to start the weekend
Please, please can the editor stop opening his Saturday letters to readers with “Morning all”? It sounds either unnecessarily blokish or as if he is parodying Dixon of Dock Green (a sort of early soap opera only remembered by your more mature readers). I cringe when I read it.
I really can’t think what it is intended to convey. Anyway, I would be very happy for him to leave out this curious salutation.
Robert Hobbs
Richmond, Surrey

No jihad for Quakers
John Phillips’ statement that there is no need to rebut the charge of “malevolence” against Quakers (letter, 26 November) is no doubt true, for the very good reason that Quakers refuse military service.
However, his implied comparison of Quakers with Muslims must not go unchallenged: he is comparing a sect within Christianity with the whole of Islam, itself divided into various sects. This is not a just comparison.
John Dakin
Toddington, Bedfordshire

Museums for the workers
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (24 November) writes: “Only two British museums [both in Manchester] are dedicated to working-class stories.” Perhaps the next time Ms Alibhai-Brown is in Scotland she may find time to visit the People’s Palace in Glasgow, which was opened in 1898.
M J Morris
Hamilton, Lanarkshire

Save children, not Blair
I am astonished and horrified to learn that Save the Children have given an award to Tony Blair. Unless they rescind it they can expect no more donations from me.
Barry Tighe
Woodford Green, Essex

Times:

Sir, Tristram Hunt’s remarks that too many private schools offer only a “charade” of minimal help for children of families unable to afford their fees (“Labour to curb private schools’ tax breaks”, Nov 25), show his ignorance of the bursary schemes and scholarships that are available. My school has always provided bursaries for day pupils and for the past 11 years has done the same for boarders from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Through two foundations, we pay the entirety of the fees for 10 per cent of pupils, which does not include the means-tested bursaries and scholarships awarded to other students. Hardly “minimal”, hardly a “charade”.
Peter Green
Head master, Rugby School

Sir, All the fees assistance, partnership and sponsorship work by UK independent schools is fantastic, but this is missing the point. The real benefit is the saving for the Department for Education which does not have to educate 7 per cent of the nation’s children. In my former London school the savings were £5.4 million a year based on capitation only, which is far less than the tax advantages of having charitable status.
Louise Simpson
São Paulo, Brazil
Sir, You quote the current head of University College School, Hampstead — Tristram Hunt’s former school — as saying it has “a diverse pupil population with £1 million per annum granted for assistance, the vast majority for 100 per cent bursaries” (Public school head attacks Labour old boy, Nov 26). Given that there are 1,200 pupils and fees are just less than £20,000 a year, it represents less than 5 per cent of the school population. Not so diverse when considered in those terms.
Michael Robinson
Onston, Cheshire

Sir, There seems to be an emerging correlation between the degree of privilege that socialist politicians enjoyed in their youth and their apparent desire to dismantle the system that so favoured them. If this legislation is enacted the damage to both private and state school pupils would be unforgivable.
Deryk I King
Solihull, W Midlands

Sir, By sending their children to private/independent schools, the most demanding, influential and articulate parents have only a passing interest in the education of the vast majority. Were their children to attend the same schools as ours, rest assured that all schools would be funded adequately and the highest standards assured for all.
Ian Ducat
Coaley, Glos

Sir, The insinuation that independent schools fail in their duty to support the maintained sector through partnerships is misinformed. Independents are increasingly working with maintained schools, sharing good practice and resources. Working at a school that joint-sponsors an academy, the mutual benefits for both of our schools is significant.
Samantha Price
Headmistress, Benenden, Kent

Sir, In the UK only 7 per cent of children go to private schools and that figure is static. In Australia it is 33 per cent and rising. Almost all are day schools. There are many of the same concerns about educational opportunities but Australians have fewer concerns about class. There, the state and federal governments give financial support to private schools; fees are therefore lower than in UK and more people can afford private education. It will not happen here: the left enjoys the posturing and what passes for the right would not dare to propose such a measure.
Bill Hutchison
Hill Head, Hants

Sir, My dictionary describes a charity as “an organisation or institution for helping those in need”. I am intrigued to know how a public school falls into this category.
Denis Steer
Morden, Surrey

Sir, Studies continue to show that state school pupils do better at university than comparable private school pupils. Might Tristram Hunt and Boris Johnson perhaps ask the state sector if they can lend a helping hand to those handicapped by a fee-paying education.
Adrian Perry
Sheffield

Sir, In the Wales v New Zealand game on Saturday the two water boys were Dan Carter, the current All Blacks fly half, and Neil Jenkins, the Wales fly half (1991-2003), who have 2,555 points and 194 caps between them. I wonder if Wayne Rooney and Steven Gerrard have any plans after retiring?
Phil Owen
Radyr, Cardiff

Sir, The jury which decided that police officer Darren Wilson should not stand trial for killing Michael Brown in Missouri consisted of nine white and three black men and women (News, Nov 26). Perhaps notice should have been taken of a regulation by English Quaker William Penn, governor of Pennsylvania in the 1680s, under which “all differences between planters and natives shall be ended by 12 men, that is, six planters and six natives; that so we may live friendly together and, as much as in us lies, prevent all occasions of heart burnings and mischief”.
Dr Peter van den Dungen
Peace studies, University of Bradford

Sir, What hope is there for the NHS when Jeremy Hunt shows ignorance of parts of the health service (“Health secretary takes children to A&E”, Nov 26)? Millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are spent to provide GP out-of-hours services which are open whenever the GP surgery is closed — and yet he chose to attend A&E. He chose to see a junior doctor instead of an experienced GP, and he chose not to contact the 111 service set up to advise on which services are appropriate. Mr Hunt also seems to be unaware of the £150 million initiatives being funded by the prime minister’s challenge fund to support GP working seven days a week 8am-8pm. Why is he so poorly briefed?
Dr Emma Rowley-Conwy
Chairwoman, Seldoc (out of hours
GP services in Lambeth, Lewisham, Southwark and Sutton)

Telegraph:
Labour Party’s threat to independent schools; sharia in Britain; the future of London’s airports; two-tree Christmas households; German-born hamsters and modern artists

More than 2,000 private schools across Britain can claim up to 80 per cent cut in their business rates because they are charities, worth around £150 million annually
7:00AM GMT 26 Nov 2014
Comments
SIR – Once again the Labour Party is threatening British independent schools, which are among the best schools in the world.
The idea of forcing independent schools to have links with state schools has not come at the request of teachers from state schools, let alone parents: it is the bright idea of Labour politicians.
The success of independent schools is not dependent on their wealth but on that glorious word “independent”. They must satisfy the parents, whereas state schools must satisfy politicians – many of whom send their own children to independent schools.
Parents should be allowed to choose any state school that has a spare place, with all admissions arranged directly between the parents and the school and not by the local authority bureaucrats. This would cost nothing and improve schools overnight.
G E Hester
Bolton, Lancashire

SIR – Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, should understand that the success of private schools stems from hard work and discipline from both staff and pupils. They have a much longer day, enabling extracurricular subjects, such as sport and drama, to be included. Time off for holidays would certainly not be accepted.
Until the state system can follow this example, it will always be at a disadvantage.
Susan Fagan
Fulmer, Buckinghamshire
SIR – Socialist thinking has always been underscored by the principle that “somewhere, somehow, someone is better off than I am and that shouldn’t be allowed”. Now Mr Hunt seeks to squeeze private schools further, which is likely to result in such an education becoming the privilege only of the super-rich.
Michael Nicholson
Dunsfold, Surrey
SIR – Mr Hunt has got it the wrong way round. He should send state school teachers into private schools to learn how to get children into top universities and help them achieve sporting success.
Lenore Nicholas
Baschurch, Shropshire
SIR – Children of intelligent and educated parents have a distinct advantage over children whose parents are neither intelligent nor educated.
Should intelligent and educated parents be taxed at a higher rate?
Kyriacos Kaye
Telford, Shropshire
SIR – Mr Hunt believes that £136 million in business rates relief minus £4 billion in savings from public sector education costs equals “something for nothing”. Perhaps he’s right – he did attend a private school, and his sums seem a bit ropey.
Crispin Edwards
Stockport, Cheshire
Sharia in Britain
SIR – As a lawyer specialising in wills, I would say that there is no question of Sharia being enshrined in English law.
The principle that a person may leave his property to anyone he chooses has survived, very nearly without qualification, into the modern era. If a Muslim wishes to will his estate according to a scheme that reflects Islamic rules of succession, he may do so as a matter of choice. A non-Muslim may make a similar will preferring his male heirs for entirely non-religious reasons.
English law respects such choices and does not inquire into their motives.
James MacDougald
London WC2
It pays to breastfeed
SIR – The health service is already in financial chaos and now the “blue sky thinkers” intend to give up to £200 each to breastfeeding mothers.
This money would be better spent improving breastfeeding help during the immediate postnatal period. Staff shortages mean this area is neglected too often.
I wonder how it will be proven that the mothers who receive this money are in fact still feeding.
Virginia Baldock
Fareham, Hampshire
Rebuild Parliament

SIR – Let’s not spend billions renovating the Palace of Westminster.
Let’s hand it over to the National Trust as a relic and spend the money on a building that incorporates debating chambers designed to promote debate, not confrontation.
Elisabeth Brown
Nottingham
The man with the best airport plans
SIR – Although the initial groups of pilots we trained to bring Concorde into passenger service with British Airways were mainly highly experienced airline captains, the man who stood out from the rest, with his technical and theoretical understanding, was a softly spoken young co-pilot named William “Jock” Lowe.
It was no surprise when he was the first to be promoted to captain and remain on Concorde. Today, he is the man who identified the idea of extending the runway at Heathrow (the Hub) as the best solution for increasing passenger capacity in the South East.
Politicians – even Boris – can therefore rest assured that Jock has analysed and considered every other possible alternative.
Brian Christley
Abergele, Conwy
SIR – Expansion at Gatwick would require major infrastructure work to handle the volume of extra passengers and employees required. Heathrow, the aviation hub of the country, is bursting at its seams. Logic and economic sense should be the guiding principles, and the Airports Commission consultation shows that an extra runway at Heathrow would bring twice the return of one at Gatwick. In business terms, Gatwick ought to be a non-starter.
A T Brookes
Charlwood, Surrey
SIR – I would always choose to fly from a local airport in the Midlands, if only Heathrow Airport Holdings released its stranglehold and allowed other airports to compete for business.
David J Hartshorn
Badby, Northamptonshire
The two-tree tradition is not just for mansions

O Tannenbaum: the Great Hall of Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire echoes a German tradition (www.bridgemanart.com)
SIR – It is absurd to suggest that anyone with two Christmas trees must have a mansion.
We have had two trees since living in Germany, where it is traditional to erect a tree decorated with white lights outside one’s home on the first Advent Sunday.
Sandra Hawke
Andover, Hampshire
SIR – The festive spirit appears to melt like a snowman in hot weather just after noon on December 25, even though Boxing Day is an integral part of Christmas.
The happier and wiser person is the one who partakes in Boxing Day pastimes such as the hunts, rather than racing to the sales.
John Barstow
Pulborough, West Sussex
Trade with EU states
SIR – Mats Persson makes the assumption that upon withdrawal from the European Union, Britain would have to negotiate a Norwegian or Swiss-style agreement in order to trade with the EU. This is not so.
Most nations trade with each other subject to simple bilateral trade agreements under World Trade Organisation rules, which prohibit discriminatory barriers. We do not need to be the 51st state of America in order to trade with that country. We have to comply with certain regulations, but our laws are not made in Washington.
Neither do we need to invoke “Article 50” of the Lisbon Treaty, whereby our withdrawal is controlled (and sabotaged) by the EU. By simply repealing the European Communities Act 1972 we can restore the supremacy of national law over EU law and remove EU legislation from our body of law.
We can then withdraw from the EU unilaterally and unconditionally, which is legal under international law, and has many precedents.
Rodney Howlett
Darley Dale, Derbyshire
Sporting success

SIR – How wonderful to have a British driver as Formula 1 champion for the second time, in a car manufactured in England, with an engine manufactured in England. What a shame that the victory feels a little tarnished because Lewis Hamilton feels the need to live in Monaco, where he is not required to contribute to British taxes.
Lucy Fletcher
Meonstoke, Hampshire
SIR – Lewis Hamilton will probably be voted the 2014 BBC Sports Personality of the Year. But what about 75-year-old Sir Robin Knox-Johnston?
He was totally alone for three weeks, with only a yacht for company and the unforgiving winter Atlantic waiting to catch him out. He did not have millions of pounds or dozens of engineers and technicians to perfect his steed, nor a vast pit crew assisting him.
What an achievement for Sir Robin to come third in a winter solo transatlantic yacht race against competitors less than half his age.
David Webster
London W5
Cut it out
SIR – Most condiment sachets do incorporate a small “v” to assist opening (Letters, November 22), but they generally don’t work.
The Rest and Be Thankful Inn at Wheddon Cross is thoughtful enough to supply a small pair of scissors in each pot of sachets. Might this catch on?
Paul Hart
Minehead, Somerset
In the name of art
SIR – Reiner Ruthenbeck has either had his grandchildren to visit or has just been burgled. His “art” hardly represents “quiet observations of domestic events”.
John Tilsiter
Radlett, Hertfordshire
SIR – I have just spread our dining room chairs across the room on their sides. My wife does not appear to appreciate the artistic merit of this exercise.
Chris Yates
Peasedown St John, Somerset
Hamster run
SIR – The abiding memory of my stay with a German family (Letters, November 21) was Max the hamster.
Max was presented to me as a leaving present, and he travelled by train with me back to Cumbria, in a biscuit tin punctured with air holes. My decision to give him a “run around” ensured that I had the compartment entirely to myself.
Patricia Donati
London SW6

Irish Times:

Sir, – To suggest that upward-only commercial rents are not negatively impacting the Irish economy (Cantillon, November 25th) is fundamentally flawed.
Most retailers are struggling to pay Celtic Tiger rents. They must pay to stay in business. So what gives? The largest variable cost to hand – jobs. I am aware of many retailers who have moved from a full-serve model to a self-serve model to ensure the rent is paid. At what cost? Jobs.
Our previous Government made upward-only rent clauses on new leases illegal. Does this suggest this flawed system is fit for purpose and good for the economy?
Upwardonly rents are costing jobs and are detrimental to the domestic economy. To suggest otherwise is inaccurate and wrong.
This week I met the global managing director of a large retailer who cannot sustain their Irish property cost. Is what they are planning good for the Irish economy? I think not.
What is most disturbing is the fact that many small Irish retailers are stuck with these leases, which in turn are tied to personal guarantees. Don’t pay the rent and you lose your business and your home. Surely this distressing situation contributes nothing to the economy? It also underlines why there is such little appetite or even ability to pay wage increases in the domestic economy.
Both Retail Excellence Ireland and many of our members deal with this matter every day of every week.
Others are more than welcome to keep their heads buried in the sand. – Yours, etc, DAVID FITZSIMONS, Chief Executive, Retail Excellence Ireland, 38-39 Fitzwilliam Square, Dublin 2
Sir, – Whatever about the rights and wrongs concerning the rendition of a rebel song by John Delaney of the FAI, it should be borne in mind that songs of a jingoistic nature, otherwise known as national anthems, are regularly performed at football stadiums throughout the world.
The national anthem of the United States speaks of “rockets red glare, bursting in air”, while the British anthem calls on God to “scatter her [the Queen’s] enemies” and our own national anthem, translated into English, tells us that “cannons roar and rifles peal”. – Yours, etc, JOHN FAGAN, Killiney, Co Dublin. Sir, – To offer some empathy and solidarity to John Delaney, I would like to offer my sincerest apologies to anybody over the years who may have heard me singing Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues. I, in no way, advocate the senseless shooting of men in Reno just to watch them die.
I would also like to promise that from now on I will no longer sing Maxwell’s Silver Hammer by the Beatles, I Shot the Sheriff by Bob Marley.
And to my wife: I have destroyed my Tom Jones CD as I now appreciate the dangerous influence that the singing along to Why, Why, Why Delilah might one day have on our relationship. – Yours, etc, DARREN WILLIAMS, Sandyford, Dublin 18.
Sir, – FAI chief executive John Delaney is undoubtedly a remarkable football man.
Who else could shoot themselves in the foot, score an own-goal while blatantly offside? – Yours, etc, MICHAEL CULLEN, Sandycove, Co Dublin.

Sir, – When a Dubliner moves to another county, as I did seven years ago, the Irish arts scene reveals itself as very Dublin-centric.
So I applaud Minister for Arts Heather Humphrey’s decision to give national status to Wexford Opera House. It is an artistically and economically sound decision.
Wexford is recognised internationally as Ireland’s home of opera, much as the provincial town of Bayreuth is in Germany.
Wexford Opera House is a beautiful venue. The capacity of the main hall (771) accurately reflects the niche appeal opera has in Ireland.
Let’s not kid ourselves, opera is not a beloved national art form here as it is in central Europe!
The Arts Council-commissioned Arts Audiences report shows opera had the poorest attendance figures of all the musical arts in 2013 (133,000). More than twice as many people attended folk events (286,000). Even jazz (177,000) had better figures, remarkable since most jazz venues are minuscule compared to Wexford Opera House.
I attended Wide Open Opera’s excellent production of Nixon in China at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in Dublin last May but I did note many empty seats.
If there is really a demand for a dedicated National Opera House in Dublin, surely that modest three-night run would have sold out?
So, if Dublin-based opera lovers like Christopher McQuaid (Letters, November 25th) can afford to regularly travel around Europe to follow their passion, surely it’s not too much trouble for them to travel down the road to Wexford to our new National Opera House! – Yours, etc, DR DAVE FLYNN, Clare Memory Orchestra , Ballyvaughan, Co Clare. Sir, – Wexford is the only location for the National Opera House because it is the place for the best opera in Ireland.
The idea of naming a theatre in Dublin the National Opera House because Dublin is the capital, is illogical.
Indeed, it is a shame that so many lovely theatres in Dublin are in such dangerous locations.
At the best of times, Dublin is not a pleasure to visit and if I have to travel beyond Munster to see opera, then I would choose London rather than Dublin.
Wexford has better opera than Dublin and an opera culture. All the town gets involved during the festival and it is a joy to visit for a week in Autumn without the dangers of inner-city Dublin.
The idea that Dublin must have everything is tedious for the majority of the population who live outside Dublin.
Perhaps that is the reason Dublin has all the problems first – traffic, water quality, housing and crime. – Yours, etc, SE LYDON, Wilton, Cork.

Sir, – In all but name and comprehensive legal protection, Irish Travellers already constitute an ethnic group with a distinct culture, traditions, long shared history, language and customs that make them “self-identify” as a separate group and be identified by the majority Irish population as a separate group to which they do not belong.
Travellers – uniquely in Ireland – have a dual identity being Irish and Traveller.
Travellers born abroad are still Irish Travellers – ethnicity over residency or citizenship. Being afforded ethnic status would not reduce their status as Irish.
In the UK, Irish Travellers have been recognised as an ethnic minority “distinct from non-Traveller Irish people” since 2000 and 1997 in Northern Ireland. With no ill consequences accruing.
Travellers should be accorded their right to “self identify” as a positive and progressive strategy for broader inclusion and greater legal protection.
Acknowledgement by the State could help create the right conditions for enhanced community respect, a rightful symbolic and overdue gesture which has potential to shape new relationships and enhanced engagement with the State and others.
Seán McDonagh (Letters, “Travellers and Ethnic Identity”, November 20th), writes “To declare them a distinct ethnic group risks perpetuating disadvantage.”
Recognition of Traveller ethnicity is not a panacea, however it is at the heart of how Travellers might become less unequal in Irish society.
Perpetuating disadvantage is not a threat derived from recognition, rather it is a “re-righting” of a wrong in which Travellers are frequently treated as criminals, untouchables, violent and an underclass. Where the actions of a minority of Travellers have led to stereotyping of all Travellers.
The protection of ethnic identity is well grounded in international law. The State’s anomalous position of offering no adequate legal protection in the face of international recommendations, and a desire by most Travellers as stated over 20 years, is inadequate and out of sync with human rights standards. – Yours, etc, JACINTA BRACK, Irish Traveller Movement, 4-5 Eustace Street, Dublin 2.

Sir, – Heartiest congratulations to Nóirín O’Sullivan, the new Garda Commissioner.
It is tempting to view her appointment as a ho-hum, nothing to see here, Irish non-solution to very serious problems in An Garda Síochána. Especially since, during her interim appointment, the penalty points scandal motored on apace, even as she ordered that it be halted.
However, as a veteran police officer, Ms O’Sullivan knows what reforms are needed and knows how to implement them.
Her comment that there will be a culture of transparency in the police force is hardly reassuring.
This kind of blah might have been acceptable in the days where An Garda Síochána was the personal fiefdom of the commissioner. No longer.
Many of us have read the Garda Inspectorate report. We know how and where the force is broken. We know the reforms needed to fix it. We do not want the Commissioner to tell us that under her guidance all will be well.
That worked when we were hand-wringing obsequious, peasants. No more.
We want the reforms outlined in the Garda Inspectorate report to be implemented, starting now. We want progress reports. We want gardaí who refuse to implement the instructions of the Commissioner to be fired, without a golden hand shake.
This is not rocket science. This is policing 101. And it’s long overdue. – Yours, etc, PATRICIA R MOYNIHAN, Castaheany, Co Dublin.

Sir, – As the centenary of 1916 draws closer, many events are being planned by different groups.
The Government, by not clarifying its plans for commemoration, have left groups like ours in a limbo, where we cannot even decide a date that does not clash with the national commemoration.
I am chairman of the Fingal Old IRA, an association set up in the 1940s to help members of the 5th Battalion IRA, the Fingal Brigade.
In previous years our association has been sidelined, and, given that the most successful engagement of the Rising took place in Ashbourne, the members of the Fingal Brigade deserve more recognition.
Three members of the Fingal Brigade died in Easter Week, including John Crenigan of Roganstown and Thomas Rafferty of Lusk. A call had come from the GPO for some volunteers and James Crenigan, brother of John and Peter Wilson from Swords were two of those who went into town. They were sent to the Mendicity Institute and it was there that Peter Wilson lost his life.
From these simple facts, you can see why the Fingal Old IRA commemoration committee is anxious to put in place a programme of events to honour the members of the brigade.
Taoiseach, Minister Humphreys, is it a State secret what the government plans to do? – Yours, etc,
NOEL McALLISTER,
Chairman,
Fingal Old IRA,
Swords,
Co Dublin.

Sir, – In a piece with rather spectacular and generalised claims, Chris Johns (“Social media causes grave damage and must be regulated”, November 24th) represents another clamour for “regulating” social media.
This area requires a long-term approach that most do not want to hear.
Concerning young people, this includes the upskilling of parents and school staff at a local, community and technological level. Reporting abuse, taking cues from peer role models, signposting those at risk of suicide to appropriate services and finally, a social media curriculum designed by and for young people, are steps that should be encouraged.
All of this takes time and money, which does not fit the knee-jerk narrative amongst current proponents of regulation.
Mr Johns complained that Government reports are often shelved.
Did he take the time to read last year’s report, Addressing the Growth of Social Media and tackling Cyberbullying by the Joint Committee on Transport and Communications? – Yours, etc,
BARRY MURPHY,
Lusk,
Co Dublin

Sir, – Colm O’Brien (“Cross on Carrauntoohil,” November 25th) says structures such as the cross on Carrauntoohil have no place on top of a mountain as they are out of place and a blot on the landscape. Mr O’Brien added that mountain tops are spiritual places.
As a mountain walker surely Mr O’Brien must be aware of the countless crosses and Mass Rocks that are in abundance on our mountains and glens which relate to the stories of the Penal days in Ireland when the celebration of the Catholic Mass was forbidden.
During the Penal times Catholic priests and worshipers had to find hidden areas in the Irish countryside to celebrate Mass. Many of these places were marked with Mass Rocks which was often a rock or cross taken from a church ruin and used as a place of worship. The areas where these Masses were held are still considered to be special sacred places.
As one who also spends much time walking in mountain areas, I don’t find these crosses offensive. They are part of our heritage. I am, however, often disgusted at the mountains of rubbish which litter our beautiful landscape, including our mountain tops. – Yours, etc, TOM COOPER, Templeogue, Dublin 6W. Sir, – The comments of Colm O’Brien (“Cross on Carrauntoohil,” November 25th) shows the reality of intolerance now prevalent in society.
While, I have no wish for a Catholic theocracy; what is so offensive about a structure which you can see only if your up close at it or through the viewing of binoculars? What next: a bill in the Dáil for the removal of all roadway Marian shrines; the Sacred Heart at the Parnell Monument or the Papal Crosses at Phoenix Park and Drogheda? Would Mr O’Brien welcome that? – Is mise, etc,
FR JOHN MCCALLION, CC
Coalisland,
Co Tyrone.
Sir, – For the benefit of those who cut down the Carrauntohill cross and in order to preserve the religious heritage of both Christian and pagan sites such as the isolated beehive huts, the monastic settlements and their round towers, grottos and churches, Newgrange, dolmens and standing stone circles, they should be advised that being an Irish citizen does not compel you to genuflect every time you see a hot cross bun. – Yours, etc, EUGENE TANNAM, Firhouse, Dublin 24.

Irish Independent:

I firmly condemn thugs hijacking peaceful protests with their vindictive behaviour, as that is giving the Government an even bigger stick to beat us with.
However, having said that, I do feel the controversy surrounding the public’s rejection of the mere existence of Irish Water has this Government running around like ducks in thunder. Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly’s new changes in making payments for the service is nothing short of ridiculous. It is inconceivable for them to think that people will buy into this latest attempt to quell public anger about the entire setup surrounding Irish Water. Pray tell, what’s going to be achieved in having people pay €100 above the recommended costs, so that the Department of Social Protection would reimburse them the overpaid amount?
Who came up with this solution? Did any of the highly-paid advisers calculate the extra costs involved in this implausible and thoughtless proposal? As a nation we have been known in the past to pay gold nuggets to political monkeys. This is a continuation of those infamous and disastrous methods of doing business all over again. Has nothing been learned at the very top in this country? But, then again, it’s always easy to wilfully and recklessly spend somebody else’s money. This economy has been decimated by the selfishness of financial parasites and their cronies for far too long.
So we must stop this destruction of living standards now, by standing together against this attempted underhanded operation. It’s become a necessity to defend the only remaining emblems of our living standards. Let’s not forget that politicians have already claimed €24.4 million in expenses in three years.
Taoiseach Enda Kenny, isn’t it time for you and this Government to take a reality check as to whom you are working on behalf of? We’ll shortly be commemorating the sacrifice of our patriots who died for the overwhelming desire of freedom for the people of this country. Let’s be mindful that liberty and democracy are meant to stand side-by-side for the good of all people – and not just for the privileged class in society.
Mattie Greville, Killucan, Co Westmeath

Gender quotas are unfair
I agree 100pc with the views expressed by Desmond Fitzgerald on the article by Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald.
There is no evidence to suggest that artificially-created (through quotas) gender-balanced leadership results in better national governance in countries. This is not surprising, given that quotas are – by their nature – contrary to true equality of opportunity, which is not the same thing as equality of outcome. Also, it’s both ironic and instructive that Minister Fitzgerald is a senior member of a Government that last year got rid of a highly-talented woman who was one of its brightest stars of either sex (and one who, I understand, is opposed to gender quotas) because she showed genuine independence of mind and devotion to principle.
It seems that such qualities will not be welcome in the kind of female public representatives and office-holders that the Minister appears to have in mind when she calls for more women in public life and gender-balanced leadership.
Thankfully, though, when the next general election comes the Government and the various political parties cannot oblige electors to vote for their quota-filling candidates.
Hugh Gibney, Athboy, Co Meath

Hitting the right note
To offer some empathy and solidarity to FAI Chief Executive John Delaney, I would like to offer my apologies to anybody over the years who may have heard me singing Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. I in no way advocate the senseless shooting of men in Reno just to watch them die.
I would also like to promise that from now on I will no longer sing ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ by The Beatles or ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ by Bob Marley. To my wife: I have destroyed my Tom Jones’ records as I now appreciate the dangerous influence that the singing along to ‘Delilah’ might one day have on our relationship.
Darren Williams, Sandyford, Dublin 18

Helter skelter marriage laws
Charles Manson is allowed to get married in jail… yet there are so many men who cannot get a divorce in the real world. Strange indeed.
Robert Sullivan, Bantry, Co Cork

Our Lady of Guadalupe
The image of the Virgin Mary on a piece of 483-year-old cactus fabric in a Catholic church in Mexico City constantly baffles artists and scientists alike. Known worldwide as Our Lady of Guadalupe, its history goes back to 1531, when Mary appeared to a 50-year-old Indian named Juan Diego. The visions occurred five times, four to Juan and once to his sick uncle.
I would like to explain briefly just of the very many interesting aspects of this image. In 1979, the newest digital techniques were applied for the first time in investigating the image. After filtering and processing the digitised images of the eyes, an entire scene of about 10 people were present in both eyes. The scene appears to be Juan Diego, a bishop and other people present at the time of the apparition. Mary seems to have taken a picture of the scene with her eyes, which remained preserved forever in the moment she appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak.
The images in Mary’s eyes appeared in three different places. This three-fold reflection is caused by the curvature of the eyes’ corner. Two of the reflections were right-side up and one was upside down. This occurs only in living eyes. Also the photograph images in both eyes are not identical, but their refraction and proportions match perfectly, just as happens now in our eyes, in which there are two distinct but perfectly-matching ‘takes’ of the same scene.
The image of Mary looks like a painting, but who is painting it? The time is now ripe for a new transparent and independent scientific investigation into this image.
Declan Condren, Navan Road, Dublin

Facts about the bank guarantee
Many of the letters to your paper talk about a bank bailout that was forced upon us by the EU. This mistaken view suits many in Ireland, particularly Fianna Fail.
It was the Fianna Fail-led government in 2008 that issued the blanket bank guarantee which effectively put in place legislation that ensured most bondholder would get all their monies back. The letters from the ECB in 2010 refers to a tiny number of unsecured bond holders that would be protected during the bailout.
However, the vast majority of the bank bondholders got their money back because of the bank guarantee of 2008, which was nothing to do with the EU.
Eunan McNeill, Letterkenny, Co Donegal

Marriage made in political hell
Many recent pub conversations have included the remark that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will have to join forces in order to retain some illusion of a popular government.
I am not sure how the idea of two highly-unpopular and incompetent parties joining forces might create some extra popularity, but such is the thinking in many democracies.
The idea appears to be gaining momentum, which would at least help to explain why there has been no opposition for the last 60 years and why we are heading downhill so fast. Sadly, it will not help our predicament.
Richard Barton, Tinahely, Co Wicklow
Irish Independenthreatened

28 November 2014 Peter Rice

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to the Post Office and Co OP do the housework. Peter Rice turns up

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down rabbit for tea and her tummy pain is still there.

