Charles Marowitz – obituary

Charles Marowitz was a provocative director of British avant-garde theatre of the 1960s who played fast and loose with Shakespeare

6:54PM BST 08 May 2014

1 Comment

Daisy Ashford (1881-1972) in 1890, the year she wrote The Young Visiters. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Praising Daisy Ashford’s precocious and wonderful novel (Long forgotten reads, G2, 6 May), John Sutherland says that her father copied out his little daughter’s work. But Daisy originally wrote The Young Visiters in her own small red notebook; I turned its pages myself when, as a very young journalist, I had the enormous pleasure of interviewing the author in old age at her daughter’s Norfolk home. She kept it in a kitchen drawer. Where is that notebook now that she has gone? I do hope it has been preserved – but where?
Kirsten Cubitt Thorley
Sheffield

• Paul Myners accused Co-op board members of such financial ignorance that they did not know the difference between debits and credits (Report, 7 May). When I was an articled clerk with a firm of chartered accountants, we were always informed that the debits were on the side nearest the windows.
Gunter Lawson
London

• The Swiss believe Scotland already has its own currency (Letters, 8 May) which is worth less than the “English” pound. On a recent visit to Switzerland, a bank in Neuchatel was buying 1GBP from Angleterre (with a St George’s cross flag) for 1.3825 Swiss francs, and 1SCP from Écosse (with a St Andrew’s saltire flag) for 1.3325 Swiss francs. Do these wily Swiss bankers know something we don’t?
Nic Madge
St Albans, Hertfordshire

• With a Salmond and a Sturgeon, surely any new currency should be the roe?
Keith Hayton
Glasgow

• The Scots would be well advised to avoid calling any currency of theirs a “connery”. The French would view this as vulgar stupidity.
Barrie King
Taunton, Somerset

• We spent four pleasant days last October in the charming but modest Wiltshire town of Mere (Letters, 7 May). As we passed signs for Mere library, Mere post office, Mere pharmacy, Mere primary school etc, we couldn’t help feeling that they were overdoing the self-effacing thing a bit.
Alan Monger
Plymouth

Prime minister David Cameron visits Frimley Park hospital in 2011. ‘[The government] only has one more year to deliver on its promise to its friends in private healthcare that the NHS will exist no more,’ writes Jeanne Warren. Photograph: Getty

Simon Jenkins demonstrates the success of the campaign to undermine the NHS and make it ready for privatisation (Small is beautiful. The NHS now needs to be broken up, 7 May). This began with the introduction of the purchaser-provider split under John Major, not for clinical reasons but as the first step towards the introduction of private providers, paid for by our taxes but able to take some profit. All the subsequent steps – fundholders, hospital trusts, and so on – were designed to the same end. Administration costs rose from 3% to the present 15%, as more and more pseudo-market processes were introduced and had to be accounted for (See The Plot Against the NHS by Colin Leys and Stewart Player.)

The final steps – a sustained negative campaign by politicians and the press and a huge, unnecessary reorganisation, together with the biggest funding squeeze ever experienced by the NHS – have been taken by this government. They only have one more year to deliver on their promise to their friends in private healthcare that the NHS will exist no more, and they already have Simon Jenkins on board as a cheerleader. Has he never read the positive reports from the likes of the World Health Organisation, saying how good the NHS is in international comparisons, and how cost-effective? Does he know how many heart patients in the US “died because of poor care”? Does anybody? Yet he quotes a UK figure without any attempt at a context. Unhappily, many more people will fall for the government’s propaganda, and instead of sensible improvements to the NHS we may well lose it altogether.
Jeanne Warren
Oxford

• Size isn’t the issue. It’s about funding: UK health spending as a share of GDP (9.2%) is less than France (11.6%), Germany (11.3%) or Canada (11.2%). Many of us close to the health service believe bad press is deliberately orchestrated by the government to undermine the NHS’s credibility as part of the plan to outsource and sell it off to the private sector for profit, ie denationalisation. It’s depressing that Jenkins now joins the bad press brigade, offering a further barrage of negative publicity, without a glance at Tory ideology, and blaming frontline staff rather than the understaffing and target culture.
Mike Campbell
Protect Our NHS, Bristol

• Simon Jenkins is right to suggest that bad structural choices were made in 1948. It used to be argued that the pre-NHS mixed system of health provision was financially moribund and profoundly unequal. Yet recent research has suggested that voluntary hospitals, accessed by most families through a weekly contribution of 2d or 3d per week, were for the most part financially stable and expanding, and that an increasingly vibrant local authority system was finally shaking off its Poor Law inheritance.