Obituary:

Baroness James of Holland Park – obituary

‘Queen of Crime’ who as P D James delighted millions with her poet-sleuth Adam Dalgliesh and wrote a sequel to Pride and Prejudice

PD James in 2009

PD James in 2009 Photo: Andrew Crowley

2:31PM GMT 27 Nov 2014

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Baroness James of Holland Park, better known as P D James, who has died aged 94, was among the most celebrated in a long and distinguished line of women crime writers stretching back to Dorothy L Sayers and Agatha Christie, with neither of whom she cared to be compared.

During more than 50 years as an author, her books showed an elegance of characterisation and an aptitude for capturing atmosphere that blurred distinctions between classic detective stories and the conventional novel. She admitted that she had started writing crime fiction because she thought it would be easier to have a story published in that genre before going on to produce “proper” novels.

She stayed with what she called “traditional English detective fiction” because she found she could still explore human behaviour within the formal structure of the crime genre. Even her final novel, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011), a sequel to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, is a mystery story that opens with a brutal murder.

A vigorous, beaming woman who described herself as “grandmotherly”, P D James had a frank and sociable exterior that belied a fascination with pain and death, often graphically described in her books. “Murder isn’t pleasant,” she explained. “It’s an ugly thing and a cruel thing. Let those who want pleasant murders read Agatha Christie.” She also admitted that if she were reading one of her own books, she would feel that she was reading “a woman with such a strong love of order and tradition that she is obviously covering in her own personality some basic turbulence and insecurity”.

Any insecurities of James’s were well disguised. A long and illustrious career in the Home Office led to a period as a magistrate, appointments to various cultural bodies, including the British Council and the BBC (as a governor), and finally to a place in the House of Lords, where she took the Conservative whip and lobbied for the arts.

Becoming a pillar of the literary establishment rather late in life — she set up as a full-time writer only after retiring from the Civil Service in 1979, shortly before turning 60 — P D James threw herself into literary life with remarkable zest. She became chairman of the Society of Authors at 64, joined the board of the Arts Council at 68, and in 1987 chaired the judging panel for the Booker Prize; on television in 1990 she chaired her own books programme, Speaking Volumes, with characteristic shrewdness and wit, becoming perhaps the first television presenter to describe herself, at 70, as “an old woman”.

In these and her other public roles she proved both fluent and forceful, and perennially good-humoured. While guest editor of the Today programme in 2009, she memorably took the BBC director-general Mark Thompson to task over the corporation’s failings. She was awarded the Nick Clarke journalism prize for the interview.

Her private life, in its middle years at least, was cruelly hard. But she retained her great capacity for friendship and was splendidly clubbable.

Phyllis Dorothy James was born on August 3 1920 in Oxford. When her father, an ill-paid tax officer, was transferred to the Inland Revenue in Cambridge, she enrolled at Cambridge High School for Girls. Although she became a star pupil — excelling at English — there was never any question of her education continuing beyond the age of 16. Hopes of a university degree ended when her father, “a man not disposed to educate girls”, told her he could not afford the fees.

Instead, at 17, she went to work in a dreary tax office at Ely; more than 50 years later she would still wince at the memory and lament the sheer waste of time. During the Second World War she was in Cambridge, engaged in the no less dreary chore of issuing ration books, and in 1941 she married Connor Bantry White, a medical student, with whom she had two daughters. Later in the war, White qualified as a doctor but was badly affected by his wartime experiences and returned in 1945 suffering from schizophrenia. He never recovered and spent the rest of his life in and out of various hospitals until his death in 1964.

In 1949 Phyllis White and her husband moved in with his parents. Faced with the responsibility of being the family breadwinner, she took a job keeping medical records. In the evenings she studied for a diploma in hospital administration. For the next 10 years she worked for the North West Metropolitan Regional Hospital Board, eventually becoming principal administrative assistant. Meanwhile, she was not only nursing her husband but also bringing up her two girls.

As she approached 40, Phyllis White began to fear that she would never fulfil her ambition of becoming a writer. “It was a now or never situation,” she recalled. “I didn’t want to end up saying to my children and grandchildren: ‘I always thought I’d be a writer.’ ”

In 1959, as P D James, she began to plot her first novel, Cover Her Face, which introduced her master detective (and poet), Adam Dalgliesh. James endowed him with the qualities she most admired in men: “courage, compassion, high intelligence and sensitivity”. She agreed that it would be unusual to find a senior detective who was also a successful poet, but argued that “we do tend to stereotype people. Why shouldn’t a policeman write poems?”

Working for two hours each morning before leaving for work, P D James completed the novel in 1961. Her agent approached Faber and Faber and suggested that they needed a new crime writer to replace Cyril Hare, who had recently died. James recalled that she fully expected to be rejected, but Faber accepted her book immediately and Cover Her Face was published in 1962. It was an instant success. “She would get reviews in the Times Literary Supplement which were like love letters,” her agent remembered.

Although Cover Her Face was set in a country house and dealt with the death of a parlourmaid, her second novel A Mind To Murder (1963) saw James on (for her) more familiar ground. This story was set in a psychiatric practice and gave James the opportunity to explore the device of the “closed community”, a setting which she favoured in her later books.

^{PD James examining a razor blade, 1987 (SYGMA/CORBIS)}

A Mind To Murder also gave P D James the chance to draw on her experience of hospital administration, providing an accurate sense of realism. Hospitals featured again in Shroud for a Nightingale (1971), set in a nursing school where a student nurse is poisoned. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) was set in the microbiology department of a Cambridge college; The Black Tower (1975) dealt with a home for incurables, and Death of an Expert Witness (1977) with the murder of a forensic scientist.

Meanwhile, following the death of her husband, P D James had resumed evening classes and in 1968 her studies led to her passing exams for a senior post at the Home Office. She worked as a principal in the police department until 1972, when she moved to the department responsible for criminal policy, specialising in what was then known as juvenile delinquency. There she acquired detailed first-hand knowledge of forensic science, juvenile offenders and other subjects which she drew on in her subsequent career as a novelist.

Her experiences in the National Health Service and Whitehall were also instrumental in teaching her how to chair a committee with an almost feline mixture of briskness and cunning. Certainly, P D James enjoyed the contrasts in her working lives. “I am a writer who needs the demands of an outside job,” she noted.

During her time at the Home Office she took advantage of her access to so many experts to check the authenticity of methods used in her books. For Death of an Expert Witness, James checked every aspect of forensic analysis of criminal evidence. But reviewers were more impressed with her characterisation. “James’s insight into sexual fears and needs is profound,” wrote one critic. “She makes of even her murderers and victims human beings we can pity.” As for her hero Adam Dalgliesh, she always insisted that he was not the man she would have liked to marry, but the man she might like to have been. As the burden of work grew, she used to complain, only half-jokingly, that what she really needed was a good wife.

For most of her writing life P D James was saddled with the sobriquet “Queen (or First Lady) of Crime”, a crown which the media had handed to her following the death of Agatha Christie in 1976. But she was at pains to point out that she differed from Christie (“such a bad writer”) in that she cared about the victim and thought that treating the corpse as simply part of a puzzle “trivialised death”.

Following her retirement from the Home Office in 1979, P D James increased her writing output. Innocent Blood (1980), which dealt with an adopted child who discovers her real parents were child-murderers, was followed by The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) and A Taste for Death (1986), dealing with the murder of a politician in a south London church.

As her literary output increased, so did other calls on her time. In 1985 she was asked to lecture on detective fiction at Boston University and in the same year produced her first play, Private Treason. Two years later P D James was appearing on the literary television programme Book Choice. Also in 1987, when she helped to judge the Booker Prize, she recalled being interviewed for the newspapers and their being very eager to have her photograph taken “clutching a dagger or carving knife”.

Having been appointed OBE in 1983, she became a magistrate while writing Devices And Desires (1989), and in 1991 was created a life peer.

The death of her husband when she was only 44 caused her great and abiding distress. Death out of sequence — and particularly the death of a child — remained for her “the most awful thing that can happen to a human being”. She was sustained not only by a remarkable inner strength, but also by her two daughters (and, later, grandchildren) to whom she remained devoted. She was also a committed Anglican: she was horrified when no one seemed to realise that the title of her novel Devices and Desires came from the Book of Common Prayer.

P D James was never a prolific writer, unlike many of her contemporaries, notably Ruth Rendell, her friend in the House of Lords with whom she was often compared and who averaged two books a year. For the first decade of her writing life, James averaged one every two years. This was partly because she was an author who took infinite pains; there was nothing slapdash about her prose, and although the earlier novels were, in the classic English tradition, comparatively short books, her later ones such as Devices and Desires and The Murder Room (2003) were more than 400 pages long.

While never neglecting the disciplines of plot, which she relished, she liked to take time exploring character in depth and, in particular, creating a sense of place. She used to say that all her novels began with the setting. Ideas often came to her when she was out walking. She was especially good on Suffolk, which she had known since family camping holidays near Lowestoft and where, in later years, she bought a cottage at Southwold.

Her descriptions of English country churches were both loving and evocative, reflecting her interest in church architecture and her passion for the language of the Authorised Version of the Bible. “Clerics have debased the Authorised Version,” she complained, “presumably on the basis that they are better writers than Cranmer or that God is unable to appreciate the more subtle rhythms of 17th-century prose.”

In her later years her fellow authors awarded her the coveted Crime Writers’ Association Diamond Dagger for a lifetime’s achievement. Her books were filmed and televised and she travelled the world lecturing, signing and taking on visiting fellowships in Boston, California and Toronto. She published A Time to Be in Earnest, her “Fragment of Autobiography”, in 1999, and the final Dalgliesh novel, The Private Patient, about the murder of a journalist at a plastic surgery clinic, in 2008.

More than almost any other crime writer, P D James transcended the genre to produce novels which stood on their own as works of literature. She herself observed that “a first-class mystery should also be a first-class novel”.

Having made a late start in the literary stakes, by the end she was as grande a dame as any, although she never gave herself airs and was ultimately as happy with her cats and her grandchildren as she was at the House of Lords with the great and good.

Lady James is survived by her two daughters.

Baroness James of Holland Park, born August 3 1920, died November 27 2014

Guardian:

US-FERGUSON-THANKSGIVING EVE Broken glass on ground where ‘I love Ferguson’ is written. Ferguson, Missouri. Photograph: Yin Bogu/Xinhua Press/Corbis

Gary Younge sets out in chilling detail (The nation of laws, but no justice, 26 November) how the structural disadvantage of African Americans is rendered concrete in specific acts including being shot dead in the street. Regrettably he offers no indication as to how this situation might begin to be remedied. In 2003 Brown University of Providence, Rhode Island, set up a steering committee on slavery and justice, its purpose being to locate the university’s historic role in relation to slavery and to make recommendations accordingly. The published report – as well as offering a sophisticated analysis of the repercussions of slavery in America – made a series of recommendations (eg on hiring protocols and the acceptance of monetary legacies) which the university set in train. The Brown University project is the obvious model for a Senate, Congressional or joint committee of inquiry on the legacy of slavery. There are, for example, 21 Senate committees currently sitting, including ones on ageing, ethics and Indian (Native American) affairs, but the screaming absence at the heart of the US governmental committee system remains slavery. It is not altogether clear how particular committees come into being, but if the president has any influence on the process, Barack Obama has the chance to bolster his somewhat threadbare legacy. Would it not be wonderful if his last act as president was to force the instruments of the US state to confront the great unspeakable in American culture?
Colin McArthur
London

• The human rights protests in the US draw attention to a great deal that’s wrong with our own media. US human rights abuses have gone largely unreported by journalists. It’s not just the killing with impunity of black Americans that is the problem. The US has only 5% of the global population but its often privatised prison system incarcerates 25% of the world’s prisoners. A disproportionate number of these are black – as are the death row inhabitants. African Americans make up around 12.5% of the US population. Yet, according to academic Michele Alexander, in some US cities the proportion of African American males with some form of criminal record approaches 80%. Also some of the worst abuses of the post-slavery era are still largely intact. Brutal post-civil war “disenfranchisment” which forced African Americans out of the public sphere and persisted into the 1960s in the practice of murdering voter registration activists now continues in the form of semi-legal “voter suppression”. Lynching culture has metamorphosed into “stand your ground, shoot-first laws”, now legal in 30 US states. These norms are being imposed across the globe and imported into our own society.
Dr Gavin Lewis
Manchester

• Surely, no police officer anywhere in the world needs to shoot to kill when attempting to disarm a potentially dangerous person? Putting a bullet in an arm or a leg is quite sufficient to disable a possible criminal. Furthermore, a white police officer putting a killing bullet into a black suspect in a country with a long history of racism must inevitably lead to riots.
Rachel Gibbons
Hove, East Sussex

A young person’s arms covered in scars as a result of self harm. ‘Applied behaviour analysis would have instituted an assessment that explains why the behaviour is occurring and put in place a plan of action for her self-harm.’ Photograph: Linda Nylind

It is deplorable that a young woman with autism died after gaining 10 stone in weight during the seven years she was detained – mainly alone in a padded room – at a private assessment and treatment centre (Patient with autism put on 10 stone during years alone in padded room, coroner rules, 25 November).

The misconception that some people with autism behave in a way that is so challenging they cannot be supported to change their behaviour resulted in a tragic outcome for Stephanie Bincliffe and her family. We believe every person with autism deserves to be supported in a way that helps them to thrive and achieve. Mencap and the Challenging Behaviour Foundation have called for the Department of Health to order an independent inquiry into the death of inpatients with learning disabilities. In the case of Stephanie Bincliffe, we echo the need for an independent inquiry to investigate her death and to address her family’s concerns about her treatment.
Jolanta Lasota
Chief executive, Ambitious about Autism

• We read with great sadness about Stephanie Bincliffe. There is a science much underused in the UK – yet in mainstream use elsewhere in the world – that might perhaps have helped. Applied behaviour analysis would have instituted a functional analysis (ie an assessment that explains why the behaviour is occurring) and put in place a plan of action for her self-harm. Nice guidelines recommend such functional analyses for behaviour that challenges: behaviour analysts are the professionals trained to carry them out. ABA is much used in the early years for children with autism, but can have application at any age. There are 160 masters-level board certified behaviour analysts in the UK – perhaps this tragic case will prompt such establishments to seek out their expertise in the future.
Dr Neil Martin, Dr Jenn Austin, Dr Mecca Chiesa, Kate Grant, Suzy Yardley, Mandy Williams, Jane McCready, Shelley Swain, Richard May
Board of the UK Society for Behaviour Analysis

• I am a “hospital manager” at a low-secure inpatient unit specialising in treatment of people with learning disabilities and challenging behaviour (Society, 26 November) – despite the title an independent panel with the power to discharge a patient against the advice of the responsible psychiatrist). I have just come back from hearing a case concerning someone with very low IQ who prior to admission had been uncontrollably aggressive and dangerous to family and others, and had not responded to treatment. Now under intensive care of staff at the unit he is experiencing a much better quality of life.

However, what does frustrate members of our panel is the fact that when the therapy is successful, and patients have learned to control their aggression and/or self-harming behaviour, so few commissioning authorities have community sheltered facilities to which they can progress. This is a real scandal. We often cannot release a person from section because we cannot be certain that he or she will be safe once in the community. So we must not create the idea that there is no need for intensive care in secure settings. But we owe it to the people concerned, and to their families, to campaign for many more places where they can come off section, but with proper care in place to enable them to live safely.
Martin Vye
Canterbury, Kent

19.06 GMT

As an individual member of YHA, and a member of the U3A’s only affiliated youth hostelling group, I was delighted to see the YHA was being celebrated (The YHA gets a bunk up, Travel, 22 November). But it became a wry kind of delight when I realised the featured hostel was Stow-on-the-Wold. The U3A group liked it so much, we’ve stayed there twice, and are planning a third visit soon. But alas, if any readers wish to follow us to this “majestic double-fronted townhouse”, they’d better not leave it too long, as the YHA has decided that Stow is a dispensable part of its portfolio, and the hostel has been sold.

The Georgian mansion that is Stratford hostel, another group favourite, is still in the YHA, but the Regency mansion on the shores of the lake that was Derwentwater hostel has also been sold, as has nearby Elterwater. Yes, this is a “realm of modestly priced self-catering accommodation known only to the few”, but what Rachel Dixon perhaps did not realise is that it is a fast-shrinking realm. So if your readers felt tempted to sample a medieval banquet at St Briavels, yet another group favourite, or to watch a magnificent sunset from Poppit Sands, I advise them to go sooner rather than later, while these splendidly located hostels remain in the YHA.
Sarah Matthews
Stafford

Soldiers of the English infantry in France, running out of their trenches at the signal to assault at the Somme. Photograph: Fototeca Gilardi/Getty Images

Paul Mason, discussing whether graphic portrayal of its gruesome reality is an effective tactic in opposing war (The closer I get to conflict, the more I think showing gruesome images can never deter war, G2, 24 November), refers to Ernst Friedrich’s famous anti-war museum in Berlin, which was closed by the Nazis in 1933. Friedrich’s grandson, Tommy Spree, reopened the museum in 1982; he and the museum are still there today, at Brüsseler Str 21 (in Berlin’s Wedding district). For those readers who are interested in the gruesome side, Friedrich’s shocking 1924 book War Against War! – which Paul Mason also describes – is available in print again in English. It was republished by Spokesman Books earlier this year.
Albert Beale
Editor, Housmans World Peace Database

Tony Blair attends the second annual Save the Children Illumination Gala at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Photograph: Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

The news that the Guardian is to adopt US spellings for some American proper nouns is to be commended (Mind your language, 21 November, theguardian.com). Generally speaking, US spellings represent the spoken sound to a slightly greater degree than the British. However, it should be remembered that this development originated largely from the initiatives of Noah Webster, whose more ambitious plans for English spelling modernisation were halted abruptly by the US Congress. In the interests of ease of learning and greater literacy, it is surely time to revisit that initiative.
Stephen Linstead
Chair, English Spelling Society

• Even before the supreme court decides, are we to hear the prince’s 27 letters have somehow “gone missing” from the ministerial files (Report, 26 November)?
Les Wheeler
Liverpool

• Notwithstanding the merits of Tony Blair’s award (Report, 26 November), how can Save the Children justify spending not an insignificant amount, out of its scarce resources, on such a superfluous event like the glittering “Illumination Gala” at New York’s Plaza Hotel no less. When I’ve donated money to this charity it was in the belief that the money would be spent on caring for children in places like Gaza, Iraq, Syria and west Africa. I shall never give it another penny in the future.
Asaf Mir
London

• Just checked back out of interest the books I have read over the past few months (Woolf is for women – and Mailer’s for men? How readers favour authors of own gender, 26 November). John Keegan, Andrew Martin, Benjamin Black, Peter Ackroyd, David Kynaston, Robert B Parker, CJ Sansom, Richard Flanagan. But no, I am not male. I did read Middlemarch earlier in the year…
Rosemary Duff
Norwich

• Facebook is criticised for failing to stop the plot to kill Lee Rigby. I await the inevitable bad press that MI5 and MI6 will face for their lamentable failure to provide us with a place to share our photos with friends.
Angela Ford
Cullompton, Devon

A handout picture from Britain's Ministr Britain’s international development secretary Justine Greening talking to medics at RAF Brize Norton prior to them flying to Freetown, Sierra Leone, to help tackle the Ebola crisis. Photograph: Cpl Richard Cave/AFP/Getty Images

We are a network of UK-based organisations and individuals working to improve health in Sierra Leone. The Ebola outbreak is the greatest humanitarian threat the country has faced since its devastating civil war and we welcome the highly committed response to the crisis from both the secretary of state for international development, Justine Greening, and from the UK government as a whole.

To ensure as much benefit is gained from these commitments as possible, we the undersigned members and friends of the UK-Sierra Leone Health Partners Network would like to bring to the UK government’s attention our following concerns, and call upon the secretary of state for international development to raise them further with relevant cabinet ministers:

First, the withdrawal of Gambia Bird flight permits. The decision by the UK government to halt direct flights between London and Freetown was ill advised and contradicts travel advice from the WHO and the Foreign Office. Forcing people from the UK to travel to west Africa via Europe significantly impedes efforts to deliver humanitarian aid and monitor returning travellers. This knee-jerk response is putting UK nationals on the ground at risk by leaving them under-equipped and understaffed, putting our own population at greater risk by undermining efforts to tackle Ebola at its source, and having a devastating impact on the Sierra Leonean economy. We call upon the UK government to reinstate direct flights between the UK and Sierra Leone.

Second, slow scale-up of bed numbers and coverage. A recent paper in The Lancet claimed we face a “rapidly closing window of opportunity for controlling the outbreak and averting a catastrophic toll of Ebola cases and deaths”. The 1,700 beds pledged by the US to Liberia are less than half the 4,800 required by mid-November to rapidly control the disease, and requirements rise exponentially as each week passes. The large treatment centres being built in permanent structures by the UK in Sierra Leone are essential, but alone are insufficient as they are time-consuming to erect and offer limited coverage. The deployment of low-tech treatment centres in local areas is the only way to achieve the rapid scale-up of capacity required. We understand the UK is beginning to adopt this approach which is encouraging, but much more needs to be done to avoid further catastrophic loss of life. We call upon the UK government to increase the use of low-tech facilities in local areas.

Third, expensive transportation costs. Many of our network organisations, including diaspora groups and charities, have significant resources at their disposal that they struggle to deliver because of extortionate logistical costs. The UN office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs can provide a cost-effective and efficient humanitarian relief supply chain via companies such as DHL when called upon to act by member states. This has yet to be done and is a significant barrier to relief efforts. We call upon the UK government to lobby the UN to provide logistical support for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Fourth, fragile health systems. This unprecedented outbreak is the result of a “perfect storm” of several underlying conditions, the most critical of which is the weakness of local health systems. Sierra Leone has about 120 doctors for 6 million people. The UK has supported ambitious government health reforms in the past and impressive progress has been made, but Ebola has pushed the health system to breaking point. Unless a comprehensive response to this crisis is adopted, health services will collapse entirely, resulting in a public health disaster that will eclipse the Ebola outbreak itself and provide the perfect incubator for further outbreaks. As the leader of the international response in Sierra Leone, the UK must ensure the unprecedented international attention and resources support long-term efforts to strengthen all aspects of the health system, in collaboration with the Sierra Leonean Ministry of Health and Sanitation. We call upon the UK government to support long-term, sustainable efforts to strengthen Sierra Leone’s health system to avert an impending public health disaster.
Sir James Mellon
Former high commissioner of the UK to Ghana, Vice-president, St Andrew’s Clinic for Children (STACC)
Professor John Rees
Emeritus professor of medical education, King’s College London
Professor David Lloyd
Chair, The Waterloo Partnership, Emeritus professor, University of Liverpool, Past-president, British Association of Paediatric Surgeons
Professor Peter Holmes
Emeritus professor, University of Glasgow, Chair, St Andrew’s Clinic for Children (STACC)
Professor David Crompton
Emeritus professor, University of Glasgow
Ade Daramy
Chair, UK Sierra Leone Ebola Taskforce
David M Holmes
Retired chair, Kambia-Gloucestershire Hospitals NHSFT Link
Dr Danny McLernon-Billows
Coordinator, UKSLHP
Edward Blandford
Coordinator, UKSLHP
Dr Edward Cole
Chair, Masanga Hospital International Board, CEO, Sierra Leone Adventists Abroad
Elizabeth Conteh
Chair, The Organisation of Sierra Leonean Health Professionals Abroad
Geoff Eaton
Trustee, Masanga UK
Jacqui Boulton
Co-founder and trustee, UK Friends of The Shepherds Hospice, Sierra Leone
Dr Mary Hodges
Vice-president, St Andrews Clinic for Children-Sierra Leone
Dr Matthew Clark
Co-founder, Welbodi Partnership
Ralph Swann
Coordinator, UKSLHP
Richard Kerr-Wilson
Trustee, Kambia Appeal
Robin Gray
Hon sec, Hastings Sierra Leone Friendship Link
Ruth Cecil
Chair, UK Friends of the Shepherd’s Hospice, Sierra Leone
Shona Lockyer
Chair of trustees, The Kambia Appeal
Mark Whitby
President of board of trustees, The Construction and Development Partnership, SL
Valerie Tucker
Country manager, IPAS Sierra Leone
Amar Nathwani
UKSLHP member
Amelia Cook
Medical student, King’s College London
Anne Barry
Surgical practitioner, Hinchingbrooke NHS Trust
Caroline Baker
Options Consultancy Services Ltd
Christine Boulton-Lane
Hastings Sierra Leone Friendship Link
Emily Bell
Programme manager, Sound Seekers, UCL Ear Institute
Darsha Patel
UKSLHP member
Dr Frederick Nye
UKSLHP member
Gemma Cook
Physiotherapy coordinator, King’s Sierra Leone Partnership
Jagruti Patel
Trustee, Better Lives Foundation
Jamie Patel
IT consultant
Jenifa Jeyakumar
UKSLHP member
Kantilal Mistry
UKSLHP member
Katrina Hann
Research consultant, Sierra Leone
Komal Patel
Senior clinical pharmacist, NHS
Krushna Patel
Pharmacy assistant
Mathew Bartley
Director, BartleyHealth Ltd
Max Manning-Lowe
Administrator, King’s Sierra Leone Partnership
Nainesh Patel
Lead pharmacist, Better Lives Foundation
Dr Natalie Gulliver
King’s Sierra Leone Partnership
Dr Natalie Nairi Quinn
Career development fellow in economics, University of Oxford
Dr Peter Baker
Public health speciality registrar, Volunteer epidemiologist for King’s Sierra Leone Partnership
Ronald G Smith
Retired fellow, American College of Dentists, International Association of Oral Maxillofacial Surgery
Sara Nam
Technical specialist reproductive and sexual health, Options Consultancy Ltd
Dr Shona Johnston
Paediatric registrar and VSO volunteer
Sneha Baljekar
Nursing student, King’s College London
Dr Tom Pearson
General practitioner, NHS
Tushar Trivedi
Pharmacist, Better Lives Foundation
Uriben Patel
UKSLHP member
Vanessa Adams
South Wales-Sierra Leone Cancer Care
Yoges Yogendran
UKSLHP member

Independent:

So this was what we’ve been waiting for? Sadiq Khan’s great plan to deal with the Green Party: “Waste your vote on the Green Party – or choose a green Labour government” (26 November). He may be charged with plagiarism, as he’s nicked the Tory strategy for dealing with Ukip. They say: “Vote Ukip, get Ed”. He says: “Vote Green, get Cameron”. Wow, what searing political insight.

Mr Khan mentions “reducing inequality” and states his and Ed Miliband’s opposition to the Iraq War, even though they both served in government under the last Labour administration that oversaw an increase in the gap between rich and poor, and went to war in Iraq.

For many disaffected former Labour members, the war in Iraq and the increase in inequality under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were tipping points. Khan and Miliband need to explain why, if the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and a widening gap between rich and poor weren’t tipping points for them, tucked up with their well-paid jobs in safe Labour seats, what on earth would be?

Ben Saunders

Mitcham, Greater London

“Vote Labour for a green radical government”? Methinks thou jest, Mr Khan. The Labour Party has not been radical since the 1980s when it lost its nerve and its purpose in the face of Thatcherism. Today’s Labour Party is ungrounded in principle and seems to have only one desire – to get into power by aping the Tory party.

I have a suggestion for all Labour Party members still holding on to the belief that somehow their party will one day become a socialist/social democratic party again: look at the Green Party manifesto as I did when I had my Russell Brand moment a year ago and was considering never voting again. Therein you will find the policies and principles that you believe in and thought the Labour Party believed in but no longer does. Join us and create a mass movement that opposes the vested interests of the rich and powerful and the subservient politicians in the three main parties who feed their greed.

Michael Jenkins

Bromley, Kent

It’s a bit rich Labour MP Sadiq Khan saying that, “Like it or not, under the first-past-the-post system, every vote for the Green Party only makes it one vote easier for the Conservatives to win the election.” In the run-up to the 2010 election Labour’s leadership supported the introduction of the Alternative Vote system; but come the 2011 voting-reform referendum, Labour MPs were conspicuous by their absence when it came to speaking up for the reform.

Since then the political system has had to accommodate even more “minor” parties, but the voting system is still stuck in the 1950s, when over 90 per cent of people voted for just two parties.

Labour is part of the problem and is certainly not the solution.

Alan Bailey

Sandy, Bedfordshire

Anyone who imagines that Labour is a “truly radical party again”, as Sadiq Khan claims, clearly missed Mr Miliband’s own essay in The Independent in April of this year. In the lead-up to the Euro elections, and with time and space to set out his own thoughts, young Ed concluded that “the party I lead is building a One Nation agenda to tackle the cost-of-living-crisis: the greatest challenge of our age”.

Jack Easton

St Albans District Green Party

May I congratulate you for presenting a comprehensive and accurate view of the Greens this past week. The Green surge is happening; Labour has even set up a separate unit deliberately to discredit us. The recent poll by Lord Ashcroft posed the question: “If you thought that a party could win, who would you vote for?” and 26 per cent of those asked said Green.

Voters need to remember that if they don’t vote for what they believe in, they are never going to get it. So be brave – tactical voting is only half of a vote.

John Marjoram

Stroud, Gloucestershire

South-east targeted by ‘mansion tax’

It is increasingly clear that the proposed mansion tax is all about politics and not about policy. It has nothing to do with fairness, and instead is all about raising easy money from a minority of the population.

I have no quibble with the argument that the current Council Tax bands are outdated and unfit for purpose and would have no objection to paying a new top band. The proposed mansion tax, however, deals with the wrong problem and, what is more, deals with it in a way that is inequitable.

Our house was bought with money on which considerable amounts of tax have already been paid. Its value has increased since then, largely as a consequence of being on the outskirts of London. If we had the same income but lived in Norfolk or the Isle of Wight we could live in a far bigger property and never be in any danger of paying the mansion tax. On this basis, the tax is not a tax on property but on London and the South-east – and someone has to live and work here.

It is completely iniquitous that Russian oligarchs and others buy properties for considerably more than £2m and then don’t live in them or contribute in any way while there is a chronic housing shortage in London.

If this tax really is about fairness then how about this: you pay mansion tax if you own a property worth more than, say, six times the regional average for where you live – this would raise far more money, which could then be spent on new affordable housing.

Kathy Moyse

Cobham, Surrey

Sol Campbell, among others, has criticised Labour for proposing a mansion tax. I quite agree that this is an unfair tax that penalises aspiration. Obviously if we want to get rid of the deficit we should rely on the 5.2 million on less than £7.70 an hour, on the disabled and on those who have been made redundant to pay for it. It is only fair that they do so since they clearly have no aspirations. Anyway they don’t seem to be complaining as much as the high-profile rich, so that’s all right then.

Dr Ian Robertson

Milton Keynes, Bedfordshire

Why I can’t support Independent campaign

I’m afraid I cannot support the idea of this year’s Independent fundraising campaign. Why? Because when people fight for this country, it is the Government’s responsibility to thank them by ensuring that they are well cared for when they return to civvy street. It is patently doing nothing of the sort, except for a very few men and women who might be getting good prosthetic limbs and rehabilitation.

By accepting that their care is a matter of charity and not governmental duty, you put their future (and that of those who follow them) more, not less, at risk.

The stories of those you have featured clearly illustrate how they have been abandoned by the people who called on their service. I find that despicable and fear your efforts will be horribly counterproductive.

Merry Cross

Reading

The real EU problem is not immigration

Even if the UK was able to close its borders to European migrants, the EU would still be expensive, badly managed, wasteful, interfering and undemocratic.

When we gave our support for continuing membership of the Common Market in 1975, we were not aware that European law would have primacy over the laws of member states.

It’s not immigration that is the greatest concern; it’s the treacherous self-interest that turned the Common Market (a perfectly laudable project) into the European Union (a job-creation scheme for politicians and lawyers).

Without intending it, we have found ourselves being governed by judges who have created an organisation that was never in the minds of our elected representatives. As long as that continues the EU will always attract deep mistrust and wisdespread criticism.

Richard Beeley

Rotherham

A cartoonist at the top of his game

Wow, Dave Brown is on fire this week! First, yesterday’s laugh-out-loud cartoon in the style of Ronald Searle, a multi-layered jab at Labour’s proposed public-school bashing, lovely warm humour with serious under-layers. Then today’s savage dig at the jaw-dropping award to Tony Blair by Save the Children, which does infinitely more to dramatise this awful absurdity than any of my letter-writing bleatings could possibly hope for.

Well done, Dave!

Ian Bartlett

East Molesey, Surrey

Voluntary black-cab banishment?

If David Mellor finds taxi drivers so irksome (Letters, 27 November) perhaps he should become a taxi exile.

Stan Labovitch

Windsor

Government hears Mi6 when it chooses to

Why is it that when the intelligence services ask for more anti-terrorism powers, the politicians obey; but when the same agencies warn that Britain’s involvement in foreign wars increases the terror threat at home, they are completely ignored?

Paul Donovan,

London E11

Times:

Sir, The chairman of the intelligence and security committee, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, believes that because one of the killers of Fusilier Lee Rigby wrote of his intentions on Facebook then the internet company knew he did this and could have told the authorities (News, Nov 26).

His ignorance of how language search on the web works and its approximate nature appears to be almost total; on the BBC’s Newsnight he seemed to think it consisted of looking for the word “terrorist”.

No, Facebook is not reading our messages. Banks of computers, some working for Facebook, some for GCHQ and the US National Security Agency, are indeed processing virtually everything in social media, but at present their ability to find what they are looking for is limited.

It would be far more relevant to blame GCHQ, though politicians seem not to understand what their own security agencies are doing, with or without their permission; the whistleblower Edward Snowden has made this clear to everyone.

Yorick Wilks
Professor of Artificial Intelligence, University of Sheffield

Sir, The furore around what Facebook knew about the intentions of the killers of Lee Rigby comes as no surprise to many of us who have been highlighting online hate on that website for several years. Sadly, there are many pages and groups on Facebook that are inciting hate on a daily basis. Facebook hosts pages including “Jewish ritual murder”, “Death to Islam” “The white race” and “The Holocaust is a lie”. The company says it will not tolerate hate speech, but in reality it responds only to user reports and reacts only to the volume of reports, not to actual content.

As we have seen with Lee Rigby and other cases, words can lead directly to actions. All social media have a duty of care to ensure such pages and comments are reported to the authorities and removed. With more than 1.2 billion Facebook users worldwide, the amount of traffic must be huge — but the company must scale up its response and take action.

If the tragic death of Lee Rigby leads to governments and social media taking hate speech more seriously, it will be a positive outcome.

Paul Corrick
Facebook — say no to Hatebook
Radcliffe, Manchester

Sir, The government castigates internet service providers (ISPs) for failing to alert the security services to extremist messages, but what is the computational definition of “extremist”?

The question can be seen as a practical example of entscheidungsproblem (the question of whether there exists a definite method which, at least in principle, can be applied to a given proposition to decide whether that proposition is provable). This was studied by Alan Turing and found to be insoluble. You would need a perpetual motion machine to do it!

Should we not stop wasting time and energy on an insoluble problem?

Ian Pyle
Formerly a professor of computer science, York

Sir, My company monitors what is being said about our corporate clients on the internet and we process millions of posts a day to find a few hundred significant mentions of a brand name. Our security services would be swamped with data if internet companies handed over every mention of a terror-related word posted on Facebook. Finding needles in haystacks is easy by comparison.

Richard Brown
Managing director, UKNetMonitor

Sir, It seems it is unacceptable for Scotland Yard to examine the phone records of 1,700 employees of News UK for criminal activity (News, Nov 25), but ISPs must monitor everyone’s emails for evidence of terrorism. What’s more intrusive?

John McAndrew
Welwyn, Herts

Sir, Why is it that when the intelligence services ask for more anti-terrorism powers the politicians obey, but when the same agencies warn that Britain’s involvement in foreign wars increases the terror threat at home, they are ignored?

Paul Donovan
London E11

Sir, I wonder whether the makers of Janice Turner’s new washing machine, which plays a tune when it finishes a cycle (Opinion, Nov 27), have been canny enough to program snatches of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau during periods of malfunction.
Dr Nicholas Marston
University reader in music theory and analysis, King’s College, Cambridge

2014

Sir, Your diarist (TMS, Nov 27) says that 20 years ago New Scientist coined the term “nominative determinism” for people with apt names for their jobs. I call it Happy Families.
Wadham Sutton
Newcastle upon Tyne

Sir, Pope Francis is a breath of fresh air but is wrong about grandmothers when he says: “We encounter a general impression of weariness and ageing, of a Europe that is now a ‘grandmother’ ” (News, Nov 26). Grandmothers are hard working, useful and fulfilled. They are loved and needed. Most are generous with their time and emotional support. They do not mourn past fertility as they have passed on this gift. The EU is much more like a grumpy, single old man suffering a crisis. The Pope is surrounded by such men.
Marian Latchman
Braishfield, Hants

Sir, I write with regard to the death of cricketer Phillip Hughes (obituary, page 82). During the years I played county cricket, helmets were not worn and I was only aware of one cricketer who received a blow to the head, and that was the captain of Essex. What happens today is that the batsman, seeing the ball approaching his head, points his helmet towards the ball and lets it hit him, presumably hoping his helmet will protect him. However, in many cases I have seen the ball get through the grille. I would suggest a trial in which helmets are not worn. Batsman will then do as we did: duck out of the way. Incidentally, one West Indian cricketer wears only a cap and never seems to have been hit.
Frank McHugh
Yorks and Glos (1949-56),
Tarring, W Sussex

Sir, A year ago to the day you published my letter about the behaviour of Australian cricketers in the Ashes series. I referred to reported comments from players, such as: “We aim to hit and intimidate”, and “Give Clarke the message to go and bust some heads”. It is to be hoped that the death of Phillip Hughes informs the approach to intimidation, but my fear is that in a few months it will be forgotten.
John Vane
Woking, Surrey

Sir, By admitting the use of “bouncers” within the canon law of cricket, bowlers are encouraged to target the batsman’s head. It would be better to mark a red line across the wicket; any bowler pitching within the prohibited area should receive a call of “no ball” and a red card, debarring him from the game.
James W Neville
Southborough, Kent

Sir, Matthew Hancock, the business minister, describes as “bonkers” requirements for oven gloves to be heat-resistant and washing-up gloves to resist detergent (“EU bureaucrats in lather over kitchen safety”, Nov 24), and claims that prices “could rise by a fifth” and that the move “would place a huge weight on businesses”.

The only businesses that may incur extra costs are those that currently offer inadequate products. The revision of the EU directive on personal protective equipment is timely, and the principle is simple: if a product is meant to protect you it should do so. Our record of ensuring that people go home safely after a day at work continues to improve. Why should anyone expect lower levels of protection outside the workplace?

Alan Murray

Chief executive, British Safety Industry Federation

Telegraph:

The real impact of independent schools; terrorists on Facebook; working families in poverty; the man who recruited Bletchley’s codebreakers; wheely annoying cases

Ofsted targets 'uninspiring' teaching at private schools

Charitable relief on business rates saves the fee-paying sector just under £150 million a year Photo: ALAMY

7:00AM GMT 27 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – The headmaster of University College School, Hampstead, has missed the point. The short-term revenue consequences for the Exchequer are incidental. The real impact of independent schools is that, by sending their children to these over state schools, the most demanding, influential and articulate parents have only a passing interest in the education of the vast majority.

Were their children to attend the same schools as most of our children, rest assured that all schools would be funded adequately and the highest possible standards assured for all.

The long-term social and financial consequences of all our children receiving the education now reserved for just 7 per cent would be incalculable.

Ian Ducat
Coaley, Gloucestershire

SIR – Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, wants to use the threat of higher tax rates to force independent schools into a closer partnership with the state sector. I invite him to visit my school to explain how we could add to our already extensive support for local schools – through shared teaching, coaching and facilities.

He clearly believes that all independent schools are awash with the children and cash of oligarchs. We are not (the headmaster of King’s in Wimbledon is welcome to send me an oligarch or two). Our fees are high because they reflect the (rising) cost of running a good school.

Of necessity, and because we believe it is the right thing to do, we offer bursaries to many families who otherwise could not afford our fees.

Our parents already pay two school bills – for state education through their taxes, and the fees at this school. I would find it hard to explain to them why we should divert more teacher time and more of our resources away from their children.

Richard Biggs
Headmaster, King’s College Taunton

SIR – Approximately 625,000 children are educated privately in Britain, which their parents pay for out of personal income which has been fully taxed. This relieves the state of the cost of educating those children – more than £1 billion each year.

Mr Hunt’s attack on private schools is spiteful class-war politics, and has nothing to do with either raising standards in state schools or correcting unfair treatment in public finances.

Neil Bailey
Audenshaw, Lancashire

SIR – The Labour Party believes that only qualified teachers should be allowed to stand in front of a class. Labour would like teachers from the independent sector to help raise standards in state schools. Many independent school teachers do not have a teaching qualification.

Has Tristram Hunt spotted the paradox here?

Chris Cory
Wootton Bridge, Isle of Wight

Hidden Shakespeare

SIR – I was not surprised to learn of the discovery of a First Folio Shakespeare in the public library in Saint-Omer.

The presence of Catholic English schools and seminaries in what is now northern France, as well as in Spain and Italy, left evidence of an exiled community anxious to keep their English roots, both religiously and culturally. There was also a considerable tradition of drama in these institutions.

It is very likely that this new discovery originally came from the library of the English Jesuit college at Saint-Omer, which was closed and its contents seized during the French Revolution.

The English College at Valladolid, Spain, retained its own copy of the Second Folio (duly censored by the Inquisition) until the Twenties when, through the offices of Maggs Brothers in London, it was acquired for the Folger Shakespeare Library in America.

Both the Royal English College at Valladolid and the Venerable English College in Rome are extant. I sincerely hope that the rector of the latter is a Telegraph reader and is now searching his library with due diligence.

Father Peter Harris
Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire

Terrorists on Facebook

^(AP)

SIR – People post all sorts of rubbish on Facebook and Twitter. MI5 would be drowned in information if much of this was passed on.

It is those on Facebook who are “friends” with these people who should accept responsibility. If they suspect such threats are serious, they should seek psychiatric help for their “friends”.

The police also need more recruits from ethnic minorities. This would help to remove the “us and them” culture, both within the police force and in Britain’s cities.

Dave James
Tavistock, Devon

Christian Advent

SIR – The advent calendars you review may be delicious, but none has any relevance to Christian Advent.

It is almost impossible to find an advent calendar, edible or not, that has any portrayal of the true representation of the Christmas season.

Gaile Morton
Belfast

Families in poverty

SIR – The Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s latest study exposes the record number of working families living in poverty in Britain.

While employment levels are increasing, the reality behind the figures is not so positive. Millions are working in low-paid and insecure jobs, and being hit by the rising cost of food and energy.

As a charity helping people in financial hardship, we find that most of our users are struggling to cope on a low income. More than half have annual household incomes of less than £10,000. Two thirds rely on financial support from friends and family, more than three fifths have been forced to cut back on food and heating, and more than a fifth have turned to payday lenders.

It’s clear that many families have yet to see the benefits of economic recovery, and more needs to be done to address low pay and the high cost of living.

In the meantime, anyone who is struggling can use our free search tool at turn2us.org.uk to identify grants and funds that may be able to provide financial, practical or emotional support.

Alison Taylor
Director, Turn2us
London W6

Machines have not yet learnt to speak human

^{Legless in Burma: from ‘The Mad World of Sign Language’ (Telegraph Books, David Drew)}

SIR – Machine translation is vastly overrated (“Learning a language is never a waste of time”).

All internet software I’ve tried to use, when translating into a foreign language, cannot differentiate between the imperfect tense (“I was looking”), the perfect tense (“I have looked”) and the preterite (“I looked”). They consistently fail to understand homonyms – for instance, perché in Italian means “why” as well as “because”.

Neither do they always understand nuance: for example, in Italian, speakers include personal pronouns with verbs only for clarity or emphasis.

Patrick West
Deal, Kent

SIR – One can get interesting results when something is translated into another language, then back into the original.

During my time working in the Middle East, I was puzzled by an item in a building bill of quantities for “wayaround”. It turned out to be skirting.

Mike Keatinge
Sherborne, Dorset

The man who recruited Bletchley’s codebreakers

SIR – While the much-acclaimed film The Imitation Game rightly acknowledges Alan Turing’s vital role in the war effort, it is sad that it does so by taking a side-swipe at Commander Alastair Denniston, portraying him as a mere hindrance to Turing’s work.

We, his descendants, prefer to remember his extraordinary achievements in the First and Second World War, as well as his unstinting devotion to Britain’s security for more than 30 years. Cdr Denniston was one of the founding fathers of Bletchley Park. On his final visit to Poland in the summer of 1939, he was briefed by Polish mathematicians on the electrical equipment they had developed to break the German cipher machine, Enigma. The Enigma machine that Denniston took back to Bletchley ultimately allowed Britain to read the German High Command’s coded instructions. Such was the secrecy surrounding his work that his retirement in 1945, and death in 1961, passed virtually unnoticed, and he remains the only former head of GC&CS (the precursor to the intelligence agency GCHQ) never to have been awarded a knighthood.

It was he who recruited Turing and many other leading mathematicians and linguists to Bletchley, where he fostered an environment that enabled these brilliant but unmanageable individuals to break the Enigma codes. The GCHQ of today owes much to the foundation he created there.

Nick Denniston
Dr Susanna Everitt
Libby Buchanan
Judith Finch
Simon Finch
Alison Finch
Hilary Greenman
Candida Connolly
Clifton-upon-Teme, Worcestershire

Accurate predictor

SIR – The ouija board may be this year’s must-have gift for Christmas. In 1942-1945 it was in constant use in hut 112 at Stalag Luft III, the Luftwaffe-run PoW camp, by my father and his fellow prisoners.

The most popular question was: “When will the war end?” The answer was always: “Next week.” Eventually, that was true.

Michael Day
Bosham, West Sussex

Far from strict

^(BBC)

SIR – Strictly Come Dancing is not strict at all. It is entertainment thinly disguised as ballroom dancing. Even the magnificent professionals have been reduced to show ponies.

Like classical ballet, ballroom dancing has a technical structure and established rules. Unlike ballet, its function is not to tell a story but to interpret the music. That interpretation at the highest level is what moves ballroom dancing closer to art than sport. Non-believers should watch videos of Luca and Loraine Baricchi performing a waltz or Bryan Watson and Carmen Vincelj performing a cha-cha.

J T Twyford
Brentwood, Essex

Wheely annoying

SIR – As a recent visitor to Venice, I have some sympathy for the residents’ dislike of wheeled suitcases that cause noise and obstruction.

However, shouldn’t the locals’ alleged plan to impose a ban on wheeled luggage be referred to the EU Commissioners? They might have a view on what is essentially a case for free movement of goods through a member state.

Ken Clamp
Aston-on-Trent, Derbyshire

Cheating in numbers

^{(Paul Mckenzie / Barcroft Media)}

SIR – On a recent trip to a game reserve in Africa, I was surprised to learn that the collective noun for cheetahs is a “coalition”.

How appropriate.

Alexander Pincus
Etchingwood, East Sussex

Irish Times:

Sir, – The way for some people to denote organisations or groups coming together from the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, to represent the island of Ireland, has increasingly taken on a curious description, that is, “all-island”.

This term was used again for the recent all-Ireland (described as all-island) Choirs Festival which took place in Belfast and also in the announcement of the “All-Island Schools History Competition” (Cog Notes, November 25th).

Is this ridiculous trend going to continue?

Why are we so afraid to use the description “all-Ireland”? Are we afraid of offending certain sections of the Northern Ireland population?

Would these sections in Northern Ireland refuse to take part in these worthwhile and important activities, unless the description “all-island” is used?

Are we not all living on the island of Ireland, that is, all-Ireland? – Yours, etc, DAVE KAVANAGH Clontarf, Dublin 3.

Sir, – There are many technocratic bodies at home and abroad such as the only recently formed Fiscal Advisory Council, as well as the OECD, the IMF and the EU, which have a duty to warn us what we ought to be doing, such bodies have not always been right or far-seeing, and may in some instances be overcompensating for past omissions before the crash.

Democratic leadership has to balance what they have to say with the need to maintain the consent of the people for what requires to be done.

In the context of rising pre-election pressures, caution is needed, and the electorate would be wise in the light of experience to be sceptical of sweeping and unfulfillable promises and of those that make them.

One of the most important lessons of the crisis, and one of the least disputed in general terms, is the danger of allowing the tax base to become too narrow.

Where the reduction or abolition of a tax quickly becomes eaten bread soon forgotten, it is much more difficult to persuade the public of the need to supply an alternative source of revenue as part of a more rational re-configuration of the tax system, if a new tax, charge or rise is involved.

Leaving aside the necessity of eliminating the budget deficit and the desirability of reducing our dangerously high debt exposure, there are many crying social needs which need some of the increased resources that growth can provide. The resort to devices such as off-balance sheet financing, which usually involves deferred but higher spending, should not be overused.

Given that the Government has adopted the policy in recent years that downward budget adjustments should consist of two-thirds expenditure reductions and one-third tax increases, should not the reverse apply in the recovery, with extra resources divided into two-thirds expenditure reinstatement to one-third unwinding the more explicitly temporary and emergency tax increases?

It would be a pity if the tax-base broadening reforms of the last few years, that were long advocated, were to be lost in the clamour to abolish water charges, property tax, and the universal social charge, whatever mitigation may be required in the interests of fairness or where there is a genuine inability to pay. – Yours, etc, MARTIN MANSERGH Friarsfield House, Co Tipperary.

A chara, — Your headline in The Irish Times (November 27th) stating that unemployment has reached its lowest level since 2009 should be balanced by the statistics relating to emigration. When the figure of 250,000 plus of our citizens who have emigrated during the past five years is taken into account, it will be seen that, far from showing an improvement, the statistics reveal a dismal picture indeed. The economy has a long way to go yet before we can take heart from our employment figures. – Is mise, etc, NIALL Ó MURCHADHA An Spidéal Co na Gaillimhe

A Chara, – Had East Derry MP Gregory Campbell, directed his bigoted outburst at the immigrant or gay and lesbian communities, rather than at the Irish-speaking community (“DUP’s Campbell denied speaking rights for ‘mocking Irish’”, November 4th) cries of racism or homophobia would have been heard before now.

However, because his intolerant outburst was directed at Northern Ireland’s Irish-speaking community there is, for the most part, an uncanny silence.

The UK has signed and ratified the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML).

The Westminster parliament, in 1967 and in 1993, enacted legislation to facilitate the official use of the Welsh language.

The National Assembly for Wales followed suit in 2012. The Scottish Parliament in 2005 enacted the Gaelic Language Act to facilitate and promote Scottish Gaelic.

The Council of Europe has recommended the enactment of similar legislation in Northern Ireland. But all we get from Mr Campbell are his “toilet paper” remarks.

European and British standards are seemingly fine in Britain itself but, as with flag-flying, British standards are not British enough for certain people in Northern Ireland.

Language rights are an integral part of human rights. The Belfast Good Friday Agreement is “subject to safeguards to protect the rights and interests of all sides of the community”.

The kind of intolerance articulated at the DUP Annual Conference is in clear violation of this and can have no part in Northern Ireland if we are to have peace and progress. – Is mise, etc, DÓNALL Ó RIAGÁIN, An Nás, Co Chill Dara

Sir, Fr John McCallion (Letters, November, 27th) writes on the subject of the cross on Carrauntoohil, “what is so offensive about a structure which you can see only if your up close at it or through the viewing of binoculars? What next: a bill in the Dáil for the removal of . . . the Papal Crosses at Phoenix Park and Drogheda?”.

Well now that Fr McCallion mentions it – yes, a bill in the Dáil for the removal of the Papal Cross in the Phoenix Park most definitely.

No need for “up close” or “binoculars” here.

This chunk of steel is 35.3m (116 ft) high and a blight on a beautiful landscape, which happens to belong to the people of Ireland and not the Catholic Church. People enter this park to escape from such monstrosities, only to have this thing stare them in the face.

Fr McCallion has every right to his religious symbols but he must learn to appreciate that size is everything. – Yours, etc, DECLAN KELLY, Rathfarnham, Dublin 14. Sir, Colm O’Brien, who describes himself as “. . . a recent climber of Carrauntoohil”, welcomed the anti-democratic act of vandalising the cross at the summit of Carrauntoohil (Letters, November 25th). Mr O’Brien’s attitude is contemptuous, disrespectful and reeks of metropolitan condescension.

The cross is recognised as an important navigational aid for inexperienced or “recent” climbers as well as the more experienced climber. There has been a cross at the summit of Carrauntoohil since the 1950s so the structure is exempt from any planning process Mr O’Brien cares to advocate.

All of the local people I have encountered have expressed sorrow about the incident. These people are a typical range of Irish people who have a diverse range of religious beliefs or no religious beliefs at all. The Irish countryside is more than a mere playground for metropolitans. – Yours, etc,

JOHN McNAMARA,

Institute of Technology,

Tralee,

Co Kerry

Sir, – David Clarke is somewhat confused (Letters, November 27th). I know of no 1916 relative that believes that they have any special place in events marking the Centenary of the Rising.

It would, of course, be absurd were that to be their position.

Relatives are, however, concerned at the fact that, to date, the Government has no definite centenary programme in place to mark the pivotal event in our nation’s history. The purpose of commemoration is to remember and pay tribute. The “Ireland Inspires” event at the GPO did neither. Not an image, mention or reference to any of the men and women of 1916 in an unprecedented airbrushing out of history in the very place where they made history.

There is a hereditary principle at the heart of this matter – those present at that now infamous gathering occupy their positions as elected representatives and office holders as a result of the great sacrifice that others made on their behalf. Freedom did not fall from the sky. It was fought for and won by a golden generation of our people who deserve to be remembered forever.

If the Government of the day are not cognisant of that fact or choose to ignore it does Mr Clarke seriously suggest that descendants of those who made that supreme sacrifice cannot as citizens comment and should remain silent?

I can think of no greater insult to our forebears – other than the “Ireland Inspires” event that is. – Yours, etc, JAMES CONNOLLY HERON, 1916 Relatives Centenary Initiative, Dublin 6.

Sir, – The issue of upward only commercial rents won’t go away, and suggesting that retailers simply “move on” (Cantillon, 25th November) appears to be pandering to the wishful thinking of a property sector in denial.

There seems to be broad agreement that the Irish upward-only rent clauses are bad for the economy, hence the reason they have now been outlawed by legislation. As a uniquely Irish mechanism they epitomised the worst excesses of an out of control property market. Given they are now outlawed by public policy, it seems hard to reconcile that they should be allowed to stand in existing leases.

In reality, present-day buyers of retail schemes – many of them foreign – will be well used to looking past the rent-roll financials and assessing the underlying health of the tenants contained within.

In cases where landlords have a “head in sand” approach what will buyers find? So there’s the rub. Property values are underpinned by the viability and vigour of the businesses that operate from them.

To be fair, some landlords of a more pragmatic nature have understood this, and deals have been done. But the music will stop for the rest, there will be more retail closures, a continued handbrake on some retail park values, and more jobs lost in Ireland.

Ironically those hurt most by these clauses were small but otherwise viable independent retailers, who are now either gone or circling the drain due to crippling rents. Sadly, their departure will further accelerate the demise of already suffering town centres.

Perhaps tomorrow you will use the same logic to write the companion article, “Negative equity costing homeowners, not the economy”.

This issue has not gone away, despite the hopes in some quarters that it will. – Yours, etc, BLAINE CALLARD CEO, Harvey Norman (Ireland), Brent House, Swords Business Park, Co Dublin.

Sir, – “I just put my arms out like a rugby ball. She started smiling at me when she came down. She just started giggling. I handed the baby to someone else . . .” ( “Young man praised as baby rescued from Dublin fire,” November 25th).

Goodness personified.

Who does one see to recommend Mr Mark Furlong as Man of The Year? – Yours, etc, JOE McPARTLIN, Mount Brown, Dublin 8.

Irish Independent:

Dearbhail McDonald’s article – ‘Without justice for the Hooded Men the spectre of torture still looms over peace’ (November 25) – discusses the call by the surviving men, Amnesty International and Northern Ireland NGOs for Ireland to ask the European Court of Human Rights to revise its 1978 judgment in Ireland v UK on the basis of new evidence the UK had withheld, and find the men were tortured.

The article poses an important question, “But will any re-trial of the Hooded Men case help heal the past?” We are convinced the answer is yes.

In our recent research on dealing with the past in the North, Amnesty canvassed the views of victims of abuses during the three decades of political violence. They came from both ‘sides’ of the conflict. Almost all felt that 16 years after the Good Friday Agreement, they still have not had their rights to truth and justice vindicated. This, they felt – and we agree – is a serious block to the ongoing search for peace and reconciliation in the North.

Therefore, 43 years after Jack Lynch’s government took the courageous step of bringing the UK to the European Court, we are appealing to the current one to follow this through. It must not shirk its moral duty by suggesting it would be to the benefit of lasting peace to let this case drop.

The North is haunted by the past because it has not been dealt with honestly. Amnesty’s research in countries emerging from conflict around the world has shown that it is those societies which have fully faced up to past abuses which are most able to move into the future with confidence. There can be no stable and lasting peace without truth and justice.

Trying to resolve the past around conference room tables without addressing the past traumas still blighting lives cannot work. The harm people suffered needs to be acknowledged if they are to rebuild their lives and their communities.

The article concludes by observing that “truth, like peace, can come with a heavy price tag”. We strongly believe that not achieving truth and justice in this case will carry a much heavier price. The clock is running down and we seriously hope the Government makes the right call – not only for those 14 brutalised ‘hooded men’ but for generations to come.

Colm O’Gorman

Executive Director

Amnesty International Ireland

Time for Kenny to go

Enda Kenny has to go. It’s not really all his fault. Tough. But there has to be a signal from this Government that things will be different.

Elements of Fine Gael guessed in 2010 that Enda might not be the man for the moment. But the amateurish failure of their heave ensured that Enda’s was the only name on the list when Brian Cowen and John Gormley went down the waste pipe. This ensured that the key positions in the new Cabinet were held by the heavies who had saved Enda’s Party skin. He let them loose to wreak political havoc and, with bizarre irony, sabotage the survival and re-election of ‘their’ (sic) Government.

Enda was unable (maybe unwilling) to establish a relationship of confidence and trust with us, the people whom he had been chosen to lead in what was nothing less than a war of national survival on global and European battlefields.