Certainly there were problems. The quality of care for the elderly, the chronic sick and mentally ill remained patchy, and geographic inequality was also evident. Looking around today, we find similar concerns. What was present then was a local connection: hospitals managed jointly by doctors, contributors, patient representatives and local politicians. This “community” link was broken in 1948. What’s also been conveniently airbrushed out of our history is that, according to polling and survey data from the period, a majority favoured retaining this system of local governance and were largely satisfied with the hospital service they had, and to which they directly contributed.
Dr Nick Hayes
Nottingham Trent University

• Simon Jenkins’s idea of denationalising the NHS has its merits (apart from resulting in the most catastrophic of all its many reorganisations), but there is one aspect of healthcare he doesn’t mention – the need for the integration of patient information. Proper health provision for the lifetime of a citizen needs information on the needs of that person to be available to all the agencies involved in their care and treatment, and this can only work with an integrated information system with rigorously managed security. The NHS has never come near to achieving this because its government-appointed managers have never really taken advice from their own employees, preferring instead to refer to useless and very expensive “consultants”, usually large accountancy firms incapable of understanding anything except the “business model” for any organisation. One solution is used in France, where everyone has a “carte vitale“, a smart card which gives accredited agencies access to all the holder’s health information, including their contacts with the social services.

Now retired, I’ve worked for much of my life in the NHS as a clinical scientist and IT manager, had my life saved by early antibiotic treatment as a child, and seen the service reorganised again and again by ignorant politicians. But never have I known such a concentrated attack on it as the one apparently organised by the media and by all those who cannot bear the idea of a public service, integrated but not centralised.
John Hewson
Leicester

• I read Simon Jenkins’s article with disbelief. I wonder if he has, like me, been a user of the NHS in all its parts on a regular basis over a long number of years (in my case, since 1948). My family and friends and myself have been in-patients, out-patients, GP patients and used many subsidiary parts of the NHS in Derbyshire, Yorkshire and other parts of the country. I know of no one who has had a serious complaint. My husband died in the care of the NHS almost two years ago and his care could not have been faulted. It is important to remember that the care homes, where particularly awful treatment has been identified, are privately owned and run.
Beryl Walkden
Matlock, Derbyshire

• Simon Jenkins says “there is no reason why Britain could not go the route of other European countries, with health cover being a national responsibility but with the service offered at the local, charitable or private level”. Many of us have been saying that for years. Every reorganisation of the last 20 or so years has added another layer of management, which has increased costs without adding value. My only disagreement is in his penultimate word. Services need to be public and/or non-profit making enterprises. Evidence shows that private healthcare creams off the profitable jobs, making it difficult to fund the more useful work.
Michael Peel
London

• Despite what Simon Jenkins has written in the past on taxation and banking, it seems from this piece that he would frown on such reforms as the Tobin tax and safeguards against corporations, banks and wealthy individuals taking their gains offshore instead of paying the fair level of tax – an income that could go a long way toward alleviating cuts in nursing and medical staff. He seems happy to blame hospitals such as Mid Staffs for financial failings when it is clear that PFIs instituted under Thatcher and gaining steam under Major and Blair were foisted on big infrastructure projects, especially hospitals, with deliberately blinkered attitudes toward the possible downsides to such arrangements. Maybe he should read NHS SOS by Jacky Davis and Raymond Tallis.

Of course an institution for public service is going to have excess capacity – it could not provide that service without it (see Richard Murphy’s The Courageous State, for example) and sure, the NHS needs reform – but the politicians’ struggles to which Jenkins refers were those to extract maximum profit at least cost: not quite the right approach towards a service essential for a healthy workforce on which the entire economy depends.