He was unable to monitor what was going on (or not going on) in the various Departments. Unable to hear warning bells. Unable to discipline or guide the big beasts. Unable to resist the old-style temptation to attempt to buy the next election before the economy was ready to ease the austerity.

His Government has been unable to function without the guidance of the Troika. What new own-goals are waiting to be scored?

Grotesquely, we find ourselves – after nearly four years of our ‘Revolutionary’ Government – politically no better off. In fact, things are worse. His failure to consult and to lead (rather than cajole) has driven a significant proportion of our population into a happy-clappy politics of unreason within which reality and common-sense have no oxygen.

If the turkeys do not arrange an early Christmas, they will lose the chance to shift the menu to geese and quails.

Maurice O’Connell

Tralee, Co Kerry

Flying the Banner for Fr Mathew

Yesterday’s story on the removal of the Fr Theobald Mathew statue from O’Connell Street, Dublin stated Fr Mathew was a Kilkenny man. Far from it.

He was born in Thomastown, Golden (not Thomastown, Kilkenny). The Cats have taken enough from us of late, but Fr Mathew remains a proud Tipperary man.

Jeddy Walsh

Clonmel, Co Tipperary

Water metering costs

Martin Glynn (‘Water meters: get the facts right’, November 26) is concerned that there is widespread ignorance, including on the part of RTE’s ‘This Week’ program, about the differences between estimates, budget cost, tender price and contract price.

Our report on the projected €431.56m water metering costs (a figure arrived at by external UK consultants) used the same terminology as that used in the official correspondence between the Department of Environment and Bord Gais Eireann.

“Budgeted Metering Programme Costs” is the description used in a detailed appendix to the correspondence and are described elsewhere as part of the “overall budget”.

Colm O Mongain

RTE, Dublin 4

Work smarter, not harder

I recently read a headline ‘the grey brigade won’t take much more pain’, economically speaking that is. Sadly the grey and the dark and the blond and every brigade that exists will be forced to take a great deal more pain as policies concocted and enacted since this recent economic crisis burst on the horizon lead nowhere but to ever increasingly pain on the way to economic collapse. They fail to understand or address what is really wrong with economics in the 21st century.

The world is in denial: pretending that historic economic policy is adequate to manage and administer an utterly changed economic situation.

Old economic certainties like always producing more (growth) and working harder have crumbled. Instead of growing and producing more we need restraint and limitation of the enormous power to produce technology has placed within our grasp.

Otherwise we continue a mad frenzy of overproduction that is already crippling commerce and turning business failure into an epidemic.

And instead of working harder and longer we must generate a lot more jobs from a lot less work, with many more people working less. I fear the present euphoria of job creation will be a short-lived mirage if we refuse to acknowledge an enormous elimination of work by automation.

Technology has changed the world: invention and innovation will not go away, so rather than be destroyed by them we must adapt.

Very influential people do not want us to think of these things. Very powerful institutions do not want such matters discussed. But it is the grey and all other coloured brigades who will pay the price squeezed by diminishing income and disappearing services to prop up a failed ideology.

The 21st century is an entirely different economic situation to any that existed before.

Until the denial stops and we embrace abundance with much less work there will be no avoidance of ever increasing pain everyone.

Padraic Neary

Tubbercurry, Co Sligo

Irish Independent

29 November 2014 Peter Rice and Vet

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to the Vet with Fluff. Peter Rice turns up again.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down trout for tea and her tummy pain is still there.

Obituary:

Bernard Stonehouse was a polar scientist who braved atrocious weather to study king penguins in Antarctica

Bernard Stonehouse, polar scientist in the Antarctic

Bernard Stonehouse at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge Photo: JOHN ROBERTSON

5:18PM GMT 28 Nov 2014

Comments

Bernard Stonehouse, who has died aged 88, was a polar scientist who studied king penguins on South Georgia and seabirds on Ascension Island; he was also one of the very few to have spent three consecutive winters in the Antarctic — and was lucky to have lived to tell the tale.

Stonehouse first went to Antarctica at the age of 20 in 1946 as a naval pilot seconded to the Falkland Islands Dependency Survey (FIDS, now the British Antarctic Survey). Based mainly at the survey’s Base E on Stonington Island, he also served as a meteorologist, dog sledder and, ultimately, biologist.

On September 15 1947 Stonehouse was on board as deputy pilot when the base’s Auster aircraft took off to mark out a safe landing spot for a larger American twin-engined aircraft which was about to undertake an extensive aerial survey. On the return flight, however, bad weather forced him and his two companions to make an emergency landing on sea ice, and the aircraft turned on its back after one of its skis hit an ice hummock. The three men emerged unscathed but were forced to pitch camp on the ice. They had only a small “pup” (two-man) tent, one sleeping bag, one inner bag and a tin of pemmican between the three of them.

After somehow surviving the first night and failing to attract the attention of a rescue aircraft with a flare, they decided to attempt to cover the 70 miles to base on foot. On the first day they travelled 10 miles, but then the snow set in. For the next few days they averaged only three or four miles a day, hauling their few belongings on a “sledge” improvised from the aircraft’s fuel tank, taking it in turns to use the sleeping bag and eking out the pemmican. Then they were hit by a ferocious gale which saw them huddling together in the tiny tent for three more days.

The gale was a mixed blessing, however, because when it abated it had scoured the sea ice and they were able to set off again. Seven days after their crash, they heard the welcome sound of an aircraft circling some miles away and decided to use their last flare to attract its attention. They were rescued by the American expedition’s Norseman aircraft. They were extremely tired and hungry, but otherwise largely unharmed.

Bernard Stonehouse was born in Hull on May 1 1926. Joining the Fleet Air Arm in 1944, he trained as a pilot, and in 1946 joined the FIDS, travelling to Stonington Island in the sealing ship Trepassey.

During his first year, apart from his close shave with the Auster, his meteorological duties kept Stonehouse mainly at the base. In his second year he took part in two long dog-sledge journeys, under the direction of Vivian (later Sir Vivian) Fuchs, who had taken over command of the base.

_{Bernard Stonehouse (third from left) celebrating Christmas Day, 1947, on Stonington Island}

On the second of these journeys, to survey the coast of Adelaide Island to the north-west, the party covered a total distance of 500 miles. Stonehouse had a few unpleasant moments when he and another member of the party with their sledge broke through thin sea ice and were plunged into the icy water.

In 1949 Stonehouse was one of the so-called “lost 11”, the name given by the press to the men who had an enforced winter at the Stonington base after a relief ship was prevented from reaching them by thick sea ice. For Stonehouse and four others, it was the third consecutive winter in the Antarctic.

By the time he returned to Britain to read Zoology and Geology at University College, London, in 1950, Stonehouse had already carried out a pioneering piece of scientific research. The expedition to Adelaide Island had made the exciting discovery of an emperor penguin “rookery” on the Dion Islands, just off Adelaide’s south coast. At that time, only two other such rookeries were known.

From early June 1949, Stonehouse, supported by two companions, spent three months on the Dion Islands, living in tents in temperatures as low as -40C, to study the penguins during the winter breeding season, about which very little was known at the time. He gained valuable data on the breeding behaviour and embryology of the animals, observing their instinctive desire to hold an egg, or indeed any object of similar size.

On one occasion when a Leica camera was found to be missing, the thief was spotted waddling away with a leather strap trailing between its feet. A penguin, Stonehouse concluded, thinks that a human is a penguin who is “different, less predictable, occasionally violent, but tolerable company when he sits still and minds his own business”.

Doctoral research at the Edward Grey Institute of Field Ornithology and Merton College, Oxford, involved an 18-month field study of king penguins on South Georgia between 1953 and 1955. On his return Bernard married Sally, whom he had met in the University of London Air Squadron and with whom he departed, in 1957, to Ascension Island as leader of a British Ornithologists’ Union Centenary Expedition.

There, with a team of five companions, the Stonehouses spent 18 months studying seabirds on the island and on nearby Boatswain Bird Island, a 250ft-high, steep-sided column of weathered rock liberally festooned with white guano and surrounded by circling hammerhead sharks. The only landing point was a flat platform of rock 25ft above the churning water, with just enough room to build a hut with two camp beds. It was there that the couple spent their third wedding anniversary.

In 1960 Stonehouse moved to New Zealand as lecturer, and later reader, in Zoology at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, where he remained until 1968. During this time he led students on expeditions over five summers working out of New Zealand’s Scott Base, Ross Dependency, continuing his work on penguins, and visiting the classic breeding area of the emperor penguin at Cape Crozier.

After a year at Yale and a further year as a Commonwealth research fellow at the University of British Columbia, he returned to Britain, teaching biology at Strathallan School, Perthshire, while embarking on a serious writing career. In 1972 he moved to Bradford University, setting up the new School of Environmental Science there.

In 1982 he accepted the post of editor of the Polar Record, the journal of the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. By this time, as well as scientific papers and reports, he had published several popular books on wildlife and the environment, including Animals of the Antarctic (1972) and an impressive volume of air photographs of the British countryside (1982), for which he provided the commentary. He thus brought to Cambridge a valuable knowledge of publishing, and he rapidly improved the style and format of the Polar Record, while attracting an impressive range of contributors.

After retiring as editor in 1992, he retained his connection with the Institute as a senior associate, forming its Polar Ecology and Management Group and heading a long-term study on the ecological impact of polar tourism, during which he took advanced students for five summer expeditions – to Cuverville and Hannah Point.

_{Stonehouse on a dog kennel roof with three of his expedition’s dogs in the Antarctic, 1947}

Antarctic tourism, he concluded, was broadly positive if properly managed, in that it encourages a public interest in polar conservation. “On the whole,” he observed, “the tourists have done far less damage than some of the scientists who have had the run of the place since the 1950s.” He published the first travel book to the area, Antarctica: The Traveller’s Guide (1996); co-edited Prospects for Polar Tourism (2007); and worked as a popular lecturer on board tourist ships for more than 20 years.

His other publications include Wideawake Island: The story of the BOU centenary expedition to Ascension (1960); Penguins and Sea Mammals of the World (1985); and Antarctica and Global Climate Change (1991, edited with Colin Harris).

In 1953 Stonehouse received the Polar Medal. He is also commemorated in Stonehouse Bay on the east coast of Adelaide Island (first surveyed in 1909 by a French expedition and to which he led an FIDS sledge party to resurvey in 1948) and by Mount Stonehouse, a peak in the Transantarctic range.

Bernard Stonehouse is survived by his wife Sally and by their son and two daughters.

Bernard Stonehouse, born May 1 1926, died November 12 2014

Guardian:

Former Chief Whip Andrew Mitchelll arrives at the High Court Andrew Mitchell. ‘I can assure him we will be able to find a room for him where I work – a charity-run hostel for homeless people in Birmingham.’ writes Graham Hart. Photograph: Andy Rain/EPA

I am concerned about Andrew Mitchell and what will happen to him once he settles his debts, believed to be about £3m (He did say ‘pleb’: judge’s ruling leaves Mitchell’s career in ruins, 28 November). Handing over this much money could clearly leave him destitute, and he could lose his homes. However, I can assure him we will be able to find a room for him where I work – a charity-run hostel for homeless people in Birmingham. And it is only a short distance from his Sutton Coldfield constituency, should the fine people there choose to re-elect him.

We house about 170 people at present on one of our sites and about 200 on several more. You could say we are one of the few growth industries of recent times. It also means Mr Mitchell would get to know a few more “plebs” and the problems they face thanks to the actions of his government. He may even realise they are not just “people you step over on your way home from the opera”, as another Tory once said.
Graham Hart
Birmingham

• Mr Justice Mitting believed PC Toby Rowland rather than Andrew Mitchell over the “pleb” allegation, but his reasons for doing so were not very flattering. The officer, according to the judge, “is not the sort of man who had the wit, the imagination or the inclination” to “invent in the spur of the moment what a senior cabinet minister would have said to him”. I don’t know how PC Rowland feels, but I’d prefer to be called a pleb.
Donald Mackinnon
Newport, Gwent

• I think the judge is probably wrong there. I’m sure the PC could have managed to think of something if he’d wanted to. More to the point is that Mr Rowland was able to handle the challenging dilemma of telling right from wrong.
David Barford
Cardiff

• It will take more than one sensible legal decision to restore any faith I have in British justice, but the £1.5m bill shows how ludicrous the system is. At the same time, the fact that Mitchell brought the case shows what an arrogant person he is. And why was he demanding the gate be opened when he could easily have wheeled his bike through the side gate, or ridden it on the pavement like most cyclists would have done? But perhaps he was afraid the police might arrest him for that? What a waste of time, energy and effort, all for one little man’s ego.
David Reed
London

• Ill-advised or capricious as the decision to sue for libel may have been, I just don’t understand how the costs of such a relatively short trial can amount to anything like £1.5m – £1.5m represents 15 years’ labour at a relatively generous salary of £100k per year. Very nice work if you can get it.
Andy Smith
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey

• Parliament is currently passing a bill designed to enable electors to recall MPs who have behaved badly. Andrew Mitchell has been found to have behaved badly. Yet the bill in its present form would not enable the electors of Sutton Coldfield to decide if they would like him to remain as their MP. Would it not make for better accountability if it did?
Tony Wright
Birmingham

• Now that the Andrew Mitchell libel trial has concluded, I do hope Bob Geldof (a character witness for Mitchell) will not be raising funds by releasing a song titled Legal Aid or something similar.
Kapil Juj
London

• Perhaps all those commenting on the Mitchell affair should recall that the post of tribune of the plebs was one of the most honourable and sought after in the Roman republic?
Dugald MacInnes
London

• In all the reports about “plebgate”, no one has explained why Andrew Mitchell was told to dismount at the gates of Downing Street and wheel his bicycle awkwardly through a side gate. There were three able-bodied policemen standing around on a rather tedious duty. Surely one of them could have made the modest effort to open the main gate and let him cycle through?
John Birtill
Guisborough, North Yorkshire

• What a pity that Andrew Mitchell didn’t have a taxi following his bicycle, the better to carry his government documents as he cycled across London. Then we might have had a complete recording of the encounter at the gates.
Bob Caldwell
Daventry, Northamptonshire

• I can’t help feeling a shred of sympathy with Mitchell’s angry “pleb” moment. It is mild compared with David Mellor’s considered diatribe to the taxi driver. Could one imagine any more offensive piece of elitist narcissism than that?
Betty Rosen
London

Francis ‘The Bible exhorts society to ‘Honour thy father and mother’, not, as Pope Francis has been portrayed as doing, dissing the lot,’ writes Hilary Cooper. Photograph: Markus Schreiber/AP

Is it just me or was there something just a touch offensive in Pope Francis’s (otherwise laudable) speech on Europe’s alleged demise, picking out, as it did, words such as tired, haggard, infertile, grandmother to get his point across (Report, 26 November)? We live in an ageing world and yet insist on the glorification of youth. Why should age be associated with lack of worth, absence of creativity and value?

Older people in our society are vigorous and active in so many ways, many still working or offering their experience for free as volunteers, others simply and uncomplainingly accepting the sheer graft of their invisible but increasingly necessary role as carers.

And yes, it is possible to be old, infertile and a grandparent and yet to be extraordinarily creative. Why else is London currently hosting exhibitions on the late Rembrandt and the late Turner, hot on the heels of the stunning exhibition of the mature Hockney’s creative outpourings, if not in recognition of the power of late-flowering genius, as in the burnishing sunsets of a Turner masterpiece?

Time was when to be called a grandmother, an elder, was a mark of respect for the wisdom and experience that came with age, a nod perhaps to that maxim reportedly coined by George Bernard Shaw (no doubt in later life), that “youth is wasted on the young”. The Bible exhorts society to “Honour thy father and mother”, not, as Pope Francis has been portrayed as doing, dissing the lot.
Hilary Cooper
Cambridge

• So the pope, the head of the Roman Catholic church, believes the EU has become “elderly and haggard” and gives “a general impression of weariness and ageing”. The words which come to mind are kettle, pot and black.
George Steel
Liverpool

Cricket lovers everywhere would wish to contribute to any fund in memory of Phillip Hughes – perhaps to advance research into head injuries (Sport, 28 November) and head protection. But it might also support the millions of cricketers across the world who play on dangerous surfaces without protection because it’s too dear.
Richard Heller
London

• So many adverts on TV and in the media show dinner tables groaning under mountains of food. What must go through the minds of people who’ll have next to nothing at Christmas, apart from perhaps bangers and mash, if even that?
Sigrid Morrison
Glasgow

• Has this subject got legs (Letters, 26 November), or will it be just another case of hare today gone tomorrow?
Ken Atkin
Richmond, Middlesex

Labour Leader Ed Miliband Makes A Speech In Defence Of His Leadership Ed Miliband. ‘While attempts are being made to portray Labour as a remote elite, it’s worth remembering that 85% of Labour MPs elected or re-elected in 2010 had been to state schools,’ writes Janet Dobson. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

I understand there may be a question mark over whether Labour remains the party of working people (Miliband pledge to white van man, 22 November)? Lets looks at some facts. Labour introduced the national minimum wage and tax credits for the lowest paid workers, and increased them year on year. Labour ensured that all fulltime workers received four weeks’ paid leave, plus bank holidays, from their employers.

Labour doubled maternity leave for mothers and introduced two weeks’ paternity leave for fathers. Labour built over 2,000 Sure Start centres to help support parents and children in the most deprived areas. Labour cut NHS waiting times from months, if not years, to the lowest they have ever been – an average of 18 weeks. Older NHS users may even remember that Labour built the NHS – an historic but not unimportant fact. Labour also helped the poorest pensioners by introducing winter fuel payments, the pensioner credit and minimum income guarantee. And can you recall how expensive it was to see a private dentist? So Labour reintroduced NHS ones.

These are really important gains for working people. They don’t happen by magic. They were legislated for and driven through by a Labour government. Despite what they say now, all were opposed by the Tories. Is Labour still the party of working people? Of course it is.
David Bodimeade
Rayleigh, Essex

• Another week, another set of briefings and Twitter exchanges about inner-party politics within Labour – what’s new (Watson ‘manipulated Labour leader contests’, 24 November)? David Lammy accurately captures part of the problem by suggesting that too many supporters and past voters feel distanced from and out of tune with the party. This will not change until he and others address the principal question – how will voting Labour change our society? Reading the obituary of Tony Lynes (Obituary, 24 November) and the work he did within and outside of Whitehall was a poignant reminder that there was a time when electing a Labour government would make a difference.

Then the speculative piece on Gordon Brown’s future told us that, flawed though he may have been, there were nevertheless reasons for voting Labour fairly recently (Brown to quit?, 24 November). Frankly I don’t give a damn whether Tom Watson or Ivan Lewis back different horses in the race, if it resembles a donkey derby – let’s have a few thoroughbred ideas.
Les Bright
Exeter, Devon

• What is most depressing about Labour now is not just the silly pratfalls, poor speeches or stupid childish gimmicks. It’s that they can only pay attention to old self-limiting white-men, Ukip and the Tories. The media is strangely fixated too; but that a large so-called progressive party should ignore the Greens, SNP and Plaid Cymru, when they could work together in coalition to create our peaceful move into a better, healthier society, is a disgrace.

Maybe it’s that at least two of those parties are led by women? I’d remind Ed and his advisers that women dislike both the Tories and Ukip by a huge margin and we are half the population. Why doesn’t Labour look north for inspiration since they’re not listening to their own women? When Nicola Sturgeon took office she announced she was going to discuss and work with all members of her assembly.
Olivia Byard
Witney, Oxfordshire

• So Labour’s answer to the anti-egalitarian independent/state school divide is to introduce a “school partnership standard” requiring private schools to form “genuine and accountable partnerships with state schools if they want to keep their business rates relief”. Because, apparently, the independent sector displays “world-beating educational attributes” beyond the advantages that come with selection and wealth, “that those working in the state sector could do more to acknowledge”. According to Tristram Hunt (Comment, 25 November), teachers in the independent sector display superior subject knowledge, private schools provide greater “pupil confidence” and better “co-curricular activities”, as if these have nothing to do with funding and resources, and better staff development, though no evidence is provided to support this claim, or the others.

The truth is the independent sector has nothing to offer the state sector that it couldn’t do for itself, with similar funding and social mix of pupils. To suggest that it does is deeply insulting to teachers who have to cope with the multiple problems that too many of their pupils experience in the divided society they live in. Which sector does Hunt suppose is teaching the children of the 900,000 odd households dependent on food banks?
Tim Davies
Lytham St Annes, Lancashire

• The tweet by Emily Thornberry exemplifies the patronising and elitist attitude we have come to know and expect from the Labour party in general and Islington’s champagne-socialist set in particular. I personally have no doubt exactly what was meant by her odious tweet, it was a snobbish and condescending insult to the ordinary working folk whom the Labour party claim to represent. Frankly, I am impressed how Ms Thornberry managed to distil into such a short tweet of three words the very essence of Labour’s elitist snobbery.As a direct result of “tweetgate”, the Ukip branch in Islington and Hackney has now made it our urgent mission to stand up for the ordinary working people that Labour has forgotten and Ms Thornberry has insulted.
Pete Muswell
Vice-chair, Ukip Islington and Hackney branch

• Whatever happened to the party that used to defend the weak against the strong? And why should a woman from a council estate be sacked for taking a photo of the house of a man who cannot remember the last time he voted?
David Handy
Sunderland

• John Harris (Comment, 21 November) says “Labour believes it can speak to two different audiences without either noticing”. With a first-past-the-post system, all political parties do this. UK elections are won by winning most of the 100-odd marginal seats, so the main political parties use focus groups to design policies for the voters in the marginal seats, not for the voters in the safe seats, which never change hands. I’ve made the point in my own blog, http://www.radicalsoapbox.com that the 1832 Reform Act created parliamentary seats in the new industrial towns and abolished the rotten boroughs with a tiny electorates, often controlled by one individual. The safe seats are today’s rotten boroughs, controlled by a small party caucus, who select a candidate who is then foisted on the electorate.

The real question for May 2015 is whether the stench of corruption and incompetence, given off by the politicians of the main political parties, is strong enough to make safe seats unsafe. In Scotland the SNP will make inroads into Labour safe seats. Can the Green party now make real inroads into the Labour heartlands in England?
Michael Gold
London @radicalmic

• I agree with Polly Toynbee (Labour must fight off these bogus Tory attacks on class, 25 November) that it is not necessary to attend a state school or be poor to care about poverty and inequality. However, while attempts are being made to portray Labour as a remote elite, it’s worth remembering that 85% of Labour MPs elected or re-elected in 2010 had been to state schools, compared to 60% of Lib Dems and 46% of Tories. Two-thirds went to comprehensives. No Etonians.
Janet Dobson
London

Independent:

When Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said in the Commons he had chosen A&E over the GP for his children (report, 26 November), I imagine parents across the country were sympathetic. Every parent wants their child to be seen quickly by a healthcare professional when they are ill, and for many the default option – whether due to opening hours, waiting times or convenience – is A&E.

Hospitals are too often seen as the place to be despite the Government urging A&E attendance only in real emergencies. We estimate up to 16 per cent of children who arrive in A&E could have their care effectively managed outside hospitals.

The question is, what are the alternatives? What should you do if your child is ill in the evening and, although you suspect it’s not too serious, you’re worried enough to want medical advice immediately?

Extending GP opening hours is one part of the solution, but more needs to be done to move more care for children outside hospitals. That means measures such as better child-health training for GPs and co-locating services in community settings – creating “child health hubs” where GPs, paediatricians, nurses and other professionals can provide high-quality local provision.

Unless we start thinking about delivering health differently and providing viable alternatives, the A&E crisis will continue to worsen.

Dr Hilary Cass

President, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, London WC1

It beggars belief that Jeremy Hunt is unaware of the arrangements for GP consultations at the weekend. All practices have out-of-hours services which can be contacted by telephone at weekends and at night time. Usually a call to the practice will be directed to a doctor who is either a member of the practice or employed by them and a visit to an out-of-hours service can be arranged if necessary. I first worked as a GP in 1983 and ever since then out-of-hours cover has been available.

It is hard to have any confidence in a health minister who has so little knowledge of how the system works.

Dr Margaret Safranek

London N10

I read with interest your report of Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s defence of his decision to take his children to an A&E department, in direct contradiction of HMG’s advice that we present ourselves to our GP or out-of-hours service if the problem isn’t life threatening.

Whatever the particular circumstances, the cruel irony is that, had there been no successful legal challenge to Mr Hunt’s acceptance of the South London Healthcare Trust Special Administrator’s recommendation that Lewisham Hospital’s A&E department be closed, he wouldn’t have had the luxury of such a choice, assuming that the problem had occurred here.

Jeremy Redman

London SE6

As Jeremy Hunt seems only to have insight into those issues in which he has had personal experience, perhaps he would like to work a few 12-hour shifts on an acute medical ward.

I think he would be awarding himself that 1 per cent pay rise within no time.

David Bennetts

Blandford Forum, Dorset

Palestine should embrace the ICC

Tomorrow marks two years since Palestine was granted non-member observer state status at the UN. The 138-9 vote paved the way for the bilateral recognitions of Palestinian statehood that have swept across Europe of late (“European Parliament considers initiative to recognise Palestine”, 26 November).

It also opened the door to international justice, by further clarifying that Palestine can become a party to the Rome Statute, and thus bring itself under the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

ICC accession would mean all actors, including Palestinian armed groups and the Israeli authorities, could be held to account for commission of war crimes in Gaza and beyond, and the missing ingredient of accountability would be introduced to this too-long running conflict.

And yet, the Palestinians have so far declined go to the ICC. Their reluctance can, in part, be put down to misguided pressure from Europeans not to do so, which runs counter to EU support for the Court in other cases.

Two years ago, Palestine’s President Mahmoud Abbas said the UN vote showed “that justice is possible”. As the region continues to be gripped by violence and deep mistrust, the prospects of such justice remain elusive.

European countries must now lift their opposition to ICC jurisdiction on the situation, which would help end impunity and bring justice for Palestinian and Israeli victims of crimes under international law.

William Bell

Senior Advocacy officer, Middle East, Christian Aid

Annemarie Gielen

Secretary General, Pax Christi Flanders

José Henriquez

Secretary General, Pax Christi International

Lieve Herijgers

Director, Broederlijk Delen

Karim Lahidji

President, FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights)

Philip Luther

Director, Middle East and North Africa Programme, Amnesty International

Mitchell case is a triumph for justice

Andrew Mitchell’s case (28 November) proves that no one is above the law in this land. Britain stands as a beacon of justice and human rights. The country has always been a haven for those fleeing racial, social and religious persecution, oppression, intimidation and corruption. Perhaps this is the most intriguing part of its success story throughout centuries.

Where else on earth can you find a country where the rulers and the ruled stand on an equal footing before the law? The alternative to this is what we are witnessing in Ukraine, the Central African Republic, Iraq, Syria, Libya, the occupied Palestinian territories, and even in Ferguson in the US.

As John Locke, one of the greatest English philosophers and enlightenment thinkers, eloquently put it: “Whenever law ends, tyranny begins”.

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob

London NW2

The verdict in the Andrew Mitchell trial is bad news for all those who believe the class struggle is dead. It seems clear that the battle between patricians and plebs that the historian EP Thompson identified as a key feature of 18th-century England is with us still.

Keith Flett

London N17

Andrew Mitchell has been found guilty because, the judge said, the police officer in question did not have the “wit or imagination” to make up the damning phrases… Mmm – I think I would have preferred to have been called a pleb.

Tony Webb

Swansea

Who should pay for the UK’s veterans?

Your efforts to raise awareness and cash for war veterans are laudable. However, it is not the general public who sent troops to war. I suggest that the governments that did do so should be responsible for any related problems in the future, and fund this through the taxation system. This could be done simply by creating a patriotic tax and hypothecating the money for veterans only. This could be collected through the current system and might have the added benefit of shaming tax avoiders.

Why not impose a windfall tax on the companies that made billions from the wars, to cover these costs?

William Park

Kilsby, Northamptonshire

Well, it didn’t take long for the party leaders to pledge support for your appeal.

While I support your appeal I strongly feel that you do a disservice to veterans if you fail to highlight that tens of thousands of ex-service personnel would not require charity if successive governments had not robbed them of their pensions.

The history of the Armed Forces Pension Group campaign is well documented; it has had plenty of support, with even Cherie Blair involved in our legal fight, which we lost!

It’s a disgrace how politicians evade dealing with this inequality and pay lip service to veterans.

Francis Vincent

Market Bosworth, Leicestershire

Balls aimed at players are just not cricket

While wholeheartedly extending deepest condolences to Phil Hughes’s family and colleagues and indeed sympathy to Sean Abbott, the tragedy is a sharp reminder of the real dangers of cricket and bouncers in particular. Once upon a time, bowling which was a direct attack on a batsman was outlawed, but nowadays hardly a test match goes by without the spectacle of batsmen being subject to what the commentators call “a good working over” or some such euphemism which in reality means a barrage of short stuff imperilling life and limb.

Is it too much to hope that head-high bouncers will be definitely outlawed (maybe with a five-run penalty at least) so that we may enjoy a contest between bat and ball rather than having to watch ducking and weaving in avoidance of deliveries persistently and deliberately aimed at a batsman?

Andrew Horton

Hemel Hempstead, Hert

Times:

Sir, You argue that the Smith Commission report could be a significant step towards a federal Britain (“The Price of Union”, Nov 28). That is unlikely: first, because England does not want federalism, and second, because no federal state known to me hands control of income tax to a sub-national unit.

Devolving control of income tax to the Scottish parliament is illogical, since revenue from the tax pays not only for devolved services such as health and education but also for reserved services, such as foreign policy, defence and pensions.

Were Smith to be implemented, Scottish MPs at Westminster would lose responsibility for the main tax paid by their constituents. Further, the prime minister has argued that Smith makes the case for English votes for English laws “unanswerable”. If Scottish MPs no longer voted on parts of the budget they would in effect be steered towards an exit from Westminster.

The SNP adopts a policy of “English votes for English laws” since it is separatist. It is odd that some unionists support a similar policy. Unionists should be seeking to bring the Scottish and English systems together. If implemented, the Smith proposals would be in danger of giving Scottish separatists — through the back door — what they failed to gain through the front door in September’s referendum.

Vernon Bogdanor
Professor of government, King’s College London

Sir, Nicola Sturgeon is “disappointed” at the Smith commission’s proposals (“SNP wants more power and vows to fight for it”, Nov 28). The commission was set up to create a more federal Britain by enhancing the powers of the Scottish parliament. The recommendations in fact go further than the original “vow” promised by Gordon Brown.

The proposals, far from being a Westminster betrayal, deliver on the home rule that was promised to Scotland and can bring about a stronger Scotland within a new federal United Kingdom.

William Beddows
St Andrews

Sir, It is understandable why the latest proposals for fiscal devolution to Scotland are encouraging ever greater demands for “English votes for English laws”. However, this is an answer to the “West Lothian question” which will not work, and should be rejected.

Enoch Powell described creating first and second-class MPs as “an abomination”, and he was right. As he explained, “no line of demarcation can be drawn in a unitary state between one set of subjects and another . . . a debate on defence is also a debate on education.”

Rather than demote Scotland’s MPs to “second-class” status, they should simply be reduced in number.

Richard Ritchie
London SW18

Sir, The only fair way of devolving power in the UK is to devolve it identically to each of the four nations, including England. We must now have an English parliament at Westminster. However, we cannot afford to have further palaces and politicians, so this should be made up of existing English MPs.

A separate UK parliament, formed by a sub-set of existing English MPs, MSPs, Welsh and Northern Ireland Assembly members, selected in proportion to their population and party support, can meet as required, on days when the devolved assemblies do not sit, in existing parliamentary or assembly facilities to deal only with UK-wide issues.

The UK government should be determined by the majority party in the UK parliament, with ministers responsible for UK-wide departments such as foreign affairs and defence. The English government should be formed by the majority party in the English parliament with a first minister and ministers responsible for devolved departments such as the NHS.

Martin Herbert
Great Waltham, Essex

Sir, The majority of Scots voted for the Union and against the SNP and their proposals in the referendum, and yet it looks as though we are now being railroaded against our will into making huge concessions driven by political need and the spectre of a May election next year.

The eventual fierce tax regime will drive business and homeowners away. Who will protect an unrepresented majority that is now disenfranchised and who do not want any of this?

Stephen M Fielding
Kirkbrae, Galashiels

Sir, The Scots want Barnett formula spending levels or even more and they want the opportunity to pay the higher taxes that such benefits and other spending require. What’s not to understand? What’s to argue with?

David J Cashman
Middlesbrough

Sir, Labour’s university-focused education polices are in danger of leaving the country without the skills to keep the economy moving forward (“This mindless dash for degrees is pointless”, Ross Clark, Nov 26).

While graduates are battling for a handful of opportunities, trade businesses cannot find enough trained and experienced workers. Students should train in the workplaces of their chosen profession. In my industry, through apprenticeships, it’s the only way forward. Creating a fully-funded, national apprenticeship scheme will provide employers with a skilled workforce that can take businesses forward.
Charlie Mullins
Chief executive, Pimlico Plumbers, London SE11

Sir, A university experience is good for individuals, society and the economy. University students are tomorrow’s teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, business leaders, entrepreneurs and inventors. Students build global connections, experience different cultures and are exposed to a range of arguments and opinions.

The UK university sector offers degrees co-created with employers, work placements, online and part-time learning. I am sure, despite never looking at his degree certificate, Mr Clark’s university experience enriches his life on a daily basis.
Nicola Dandridge
Chief executive, Universities UK

Sir, After reading the first paragraph of your leader (“Beauty Sleep”, Nov 27) I was (I am reliably informed) already snoring.

Lindsay GH Hall

Theale, Berks

Sir, Arthur is not the first dog to attach himself to a long-distance event (“Amazing jungle tale of Arthur the dogged adventurer”, Nov 25). In the 1970s a dog joined a team in the 50-mile Tour de Trigs hike in Oxfordshire. At the end, the dog was handed to the warden of a scout campsite. “Trigs” saw out his days as a much-loved member of the camp staff.
Trevor E Parry
Banbury, Oxon

Sir, Shakespeare would have loved the debate on whether his sonnets reveal homosexual love as well as heterosexual (“Shakespeare in Love . . . with a man?”, Nov 27). He loved to play with the sensibilities of his audience: in Twelfth Night he endorses love for Viola both as man and woman and in The Merchant of Venice he portrays Antonio favouring a man with his eye on the main heterosexual chance.

David Day

Pontefract, W Yorks

Telegraph:

Scottish devolution; Miliband’s mansion tax; school politics of envy; and the risks and romance of Marigolds

People fly the British and Scottish flags outside the Scottish Parliament prior to the debate on the future of Scotland

The Smith Commission will unveil proposals to give the Scottish Parliament a swathe of new tax and welfare powers Photo: Alamy

7:00AM GMT 28 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – All three main Westminster parties have already agreed to the Smith Commission proposals for significantly increased devolved powers for Scotland. These go beyond what was understood to have been promised shortly before the September referendum.

They retain the nonsense of Scottish MPs being able to vote on matters affecting the rest of the United Kingdom where powers have been fully devolved to Scotland. To someone who is English, this proposal, with agreement before it is even put before the House of Commons, seems to be the ultimate nightmare – ensuring that a greater portion of my English taxes goes to Scotland than ever before.

The proposals appear to be completely unfair, not to mention unconstitutional and undemocratic.

I cannot believe that our politicians are so out of touch with reality and so scared of the independence lobby in Scotland.

It will only take a half-sensible proposal from Ukip to modify these proposals into something more reasonable to see English voters flocking behind Nigel Farage’s party at the next general election.

Letters: The three main parties stitch up unfair settlement for Scotland in the UK

28 Nov 2014

Andrew Robinson
Ecclesfield, South Yorkshire

SIR – If a cross-party deal is to give more power to Scottish MPs, why should we not have equivalent powers in Hampshire? Hampshire, which dates from AD 755, is older than England itself.

Michael Fielding
Winchester, Hampshire

SIR – We are told constantly that one of the main problems with the eurozone is lack of fiscal convergence, and here we are encouraging fiscal divergence in our little sterling zone. This is yet another nonsense emanating from our panicking politicians.

John Kellie
Pyrford, Surrey

SIR – The Smith recommendations ensure that Scottish ministers are fully involved in agreeing the UK position in EU negotiations relating to devolved policy matters. Sadly, however, this does not extend to reserved matters which will affect Scotland.

Should the other devolved administrations disagree with the Westminster line, there is no means of arbitration to resolve this, unlike the situation in Belgium. In that country the regions and communities have been given powers, through a co-operation agreement, to represent a common Belgian position at Council of Minister meetings, but, should views differ, there is a mechanism in place to try and resolve this.

Alex Orr
Edinburgh

SIR – Is the Government seriously going to allow the Scottish Government to set its own income tax and still subsidise it through the Barnett formula?

Bill Halket
Ormskirk, Lancashire

Harm of net migration

SIR – The latest statistics about UK immigration reveal that 583,000 mostly poorer immigrants arrived and 323,000 mostly wealthier people left. This illustrates the negative impact that migration is having on the wealth of Britain.

Gordon Black
Stockport, Cheshire

SIR – Nobody seems to be explaining what the net immigration figure of 260,000 people a year really means. It is a city the size of, say, Derby (or Brighton or Hull).

Who is building each year the houses, schools, hospitals, police and fire stations, sewage plants and prisons for such a city?

Politicians and others bandy statistics with gay abandon, but we cannot accept immigration on this scale without building the infrastructure; and we cannot build a city this size in the United Kingdom every year. It is madness.

Patrick Fossett
Cobham, Surrey

SIR – It has been a pretty awful 24 hours for David Cameron – Scottish devolution proposals, benefit payments being used fraudulently to finance jihadists, immigration up by 78,000 a year.

Can’t he and other British politicians sort out Britain’s problems instead of trying to sort out everybody else’s? Let’s start by slashing foreign aid.

David Booth
Macclesfield, Cheshire

SIR – “No ifs, no buts”, I will be voting for Ukip at the forthcoming general election.

Roger Castle
Cardiff

SIR – First they came for the immigrants from outside Europe. Then they came for the (almost non-existent) EU immigrants who come here just to claim welfare.

Now they’re after the EU working poor (getting rid of tax credits for hardworking immigrants in menial jobs).

I’m an Irish immigrant who’s worked hard and paid taxes here for almost 20 years. I wonder when it will be my turn.

David Clarke
Edinburgh

School politics of envy

_{Tristram Hunt said David Cameron was failing in his ‘basic responsibility’ to provide good teachers. Photo: Rex Features}

SIR – Tristram Hunt should descend from his political high horse, drop the politics of envy and visit King’s College School, Wimbledon, which takes pride in close links to the local community and whose amenities are fully used by those outside the school.

I know: I went there and my sons have gone there. Believe me, I am no rich oligarch and there have been years of financial difficulty to afford this choice.

Tony Parrack
London SW20

SIR – Mr Hunt is advocating private-school teachers (some unqualified) should go into state schools to show state-school teachers (qualified) how to teach.

What does that say about the standard of the state-school teachers?

Denise Taylor
Glossop, Derbyshire

SIR – Mr Hunt is right to have high expectations of independent schools, but he is behind the times, as much of what he hopes for is already in place.

Benenden sponsors a local academy, sharing resources, expertise and time, in a growing and reciprocal relationship. We offer Ucas support, share staff training and run a well-established mentor programme conducted by the students themselves.

We also play a part in a county-wide programme of Easter and summer residential schools for the brightest students from Kent academies.

Alfred Nicol
Benenden School
Benenden, Kent

SIR – I am patriotic, hence I support England teams. I own a white van for the purpose of work, and pay independent school fees for my children.

It now appears that for all three of these activities (and maybe others too) I am despised by the Labour Party. The feeling is mutual.

Dominic Cummings
London SE15

Dangerous cricket

SIR – We can get rockets millions of miles into space but we can’t seem to provide a safe cricket helmet.

Patrick Moroney
Swansea

SIR – Bouncers should be outlawed. It is pure aggression against the batsman and quite unsportsmanlike.

Sir Gavin Gilbey Bt
Dornoch, Sutherland

Burning money

SIR – I am beginning to wonder if I have unwittingly become part of a government money-laundering scheme. On the same day that my £200 winter fuel payment arrived in my bank account, the local council removed most of it by direct debit into their coffers as council tax for the month – no doubt to help with the heating of their offices.

Chris Bocock
Quorn, Leicestershire

One-track franchises

SIR – With a joint venture between Stagecoach and Virgin picked to run the East Coast Mainline service, the three main routes to the North (West Coast, Midland Main Line and East Coast) are now to be run by Stagecoach and Virgin. What’s the point of a privatising franchise system that hands control to a duopoly? They might as well be run as they were by British Rail.

Bill Jolly
Lancaster

Too many flaws in Miliband’s mansion tax

SIR – A property can only be valued accurately when it is sold. A house near mine was recently put on the market for £2.1 million but sold for £1.9 million. If mansion tax had been in operation, would tax have been levied on the asking price? Would the owner be entitled to a refund when the selling price fell short?

In the property market there are always huge fluctuations. A property worth

£2 million today could be worth much less if the market crashes. How will mansion tax be calculated if a crash occurs half way through the financial year?

As a practitioner in tax for over 50 years I believe this to be the most ill-conceived tax I have ever come across. Its main purpose is to convince the electorate that the Labour Party is on the side of the “poor”.

David Turner
Brookmans Park, Hertfordshire

SIR – If Angelina Jolie is put off buying a £25 million house in London because of mansion tax proposals, perhaps she should buy a similarly priced property in Hollywood, where the property tax could be as much as £250,000 a year and increase by up to 2 per cent a year.

Mike Evans
Shalford, Surrey

The rare risks and romance of Marigold gloves

_{Foot in glove: creative home-made chicken costumes . Photo: Getty Images/Flickr RF}

SIR – The reason to get rid of a pair of rubber gloves is because they have developed a hole. I have never been scalded, because the water cools down before it gets to your hand.

Oven gloves do wear out at the end of the fingers, but far more dangerous is the oven itself. Or, come to think of it, the iron. Is Brussels going to invent an oven and an iron that do their jobs without getting hot?

Margaret Bentley
Dublin

SIR – Lady Coward is unaware of injuries caused by Marigolds. While recovering from a rugby-induced cracked rib some years ago I had a rare go at washing up. Removing a wife-sized Marigold with great difficulty, my hand recoiled and struck me directly on the injury.

Robin Hargreaves
Trawden, Lancashire

SIR – Marigolds can have a very strange effect on men. I was once with my now husband at a nature reserve planting reeds and wearing my Marigolds when he looked up at me, thought for a moment, and said: “I think we should get married.”

Joyce Corlett
Higher Poynton, Cheshire

Keep off the grass

SIR – I recently read that a cull of wild boar is intended as they are damaging the Forest of Dean. I also read that some scientists are anxious to clone mammoths. This must be of concern to golfers and members of bowling clubs.

John Buggins
Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands

Irish Times:

Sir, – I found Keith Duggan’s article (“Is rugby in danger of becoming a brilliantly-coached bore?”, November 22nd) to be an excellent assessment of the current professional rugby game. He, however, sees the halcyon days of the amateur era through somewhat rose-tinted glasses. The “up your jumper” 10-man rugby so expertly played by Munster, and to some extent by Ireland, through many of those amateur years was just as boring as the modern game.

I have two suggestions to help make the current game more exciting and to encourage more individual flare.

Firstly, to provide more open space in which to attack, reduce the number of players or increase the size of the pitch. Secondly, to encourage the team in possession to take more risk and use its creativity, change the laws at breakdowns and restarts so that it is much less likely that the team in possession retains the ball. At the moment that likelihood is almost at 100 per cent stupid. – Yours, etc, ADRIAN O’CONNOR Tai Tam, Hong Kong.

Sir, – The recent decision by the Equality Tribunal to recommend promotion of a NUIG academic Dr Sheehy Skeffington and to award damages to her in the context of what they described as a “ramschackle” promotion process (“NUI Galway ordered to promote lecturer overlooked over gender”, November 18th) raises questions about the role of the Higher Educational Authority (HEA).

It has responsibilities under the Universities Act (1997) to promote gender balance.

It also has responsibilities to return figures to the EU to enable the strength of the “glass ceiling” in public universities to be compared.

In that context, the very least one would expect is that the HEA would publish academic staff data broken down by gender and level for each of the seven Irish public universities.

After failing to do this from 2004-2012, it did so in January 2013. However the annual report in 2014 again omitted this.

What gets measured gets done. – Yours, etc, PAT O’CONNOR Professor of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Limerick.

Sir, – Your editorial (November 27th) on “a critical situation worsening as high rents compound problems for the disadvantaged”, underlines that the housing rental market in Ireland is dysfunctional.

If the rental market functioned as it does in Belgium for example, the supply could meet demand or even exceed demand and rent increases would be controlled.

I lived and rented there for a number of years. While no system is perfect, a standard lease is based on a three-six- nine-years principle, where rent can only be increased at the beginning of each three- year stage.

After each three-year period the landlord can ask the tenant to leave if the owner wants the property for a family member but must give six months notice, pay the tenant three- months rent if ejected after a three-year lease and six -months rent after a six-year lease period. Leases are registered with the finance ministry and can only be increased in line with the consumer price index .

What’s in it for the landlord? Tax on rental income is low and based not on the rent but on a notional cadastrel income level; the base for which is reset every 15 years. The result is a very low effective tax rate, whcih on a notional rental income of €1,000-€1,500 per month can be as low as 10 per cent.

It appears that this tax regime encourages investment in property to let, thus creating a healthy supply-side market and keeps rents affordable for the demand side. This mutually beneficial approach for tenant (security) and landlord (good return on investment), would ensure that the Government could get its act together on the rental housing market.

It is not that difficult to fix. – Yours, etc, FRANK KAVANAGH Greystones, Co Wicklow.

Sir – The reason our rental sector is so desperately neglected (Kitty Holland “Nine out of 10 Dublin rented dwellings failstandards test”, November 26th) is because the Government is too lax on private investors in the property market.

Anyone can become a landlord without any licensing or basic knowledge of housing legislation. With the standards set so low, why should we expect any better of landlords?

There should be a proper licensing process where those who want to rent out a property have to be up to date on housing legislation and their duty of care to tenants.

They should be tested on their knowledge and, only if successful, granted a license to rent out property.

We don’t allow people to drive cars without first taking lessons and passing a test, so why should we allow anyone with a bit of extra cash to become a landlord?

We are seeing over and over again greedy investors providing sub-standard housing at exorbitant prices.

Just because someone has money to invest, doesn’t mean they will make a good landlord. We need to stop talking about rentals as investments, and acknowledge that the business of providing a home is a big deal. – Yours, etc, BROOKE NEARY Bray, Co Wicklow.

Sir,- In this wet and watery month of November, my civic spirits were lifted by my recent passport application.

First I was given an online tracker number which provided helpful and updated information about my application. Then my passport arrived a day earlier than the 15-day turnabout promised.

The document itself can only be described as a thing of beauty, with many great images of this Republic.

Well done to the Passport Office!

If this agency – which was in considerable chaos and the subject of much controversy some years ago – can get its act together, perhaps there is hope for change in other other public services. – Yours, etc, FIONA CUMMINS Bray, Co Wicklow.

Sir, – The Feeder Schools 2014 supplement (November 27th) provided limited but welcome data on the present situation of education inequality.

In providing progression rates per school to third-level education as a percentage of all students sitting the Leaving Cert, the figures shed light on the vast disparities by postcode which exist in Ireland.

However, the figures are limited as they do not provide a full picture, particularly in relation to Deis (designated deprived) schools. The number of students within each school not sitting the Leaving Cert, or who drop out of the school prior to this, are not represented within the figures. Thus, the figures, already damning in terms of inequality, are actually downplaying the situation.

Serious questions must be asked as to the dearth of available data by the Government in this area. A number of months ago, my office contacted the Department of Education, the Higher Education Authority as well as the specialist body for widening access HEAR (Higher Education Access Route).

We asked for available data in relation to progression to third level from all Deis schools in the country, to which we were told that such data was not collected or indeed available by the State.

In light of the massive inequalities that exist, and have existed for a very long time, the question must be asked as to how the Government can justify not collecting this data?

In order to address these inequalities, it is absolutely imperative that such analysis is available.

Moreover, the very glaring inequity associated with socio-economic status must be addressed head on by this Government, not in the future, but right here, right now. How much longer can this two-tiered system of opportunity continue? – Yours etc, MAIREAD HEALY, Chief Executive, Future Voices Ireland, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. Sir, – Following the publication of the Feeder Schools 2014 supplement (November 27th) I wish to acknowledge and congratulate the 2,965 students who sat the Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA) programme this year. Sadly, this group of students do not merit consideration or comment in your supplement. However many LCA students have secured places on their chosen course in one of our many “top” PLC colleges.

A decade ago a cohort of students would not have continued their second-level studies because of the high-stakes exam that is the Leaving Cert.

The LCA programme is an exciting alternative to the established Leaving Cert for those students who respond best to a hands-on, practical approach to learning. The skills they develop in LCA, such as communication, decision-making and teamwork, are essential in the modern workplace. It is designed to enable students develop these skills and qualities through the various experiences in the classroom and beyond. It enables students to have more positive learning experiences through the ongoing assessments and the regular feedback they receive at the end of each session of the programme.

At Castleknock Community College our LCA students are part of the Leaving Certificate group: they share the same teachers, participate in the same sports and are considered for the same awards.

Congratulations to all LCA teachers who honour their profession on a daily basis by ensuring that the needs of all students are provided for in their schools. – Yours, etc, JOHN CRONIN Principal, Castleknock Community College, Dublin 15.

Sir, – Peter McGuire says of the feeder school tables (Feeder Schools 2014, November 27th), “These tables are flawed and imperfect. We know that.” Well said, Peter, maybe now we can stop publishing them and making such a song and dance about what are essentially indicators of privilege and advantage as opposed to any real reflection on quality of experience and schools.

Wealth, privilege and opportunity are the real keys to success at school and progression to third level, as alluded to in Brian Mooney’s commentary in the same supplement.

The one way of raising standards for everybody is through narrowing the gap between rich and poor, something our current domestic policies seem hell-bent upon avoiding.

What the feeder school supplement does teach us is that the rich get richer through increased opportunity to access third-level education and therefore any discussion of school performance is in fact a discussion of social inequality. – Yours, etc, DR KEVIN CAHILL School of Education, University College Cork

A chara, – While the person who cut down the cross on Carrauntoohil may have had an anti-religious motive, I, not so much as a Catholic priest, but more as a climber of hills for most of my life, would be of the opinion that certain structures defile the natural beauty of hilltops and mountaintops.

When I drove through England in the early 1970s, I noticed how many beautiful hilltops were spoiled by masts, a feature which we didn’t have in Ireland. Not so any more.

Soon after that visit, the beautiful Corn Hill with its perfectly centred ancient meascán, Carn Chlann Aodha, which had for centuries dominated the scenery in my native Co Longford, was ruined by the erection, slightly off centre, of a television mast.

The symmetry of the hill, and the view from the top, has been further spoiled by the planting of trees on the hilltop.

While our ancestors had a sense of regard for the shape of our hills in their placing of cairns on various hilltops, none more striking than those on the Paps of Dana, An Dá Chích, in Co Kerry, crosses, no less than masts, seldom fit with the natural contours of hills and mountains, and therefore should be allowed only sparingly, and with due account of the hill’s natural shape.

Tree planting, too, should be similarly controlled. What can be done to restore the beauty of so many spoiled hills now is quite another problem. – Is mise, etc, AN tATHAIR SEÁN Ó COINN, Maothail, Co Liatroma.

Sir, Bishop Kevin Doran (“Bishop says opposition to same-sex marriage not about homosexuality”, November 28th) asserts there is a “unique relationship between marriage and procreation” and that “this is the principal reason for the State to have any reason in regulating marriage”.

It may help to clarify the Bishop’s thoughts if he, and others, were to consider that marriage is a contract between two people for the joint ownership of property and its intergenerational transfer.

All the terms within this statement are capable of definition and regulation within the law as society changes its emphases over time. If he does not believe me, look what happens when a marriage breaks up. – Yours, etc, ROBERT TOWERS Monkstown, Co Dublin. Sir, Bishop Kevin Doran’s view that marriage is primarily about procreation (“Bishop says opposition to same-sex marriage not about homosexuality,” November 28th) is obviously incorrect, the former being in no way a requirement for the latter.

A majority of births in Ireland already occur outside of marriage and historically the notions of adoption or of acquiring stepchildren by marriage are commonplace.

Suggesting that the entire purpose of marriage is procreation is an insult to those married couples who for one reason or another cannot have children of their own.

Furthermore, tying marriage to an exclusively heterosexual biological event, while at the same time denying a bias against homosexuality, is a threadbare hypocrisy.

Marriage is a legal contract between two parties. It applies certain mutual rights and privileges, and complementary duties and obligations, in respect of each other and of property and minors in their guardianship.

The sexual, emotional or financial character of the interpersonal relationship between those parties is not material to its legal status.

While the open adoption of children by homosexual couples or procreation via surrogacy may be new phenomena, it is certainly the case that these children deserve the same protections and privileges in respect of their parents as do the children of heterosexual unions.

The bishop might find less opposition if they were to argue that a principal difference between a marriage and a “sexual friendship” is the legal framework to support parenthood, a possibility which in the modern world is equally open to heterosexual, homosexual and infertile couples.

There are obviously other spousal privileges and responsibilities conferred by marriage that have nothing to do with children but are still valuable and meaningful to society, such as next of kin status, inheritance rights and so on that the bishop seems content to ignore. – Yours, etc, JOHN THOMPSON Phibsboro, Dublin 7.

Irish Independent:

Pope Francis is right to call for opening dialogues with adversaries. However, terrorists bent on conquering the cradle of Christianity and planting the black flag of their self-declared caliphate, represent only themselves. They do not represent the more than one billion Muslims scattered across the globe. Muslims and Christians have coexisted harmoniously throughout centuries, from the times of Prophet Mohammed and the dawn of human civilisation.

It is true that the Muslim world is facing formidable challenges at the present juncture and that a few terrorist organisations and individuals are perpetrating gruesome and chilling acts in its name, assailing its true message of fraternity and tolerance and sowing discord and enmity among believers and non-believers alike. But extremism has no religion, creed or colour. Extremism, prejudice and bigotry are as old as history.

Let us not forget the Holocaust, the most atrocious massacre witnessed in contemporary history when six million Jews perished in Christian Europe; and the unmitigated anguish endured by defenceless Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territories, and the countless Muslims tortured, humiliated and murdered in Burma, Central African Republic and elsewhere.

Interfaith, intercultural and interreligious dialogue can positively contribute to the advancement of good governance, compassion, tenderness and the appreciation of the sanctity of human life and dignity. The Koran says “if any one slew a person, it would be as if he slew the whole people. And if any one saved a life, it would be as if he saved the life of the whole people.” (The Koran, Al Maida: 32).

Dr Munjed Farid Al Qutob

London NW2

Irish nationalism a mutation

In commemorating 1916 we must substitute critical reasoning for romance and fantasy. Nations are only ‘imagined communities’ and nationalism of ‘hate the other’ is negative. Padraig Pearse said: “Irish hate of English is a holy passion”. Universal love promotes forgiveness and fellowship and necessary in a global village. Knowledge is power and a creative scientific community sufficiently big to push out the frontiers of knowledge would be over a hundred million people.

Financial and intellectual capital is scarce and only big units have the critical mass to be effective. States that push out the frontiers of knowledge are a blessing and those that push out the frontiers of their territories are a curse. The US and UK innovated most of the world’s significant technology. The world is interdependent and shared sovereignty and integration is good. The founding fathers of the EU described nationalism as a sewer down which flowed the blood and wealth of Europe in two major wars.

The EU was set up to prevent a recurrence and has the size to keep pace in a high-tech race. An open society based on an ideology of liberty – not race or creed – is best to maintain human rights. Freedom is about human rights, the freedom to be different, to form your own opinions, to change and grow. Irish nationalism was a mutation of race and religion that enforced compulsory conformity. History cannot be changed. Bear the pain, lean from it and it will not be lived again.

Kate Casey

Limerick city

A case of history repeating

Economists – blind to the lessons learned from the ‘Celtic Tiger collapse’ six years ago – seem happy with the speed of the property price rises. They continue to asses house values using the peak figures achieved in the boom – even though it was nationally acknowledged these prices were outlandish and not value for money.

In Dublin, houses were up 3pc in October and are now 24pc higher than a year ago. Likewise, house prices outside the capital are up 8.3pc in same period. Note prices are still down 35pc nationally since the peak in 2007. To me, the correct market values are the prices now prevailing.

I have been observing advertised house prices in a number of weekend national newspaper property supplements, particularly in the Dublin area, where prices are suddenly becoming very similar to those in 2007. Property columnists, not economists, are even warning on the danger of another bubble.

The same wise guys who said: “Why didn’t somebody call ‘halt’ on the Celtic Tiger bubble?” are now fanning a new bubble. Finance Minister Michael Noonan clearly wants the property party to continue indefinitely.

Challenging him is his ‘obedient’ servant Patrick Honohan, head of the Central Bank. He seems desperate to take sensible action to, at least, appease the Dublin house market and avert any possibility of another national economic inferno.

I believe a lot more social housing is the solution, and let those who can afford it follow the markets. Sanity must prevail.

James Gleeson

Thurles, Co Tipperary

Parents clued in about schools

I am baffled by John Walshe’s article (November 27) in which he asserts that parents “have a right to know more about how well our kids are being educated”. (I deplore the use of the word “kids” in relation to children, as kids are young goats) As an educationalist for the past 36 years I can assure your readers that parents are very tuned into all aspects of the school life of their children.

Schools are very engaged with critical self-evaluation,and this is examined in all ‘whole school evaluations’, and standardised tests results are returned to the Department of Education on a yearly basis. Parents’ associations are an integral part of all school activities and their opinions are listened to and acted upon.

It seems to me that the call for “league tables” comes from the media and not from parents – because they already have all the information they need.

M McDonnell

Address with editor

Health and funding

Illness, both physical and mental, is a very fickle thing. It doesn’t talk or communicate. It doesn’t listen or negotiate. Time is of no interest to it and it can strike like a thief in the night. Words such as over budget, National Service Plan, deficit, going forward, HSE and bed blockers are of no consequence to it. As somebody who has suffered several serious illnesses and survived – thanks mainly to our superb medical people and all hospital staff, I can vouch for this .

Therefore there is no such thing as over budget when it comes to health and illness – only underfunding.

Dr Aidan Hampson

Artane, Dublin 5

Dail could learn from sports

I have recently being thinking of Ireland’s position in the world of sport.

Rory McIlroy and Shane Lowry at the top of the leader board in a prestigious golf tournament; Rory number one in the world; Katie Taylor number one in world women’s boxing for the fifth time; our men’s amateur boxers one of the very top teams in the world; the Irish rugby team number three in the world.

I couldn’t help thinking, how did such a great little country get such nondescript – with a few notable exceptions – politicians through the years?

Brendan Delaney

Donabate, Co Dublin

Save us from Sinn Fein antics

That the Dail and the country should now be doomed to a near-weekly display of the Shinners’ stunt politics is a damning indictment of our parliament’s disciplinary procedures, and a disappointing one at that.

Killian Foley-Walsh

Kilkenny city

Irish Independent

30 November 2014 Sandy

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I manage to get to the post box, Sandy comes around.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down duck for tea and her tummy pain is still there.