Under the present lobby-friendly regime, it’s the huge corporations such as Serco and Harmoni that are going to be awarded contracts against smaller, not-for-profits companies that do give the NHS a localism already – such as the out-of-hours service provider Devon Doctors. It is government policy Jenkins should be railing against, not the NHS itself. Some of the “scandal” frowning down on the dispatch box may be down to mismanagement but it’s a sure bet that far more of it is down to debilitating cuts and a government-generated culture of financial profit at any cost.
Rosemary Haworth-Booth
Green party, North Devon

• Simon Jenkins seems to have overlooked the fact that, for the best part of the last 30 years, the NHS has been gradually broken up into numerous, illogical, often competing elements. It began under Margaret Thatcher with the introduction of the internal market and hospital trusts. Under John Smith’s leadership, Labour briefly considered placing the NHS within local authorities, combining health and social care, but this was ditched as Tony Blair’s New Labour embraced a market ideology, with foundation trusts reinforcing hospital domination of the service. Rather than harking back to pre-NHS charitable and private care, as Jenkins suggests, renationalising the currently fragmented NHS is surely the answer, with local authorities empowered to bring hospitals, primary and community care together as a long-overdue coherent whole.
David Hinchliffe
Former Labour MP and past chair of health select committee

• At last! Your leader (More cash for better care, 7 May) makes reference to the financial problems faced by NHS trusts as a result of the government requirement to make annual “efficiency savings”. The media – including the Guardian – have frequently referred to the protected, ringfenced NHS budget, implying that trusts are not subject to budget cuts. The reality is that, on top of having to cover inflation costs from within existing budgets, trusts also have to find savings currently of around 5% annually. They are now facing a fourth year of this policy, with at least two more years to follow. No surprise then that your leader refers to a looming financial crisis. How about more investigation of this issue?
Dave Rigby
Huddersfield

• While the EU election candidates are very quiet on the topic of the transatlantic trade and investment partnership (TTIP) and the current incumbents mystified or in denial, those concerned with preserving the NHS would like to know their stance on this highly secret deal that would “harmonise” US and EU regulations, lowering health and safety standards for one thing, but also permitting the already harmonised NHS to be sold to the highest US bidders.

We must ensure that workers’ rights and health professionals’ training and qualifications are kept at EU standards, and primarily that the NHS is exempted from all aspects of TTIP. We need to know that EU candidates will do this before voting for them or their respective parties.
Dr Mick Phythian
York

• While I have great respect for Simon Jenkins and his thought-provoking column, I have to disagree with his diagnosis and solution for the NHS. The NHS already has a mixed public/provider model of NHS service delivery embracing many small organisations. What we need is for the NHS to be “joined up rather than broken up”. Many of the failings and pressures being experienced by the NHS reflect the lack of joined up government action and partnership at local level. We can no longer afford for this to continue.

I have had the privilege of working in and with the NHS for some 40 years and travelled widely assessing other health models around the world. The NHS – for all its faults and problems – is still generally viewed with envy, if nothing else because of the underlying principles of universal equity and access that it affords. England has the benefit already of being relatively small and therefore has the opportunity to deliver an NHS based on these values cost-effectively. The NHS has been re-structured “to death” without addressing the fundamental issues – with a fast-ageing population and a failure to develop or deliver an effective national strategy for preventing ill health we are now faced with a tidal wave of preventable chronic disease overwhelming the existing infrastructure.

The NHS has now become solely a “treatment service”, which is creaking at the seams. This should not be a surprise as it was highlighted in 2002 by the Wanless report and subsequent health select committee reports and the opportunities for investing in longer-term sustainable solutions when we had substantial real growth in public services was not taken. Rather late in the day, we are now contemplating solutions to these problems including the Better Care Fund as highlighted in your front page report (Whitehall calls halt on £3.8bn NHS reforms, 7 May), and by the Royal Academy of Royal Colleges (of medicine), who recently drew attention to the unsustainable level of childhood obesity.