Obituary:

Dame Mary Glen Haig was a fencer who competed at four Olympic Games and defended the movement’s ideals as a member of the IOC

Dame Mary Glen Haig in front of the Olympic flag

Dame Mary Glen Haig in front of the Olympic flag Photo: BRIAN SMITH

5:57PM GMT 26 Nov 2014

Comments

Dame Mary Glen Haig, who has died aged 96, fenced for Britain at four Olympic Games and later became a respected sports administrator, serving as one of two British representatives on the International Olympic Committee from 1982 to 1994.

Her father, William James, who had competed in the 1908 Olympics, had taught her how to fence and she went on to become one of the country’s most decorated competitors, winning gold medals for the Women’s Foil at the British Empire Games (later the Commonwealth Games) in Auckland in 1950 and in Vancouver in 1954, followed by a bronze at Cardiff in 1958.

She made her first Olympic appearance at the 1948 “Austerity” games in London, where she did not win a medal, although she made it to the final, finishing in eighth place.

At the time she was working as an administrator at King’s College Hospital, London, and she was still at work the night before her first match. There was no Olympic Village and nobody to carry her fencing gear for her from the hospital to the lodgings the women’s team had taken in a run-down house behind Victoria station (where she had to sleep on a camp bed in a room shared with two other women). “I went looking for some food and there was a lovely smell coming from the house next door and I joined the queue,” she recalled. “I think it must have been the French team. That’s the sort of spirit in which one went off to the games.”

In contrast to the hype that surrounds the modern Olympics, she recalled that her hospital colleagues were “not too bothered” about how well she did: “When you’ve had a war and had ghastly things to contend with . . . On one occasion a nursery had been hit. Can you imagine? I’ll never forget that day, mothers beside themselves, not knowing where to run to, not knowing if their child had been brought in. Things like winning medals, we didn’t worry about things like that in those days.”

^{Mary Glen Haig in the 1950s (TOPHAM PICTUREPOINT)}

Mary Glen Haig continued to compete in the Olympics until 1960, though she never again made the finals, and continued to fence until her late seventies. In 1982 she was one of the first women to be appointed to the IOC, a post she continued to occupy until 1994, also serving on bidding committees set up by Manchester and Birmingham.

In this capacity she supervised the first Women’s Islamic Games, held in 1993, in which 407 athletes took part in eight different sports. She was also greatly admired for her work over a decade on the IOC’s medical commission, which often involved her having to rise at 5.30am to attend meetings on doping. She took an idealistic approach to the bidding process, revealing in a letter to the House of Commons National Heritage Select Committee in 1995 that she and her fellow British IOC representative, Princess Anne, found the whole business of Olympic lobbying to be “exceedingly distasteful, not in line with Olympic philosophy and certainly outwith all the ethics of fair play”. The Princess, she recalled, “openly declared her distaste for the valuable and too readily accepted ‘perks’ seemingly directed at influencing votes – hence perhaps her alleged unpopularity with those reported to be ‘powerful men in sport’.”

^{Mary Glen Haig at a fencing display in 1950 (TOPHAM PICTUREPOINT)}

Mary Glen Haig remained an honorary member of the IOC and made her last major appearance at the conclusion of the 2004 Summer Olympics, held in Athens, reciting the English version of an ode in praise of the city which she had commissioned to be written in ancient Greek by the Oxford classics scholar Armand d’Angour.

Mary Alison James was born in London on July 12 1918 and educated at Dame Alice Owen’s School.

She began taking part in regional and international fencing competitions in 1937 and made her last competitive appearance in 1960. In 1943 she married Andrew Glen Haig.

^{Fencers Gillian Shhen (left) and Mary Glen Haig model their new Olympic hats in 1956 (TOPHAM PICTUREPOINT)}

As well as her work on the IOC, Mary Glen Haig held positions within the British Olympic Association and the International Fencing Federation. During the 1970s she chaired the Central Council of Physical Recreation, and she was president of the British Sports Association for the Disabled from 1981 to 1991.

Alongside her sporting interests she continued to work as a health manager, working as a hospital district administrator from 1974 until 1982.

She was also a long-serving vice-president of the British Schools Exploring Society (now British Exploring). Never a figurehead, she took a deep interest in the activities of the “Young Explorers” (YEs) and over many years never missed committee meetings, where her experience and wise counsel were of great value. Until recent years, she also attended the annual reunions held at the Royal Geographical Society when the YEs presented accounts of their activities and scientific field studies.

Mary Glen Haig was appointed MBE in 1971, CBE in 1977 and DBE in 1993. In 1994 she was awarded the Olympic Order at the Centennial Olympic Congress in Paris. Her passion for sport never left her, and she was a great supporter of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

Mary Glen Haig’s husband predeceased her, and she later lived with Joyce Pearce, a medal winner in fencing at the 1966 British Empire and Commonwealth Games, who died in 2011.

Dame Mary Glen Haig, born July 12 1918, died November 15 2014

Guardian:

Piles of coal in China Imported coal on a quay at Lianyungang, China. Photograph: Imaginechina/Corbis

Next year in Paris the world’s leaders need to find proper solutions to mitigate the impacts of climate change, as Robin McKie explained (“Six vital steps world leaders must agree to take to protect Earth”, In Focus).

But there is no mention that a price should be put on carbon. It is essential that the externalities of carbon are internalised in the price, as we often do not directly pay for the associated health and environmental costs. People who are not responsible for the pollution can suffer from the consequences and this is not fair. The revenue gained from carbon pricing can be used for the Green Climate Fund to lessen the impacts of climate change globally.

The key driver behind climate change is excessive consumption. Consumption creates higher energy demand, requires more resources and has a large impact on global pollution levels. Limiting consumption will not be solved by technology, which McKie mentions as the key factor to stop temperature rise, but requires political will and awareness among consumers. Instead of focusing on pollution from the production sides solely, the world’s leaders must take action to limit the effects of consumption on the environment, just as consumers need to be more aware how much they contribute to climate change through their behaviour. The problems will even be more severe with the increasing demand for energy and resources in the future, especially of the developing nations, so solutions are needed as soon as possible.

Yanniek Huisman

Rijswijk, The Netherlands

Chris Rapley and Duncan Macmillan are absolutely right that, although climate change has been revealed by science, it’s not really about science (“Climate change is not just a matter of science. It’s about the world we want to live in, the future we want to create”, special report). They are also right that, despite all the technology we’ve thrown at the problem, emissions continue to rise. This is because no feasible technology will sufficiently decouple economic activity and environmental impact – the challenge is political rather than scientific. So it’s a shame that, in the face of all the evidence, Rapley sticks with the line that his hope “lies with the engineers”, and that he is encouraging his daughter to be one. When will scientists take the political plunge?

Andrew Dobson

Spire, Keele University, Staffordshire

Nobody wanted climate change. James Watt’s steam engine started it but, unlike slavery for example, those who brought it about didn’t know that what they were doing was harmful to people.

Now we know. So from now on, we are faced with the decision to take effective action. We must join together and ask our leaders to do this. Generate electricity from renewable sources. Insulate homes to reduce demand for heating. Adopt agricultural practices that sequester more carbon than they produce. It’s all possible and we have to start doing it. Don’t waste time blaming people or feeling guilty, but do talk about it. Make governments start now to reduce and then reverse greenhouse gas emissions. It is their most fundamental duty to us.

Jeanne Warren

Oxford

Your analysis on climate change concentrated on the usual relatively easy fixes and, like almost all articles on the subject, ignored the problem of rapidly increasing population. There is no crisis without people, and since having children is such a fundamental right, it seems easier to concentrate on renewables than seriously try to address this basic truth. It’s often said reassuringly that population size in developing nations is static or falling. Whether true or not, it also seems likely that the current 7 billion will be 9 billion in a few years, and presumably go on increasing, putting at greater risk food, space, water, shelter. Wouldn’t it be sensible for governments to start thinking about this, rather than wait for nature to fix things?

Mark Dickinson

Funding for services provided by councils has borne the brunt of austerity while demand continues to rise. When the chancellor delivers his autumn statement this Wednesday, “more of the same” cannot be an option.

After a 40% reduction in funding during this parliament, our efficiency savings are coming to an end. Further reductions without radical reform will have a detrimental impact on people’s quality of life and will lead to vital services being scaled back or lost altogether. Services such as libraries, leisure centres and road maintenance continue to buckle under the strain of cuts and the ever-rising cost of caring for our growing elderly population. Failure to address this will not only jeopardise other services, but will pass costs on to the NHS, which will have to pick up the pieces if we cannot protect adult social care or provide the services that keep people healthy.

Last week, the Smith commission set out a better deal for Scotland, granting more control over funding and recognising the importance of devolving power down beyond Holyrood. It’s England’s turn now.

There is compelling evidence that taking decisions closer to the people affected achieves better results and saves money. It is vital that the autumn statement sets out a new settlement for England, which puts powers beyond Westminster, and shares out tax and spending across the UK on a fair basis. The people we represent, who look north of the border with envy at the greater control Scots are to get over their everyday lives, will expect nothing less.

Signed by:

Cllr David Sparks, Chair of the Local Government Association

Independent:

Ben Bradshaw’s article “Our route to a safer planet begins at sea” (16 November) is a call for the delivery of the full UK network of marine protected areas by 2016. His campaign worries fishermen who face being displaced from their fishing grounds; it should also worry scientists and all those who are genuine about conservation of the marine environment.

A rushed process is a recipe for failure. Ben Bradshaw’s call to arms is an example of the blundering amateur – ex-minister or not – and includes a number of inaccuracies. Closed areas did not play a significant role in rebuilding the North American cod stocks in the 1980s.

Bass stocks have not “collapsed”. Poor recruitment and high fishing pressure (both commercial and recreational) have led to a decline in biomass. It’s important to introduce balanced and proportionate constraints to reverse this trend.

West Country boats are not tied up, as he implies, because of overfishing of skates and rays but because of quotas drastically reduced to meet a short-sighted and arbitrary policy timetable. Measures other than marine conservation zones have been shown to deliver. Scientists at the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea confirm that since the year 2000 fishing pressure across all the main species groups in the North Atlantic has been halved and fish stocks are responding – some very dramatically, like North Sea plaice, others more slowly, as we would expect.

The Government’s policy of implementing a network of marine conservation zones, carefully and progressively, is the correct approach. It is in no one’s interest to put marine protected areas in the wrong place. Only if you are content to have a tick-box exercise could you support rushing into this.

Barrie Deas

Chief executive of the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, York

The article “Limit gambling machine bets to £2, say councils” (23 November) includes statements about betting shops that are untrue.

The article refers to gaming machines as “addictive”, yet no independent empirical research has been produced stating that – indeed, the first major study into this issue is being published in December.

The claims that there are twice as many betting shops in the most deprived areas than the least is nonsense – only 17 per cent of betting shops are located in the most deprived areas of the country. This is the conclusion of an independent report by the Local Data Company.

The Gambling Commission, which is the regulator of all gambling, states that the number of betting shops is in decline – there are fewer betting shops now than there were in 2011; indeed, there are fewer betting shops than six months ago. It is disappointing to see a retail sector that employs more than 40,000 people and has eight million customers misrepresented to such a degree.

Paul Darling

Chairman, Association of British Bookmakers

London SW1

The gender gap begins in primary school with boys benefiting more from the pupil premium than girls (“Funding for poorer pupils helps more boys than girls, study shows”, 23 November).

The impact of this may last a lifetime; girls leaving school with few qualifications are given far fewer opportunities than boys in the same situation. While girls do better than boys at GCSEs overall, the gap in GCSE results is greater between disadvantaged and other girls than it is between their male equivalents.

The fact that girls who get on with their work and don’t play truant lose out to disruptive boys is unfair, but it’s not nearly as unfair as having to pay the price for this for life.

Carole Easton

Chief executive, Young Women’s Trust

London N1

Thank goodness for Katy Guest’s column last Sunday. Ed Miliband needs to remember that he leads the Labour Party; he should stand up to the bigots increasingly represented by Ukip, let David Cameron destroy his party by lurching to the right, and nurture the huge support he could have from liberal-minded people wanting a fair-minded society. That is what the Labour Party is for.

Peter Brookes

Wakefield, West Yorkshire

Times:

Humanitarian assistance is vital to help struggling nations, but there is concern about how the funds are distributed (Louis Leeson/save the children uk/pa)

Aid hand-outs do not always go to the right causes

THE British taxpayer, I’m told by a former minister for Africa, hands out £500,000 a day for the intended benefit of Kenya’s citizens (“Yes, they know it’s Christmas, but we don’t know where UK aid goes”, Camilla Cavendish, November 16).

One recent initiative Britain sponsors is the creation and running of the Independent Policing Oversight Authority (IPOA), whose purpose is to clean up Kenya’s corrupt police. One of the first cases it has spent a year investigating is the death of my son, Alexander, in custody in 2012.

The autopsy carried out by two pathologists concluded he died from blunt force trauma caused by a blow to the head. He had suffered other injuries too. The task of the IPOA was to find out which officers in a small police station carried out the attack.

A fortnight ago the IPOA called in Alexander’s mother to its offices in Nairobi to tell her its findings: the pathologists had got it wrong — our son had not died because of violence but because of an ingestion of drugs. The police were in the clear — in our view a whitewash and a White Mischief smear, paid for by the British taxpayer.
Lord Monson, London SW5

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Cavendish argues that direct targeting of basic services such as sanitation and infrastructure avoids handing over cash straight to undemocratic governments. But if, say, one of these states asks a donor country to pick up the existing tab for primary education there is no benefit to impoverished locals if the contribution merely frees up the existing budget so the president-for-life can buy an executive jet or redecorate his mansion.

Aid should be used to ensure additional development via provision of matching funds. Power brokers in some developing countries may claim that imposing such conditions is a form of neo-colonial interference. Yet Band Aid celebrities and donor countries surely have a right to know how the money is spent.
Brendan Cardiff, Wezembeek, Belgium

BLAIR AWARD

Your Christmas appeal (“Save Syria’s children”) is well worth supporting. However, the news that Save the Children has given an award to Tony Blair after his warmongering in the Middle East means it will not get another penny from me.
Gordon Bateman, Reading, Berkshire

SYRIAN AMNESTY

If Britain cares about the Syrian refugees, it should consider opening talks with President Bashar al-Assad. He is still the legitimate leader and is supported by the multiethnic Syrians; good Sunnis, Shi’ites, Christians, Armenians, Druze, Alawites and Ismailis. He also has the boots on the ground to defeat Isis and others. An amnesty and a ceasefire should be worked for.
S Skaff, North Ferriby, East Yorkshire

Oligarchs not buying up top school places

THE views of the head of King’s College School in Wimbledon expressed in the article “Private schools now preserve of oligarchs, admits head” ( News, last week) do not reflect the situation at most independent schools. Having led a small and successful prep for two decades, I know many independents have become more inclusive, not least because of the introduction of means-tested bursaries.

Fees charged by boarding schools, and establishments in London and the southeast of England, distort the figures.
Mr John Tranmer, Headmaster, Froebelian School, Leeds

FEE PAYING

In the grubby world of agents who place the students of overseas parents, placing fees are now almost standard. These can be up to 25% of the annual school charges, with even second-year and third-year fees increasingly common. No doubt bursars factor the existence of these backhanders into their calculations, hence the costs spiral.
Kevin Davis, Shillingstone, Dorset

ECONOMICS CLASS

Just 4.8% of pupils at Independent Schools Council (ISC) schools are international students with parents living overseas, and their numbers fell last year. The idea that our schools are dominated by the children of oligarchs is not one that any head of an independent school would recognise.

Overseas pupils bring perspectives from which all children learn. Fees average £12,000 a year for day schools, and one in three pupils receive some help paying them — £660m in financial assistance was provided last year.
Barnaby Lenon, ISC, Richard Harman, Headmasters’ and Headmistresses’ Conference, Alice Phillips, Girls’ Schools Association, David Hanson, Chief Executive, Independent Association of Prep Schools, Andrew Hampton, Chairman, Independent Schools Association, Mike Windsor, Chairman, The Society of Heads, Mark Taylor, Chairman,Independent Schools’ Bursars Association, Colin Bell, General Secretary, Council of British International Schools,Richard Green, Chairman, Association of Governing Bodies of Independent Schools, Robin Fletcher, National Director, Boarding Schools’ Association

Net migration puts everyone in same boat

IT IS hardly surprising the “net migration” policy has collapsed (“PM: I’ll ban benefits for EU migrants”, News, last week). It makes no distinction between the arrival of an engineer from outside the EU and a traveller from the Balkans. Its sole purpose was to conceal the impotence of the government under EU law.

There are the skilled craft workers who force wages even lower and enable employers to avoid training our young people. There are the unskilled who do menial labour — work our own unskilled see as less attractive than living on benefits. There are those who arrive for the welfare. And most crucially, there are those without whom the NHS would collapse.There is no chance of a rational policy while we remain in the EU.
David Brancher, Abergavenny, Monmouthshire

CONTRIBUTORY FACTORS

A simple solution to the so-called benefit tourism is to make all welfare contributory, as many other EU countries do. British citizens should be subject to this rule too. Let’s set the entry point to, say, five years. We could require child benefit and family credits to be subject to residency. I was astonished to learn that we gave British citizenship to nearly 200,000 people in 2012.
Joan Freeland, Colyton, Devon

COSTA LIVING

I recently purchased property in Spain and take issue with the figures in the report from Open Europe. It may well be the case that “a single Spanish immigrant moving to the UK to work on minimum wage sees their weekly income rise from £214.07 to £290.28, a gain of £76.21 a week”.

But it ignores the fact that moving from Madrid to London would cost far more — an increase in the price of groceries of 50% and rent up 200%. A monthly ticket for Madrid’s public transport costs €54 (£43), whereas in London it costs £120.60 (almost 200% more). Any “single Spanish immigrant” moving here in the hope of an easier life would be off his or her head.
Peter Millar, London SE1

VEILED COMMENT

LIKE Yasmin Alibhai-Brown (“She might as well go out half naked”, News Review, last week), I dislike seeing women wearing the niqab. Unlike her, I do not think it is my right to complain about this. It strikes me that liberals (such as myself) love multiculturalism as long as it entails no more than exotic foods and colourful street carnivals. But as soon as a culture has beliefs or behaviours that clash with ours, we quickly drop the liberalism because we know that our value system is without question the better. Wearing the niqab may represent very different things for different people but it is hardly going to frighten the horses, is it?
Jim White, Glasgow

TAKING COVER

I lived and worked in the Muslim world for more than 20 years. My wife and I were made welcome but she conformed with the expectation that she covered her hair. Some women now wearing the veil in Britain may have been forced to do so by family pressure. Others who do so by choice are abusing our tolerance and making a statement that they have no wish to integrate.
Malcolm Stathers, Haslemere, Surrey

Wind Farms

GREEN ENERGY NOT VIABLE

Following on from your two excellent articles on the wind turbines can we now look forward to a third article highlighting the horrendous costs involved providing the subsidy and where the majority of the money is going.

Using National Grid figures and graphs a rough figure for the present subsidy is £3bn a year and the bulk of this goes to European companies (Germany, France, Spain, Norway and Sweden). The problem is that this figure is based on the wind power being at 10% and the Scottish government is looking at 100% which could mean a figure of £20-30bn a year which is unsustainable in the present conditions.

The problem for the governments both in London and Scotland, who are now in a very deep hole, is that the above horrendous figure does not include the very large biomass scheme at Drax, the new gas fired power stations or nuclear.

It is now very clear that not only the wind turbines but the whole green energy system is not viable at the rate the government is trying to achieve and we should take note of China’s decision to reduce the dirty power stations over a longer period.

It should also be noted that we are relying on the French and the Dutch to keep our lights on.

William McNeil, Edinburgh

Referendum

NOT SO DECISIVE

May I correct the percentage of Scottish voters who voted “yes” in the referendum quoted in Gillian Bowditch’s otherwise admirable article, (“Wooing Nicola” , Focus, last week). The figures of 44.7% for independence and 55.3% against are percentages of the 84.6% (3,619,914) who actually did vote and do not take account of the other 15.4% who did not. Of all those eligible to vote in the referendum (4,278,858), 37.8% voted for independence, while 62.2% did not vote for independence.

Hair-splitting? Perhaps. But it certainly shows that the vote for independence was not as decisive as it is made out to be.

Monique Sanders, Giffordtown, Fife

Points

NO CAN DO

As Camilla Cavendish says, the key is not how much we eat or exercise but what we eat (“I choke on the words but our bulging world needs laws to curb Big Food”, Comment, last week). This has been well documented in countless scientific studies. It’s an uphill struggle, however, to convince people when an organisation such as the NHS endorses sugar-filled drinks. I visited hospitals in Sheffield and Leicester recently and all wards have Coke-dispensing machines stationed at their entrances. The most influential doctor in any hospital appears to be Dr Pepper. Surely a hospital should be saying, “When you enter these doors, we will show you the way. What you do after that is up to you.”
Mark Littlewood, Leicester

SCOTLAND THE BRAVE

Should the English thank the Scots for showing us how to take on a challenge? They won a referendum that has been repeatedly denied the English people. Whatever else is said about Alex Salmond, he fired the great majority of his nation to go out and vote and in doing so almost succeeded in dismantling the UK.
George Mitchell, Tunbridge Wells, Kent

KING OF HEARTS

Your editorial “Discretion is the better part of monarchy” (last week) criticises Prince Charles for wanting to speak out on matters close to his heart, but the master of Wellington College, Anthony Seldon, praises him for the Step Up to Serve campaign (“The young yearn to help. We’d be mad not to let them”, Comment, last week). It would be really sad if such well-intentioned efforts were to be muzzled once he becomes king. Surely such action can’t possibly be regarded as political, especially when it was enthusiastically supported by all three party leaders at its launch last year. I do not think the Queen has ever initiated a campaign, brilliant as she has been at avoiding controversy. Please allow our future king to be proactive in some matters.
Margaret Ross-Bell, London SW12

RUSSIA’S DARK LEGACY

What is forgotten amid the arguments about who is to blame for the fighting in eastern Ukraine is the fact that most Ukrainians loathe the Russians for the treatment suffered by them over the past century (“West scrambles diplomats as Russia drops billions into Balkans”, World News, last week). In the 1930s Stalinists murdered 7m Ukrainians during the so-called dekulakisation process by starvation, with the sequestration of grain. Some Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as being less evil than the Russians, though that did not last long due to the Nazis’ doctrine of untermenschen. But Russia’s deed has not been forgotten.
JP Warren, By email

Corrections and clarifications

AA Gill (Table Talk, Magazine, last week) stated that the Declaration of Independence was read by James Pearse. The document was the Proclamation of the Irish Republic and it was read by Padraig Pearse. The starter at the Farmgate Cafe in Cork is with drisheen, not dasheen. There was no referendum on water in Ireland. The Seamus Heaney poem referred to is not For Wednesday but Postscript. We apologise for the errors.

On November 16 we published a prominent photo of Margaret Evison with the story surrounding the circumstances of her soldier son Mark’s death in Afghanistan five years ago. She did not wish to be associated with the story and we apologise for any distress caused.

The top 200 state secondary schools table in last week’s Parent Power section in News Review omitted Cranbrook School, Kent, which should have ranked 100th with 68.6% A*-B grades at A-level and 65% A*/A grades at GCSE. Torquay Girls’ Grammar School showed incorrect GCSE results. The proportion of A*/A grades at GCSE should have read 69.2%. This would have ranked the school 67th overall. We apologise for the errors. The schools’ corrected entries in our Parent Power rankings can be found online at thesundaytimes.co.uk/parentpower.

Birthdays
John Bishop, comedian, 48; Magnus Carlsen, chess champion, 24; Des’ree, singer, 46; Alan Hutton, footballer, 30; Billy Idol, singer, 59; Josh Lewsey, rugby player, 38; Gary Lineker, TV presenter, 54; David Mamet, playwright, 67; David Nicholls, novelist, 48; Sir Ridley Scott, film director, 77; Ben Stiller, actor, 49

Anniversaries
1872 Scotland and England draw 0-0 in Glasgow in first international football match; 1934 Flying Scotsman officially becomes first steam locomotive to reach 100mph; 1968 Trade Descriptions Act comes into force; 1996 Stone of Scone is returned to Scotland 700 years after it was taken to England by King Edward I

Telegraph:

The public’s requirements on immigration; living with HIV; the arrival of Black Friday in Britain; Thomas Hardy’s birthplace under threat; silly signs; a taste for reindeer meat

David Cameron has delivered a bold speech that reconfigures UK policy towards the EU.

David Cameron has warned that the “future” of Britain in the European Union is at stake Photo: Getty

7:00AM GMT 29 Nov 2014

Comments

SIR – On immigration the public’s requirements are simple: that no preference be given to EU citizens over those from the rest of the world, and that the Government should limit the overall numbers appropriately, with proficiency in English being a key qualification for entry.

The sort of short-term fudges beloved of politicians and civil servants are a betrayal. Economic purists argue that a single market requires free movement of people, but they also argued that it would require a common currency. Our position on the sovereignty of immigration policy should mirror our position on currency.

Robert Smart
Eastbourne, East Sussex

SIR – There is no point at all in David Cameron – or anyone else – making promises on tougher rules for EU migrants’ comings and goings when we all know that our borders are so leaky and under-policed that we can’t even stop jihadists on bail from leaving.

Some reassurance from Theresa May that we will soon have a much tighter grip on this would be welcome, or these impressive pronouncements on control of numbers are meaningless.

Ginny Martin
Bishops Waltham, Hampshire

SIR – I see absolutely no reason to believe that David Cameron and his party of jelly-spined jobsworths are qualified or able to negotiate with the EU.

Christopher L Cruden
Lugano, Ticino, Switzerland

SIR – I live in Spain. To be able to do this, I have to comply with the laws of Spain.

I must first register in person at the oficina de extranjeros in my province of residence or at a designated police station. I must have sufficient resources, so as not to become a burden on Spain’s social assistance system during my period of residence. I must present proof of these resources, whether from regular income or from ownership of assets.

Lastly, I must supply proof of private or public healthcare insurance.

If Spain can insist on this for a citizen of the European Union, why can’t Britain?

Keith Donovan
Mazarrón, Murcia, Spain

SIR – Too little, too late, and nothing but a cap on numbers will do.

Stephen Lord
Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire

SIR – We keep being told to accept EU immigration because there are 2 million Brits living in other EU countries. I wonder how many of those have retired abroad to spend their money or are working for the EU in Brussels?

Kevin Platt
Walsall, Staffordshire

Living with HIV

SIR – The perception that a woman living with HIV is “selfish” for deciding to have children shows how entrenched HIV-related stigma remains in Britain.

Negative attitudes about the reality of life with HIV cling on in the face of medical facts: in Britain the risk of mother-to-child HIV transmission is less than 0.5 per cent.

Sarah Radcliffe
Policy and Campaigns Manager, National Aids Trust
London EC1

Hamilton as tax exile

SIR – Oliver Brown’s anger at Lewis Hamilton’s tax status should be directed at Labour’s 50 per cent higher rate tax (now 45 per cent but still counterproductive).

Margaret Thatcher proved that reasonable marginal tax rates produce more tax and more GDP. High earners already pay a vastly disproportionate amount of tax and will vote with their feet, because they can.

Andrew Tooby
Ombersley, Worcestershire

Sharia in Britain

SIR – I was pleased to see your report about the Law Society withdrawing its Practice Note on sharia-compliant wills.

As a member of the Law Society, I hope that this will reopen discussions about this and preceding governments’ dangerous flirting with misguided multiculturalism. While most of our politicians have been complaining loudly about the impact of EU law on Britain, they are afraid to challenge or even discuss the shameful fact that sharia, or Islamic law, has a foothold in certain pockets of our country where those most disadvantaged by sharia have no choice but to submit to it.

Should we have a referendum on action to reform this situation instead of, or as well as, the EU referendum?

A A Brook
Gloucester

No, thanks

^{Shoppers at the Asda store in Wembley wait fo the door to open (PA)}

SIR – Why has “Black Friday” become an event for British shoppers?

In America, Black Friday naturally follows Thanksgiving (always the fourth Thursday in November), and has a similar status for American shoppers as Boxing Day has for us.

But now, in Britain, the event of Black Friday appears to compel retailers to discount products at exactly the time when shoppers are most willing to pay full price. This weekend, people will be out shopping for Christmas. Retailers should seize this opportunity to maximise their already stressed profitability.

David Allan
Richmond, Surrey

Private school fees

SIR – Those who send their children to private school receive no rebate for the place at state school for which, through taxation, they are entitled and have paid but do not benefit from (Letters, November 26). The same could be said for private health care – there’s no refund for not using the NHS.

Dr Michael Barrie
Kingston upon Thames, Surrey

SIR – Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, seems to be uninterested in the reality of the independent schools’ interaction with the state sector. Only privately educated Labour MPs fail to see the hypocrisy of their behaviour.

Don Bailey
Helsby, Cheshire

SIR – In his haste to lambast independent education, the shadow education secretary conveniently misses the downsides of state education. After four years in the state sector, my son was struggling. Despite frequent consultation, his teachers could offer no explanation. When he applied to the local independent school, the head identified his mild dyslexia within an hour. Now, with proper support and teachers who are accountable, my son is thriving in the independent sector.

Adrian Walton
Moddershall, Staffordshire

How to get a head

SIR – My photographer husband was asked to turn up at Faber & Faber one day in the early Seventies to do the cover shot for a new book and was told to bring a human skull with him. Sourcing this was my job.

As I was walking away from the props place with the skull in a basket, a gust of wind blew the covering cloth aside just as I passed a man who gave a yell and took off at high speed.

P D James awaited us in Queen Square and deftly arranged the ghoulish black wig topped by a beautifully tied nurse’s cap on the grinning skull. It was a very jolly session, she couldn’t have been more delightful – and that’s how the Shroud for a Nightingale book cover (pictured above) came into being.