As ever, the “devil is in the detail” when devising and implementing such critical strategic solutions and clearly more time and resources are required to get this right – failure to do so is not worth contemplating. We now need to concentrate on sickness prevention by investing heavily in evidence-based programmes in our schools and in our communities to reduce the incidence of chronic disease in the longer term while also continuing to deal with the historic levels of preventable disease – that are a product of not having made such an investment in the past – with partnership delivery models across many government and other sector services. Breaking up the NHS is not the solution. Joining it up is.
David Whitney
Hathersage, Derbyshire

• Simon Jenkins has fallen for the government’s mantra that the NHS is sick and can only be cured by larger doses of the private sector. By listening only to the relentless tales of NHS failure he has completely misdiagnosed the current ills of the service. He then compounds the error by suggesting it be cured by applying the very actions that have caused the trouble, ie greater fragmentation with healthcare offered locally “at a charitable or private level”. Bevan said that private charity can never be a substitute for organised justice, and that still holds true for the NHS.

Jenkins has got hold of the wrong end of the stick is now using it to beat the service and its staff. Wrong diagnosis, wrong treatment, wrong headed.
Dr Jacky Davis
Co-chair, NHS Consultants’ Association

• I have had enough, I am going to stop buying the Guardian. There are multiple outlets for Tory propaganda yet you continue to provide a platform for Simon Jenkins, Melissa Kite and other fellow travellers. I am aware of the adage that I should keep my enemies closer (than friends) but if I want to know what my enemies believe and do I can read the Daily Mail. Our parting of the ways makes me sad but it was you who forsook me.
Dr Gerard Jones
Fleet, Hampshire

A significant, but airbrushed, element of Ebenezer Howard’s garden city dream was his advocacy of economic and physical destruction for existing cities. This, he believed, would be vital to make us all move to his dispersed, low-density settlements. Throughout the 20th century, therefore, we were encouraged to move to garden suburbs or new towns and let the older cities crumble.

The urban renaissance policies of the late 20th and early 21st centuries achieved a great deal more than a bit of luxury housing in waterside settings. They cut across the destructive, high-carbon dream of dispersed, car-dependent garden suburbs bizarrely still being advocated by garden city enthusiasts, but were undermined by continuing out-of-town development in the south-east and then killed by government.

America now has a new name for policies to regenerate cities, attack car dependency and revive local economies: it’s called smart growth and it works. Robust regional policies and an end of the wealth drain to suburbs are key elements of the smart growth idea as it’s developing in the UK and will be a key element of any of solution to entrenched poverty.
Jon Reeds
Smart Growth UK

•  Your editorial rightly points out that the battle against poverty has not been solved by gentrifying the inner cities. But having worked in urban regeneration since before 1976, when I founded URBED, I believe we should recognise the achievements in changing the image of inner-city areas such as Hulme or Hackney that were in danger of being abandoned. The tides of private investment no longer only flow out.

The challenge now is to join up development with infrastructure so that British cities match their continental counterparts, and do not end up like American doughnuts – with holes in their centres. Smarter growth should become the new rallying cry as it is both fairer and less wasteful. This means getting control over land values and reintroducing strategic planning, rather than expecting a rising tide to lift all the boats.
Dr Nicholas Falk
Director, London Office, Urbed (Urbanism Environment Design)

Pupils study inside a Beijing classroom. Photograph: Alamy

The letter by Dr Heinz-Dieter Meyer and other academics (OECD and Pisa tests are damaging education worldwide – academics, theguardian.com, 6 May) makes a series of false claims regarding the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Pisa programme. There is nothing that suggests that Pisa, or other educational comparisons, have caused a “shift to short-term fixes” in education policy. On the contrary, by opening up a perspective to a wider range of policy options that arise from international comparisons, Pisa has provided many opportunities for more strategic policy design. It has also created important opportunities for policy-makers and other stakeholders to collaborate across borders. The annual International Summit of the Teaching Profession, where ministers meet with union leaders to discuss ways to raise the status of the teaching profession, is an example. Not least, while it is undoubtedly true that some reforms take time to bear fruit, a number of countries have in fact shown that rapid progress can be made in the short term, eg Poland, Germany and others making observable steady progress every three years.

Equally, there are no “public-private partnerships” or other “alliances” in Pisa of the type Dr Meyer implies. All work relating to the development, implementation and reporting of Pisa is carried out under the sole responsibility of the OECD, under the guidance of the Pisa governing board. The OECD does, of course, contract specific technical services out to individuals, institutions or companies. Where it does, these individuals, institutions or companies are appointed by the OECD following an open, transparent and public call for tender. This transparent and open process ensures that each task is carried out by those entities that demonstrate they are best-qualified and provide the best value for money. No individual academic, institution or company gains any advantage from this since the results of all Pisa-related work are placed in the public domain.

Furthermore, in the article by Peter Wilby (Pisa league tables killing ‘joy of learning’, 6 May) it is stated that Pearson is overseeing the Pisa 2015 assessment, which is not the case. Pearson was one of a number of contractors who have been appointed through a competitive tendering process to develop and implement Pisa 2015. Pearson’s contract to develop the assessment framework has been completed and has now come to an end.
Andreas Schleicher
Acting director of education, OECD

Your editorial (The Piketty phenomenon, 6 May) is right to salute the voluminous historical support that Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century provides for those campaigning against neoliberalism. But both your paper and Piketty himself undermine efforts to provide an alternative by characterising the chances of his proposed global wealth tax succeeding as “remote” or, as the author claims, “utopian”. His work provides the impressive groundwork for the development of a new economic context that could result in this and his other proposal of an 80% top tax rate on very high earners. However, he has undermined any effective solutions by making it clear he is a defender of the free market and that he wants to remodel society “into the process of globalisation” (Our manifesto for Europe, 3 May). This implied retention of the open borders system will dash hopes for effective regulation of financial capitalism, since it will be dismissed as threatening globalisation’s holy grail of international competitiveness.

Piketty needs to be far more radical. His book does make clear the potential centrality of Europe in bringing about the required changes. However, he fails to make the case that it will also mean returning to member states the ability to control their national borders and so allow for the diversification of more equal, local economies. This will involve substantial constraints on the free movement in goods, money flows and people.

The public is already clamouring for the latter and will doubtless deliver a drubbing to complacent established parties in the European elections for failing to do so. This must act as a wake-up call for fundamental EU treaty changes to allow the reintroduction of border controls to result in a localised economic model. This is the key to a more secure and civilised future for Europe, and as such could act as an example to the rest of the world.
Colin Hines
Author of Progressive Protectionism (to be published July 2014)

•  Thomas Piketty acknowledges that “the EU is experiencing an existential crisis” but nonetheless proposes “moving towards political union”. He acknowledges that many “people do not want greater European integration”, but he seems to think they want no change at all.

The logical solution would be for the EU to return to its beginnings as a free trade area. Piketty is an economic historian. He will remember the Hanseatic league, whose independent member cities managed to maintain a confederal free-trade area for four centuries.

These days, that model is being developed in South America and Asia – it is an alternative future for the EU too.
Jack Winkler
Former professor of nutrition policy at London Metropolitan University

•  Thank you for recognising in your editorial that behind Piketty’s impressive recent book lie years of statistical work on income inequality by many researchers in this and other countries. They in turn would like to acknowledge the financial support provided in the UK for this work by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the Programme for Economic Modelling at the Oxford Martin School. Without their support over the years for what was then an unfashionable area of economic research, and the encouragement it gave to promising young scholars, the current public debate would be less well informed.
Professor Tony Atkinson
Oxford

As is pointed out in your article about e-cigarettes (What’s the new buzz?, G2, 6 May), “tobacco companies can advertise [them by] showing lots of pictures of people, basically, smoking”. And how grateful they must be to you for combining retro glamour with a frisson of sexy sinfulness in your cover image. Even the article about a smoker coughing his lungs up while trying to drag on a fag outdoors in horizontal rain (How smoking lost its cool, G2, 6 May) was illustrated with a picture of “The Thin White Duke, complete with cigarette”. How very elegant – and not at all likely to appeal to those teens who, you tell us, are likely to use e-cigarettes as a “gateway drug” leading to experimentation with traditional cigarettes.
Gayle Wade
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

• Two different stories, two different worlds. The first a positive story on efforts to increase the number of maths and physics PhDs into teaching careers within our state schools (£40k pay to lure maths postgrads into teaching, 5 May). The second a story of petulance from QCs and barristers because they are only paid between £60k-£100k for a couple of weeks’ work arguing the difference between “shall” and “will” as a point of law (Minister denies fraud lawyers are underpaid, 5 May). I know who most people would see as wastrels living off the public purse.
Chris Trude
London

• In October, after the game at Anfield, you were good enough to publish a letter from me about wanting a new-build Crystal Palace. Just to reassure your readers that I am happy now.
Michael Cunningham
Wolverhampton