Celia Moreton-Prichard
London SE13

Britain’s Indian comrades in war deserve better

SIR – General Lord Dannatt is right to call for us to remember the contribution the Empire made in the First World War. The Chattri at Patcham (Letters, November 24) is magnificent, but it cannot tell the whole story. That should be told at the National Memorial Arboretum at Alrewas in Staffordshire.

There are presently four relevant memorials at Alrewas; three of them specific to regiments. Two are dedicated to the 10th Baluch Regiment and the 17th Dogras, both raised by former British officers of those regiments. The third, erected recently by the Brigade of Gurkhas, honours not only the pre-Indian Independence Gurkha regiments but also their successors in the British Army.

The fourth memorial stands nearby. It is dedicated to the Royal Indian Navy and the Indian Army, the greatest volunteer army the world has known. This last memorial comprises a high and forbidding hedge that surrounds a small rectangular space containing an uninformative notice board.

Can we not do something that truly reflects our respect and gratitude to our former Indian comrades?

Lt-Col William Prince (retd)
Brightlingsea, Essex

SIR – The majority of Muslim burials were at two locations close to the Shah Jahan Mosque, Woking: a purpose-built burial ground on Horsell Common, established on land procured by the War Office in early 1915 specifically for the purpose, and, in the earliest months of the war, within the Muslim section of the Brookwood Necropolis Cemetery.

Sadly, following acts of vandalism in the Sixties, the remains were removed from Horsell and reinterred at a special plot within the military cemetery at Brookwood.

Nigel Searle
Woking, Surrey

The National Trust must save Hardy’s Dorset

^{Exposed to the madding crowd: the quiet of Hardy’s birthplace in Dorset is under threat (Alamy)}

SIR –The National Trust must bear some responsibility for the proposed planning application for 70 new homes close to the site of Thomas Hardy’s birthplace (report, November 27).

In September, the trust opened a grotesque and unnecessary visitor centre at nearby Thorncombe Woods which has further commercialised the area. While it remains possible to follow Hardy’s trails through the surrounding woods and up on to the ancient land immortalised as Egdon Heath, the tranquillity of the area has faced numerous threats in recent years, including traffic noise from the Puddletown bypass and commercial ventures close to the trust’s visitor car park at Higher Bockhampton.

The National Trust must vociferously oppose this planning application at Lower Bockhampton, which threatens to triple the local population.

Philip Duly
Haslemere, Surrey

Run out of town

SIR – My favourite sign (Letters, November 27) is from St Lucia and runs as follows: “Notice: The village square is closed for rehabilitation any unauthorised persons found in the square shall be persecuted.”

Kevin Henley
Jubail, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia

Fast food

SIR – Lidl’s magazine says its new line in reindeer meat “resembles antelope in flavour and texture”. That’s helpful.

Tim Barnsley
London SW16

Irish Times:

Irish Independent:

I firmly condemn thugs hijacking peaceful protests with their vindictive behaviour, as that is giving the Government an even bigger stick to beat us with.

However, having said that, I do feel the controversy surrounding the public’s rejection of the mere existence of Irish Water has this Government running around like ducks in thunder. Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly’s new changes in making payments for the service is nothing short of ridiculous. It is inconceivable for them to think that people will buy into this latest attempt to quell public anger about the entire setup surrounding Irish Water. Pray tell, what’s going to be achieved in having people pay €100 above the recommended costs, so that the Department of Social Protection would reimburse them the overpaid amount?

Who came up with this solution? Did any of the highly-paid advisers calculate the extra costs involved in this implausible and thoughtless proposal? As a nation we have been known in the past to pay gold nuggets to political monkeys. This is a continuation of those infamous and disastrous methods of doing business all over again. Has nothing been learned at the very top in this country? But, then again, it’s always easy to wilfully and recklessly spend somebody else’s money. This economy has been decimated by the selfishness of financial parasites and their cronies for far too long.

So we must stop this destruction of living standards now, by standing together against this attempted underhanded operation. It’s become a necessity to defend the only remaining emblems of our living standards. Let’s not forget that politicians have already claimed €24.4 million in expenses in three years.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny, isn’t it time for you and this Government to take a reality check as to whom you are working on behalf of? We’ll shortly be commemorating the sacrifice of our patriots who died for the overwhelming desire of freedom for the people of this country. Let’s be mindful that liberty and democracy are meant to stand side-by-side for the good of all people – and not just for the privileged class in society.

Mattie Greville, Killucan, Co Westmeath

Gender quotas are unfair

I agree 100pc with the views expressed by Desmond Fitzgerald on the article by Minister for Justice Frances Fitzgerald.

There is no evidence to suggest that artificially-created (through quotas) gender-balanced leadership results in better national governance in countries. This is not surprising, given that quotas are – by their nature – contrary to true equality of opportunity, which is not the same thing as equality of outcome. Also, it’s both ironic and instructive that Minister Fitzgerald is a senior member of a Government that last year got rid of a highly-talented woman who was one of its brightest stars of either sex (and one who, I understand, is opposed to gender quotas) because she showed genuine independence of mind and devotion to principle.

It seems that such qualities will not be welcome in the kind of female public representatives and office-holders that the Minister appears to have in mind when she calls for more women in public life and gender-balanced leadership.

Thankfully, though, when the next general election comes the Government and the various political parties cannot oblige electors to vote for their quota-filling candidates.

Hugh Gibney, Athboy, Co Meath

Hitting the right note

To offer some empathy and solidarity to FAI Chief Executive John Delaney, I would like to offer my apologies to anybody over the years who may have heard me singing Johnny Cash’s ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. I in no way advocate the senseless shooting of men in Reno just to watch them die.

I would also like to promise that from now on I will no longer sing ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ by The Beatles or ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ by Bob Marley. To my wife: I have destroyed my Tom Jones’ records as I now appreciate the dangerous influence that the singing along to ‘Delilah’ might one day have on our relationship.

Darren Williams, Sandyford, Dublin 18

Helter skelter marriage laws

Charles Manson is allowed to get married in jail… yet there are so many men who cannot get a divorce in the real world. Strange indeed.

Robert Sullivan, Bantry, Co Cork

Our Lady of Guadalupe

The image of the Virgin Mary on a piece of 483-year-old cactus fabric in a Catholic church in Mexico City constantly baffles artists and scientists alike. Known worldwide as Our Lady of Guadalupe, its history goes back to 1531, when Mary appeared to a 50-year-old Indian named Juan Diego. The visions occurred five times, four to Juan and once to his sick uncle.

I would like to explain briefly just of the very many interesting aspects of this image. In 1979, the newest digital techniques were applied for the first time in investigating the image. After filtering and processing the digitised images of the eyes, an entire scene of about 10 people were present in both eyes. The scene appears to be Juan Diego, a bishop and other people present at the time of the apparition. Mary seems to have taken a picture of the scene with her eyes, which remained preserved forever in the moment she appeared on Juan Diego’s cloak.

The images in Mary’s eyes appeared in three different places. This three-fold reflection is caused by the curvature of the eyes’ corner. Two of the reflections were right-side up and one was upside down. This occurs only in living eyes. Also the photograph images in both eyes are not identical, but their refraction and proportions match perfectly, just as happens now in our eyes, in which there are two distinct but perfectly-matching ‘takes’ of the same scene.

The image of Mary looks like a painting, but who is painting it? The time is now ripe for a new transparent and independent scientific investigation into this image.

Declan Condren, Navan Road, Dublin

Facts about the bank guarantee

Many of the letters to your paper talk about a bank bailout that was forced upon us by the EU. This mistaken view suits many in Ireland, particularly Fianna Fail.

It was the Fianna Fail-led government in 2008 that issued the blanket bank guarantee which effectively put in place legislation that ensured most bondholder would get all their monies back. The letters from the ECB in 2010 refers to a tiny number of unsecured bond holders that would be protected during the bailout.

However, the vast majority of the bank bondholders got their money back because of the bank guarantee of 2008, which was nothing to do with the EU.

Eunan McNeill, Letterkenny, Co Donegal

Marriage made in political hell

Many recent pub conversations have included the remark that Fianna Fail and Fine Gael will have to join forces in order to retain some illusion of a popular government.

I am not sure how the idea of two highly-unpopular and incompetent parties joining forces might create some extra popularity, but such is the thinking in many democracies.

The idea appears to be gaining momentum, which would at least help to explain why there has been no opposition for the last 60 years and why we are heading downhill so fast. Sadly, it will not help our predicament.

Richard Barton, Tinahely, Co Wicklow

Irish Independent

1 December 2014 Rest

I still have arthritis in my left toe I am stricken with gout. But I have a quiet day.

Mary’s back much better today, breakfast weight down trout for tea and her tummy pain is still there.

Obituary:

Cherry Wainer was a pianist known as ‘the female Liberace’ who found fame playing a quilted white-leather Hammond organ

Cherry Wainer in the film Girls with Latin Quarter

7:14PM GMT 30 Nov 2014

Comments

Cherry Wainer, the pianist hailed as “the female Liberace” who has died aged 78, pumped the Hammond organ in the group Lord Rockingham’s XI and was singled out for solo stardom on Oh Boy!, British television’s most atmospheric pop spectacular.

During live broadcasts of Oh Boy! on ITV in the late 1950s, its procession of chiefly male idols passed so swiftly before the cameras that screaming girls scarcely had pause to draw breath. However, screams became cheers for Cherry Wainer, seated at an upholstered Hammond organ as part of the programme’s house band, Lord Rockingham’s XI. With her grinning vibrancy and ping-pong eyes, Cherry was adored more as an admired elder sister.

Indeed, she was something of a mother figure to the up-and-coming Cliff Richard. “I drove him to and from his family home and was his general confidante,” she said in her final interview, for Vintage Rock magazine. “His parents knew nothing about showbusiness .”

Cherry Wainer was born on March 2 1935 in South Africa, and was in showbusiness almost from infancy. Her father promoted tours by nationally renowned artistes while her mother ensured that their daughter’s obvious musical talent was formalised. “I was going to be a classical pianist,” she recalled. “At the age of eight, I performed a concerto with an orchestra. I was, I suppose, considered a child prodigy – because, in my early teens, my mother took me to London to start at the Sadler’s Wells Ballet School.”

While she finished the course, she failed the audition to join the associated ballet company. However, on returning to the Transvaal, her imagination was captured by the Hammond organ, a keyboard that was becoming increasingly more prominent in jazz, notably beneath the hands of the American exponent Jimmy Smith. “I was entirely self-taught,” she confessed, “mostly by applying what I knew on piano to organ. I wanted to be the female Jimmy Smith!”

Response to her performances in regional clubs was sufficiently encouraging for Wainer to seek engagements further afield – in the first instance in Holland, but she was too young to go on her own, so her mother went along too. “I only knew six tunes, which I played over and over again while trying to learn new ones,” said Cherry Wainer in later life.

Next, she collaborated with accordionist Nico Carstens on Flying High, the first rock and roll album recorded by South Africans before entering the orbit of Don Storer, a highly paid jobbing drummer and her future husband. They first played together in 1958 at a private function for the billionaire Johnny Schlesinger. With a musical chemistry that was, reckoned Wainer, “almost telepathic”, the duo tried their luck in Britain – where Wainer’s flatmate, the singer and actress Georgia Brown, introduced them to booking agent Tito Burns, who found them work on the variety circuit and in US military bases. Burns also got them booked on ITV’s Lunch Box, the lightest of light entertainment shows.

^{Cherry Wainer with Cliff Richard in the 1960s (REX FEATURES)}

It was through one such appearance that they came to the attention of Jack Good, who had been commissioned to produce the first series of Oh Boy! that autumn. As well as incorporating Storer and Wainer into Lord Rockingham’s XI, he also brokered a recording contract for Wainer. Her output was to include Money (1960), historically the first Tamla-Motown number to be covered in the UK (and, later, a set track for many beat groups).

While chart entries proved elusive for Wainer in her own right, a maiden Rockingham single, Fried Onions, made the US Hot 100. Hoots Mon, the follow-up, was a domestic No 1 – and was heard on a section of Oh Boy! featured in the 1959 Royal Command Performance. Wainer became the focal point of the band – publicised as “the female Liberace” – with solo spots as both a singer and instrumentalist.

“I had my Hammond customised with quilted white-leather and diamanté studs,” she recalled. “Also, my poodle used to sit next to me. I loved every minute of it – being recognised in the street, signing autographs and when fans washed my pink saloon car when it was parked outside the hall in Islington where every Oh Boy! was rehearsed.”

After the final edition of Oh Boy! in 1959, Wainer went on to star in another ITV series, Boy Meets Girls, which was aimed at a wider audience. “It didn’t have the same pace as Oh Boy!” said Jack Good, “and was a dreadful mistake.”

“It just didn’t feel the same,” agreed Wainer, “Neither has any other television series in which I’ve been involved since.” Among the shows was Beat! Beat! Beat!, a German TV pop programme on which she and Storer were regular performers during the mid-1960s prior to their move to the United States in 1968. In America they played residencies at venues in Las Vegas where they settled.

In the wake of Storer’s death in 1977, Wainer retired as a professional entertainer. In 2013, at the time of her appearance on Rock’n’Roll Britannia on BBC4, she was working as an assistant in a small gift shop.

Cherry Wainer, born March 2 1935, died November 14 2014

Guardian:

I agree with every word Ian Jack says (We should tax private schools as businesses, not beg to borrow their cricket pitches, 29 November.) Tristram Hunt’s lamentably feeble proposals have finally sunk my floating vote. How could I possibly vote Labour after this? Labour should abolish the charitable status of private schools, not beg from them. They know this, we know this, but they dare not do it.
Margaret Drabble
London

• I hope all the rightwing critics of the BBC will apologise now we know that its former political interrogator-in-chief is a Conservative (Paxman approached to be Tories’ candidate, 29 November). It also puts the Michael Howard farce in a different and dubious light.
RC Whiting
Stilton, Cambridgeshire

Battersea power station, London Casino property speculation: a £1m studio flat being built in the old Battersea power station, above, is going back on the market at £1.5m. Photograph: Finbarr O’Reilly/Reuters

Page 5 in your 29 November edition about ordinary people desperately shoving each other to get a cheap telly (They’re going to need a bigger boot … Black Friday brings shopping frenzy). Page 7 in the same edition about rich investors desperately buying and selling non-existent flats in a non-existent development . Difference? Black Friday comes once a year; obscene casino property speculation happens 24/7/365. Effects: Black Friday means shops lose a little revenue and people get a few bargains; obscene casino property speculation causes homelessness, rampant, greed-driven private rental rises, poverty and associated mental health problems; and incentivises tax avoidance, leading to further austerity measures by a government who couldn’t care less.
Max Fishel
London

• While police were called to Tesco in Manchester on Black Friday to deal with greedy, fighting shoppers, at our branch of that hugely profitable supermarket there was an equally depressing scene. As shoppers entered the emporium, they were buttonholed by assertive volunteers and urged to give donations to the local food bank. Lists thrust at those manoeuvring their trolleys through the door requested tins and packets of foods that might fill hungry stomachs but certainly would do nothing to enhance health. Both scenarios speak much of the nation we have become.
Margaret Kitchen
Ormskirk, Lancashire

• Striking juxtaposition on Saturday’s front page: “Christmas, a time for giving – and grabbing” and “Our appeal: Please help us take on mental illness”. Taking on increasingly widespread social madness would seem an even bigger ask than usual.
Howard Lane
London

African woman with bottle of drinking water ‘No one can lead a healthy, productive and dignified life if they do not have access to safe drinking water.’ Photograph: Ahmed Jallanzo/EPA

Twenty-six years after the first World Aids Day was declared, on 1 December 1988, the HIV epidemic is still with us. It claims 1.5 million lives each year, 70% of them in sub-Saharan Africa.

There has been progress. Many more people are living longer with HIV, thanks to more advanced drugs and efforts to make them available. Work on prevention, including mother-to-child transmission, has slowed new infections.

But there is one crucial element missing from life in sub-Saharan Africa that disproportionally affects the health and wellbeing of the 25 million people there living with HIV. That element is water. Clean water is critical to keeping them healthy, for taking antiretroviral drugs and for good hygiene to minimise infections – ideally, as much as 100 litres a day. Yet 35% of people in sub-Saharan Africa are without access to clean water and 70% are without basic sanitation, leaving many people living with HIV suffering from chronic diarrhoea and unable to care for themselves or their families.

No one can lead a healthy, productive and dignified life if they do not have access to safe drinking water, a safe and private place to relieve themselves, and the ability to keep their bodies and surroundings clean. Doctors and nurses cannot properly contain infections if hospitals and clinics do not have clean running water, functioning toilets and good hygiene practices.

Next year, as the UN finalises a new set of sustainable development goals that aim to eradicate extreme poverty within a generation, a strong stand-alone goal that ensures that everyone, everywhere has access to water and sanitation must be among them, as well as targets within health goals that recognise the importance of these services. Without safe water and sanitation, we undermine all other efforts at infection prevention, control and treatment.
Barbara Frost Chief executive, WaterAid, London, Chris Bain Director, Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (Cafod), London, Ben Simms, Director, StopAids, London, Lois Chingandu Executive director, SAfAids, Harare, Zimbabwe

Disappointed at Smith commission tax proposals: Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon. Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP/Getty Images

Nicola Sturgeon states, unsurprisingly, that she is disappointed at the Smith commission’s proposals on devolving powers to Scotland (Report, 28 November). Naturally it is right that both she and the SNP are left disappointed. The Smith commission was set not with the task of delivering independence by the backdoor but with the aim of creating a more federal Britain by enhancing the powers of the Scottish parliament. Whatever outcome the commission brought forward, it was always going to be short of SNP desires to break up the union.

In contrast to nationalist attempts to present the proposals as a betrayal by Westminster, the commission’s recommendations go further than the original “Vow” promised by Gordon Brown, in that they recommend full, instead of part, devolution of income tax, alongside significant elements of welfare spending. The proposals provide Scotland with a large degree of political autonomy, while retaining the economic security, international prestige and joint British identity that the UK provides. The proposals, far from being a Westminster betrayal, as the nationalists may try to make out, deliver on the home rule that was promised to Scotland and can bring about a stronger Scotland within a new federal United Kingdom, fit for the challenges of the 21st century.
William Beddows
St Andrews, Fife

• The passing of powers to tax income to the Scottish parliament has the hallmarks of a short-term political fix with long-term economic consequences. The political consequences of variations in income tax rates are easier to predict than their economic consequences. Tax increases for the rich (however defined) tend to be liked by those less well off. They may or may not lead to an increase in government revenues, with consequences for amounts available for public spending.

Will those responsible for tax rates be accepting the political consequences, or will they be looking to the Barnett formula’s guarantee to fund devolved administrations? Will the same economic rules apply to all parts of the proposed federal UK? Are you taxed on the basis of where you live, or where you work? What is going to happen if people currently taxed in Scotland decide to nip over a dividing line? What will happen to social cohesion where neighbours on different sides of the line face significantly different rules? The SNP lost the recent vote, but the reaction to damp the fires may be the first step in providing a logical rationale for full devolution.
Andrew Watters
Director, Thomas Eggar LLP, London

• Does anyone understand how the principle of English votes for English laws, as applied to devolved income tax, will relate to the Barnett formula (or any successor) for redistributing UK tax revenue to fund public services run by the devolved administrations? We are promised a paper before Christmas. But the issue needs to be thought through and debated in public. If Scottish income tax revenue is under the control of the Scottish government, there will be that much less under the control of the UK exchequer for spending in the rest of the UK (rUK). So the transfer of public service funding cannot be left unaffected.

On the other hand, to deduct the whole amount from the Barnett transfer would cancel any income-tax change decided on by the Scottish government. The most equitable arrangement would seem to be to deduct what the Scots would have paid if rUK rates had applied. So it is hard to see what remains of (purely) English laws in this field.
Alan Bailey
London

• The commission’s decision to devolve all rates and bands of income tax, while reserving the personal allowance (apparently at Labour’s insistence) is bizarre to say the least. Full control over rates and bands implies the power to alter the personal allowance. For example, the allowance could be increased above £10,000 simply by creating an initial tax rate of 0%. Similarly, it could be lowered below £10,000 for workers earning over the threshold by creating an initial rate of say 40% (a 40% rate on the first £1,000 of income would be equivalent to reducing the personal allowance to £9,000).

The only thing Holyrood would be unable to do would be to lower the personal allowance for workers earning less than £10,000, though this is inconceivable within the current climate in Scottish politics. That Labour sees this arrangement as a guarantee of the strength of the union is indicative of the state of utter confusion/panic within Scottish Labour.
Thomas Roberts
Edinburgh

• English votes on English laws may be a superficially seductive slogan, but it does not answer the West Lothian question satisfactorily if a UK government of a different political affiliation from the majority of English MPs continues to control the Queen’s Speech, the legislative programme, the parliamentary timetable and the Commons agenda.
Clive Saville
London

• So sweeping constitutional change will become law irrespective of who wins the election. What happened to the principle of consent? Constitutional change used to require a popular mandate from manifesto pledges. MPsno longer feel they need consent; they have assumed unprecedented power. The real winner of the referendum was Westminster itself. Will politicians have the courage to seek consent with a referendum on these proposals?
John Hartigan
Norton Lindsey, Warwickshire

• Having now had the recommendations for “devo max” in Scotland, I hope this will be followed by a proper devolution settlement for the rest of the UK. We need real devolution to the English regions, given that this already exists in part for London, and a new Westminster parliament, much reduced in numbers, which deals with matters affecting the whole of the UK. This would provide for a real cascade of powers to regions/Northern Ireland/Scotland/Wales and thence to unitary authorities and to the parish and community level. But reducing the numbers of Westminster MPs will be the biggest problem, given that turkeys don’t like voting for Christmas.
Tony Mayer
Swindon, Wiltshire

• Around a third of the east coast mainline is in Scotland (Report, 28 November). Ironic, then, that on the day the Smith commission announced more devolved powers to Scotland, including more control over its railways, the UK government decides to award the east coast franchise to a private company, Virgin/Stagecoach, rather than allowing East Coast, the profit-making state operation, to continue.
Malcolm Stewart
Edinburgh

• Policies dealing with childcare, in-work poverty, access to education, public health, gender equality and domestic abuse, extending the franchise to 16- and 17-year-olds, and land reform (Sturgeons strategy, 27 November). Can we have an SNP government in England, please?
David Bishop
Nantwich, Cheshire

ungang, China. Photograph: Imaginechina/Corbis

Yanniek Huisman

Rijswijk, The Netherlands

Andrew Dobson

Spire, Keele University, Staffordshire

Nobody wanted climate change. James Watt’s steam engine started it but, unlike slavery for example, those who brought it about didn’t know that what they were doing was harmful to people.

Jeanne Warren

Oxford

Mark Dickinson

Barnet, Herts

Independent:

Andrew Mitchell’s defeat in the High Court (report, 29 November) has emphasised the cost of going to law in England. We probably have the most expensive legal system in Europe.

The EU Commission took the UK Government to court about the matter. In the case of EU Commission vs UK (Case c-530/11) the European Court of Justice ruled, in February this year, that English justice was “prohibitively expensive”. That case was about the environment, and the decision was to the effect that the UK was in breach of its environmental obligations by having such an impossibly expensive system of law. The ruling has wider application, however. EU law generally requires an effective civil justice system; ours is so terrifying even to the very rich, let alone the poor or averagely wealthy, that it is no longer effective.

Yet nothing is being done about this. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the Government welcomes the extravagant costs of legal proceedings and the consequent decline in the role of the courts as contributors to the nation’s governance.

In a lecture in 2012 Professor Dame Hazel Genn of University College London vividly described the “decline, and now virtual extinction of trials in the civil courts, and with it the public determination of the merits of civil disputes”. Matters have got worse since then.

The odd thing is that this has escaped public notice. Clients come to me with an expectation that justice can be had. It is only when the cost of litigation is explained that it dawns on them just how things have changed in the last 25 years or so.

It’s easy to blame the lawyers, but this state of affairs certainly does not suit me, nor, I am sure, the vast bulk of practising solicitors. It is the system which drives costs up to our own and our clients’ despair. Yet there is no need for our courts to be so expensive.

Reform has been attempted, but these efforts have been judge-driven, and ineffective. It is high time the people themselves started to demand an accessible and therefore effective system of law. For its part, the Government should seek to avoid further collisions with the European Court of Justice. These are inevitable if nothing changes.

Robert Morfee
Langport, Somerset

Your description of Andrew Mitchell as “clever and talented [with] a genuine passion for… helping the world’s poorest people” flies in the face of all the facts. Clever? He has had a very good education and has hence spent hours immersed in the sanest philosophies produced by the best of human culture: Plato, say, or Dickens, or the Bible. It is evidence only of breathtaking stupidity, that after all that education, he can still emerge thinking that he is innately superior to other people. David Mellor’s recent cringe-inducing altercation with a taxi driver is evidence of the same disaster: giant education, tiny mind. The cabbie behaved better, spoke more rationally and was hence clearly the brighter man.

Yet the cabbie is a still a cabbie, the policeman is still a policeman and crassly stupid people just like Mr Mellor and Mr Mitchell are still running the country. No wonder we’re in such an awful mess.

Emma Fox Wilson
Birmingham

All the fuss about the word “pleb” stems from its association with social class; had Mr Mitchell used a different word he would not have attracted the same obloquy. But surely this misses the point; rather he should be condemned for stubbornly and persistently lying about what he did or did not say.

David Gist
Fairlight, East Sussex

While I would agree with much of your editorial concerning Andrew Mitchell (28 November), I would take issue with the idea that what took place at the gates of Downing Street when he abused police officers was “a silly row and should have been settled quietly and privately”. The public has every right to know that Mitchell is a bully and a snob.

Joe Connolly
Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire

We need to talk about death

Thank you for a moving and much-needed article on the rarely discussed subject of dying. Catherine McCartney (28 November) describes the “medicalised battle to prolong life” that seems to happen so often, quite simply because doctors believe they should offer treatment and because patients believe they should accept it. It is possible for a patient to be in control of what happens to them, but only if they are of sound mind and/or have made an advance decision.

I have done so, with the help of my GP, who said that very few people came to him with such a request and he wished they would: it would be beneficial to both doctors and patients at a very difficult time.

I made my decision after my mother-in-law’s far from “humane, happy ending”. Ninety-two years old, she had crippling arthritis, and senile dementia. When diagnosed with pneumonia, she was taken to hospital, though she protested. There she languished for 11 weeks, being treated with antibiotics for one infection after another until she died. It was a horrific situation which no one, patient or family, should have to endure.

We don’t like to talk about death, but we should do so before it is too late. I would urge everyone to make an advance decision.

Christina Jones
Retford, Nottinghamshire

Last year my husband, Richard Coward, was diagnosed with lung cancer. It was metastatic. He died exactly eight months later. They were very difficult months for him.

Richard underwent some chemotherapy, at his own request, but it damaged his immune system and his death, when it occurred, was not an easy one. He died in hospital.

Since his death I keep reading about others who have “lost their battle”/ are “bravely fighting” cancer. Cancer is a disease and, as such, should be approached like any other disease. Cancer UK would do well to recognise this. Their current advertising campaign, which includes young children, could lead people to the view that all cancers can be cured. This is simply not the case.

Dr McCartney is absolutely correct in her views. We, all of us, patients, their families, the medical team, need to rethink how we deal with those diagnosed with cancers that are not going to be “cured”.

Siobhán Leslie
Edinburgh

Veterans’ plight deserves publicity

Merry Cross raises an excellent point (Letters, 28 November) about this year’s Independent fundraising campaign. War veterans are clearly being let down by the Government they served. However, her opinion actually highlights the need for this appeal.

A high-profile movement to raise money and awareness for those in need can only be a good thing. By making the population more aware of this issue, the Government is more likely to accept its responsibility. We’ve already seen the leaders of Britain’s three main political parties get involved, which again raises awareness. Support for the armed forces is rising up the political agenda and I don’t see why this issue can’t be viewed as both a governmental duty and a charitable cause.

Dan Krikler
Kenilworth, Warwickshire

Franchises that risk becoming monopolies

The award of the East Coast rail franchise to the Virgin-Stagecoach consortium (report, 28 November) means that all three main lines north out of London (West Coast, East Coast & Midland) will be run by an operator comprising a significant Stagecoach presence. This is essentially a private monopoly analogous to British Rail Inter City which was broken up some 20 years ago on the mantra that privatisation creates competition which drives improved customer service and operational efficiency.

When National Express won the original Midland Mainline franchise it had to undertake to maintain coach services at current levels. Stagecoach is already undercutting National Express coaches using Megabus and Megatrain budget services feeding into East Midlands Train services; will a similar undertaking be required to ensure that Stagecoach doesn’t create a complete monopoly in the public-transport market between London, the Midlands, northern England and Scotland?

Dr John Disney
Nottingham Business School

Black Friday madness

If stores can afford to discount so much over “Black Friday” then surely they are ripping consumers off the rest of the time. Why do they not reduce the price of their products over the course of a whole year?

Seeing the images of fights and injuries, it seems as if companies are revelling in the infamy of it all. Imagine if a festival wilfully arranged such a dangerous situation – its organisers would be hauled over the coals. I hope that the Health and Safety Executive will investigate why shops did not provide enough security and staff to prevent chaos.

DJ Cook
Southampton

What a hideous display of rampant greed, as normal decency is sacrificed on the altar of imported American-style consumerism. Black Friday indeed!

Nick Pritchard
Southampton

Why are Health and Safety regulations ignored by stores when they organise their Black Friday greed stampedes?

Robert Tuck
Wimborne Minster, Dorset

Times:

Sir, Your lead story “Parents say yes to more grammar schools” (Nov 27) illustrates the difficulty of gauging public opinion. You report that 54 per cent would support opening new grammar schools. The number would have been far lower if the pollster had asked whether people supported opening new secondary moderns, which in a selective system is where most pupils go.