• I see there’s a Guardian Masterclass “How to market your business on a zero budget”. It costs £229. Need I say more?
Pete Bibby
Sheffield

• Scottish banknotes have always been known in Lancashire as “funny money”, so maybe the new currency should be the Rab, Yin, Chic or even the Krankie (Letters, 7 May)?
Bob Hargreaves
Bury

• “N’est ce pas?“, “Nach eil?” (Letters, 7 May). Down here one says “innit?”
Gerry Bond
Earley, Berkshire

‘The Land Registry’s staff make impartial, quasi-judicial decisions on millions of transactions annually … This vital statutory function is not an activity that any responsible government can pass to the private sector.’ Photograph: Owen Humphreys/PA

Polly Toynbee bewails, as many of us do, the government’s determination to sell, as far as possible, all the public assets of the UK (There’s no evidence it works, but privatisation marches on, 6 May). She suggests that Cameron is motivated by a belief that things are better provided by the private sector.

But this is a naive perception; things are far worse than that. The objective is plainly to maximise party funding and support, through donations, providing offices and campaign support, and seconding staff to replace civil servants. And personal advantage is not overlooked, either. Ex-ministers and senior party members go on to lucrative jobs and directorships. Friends and supporters can also gain handsomely from rip-off sales of our assets.

It’s really not surprising that there is general disillusionment with politics and politicians, when we have this travesty of a democracy. As it is now said in the US, it’s not so much one person one vote, as one pound one vote.
Suzanne Keene
London

•  ”There is no evidence about how well contracting and privatising work,” says Polly Toynbee. Exactly. There is, however, a wealth of data about how the public views outsourcing companies. Our polling complements that of YouGov and the High Pay Centre, with new figures to be released this week showing support for a public option surging upwards from last year. They also show that the government’s decision to hastily forgive shamed bidders G4S and Serco was patently at odds with common sense. The headlong march towards further sell-offs will only be stopped by politicians acting boldly on this groundswell of public opinion. We’ll be outside Serco’s AGM this Thursday morning and pushing for manifesto commitments for a public service users bill. This would boost transparency and give the public a say over outsourcing and privatisation.
Cat Hobbs
Director, We Own It

•  The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has proposed that the Land Registry should cease to be a government department and be established as a “service delivery company” (Report, 6 May). Ominously its proposals “include options for moving assets to the private sector where there is no longer a strong policy reason for continued public ownership”.

The proposals are woefully misguided. Countries worldwide seeking stability and a functioning market economy recognise the need for an effective system of land transfer where land rights are guaranteed. The Land Registry, free from any conflicts of interest, has long provided such a successful and trusted system. It operates at no cost to the exchequer and has a 97% customer satisfaction rating based on the latest independent survey.

The Land Registry’s staff make impartial, quasi-judicial decisions on millions of transactions annually – transactions involving citizens, businesses, lenders, institutions, local and central government and the crown – in any combination. This vital statutory function is not an activity that any responsible government can pass to the private sector.

I hope it will recognise, as others have before, that the Land Registry must remain as a commercially neutral department of government – as it has been for over 150 years.
John Manthorpe
Former chief land registrar

•  Polly Toynbee is undoubtedly right that there is no basis in fact for the government’s endless privatisations. In my area, the Probation Service, shameless misinformation has been the government’s stock-in-trade as it bulldozes through reforms to enrich the corporations. But the key issue is surely that rational or evidence-based disagreement is futile unless one recognises how far it would be a dispute about values, and how far the government’s obsession with privatisation is based not just on shady lobbying but also on a view of democratic freedom identified with narrow and exclusive self-interest. Where the interests of others are not my interest then it is my political right to refuse to pay for them. This value system underpins the political debate, and constrains Labour, so until governments can genuinely project values of sociality, equality of opportunity, social responsibility and empathy, this bleeding dry of public resources by the private corporations will continue unabated.
Joanna Hughes
Cheltenham

•  By saying that privatisation does not work, Polly Toynbee is missing the point. Whatever reason or justification is given for the outsourcing or selling of public services, the object of policy is to find outlets for surplus capital and deliver a return to investors, and in that sense privatisation has been a bonanza for thousands of corporations around the world. Since the demise of the Soviet Union there has been little resistance to the hegemonic neoliberal mantra stating that all barriers to capital accumulation must be systematically removed and governments should not interfere in the market, a dogma that was directly responsible for the banking crash and subsequent recession.