The YouGov poll says that two thirds of parents want their children to go to grammar school. The latest research, from the Institute of Education, shows that in recent decades, in selective areas, 20 per cent went to grammar schools — leaving 80 per cent for secondary moderns or equivalent. So much for parental choice.

The selective system was designed for a very different postwar world where a tiny number of people went to university and the vast majority left school with no qualifications at 15. Indeed, in practice, until the mid 1950s it was illegal for those at secondary moderns to take public exams at all. As last week’s research showed, grammar schools do not help working-class children to get to university, although secondary moderns are a barrier.

The standard of secondary education now is much higher than when selective education was the norm, partly as a result of the abolition in most areas of the 11+. If you tell a child of ten that they have failed the 11+, and that an academic education is not for them, most will believe you and behave accordingly. In most of Britain we don’t do that any more. Far more people now are expected to do GCSEs, A levels and go on to university — and therefore many more do. The challenges of the future will not be met by a return to a system of the past where conditions were very different to those of today.
Demitri Coryton
Editor, Education Journal

Sir, You report that 66 per cent of parents responding to a YouGov poll said that they would send their children to a grammar school. Were they aware that, under the old system, 80 per cent of their applications would be turned down? Perhaps they should be asked whether they would welcome the return of secondary modern schools.
Rev A Graham Hellier
Marden, Hereford

Sir, By all means let us discuss grammar schools — but only after a national debate on the schooling of the unacademic, a far larger group. To do otherwise is to hasten the re-emergence of the default option, namely the discredited secondary modern. Why should the state concentrate unduly on the bright, who by definition are more capable of fending for themselves? This calls for a less socially divisive, tripartite secondary school system consisting of grammars and vocational institutes, with high schools for the academically inclined sandwiched in-between.
Yugo Kovach
Winterborne Houghton, Dorset

Sir, The YouGov poll mirrors other major polls commissioned by the National Grammar Schools Association in recent years, all demonstrating that a majority of parents and voters support new grammar schools. But what of the best of all polls — the choice of real parents for real schools? The 164 grammar schools left in England, under parental pressure, have expanded their schools as far as ingenuity will allow, to admit the equivalent of 30 new grammar schools into their bulging walls. Some have up to 20 pupils who have passed the 11+, competing for each place. The main parties have their own agendas for ignoring parental wishes, but the reality of them has been blindingly obvious for decades.
Roger Peach
Vice-president, National Grammar Schools Association

Sir, Clarissa Farr makes no mention of her own school’s responsibility for the kind of pressure which sees students and parents unable to cope with the “failure” of coming second (“Head attacks rich parents”, Nov 29). The briefest glance at the St Paul’s Girls’ School website reinforces the “shame” awaiting if you wreck the school’s evident desire to top the league tables. “For the fourth year running no grade less than a B in 2014”. Woe betide the poor girl who gets the school’s first C grade since 2010. No wonder the parents have a “kind of ticking frenetic anxiety”. The solution is in Ms Farr’s own hands. Looking at her school website, I suspect she has as much difficulty coming second or even third, fourth, or fifth as her pushiest parents.
Dennis Richards
(Former headteacher, St Aidan’s CE High School, Harrogate)
Harrogate, N Yorks

Pharmaceutical companies are not ‘turning a profit’ – they need to make a return on their investment

Sir, At a time when the UK is falling behind its peers in terms of patient access to innovative medicines, it is deeply concerning to note the Department of Health’s remark that the meningitis B vaccine producer Novartis is trying to “turn a profit” (“Dispute with drug company delays meningitis jab”, Nov 25).

Pharmaceutical companies invest £1 billion and 12 years in developing a new treatment; they need to make a return on that investment if we are to ensure the development of new medical treatments. It is short-sighted to want to deny pharmaceutical companies a return on their investment when the value such products bring, to patients and the healthcare system alike, is so significant. Would the department prefer companies to make a loss, close factories and laboratories and stop their research? Without profit, there would be no new medical innovations — drugs or vaccines alike — or even existing medicines. Profit has served patients extremely well; let it continue to do so.

Stephen Whitehead

Chief executive, Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry

Sir, Your excellent leader on dairy farming (“Milk and Money”, Nov 29) states that “the task of fixing this mess starts with the consumer”. As one who buys four pints of semi-skimmed at my local Waitrose for £1 twice a week, may I propose that the store immediately takes a lead in saving the dairy industry by raising that price to £1.50 and sending all the difference directly to the farmers who produce the milk? I am confident that many of my fellow customers would support this initiative.
Samuel Gray
Eastbourne, E Sussex

Sir, It is the supermarkets and milk processors who are ruining the dairy farmers, not the consumer. If they wish to lead with low-priced milk, it is they who should bear the cost.
John Taylor
Coniston Cold, N Yorks

Sir, Queen Victoria scarcely turned a hair when on March 2, 1882, Roderick Maclean became the seventh person to try and kill her (“Mad poet who shot at Victoria”, Nov 27). “He had fourteen bullets on him,” she noted calmly. She much enjoyed reading, and replying individually, to the 206 telegrams that poured in. Two Eton schoolboys, who had set about Maclean at Windsor station with umbrellas, brought nearly 900 others with them to present an address in the castle quadrangle to which “I read a short answer” while noting how good-looking her two young champions were. She told her eldest daughter: “It is worth being shot at to see how much one is loved.”
Lord Lexden
House of Lords

I was always taught that a police officer could not be insulted and that silly remarks should be ignored

Sir, There is a bit of me that wishes Andrew Mitchell’s comments could have been shrugged off in the first place (report, Nov 28).

In my initial police training, we learnt that a police officer could not be insulted and that idle and silly remarks were unworthy of notice.

Geoffrey Bourne-Taylor

(Metropolitan Police, 1957-88)

Bridport, Dorset

Bouquets are not always the sole preserve of female performers – as the pianist Kevin Kenner proves

Sir, On his regular visits to his father, my husband always takes flowers (report and leader, Nov 29). Chosen with care and received with pleasure, they are regarded by both as a perfectly normal gesture of affection.

Kate Saunders

Ipswich

Sir, Last Thursday, at the end of a splendid recital in the Perth Concert Hall given by the violinist Kyung Wha Chung and the pianist Kevin Kenner, staff appeared on the stage bearing a bouquet of flowers and a package, which clearly contained a bottle. It was Mr Kenner who received the flowers — Kyung Wha Chung had already claimed the bottle!

Robert Sanders

Crieff, Perthshire

Telegraph:

SIR – Janet Daley is right: not all voters share Labour’s view that social fairness is achieved by endless redistribution of wealth “from those who have earned it to those who haven’t”.

Resentment is felt especially towards the few EU immigrants who, prompted by gross financial disparities between member countries, are content simply to take. The EU’s greed for political expansion has blinded it to the utter failure of some latecomers to meet entry criteria.

Robbing Peter to pay Paul ensures that, ultimately, nobody benefits fairly from hard work.

Robert Stephenson
Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire

Letters: It is time for Britain to forge its own tighter immigration policy

29 Nov 2014
Letters: The three main parties stitch up unfair settlement for Scotland in the UK

28 Nov 2014

SIR – As usual, I find myself agreeing with Janet Daley. She mentions several ways in which it is evident that the Labour Party despises a large proportion of the electorate. There are two more examples that are worth adding to her list.

First, the fact that Labour refuses to redraw electoral boundaries, which are manifestly unfair to the Conservatives to the extent that they need about 10 per cent more votes than Labour does to attain a majority. This indicates contempt for voters in one of the most important areas of our democracy.

Secondly, Labour’s Scottish MPs have frequently abused the electorate by voting on matters relevant to England and Wales which north of the border have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament.

Ken Rimmer
Chelmsford, Essex

SIR – Labour was founded by hard-working people fighting to get the best for their families, but today it wastes time fighting over trivial issues in Westminster.

The trade unions were founded to protect workers and fight for better working conditions, but these battles have been won – safe working conditions are enshrined in law, and non-compliance carries severe penalties.

Both Labour and the unions have lost their purpose.

Jennifer Habib
Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire

SIR – The Government has failed in two of its main tenets: immigration and the budget deficit.

In fact, Mr Cameron’s greatest asset is that he is not Ed Miliband.

Mervyn Jackson
Belper, Derbyshire

SIR – At the heart of the Tory election campaign is a promised re-negotiation of Britain’s EU membership. But where are the details? Not even David Cameron seems to know what he intends to demand, what he will accept, or how it is to be achieved by 2017.

Mr Cameron obviously hopes to win the election without any detailed commitments, so that he can remain free to abandon his vague promises and fulfil his desire to remain in the EU.

David Hutton
Crewe, Cheshire

SIR – The only reason Mr Cameron is entertaining the idea of leaving the EU is because of the formidable challenge to the Government posed by Ukip.

If the Conservatives or Labour win the next election, they will carry straight on with the business of handing more British sovereignty to Brussels.

Roger Hayes
Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

SIR – The Tories have only themselves to blame for Ukip’s success in Rochester.

Mr Cameron has had ample time since the last election to win over the support of working-class voters. The disparity between his rhetoric and actions is all too obvious.

Ukip had to do very little to win over the disaffected voters.

Angus McPherson
Findon, West Sussex

SIR – At the centre of one of the England flags adorning the house in Rochester, which was immortalised by Emily Thornberry’s tweet, is the logo of West Ham United Football Club.

The Hammers’ recent run of success owes much to the recruitment of talented overseas players, which provides a symbolic commentary on Ukip’s immigration policies.

Frank Tomlin
Billericay, Essex

Not the end for HS2’s Euston terminus

SIR – Andrew Gilligan reports that work on the favoured Government scheme for rebuilding Euston station to house HS2’s terminus has stopped. This does not mean that HS2, or its Euston terminus, are dead.

We continue to discuss a much cheaper alternative, connecting HS2 at Old Oak Common by tunnels to the West Coast Main Line (WCML) near Queens Park Station. Both HS2 and WCML trains would use the existing six tracks into Euston.

There is enough width at Euston to cater for this traffic, and tracks would be extended southwards towards Euston Road in order to give the platform the length required for HS2 trains. A deck over the top would give access to platforms along the length of the trains, and provide the necessary station facilities, as well as better connections to the Underground, buses and taxis.

By using existing tracks and platforms, the construction time and costs of the project would be much reduced.

Lord Bradshaw
Lord Berkeley
London SW1

SIR – HS2, with projected costs of £50 billion, never made sound financial sense. The French are building a TGV line to Bordeaux, running the distance of London to Manchester, for £9 billion. A financial case can be made for high-speed railways but only at less than £40 million per mile.

In the Nineties a university research project in Liverpool designed a high speed railway between the North West and London, via Birmingham, using existing rights of way and terminating at St Pancras.

Perhaps HS2 should be renamed the Brabazon Line, after the ill-fater airliner, and quietly dropped.

Prof L J S Lesley
Liverpool

Mass-produced game

SIR – Your report on the RSPB is rather too kind to the shooting industry.

A review by economists at Sheffield Hallam University this year valued the industry at less than £746 million, and grouse shoot operators receive millions of pounds annually from the taxpayer via the Common Agricultural Policy.

Every year in Britain around 50 million pheasants and partridges are mass-produced like commercial poultry. Many of the birds used for breeding are confined in metal battery cages.

The industry tries to portray “game” meat as being natural, but the sad truth is that it is yet another unnatural product of intensive farming.

Richard Mountford
Development Manager, Animal Aid
Tonbridge, Kent

Women bishops

SIR – The comments of the Rev Canon Dr Alison Joyce illustrate why it has taken so long for the Church of England to move from accepting women as priests to accepting women as bishops.

She suggests that structures have been set up so that traditionalists never have to be “contaminated” by any glimpse of women’s ministry. For theological reasons, a proportion of worshipping Anglicans do not believe that women can be properly ordained as priests or bishops. I am one of those people, and I have been labelled a misogynist by female priests and told to go to Rome by others.

Nevertheless, I and others like myself welcome the fact that, whether for or against women bishops, we can all now go forward together in a spirit of Christian unity.

R T Britnell
Canterbury, Kent

Taking a gamble

SIR – Nigel Farndale extols the virtues of the National Lottery.

It is noticeable that he avoids any mention of scratchcards, studies into the effects of which suggest that they should be considered a “hard” form of gambling that can lead to untold misery, even among adolescents. They are often bought in tens, sometimes even hundreds, at a time and are almost certainly addictive.

A percentage of their sale may well go to good causes, but the fact that the state conspires in the promotion of such forms of gambling is extraordinary.

Tim Coles
Carlton, Bedfordshire

Intelligent design

_{GCHQ is far from the average office block. Photo: Alamy}

SIR – GCHQ’s building is very impressive, but I wonder if it has been found by those who work in it to be as practical as a normal office block.

Do employees have to walk half way round the building to reach the other side, or can they nip across the lawn in the middle? Was it designed expressly to discourage such excursions, and thus possible leakage of information?

Richard Shaw
Dunstable, Bedfordshire

The height of fashion

SIR – I was once in Park Street in Bristol – a very steep street – when a woman walked down the adjacent pavement in high heels. I realised as she tottered down the hill that the main portion of each foot was actually leaning forward.

It really was a frightening sight and I felt pity for her in her fashionable plight.

David E Hockin
Portishead, Somerset

Psychological abuse between partners

SIR – You report the good news that “coercive control” by partners is soon to become illegal. However, only the psychological abuse of women by men is mentioned.

I hope this law will also apply to the abuse of men. Women can withdraw affection, demand that ties be cut with family and friends, and threaten (with some confidence of financial gain) to leave and to take their children with them.

John Stringer
Harbury, Warwickshire

Music in schools

SIR – It was very encouraging to read a letter from musicians at the top of their profession, lamenting the demise of instrumental music in schools.

The Government’s pledge in 2011 to give every child the opportunity to learn an instrument, free of charge, appeared to coincide with mass redundancies of many peripatetic music teachers across several local authorities. Small-group teaching was replaced in many instances by whole-class tuition.

If the present state of instrumental tuition is allowed to continue, centuries of music by the classical masters will be lost for ever.

Ros Groves
Watford, Hertfordshire

SIR – For much of the last decade I was a governor at a state school. We valued music highly, prioritised it above many other subjects and cut our spending cloth accordingly. Of the 350 children at the school, at least 50 per cent were learning to play an instrument.

The power to provide this opportunity already exists in many schools. Perhaps educating the volunteers on governing bodies and school leadership so that they better understand what music brings to children would have a greater effect than carping at the Government.

Andrew Wall
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Metric madness ahead

SIR – Introducing new height restriction road signs, using metric as well as imperial measurements, is clearly the beginning of a change to a fully metric system. Any suggestion that our continental neighbours should follow suit and display feet and inches on their road signs would be laughed at.

Edward Huxley
Thorpe, Surrey

SIR – Metric or imperial, it doesn’t matter. They will still be hidden behind overgrown trees.

John Henn
Marazion, Cornwall

Downton discrepancies, from etiquette to fashion

_{Table manners: Lady Sybil rests her elbows on the dining table. Photo: ITV}

SIR – Concerning period detail in Downton Abbey I am sure no one, either upstairs or down, would have talked without first having put down their knife and fork. Nor would they have gesticulated with their knife or fork. Lady Grantham is one of the worst offenders.

Caroline Coke
Slapton, Northamptonshire

SIR – I was surprised to read that Alastair Bruce, a historical adviser on Downton Abbey, is a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. I gather that the wearing of Sam Browne belts – from the positioning of the belt buckle to their being worn indoors – has been the most frequently criticised detail of accuracy in this popular costume drama.

I sympathise with Mr Bruce’s predicament over “men in tights”, but a real stickler would never have let improper dressing hold sway over looking good.

Col J M C Watson (rtd)
Welford, Berkshire

SIR – While watching the recent finale of the fifth series of Downton Abbey, I was irritated to note that the characters kept talking about the wedding they attended in the Caxton Hall “registry office”.

Surely Julian Fellowes should know that weddings take place in a register office.

My dear old father informed me that in days gone by the registry office was where one sought out one’s prospective servants.

Alexandra Sard
Portsmouth, Hampshire

Irish Times:

Sir, Season’s greetings from all here in the North Pole Workshop to you and to all your readers!

Santa has checked his list and has asked if you would remind all the boys and girls to write and post their letters to him as soon as possible.

The workshop is buzzing with activity and Mrs Claus is busy adding some glitter and magic to all the toys and gifts while the elves are packing them.

Santa looks forward to reading letters from the children in Ireland, especially when so many children include colourful drawings of him, Mrs Claus and Rudolph. Mrs Claus likes to put these special drawings on the mantelpiece.

All the boys and girls need do is:

– Put their letter in an envelope;

– Write their own name and address (in very clear writing) on the top left-hand corner of the front of the envelope;

– Stick a 68 cent stamp on the top right-hand corner and,

– Post it in a green post box to: Santa Claus, The North Pole.

It’s as simple as that!

An Post is once again helping Santa to reply to as many letters as possible so it’s important that the boys and girls get writing and posting straight away.

I hope you have a Christmas filled with magic and lots of sparkle. Yours, etc, NOLLAIG Chief Elf, North Pole PS, Rudolph and his friends have asked me to thank the boys and girls for all the carrots they got last year.

A Chara, I didn’t think he would or could tackle the topic of Junior Certificate Reform, but Fintan O’Toole actually nailed it. (IT 25.11.14)

Let me be clear: I love teaching young, inquiring minds. It allows me to keep fresh, enthused about my profession and idealistic that great teachers can and do make a daily difference.

Tomorrow’s protest is not about pay or conditions, nor is it about “lazy teachers” not wanting to do extra work.

Teachers have, for years now, repeated that they are willing to engage on many of the proposals contained in the Framework for Junior Cycle. We have supported a move away from a single terminal exam and the inclusion of portfolios and project work etc.

In addition, teachers have implemented a wide range of changes to the Junior Cycle curriculum over the last 10 years, and will continue to do so. This has included the introduction of project maths, a new science syllabus, and group work, especially in CSPE.

We do not want to assess our own students. This is quite simply about maintaining educational standards, defending the integrity of the pupil-teacher relationship and affirming the (yes, cold and not-without-fault) anonymity and egalitarian nature of the current exam structure.

Yes, there are many faults. Yes, grinds and grind schools provide an uneven playing field. Yes, DEIS schools do marvellous things, but can struggle on a number of criteria. Yes, private schools confer an inherent and understood advantage.

But the structure of exam corrections is it stands is anonymous, unassailable and bullet-proof. And it works.

And maintaining that incorruptibility is what the strike is about.

Nothing else.

Is mise, etc, FRANK MILLING Ardee Community School, Co. Louth

Sir, – In the education opinion piece in relation to the Junior Cycle reform ( “Students will suffer most if reform of junior cycle fails,” November 25th), he analysts appear to agree that the changes recommended by Minister for Education Jan O’Sullivan will benefit all young people into the future.

After all what could possibly go wrong in the Ireland of today with teachers assessing their own students for 40 per cent of the examination? What could possibly go wrong with young people age 12 choosing not to take subjects, such as, history or physical education? It is naive to think that this policy is politically neutral and is unconnected to the liberal agenda sweeping across Europe seeking to reduce the role of the state in the delivery of all public services, including education. This reform intends that schools will find their own way within the logic of the markets and will finally separate one from the other as either “exploratory”, “adventurous” or “cautious” schools.

This stratification will for the first time in the history of the state shatter the conception of education as a public good for all. The questions that might need to be asked are: what savings will be made on an annual basis by the government in this reform, what policies and plans have been put in place to ensure that the savings made will remain within the Ministry and be used as a future sustainable investment in education and who will really benefit from these changes? – Yours, etc,

DR GERALDINE MOONEY Department of Education and Professional Studies , University of Limerick.

Sir, – Recently, Fáilte Ireland and the Department of Tourism expressed concern that Dublin is falling behind cities such as Edinburgh and Copenhagen as a tourist destination.

The comments by Davis Norris (“David Norris says areas of Dublin city centre derelict”, November 25th) explain why.

As a Dubliner, I am constantly struck by the level of dereliction and by the number of vacant sites in the city centre compared to in any other European capital city. The building that housed Gill’s Bookshop in O’Connell Street was destroyed in 1981, and the site remains derelict 33 years later. The top end of the city’s main street is a mixture of vacant sites, and a lot of ugly architecture built in the last third of the 20th century.

The centres of Edinburgh and of Copenhagen are intact and well-maintained, with attractive shopfronts and a complete absence of the ugly steel shuttering that characterises much of Dublin’s shopping streets.

People live above shops in these cities but this is not the case in Dublin, where the upper floors of many buildings are unused.

A lot of work needs to be done on the city centre and its immediate environs in order to make the city an attractive place to visit, or indeed, as David Norris points out, for Dubliners to wander around.

A levy of up to 5 per cent annually on all vacant buildings or derelict sites, as proposed by Minister for the Environment Alan Kelly, might encourage their owners to develop or sell them.

In Dublin, the rights of property owners is more important than the common good. – Yours, etc, DAVID MacPHERSON Clontarf, Dublin 3. Sir, – In the light of Dublin Corporation’s proposal to pedestrianise an area at the Bank of Ireland building in College Green, hopefully they will also turn their attention to the streetcape in the adjacent area outside the beautiful building housing Pearse Street Garda station.

This wonderful building cannot be properly enjoyed – viewed, photographed, or sketched – because of the sea of vehicles parked outside, two and invariably three rows deep from the footpath.

How this situation has been allowed to happen in the very centre of our capital city is baffling.

This area should be restored to public use and “softened” with for example landscaping, a fountain or seating. – Yours, etc. TOM KENNEDY, Milltown, Dublin 6.

Sir, – You report (“Home being built from shipping container to house family for Christmas”, November 28th) that contractors and suppliers are donating materials to build what will be Ireland’s first home in a shipping container. This is not strictly correct. Cork people were building holiday homes from timber shipping containers delivering material to the Ford factory in Cork back in the 50s and 60s. The “Ford boxes” homes were a common sight in seaside resorts like Myrtleville, Fountainstown and Youghal and I understand that some still survive. As ever, Cork people were ahead of the game. – Yours, etc, JOHN FINN Carrigtwohill, Co Cork

Sir, Your economics editor Arther Beesley is obviously concerned that the EU Commission “is coming after the use of green diesel by Ireland’s boating classes” (“EU now making waves over ‘green diesel’ for boats”, November 27th.)

Should Mr Beesley’s concern not be that the Government allows the wealthy owners of boats and yachts, used solely for pleasure, avail of cheaper green diesel, while at the same time frequently deploying customs officers to ensure that owners of small businesses do not avail of this concession.

I suspect this concession to owners of pleasure craft came about when a well-known sea- faring taoiseach was in power.

This is not a reason for the present Government to continue the anomaly.

For once I agree with the EU Commission. – Yours, etc, FRED J FITZSIMONS, Carrickmacross, Co Monaghan

Sir, – Niall Ó Murchadha (Letters, November 28th) justifiably queried the latest unemployment figures by saying that the figure of 250,000-plus of our citizens who have emigrated during the past five years should be taken into account.

However a more balanced approach would be to include citizens returning to our shores which provides us with net emigration figures.

This method leaves us with an emigration figure of 124,000 citizens, or, approximately half the number who left. We should also separate unemployment figures from the more telling fact that there is actual growth in employment numbers. – Yours, etc, JOHN BELLEW, Riverside House, Dunleer, Co Louth

Sir, – Like your correspondent Noel McAllister from Fingal, (Letters, November 27th) we in Dún Laoghaire Rathdown are also planning our own events to mark the centenary of the 1916 Rising.

Similarly we find ourselves in a limbo on deciding on dates which do not clash with the national commemorations which remain to be clarified.

Nevertheless we are pressing ahead. For our exhibition we appeal to the public to loan us any relevant artefacts they might possess and indeed provide any facts on our area’s many connections with the 1916 Rising.

We will then attempt to present this information not only through the public exhibition but also in publication format. All items loaned to us will be maintained to the highest museum standards and returned with gratitude following a successful conclusion. – Yours, etc, ROGER COLE, 1916 Rising Committee, 3 Eblana Avenue, Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin.

Irish Independent:

Dear Bertie Ahern. I’m sorry Bertie, but I have to ask this; are you mad or what?

You say that your government’s response to an over-heated housing market during the bubble was to accelerate the process in the hope, as you so ‘Bertily’ put it, “somewhere along the line we had to get to a situation where we would have saturated it [construction], and that the natural laws of supply and demand would kick in…” Doesn’t that have the ring of a bloke in a pub telling you about his plan to ‘do over’ the bookmakers by putting a tenner on every horse in a race?

Now Bertie, when you say that you didn’t know that the Irish housing bubble was built on borrowed money, you must be having a laugh, come on now, admit it, you’re just pulling our legs. Or perhaps there’s another explanation? Because Bertie, not everyone could adopt the house financing model you developed, you know, the instant whip-round after your spurned wife demanded the family home, so that you could have an equally good place in the same general area, finance free.

Perhaps that’s where you went wrong, you didn’t have to borrow like everyone else, so you came to believe in miracles, or organised miracles, as some might put it? Bertie, you often complain bitterly about how the Irish people got government spending out of control, by demanding more and more during the bubble years. Poor you, being leader and all, it must have been awful having to be so un-leaderly when the people became so demanding. But there are those that argue that the point of leadership is to provide for the general, long-term good, and not the populous demands of any particular group. But don’t worry too much Bertie, those silly voters got what they deserved in the end. They won’t be so demanding again, will they?

Declan Doyle, Lisdowney, Kilkenny

Enda Kenny’s selective memory

Mr Kenny is quoted in your paper as stating that people should reflect on how perilously close the country was to an economic abyss when the coalition came to power in 2011. I would call this selective memory on his part.

However a miracle must have occured soon after; his government permitted a lot of public sector employees make an early exit before the end of 2012 in order to retain certain retirement benefits courtesy of the following: USC, Property Tax and the impending introduction of water charges. Not Another Penny Mr Kenny.

Terry O’Connor, Co Dublin

Vandals have heavy cross to bear

As a keen hillwalker, the Carrauntoohil cross was always a welcome sight to me in dense fog. Thanks to some vandals, climbers had one safe landmark less when making the ascent. Lugging cutting equipment up 1,000m of steep terrain required a lot of effort. Somebody was clearly out to make a point. Hopefully they’ll be quickly caught and made pay the full cost of re-erecting the cross, complete with CCTV.

Whoever it was, Atheist Ireland were quick to jump into the fray, saying the cross should be replaced with ‘something more representative of the whole community’. Perhaps Atheist Ireland could enlighten us which ‘community’ they have in mind. They don’t want a cross because, in the atheist mindset, the 84pc of the population it represents simply isn’t enough. Atheism is already represented on the summit – by nothing – because as they’ll tell you themselves, they are defined by their lack of belief.

Nick Folley, Carrigaline, Co Cork

Wily fox is a great human ally

The old saying that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ should be applied to one of the most maligned creatures of the Irish countryside: the fox. At this time of year foxes are under relentless attack from both trigger-happy gunmen and tin-pot aristocrats on horseback. There is no let-up in the killing and orchestrated torture of these wild dogs that have co-existed with humans for millennia.

The fox’s role as a predator on sheep and poultry is exaggerated by hunters to justify their recreational cruelty. Foxes mostly take lambs that have died from hyperthermia or eat discarded afterbirth tissue. And the hyped-up horror stories of the fox in the henhouse date from an age when poultry was not as well-protected as it is in today’s security-conscious farm environment.

Not only is the fox NOT our enemy. He is in fact our great benefactor. Foxes kill vast numbers of rats, in addition to keeping mice, slugs, beetles, and grubs at bay. They also serve as nature’s bin-men, removing dead animals from country lanes and forest clearings.

Right now, rats are running riot across the country, infesting rural households, throwing their weight around farmyards and homes nationwide as if they owned them.

But rats are no match for the wily fox. Every fox accounts for anything up to six or more rats a day. A significant toll when you consider that a tiny rat population of say five rats can, if undisturbed, grow to several thousands in a few months. There have been reports of rats as big as cats arrogantly strutting about in some districts, the suspicion being that they have developed immunity to the various poisons deployed against them.

So I say we should stop demonising the fox and recognise this wonderful creature for the great ally he is in keeping an age-old pest at bay.

John Fitzgerald, Callan, Co Kilkenny

Step forward Ivan Yates

In his now customary mode Mr. Ivan Yates launched another broadside against the Taoiseach: “Kenny has now become part of the problem rather than part of the solution” (Independent Nov 27). One must wonder why. Mr. Yates often says that he once shared an office with Mr. Kenny, so is there some bit of jealousy at work here?

Mr. Kenny opted for the long hard (often unrewarding) slog of politics, while Mr. Yates opted out for private business. Ivan even tells us that his period as Minister for Agriculture for just two years got to him health wise. So why does he rail against one who did not opt out?

Mr. Yates as a hurler on the ditch might just ask himself what he did for his country, maybe indeed given his ego and experience he might return – there are plenty of vacancies around, and new parties coming up which he advocates.

Brendan Cafferty, Ballina Mayo

Anti-Catholicism irony

It has long been the mantra of modern/liberal Ireland that in the past the State was over deferential to the Catholic Church. There undoubtedly was an element of truth to this; to the detriment of both Church and State, it must be said. However those times have long since passed.

Unfortunately instead of a reasonable/rational middle way, much public debate has been replaced by a nasty, ill-informed and knee-jerk anti-Catholicism. This poison has seeped also into academia, and a Catholic chaplain, Fr. David Barrins has courageously drawn attention to this new form of intolerant, anti-intellectual, liberal fundamentalism.

No where was this phenomenon better illustrated than in a recent RTE Today radio debate, featuring Fr. Barrins and three protagonists.

It was ironic that when Fr. Barrins stated that he wasn’t looking for any privileged position for Church-related groups, merely pluralism on campus, he was shouted down by his opponents. The irony was lost on all three that they were engaging in exactly the kind of censorious group-think that in the past was labelled on the Church.

Eric Conway, Navan, Co Meath

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