Arguably the most dangerous manifestation of the neoliberal project is the attempt to force through free-trade agreements that effectively force nation states to allow transnational companies to run their economies for their benefit, regardless of the popular will. The Transnational Trade and Investment Partnership, between the EU and the US, and the Trade in Services Agreement, between the EU and 21 other states, are currently being negotiated in secret and, if allowed to succeed, will completely undermine the concept of national sovereignty and leave corporate profit as the sole driver of economic activity.
Bert Schouwenburg
International officer, GMB

While one can understand the appeal of unravelling the intricate plot lines of something such as Line of Duty, it is the indulgence in gruesome detail and gratuitous nastiness that writers seem to delight in, or feel obliged to take to an extreme, that renders otherwise well-written programmes unwatchable for many.

It was very disappointing to find that Happy Valley fell so swiftly into this category. This does not mean that gritty subjects cannot be tackled; rather it points to a failure of imagination.

A M S Hutton-Wilson
Evercreech, Somerset

Consumers should be informed whether an animal has been mechanically stunned prior to slaughter and whether it has endured repeat stuns if the first attempt was ineffective.

They should also be told the method of slaughter: captive bolt shooting, gassing, electrocution, drowning, trapping, clubbing or any of the other approved methods.

Comprehensive labelling should be supported by faith communities and animal welfare groups alike. It would offer all consumers genuine choice, whether they are motivated by animal welfare, religious observance, or even intolerance of anyone who looks or worships differently to them.

Henry Grunwald
Chairman, Shechita UK
Dr Shuja Shafi
Deputy Secretary General, Muslim Council of Britain

GCSE failure

SIR – Chris Skidmore MP, the Downing Street adviser, is right to argue that pupils at risk of failing their GCSEs should be spotted and given additional support at the age of 11.

For children who are struggling to keep up at primary school and often experiencing problems outside the classroom, the support they receive during the transition to the first years of secondary school can make the difference between success and failure. A new check at the age of 11 could be the trigger for intensive help for vulnerable young people, funded by the pupil premium, helping them and their families navigate the teenage years and succeed in school and beyond.

Anne Longfield
Chief executive, 4Children
London E14

Flexible GPs

SIR – I, like many people, would gladly pay £25 to see my GP but I’d want to be able to see them at a time of my choosing, including at the weekend.

Tim Bochenski
Bramhall, Cheshire

Will EU block Pfizer?

SIR – For once the EU may prove to be useful in defusing a growing political storm.

David Cameron is trapped between his free marketeers, who see no reason for government to intervene in the workings of global capitalism, and a phalanx of detractors who warn of endangering Britain’s science base, which is linked to universities and research funding bodies.

If the takeover goes ahead, Mr Cameron has as good as lost the 2015 election, as the electorate will see where his loyalties lie.

However, all is not lost. Any merged company would be so vast that it would be bound to offend the European competition authorities and immediately attract calls for its break-up, as happened with Lloyds Bank after it gamely tried to rescue HBOS.

Could the EU be called upon to ban the merger before it takes place?

Jane O’Nions
Sevenoaks, Kent

SIR – Investors invest because, in the long term, they expect to get more out of their investment than they put in. Successful foreign investors in Britain therefore have a negative effect on the balance of payments over the long term.

If we were a developing country, this would perhaps be something to welcome. It is certainly not something for our politicians to crow about. Furthermore, a takeover is not an investment, since all it does is replace one set of shareholders with another.

The Government should act in the long-term national interest, as other governments do, when it comes to approving takeovers of large British firms.

Michael A St Clair-George
Udimore, East Susssex

SIR – Why are politicians so exercised about Pfizer putting in a bid for AstraZeneca? How can this be so wrong when 14 years ago Vodafone bought Mannesman, a German company, for £112 billion, and this was seen as a great British success story? This is what businesses do. Politicians should stay well clear.

Steve Willis
Olney, Buckinghamshire

Skull Cracker security

SIR – If someone with 13 life sentences is serving his time in an open prison, who on earth is occupying the high-security prisons?

Nairn Lawson
Portbury, Somerset

Slugging it out

SIR – This week I have disposed of more than 600 large black slugs. Are these creatures averse to oil seed rape? Our garden backs onto a field full of it.

Dorothy Foreman
Burton-upon-Stather, North Lincolnshire

SIR – It is ironic that Chris Mitchell complains about the look of the dazzling yellow rape crop, often grown for the production of “green” fuel, from his view in a gas-guzzling aircraft.

David White
Great Wilbraham, Cambridgeshire

Where in the world?

SIR – I am currently on holiday in Bali. On Tuesday I had my HSBC bank debit card stopped and received an urgent voicemail asking me to ring the HSBC fraud office. I did this, and was informed: “You told us that you were going to Bali, so when a transaction was attempted in Indonesia, we suspected fraud and stopped the card.”

Professor R G Faulkner
Loughborough, Leicestershire

Emergency advice for 30th anniversary presents

SIR – George Brown wonders what to do for his 30th wedding anniversary when his wife says she doesn’t want anything special. He should know by now that women speak in tongues on such matters. What they really mean is, “Don’t even think about filling-station flowers or a boxed set of underwear; buy me something that sparkles and goes with anything.”

David Shaw
Codford, Wiltshire

SIR – I, too, did not want anything special for my 30th anniversary earlier this week. My husband surprised me with a beautiful bouquet and a PowerPoint presentation, with one photo from each year of our married life. Memories flooded back, and I was delighted.

Susan Coe
Perth

SIR – May I suggest a gift of a necklace with 30 pear-shaped diamonds? As I have been married for 29 years, I hope my husband is reading this. I also told him that “I don’t want anything special”.

Sara Noe
London NW11

SIR – A thoughtful present, preferably one that rekindles a memory and raises a smile, is unlikely to go down badly.

Dr Anahita Kirkpatrick
London NW3

SIR – Buy pearls, or you may need to write a similar letter next year.

Geraldine Logan
Ormskirk, Lancashire

SIR – Mr Brown should ignore his wife’s request, and pull out all the stops.

J C Craig
Bodmin, Cornwall

SIR – George Brown is wise to seek advice. For our crystal anniversary I presented a box of Epsom salts. Almost 40 years later I am still paying the price.

Christopher J Bolton
Glossop, Derbyshire

The main reason for this, as in my case, is a gentle protest. We were all British until the government, while trying to lump us all into being European, decided to split the UK into its constituent parts.

Now we have Scotland with its own parliament, Wales with its own assembly and Northern Ireland with its own assembly while the remainder of us British must endure everyone, including Europe, meddling in our affairs.

Ask a Scot or a Welshman or a Northern Irishman if he sees himself only as British, and you know what the answer will be.

I am English, and then British.

Jeff Gowers
Moretonhampstead, Devon

SIR – In your leading article (“A nation so many are proud to call their own”, May 6), you put forward the view that “Britain is a nation”. However, you also state that Britain “includes separate nations in a single state”.

If a group of people wish to call themselves a nation, then they are one.

The question, therefore, is: do the majority of people in Britain consider themselves to be British rather than English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish or other? I think not.

Christopher Rodgers
Martlesham Heath, Suffolk

SIR – I recognise the need for optimism, but I wonder whether your leading article was a little overly optimistic.

Your statement that “among British Indians and Pakistanis, more than 60 per cent consider themselves to be British” was presented as a positive story.

Considering the first adjective in the phrase, I would hope that the percentage would be much greater.

John Haiste
Bibury, Gloucestershire

SIR – When my husband was granted British citizenship, we were given to understand that “British” applied to foreigners getting the British nationality. We were told that only people whose parents come from England can call themselves “English”. We were also told that children of British parents would be British rather than English.

Our daughter married an Englishman. Are her children English?

Elisabeth Szalay
Beckenham, Kent

SIR – The people of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall, the Isle of Man and England manifest their nationalities by naming them on forms, rather than using the word “British” – which, far from being a unifying term, has been hijacked by those who appear not to respect our laws, customs or culture and are doing all they can to change Great Britain.

Hannah Fisher
London N2