Angela Ritch laments the failures of today’s parents (Education, July): they are “ill-equipped to prepare their children” for today’s education; their “engagement and responsibility . . . cannot be taken for granted.”

It was not always thus. In 1813, James Mill, commenting for the Edinburgh Review on education in England, wrote:

We have met with families in which, for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.

Parliamentary surveys revealed that the number of children in education increased from 478,000 in 1818, through 1,294,000 in 1834, to 2,535,462 in 1858.

So how have we arrived at a position where teachers argue that parents need “nudging” and should suffer “financial penalties” for their children’s poor school attendance?

The first step was the introduction of school subsidies in 1834, funded by additional taxes. This discouraged the parents of unsubsidised schools, who paid the new taxes but whose children did not benefit from the subsidies.

The second step was the widespread introduction of Board Schools in 1870. These schools were funded by the rates, merely charging fees for attendance. All parents ended up paying for Board Schools: ratepayers directly, and non-ratepayers through increased rents. All other schools suffered from competition from the Board Schools: some switched to Board status, some closed, some struggled on. Effectively, education was being nationalised, even though W.E. Forster, the promoter of the Board Schools, was worried that the changes would encourage parental apathy.

The third step, taken in 1880, was to make education compulsory. The effects of this were completely unforeseen: parents took the view that since education was now compulsory, the government should pay for it. The government was forced to reimburse elementary school fees in 1891; and to abolish secondary school fees in 1944.

Each one of these interventions marginalised parents. Today’s parental apathy is precisely that feared by Forster in 1870.

How are we to put this right? First, we must recognise that the government’s interventions in schooling are the cause of this situation. Second, we must restore parental responsibility to the level noted in 1813. This will not be easy. It will require a conscious transfer of power from the government to those apathetic and ill-equipped parents.

David J. Critchley, Buckingham

Ancient and modern

Kant’s Categorical Imperative, discussed by Ralph Walker (“Why Immanuel Kant matters”, August/September)—that an action has moral worth only if done from duty—was a position taken by the pre-Socratic philosophers 2,500 years ago. Democritus thought we should eschew doing wrong, because of a sense of duty, not fear; the truly good do not even desire to do wrong; and we should learn to feel shame not before others but before ourselves. Empedocles thought along similar lines: we live most justly if we avoid doing the things for which we blame others.

Empedocles also anticipated the linguistic revisionism of which Konsantin Kisin writes (“Goodthink and crimethink”): evil men, he wrote, want to have power over the truth by distrusting it. And Democritus deftly demolished the relativist argument that is so modish today: if every opinion or statement is true then it must also be true that every opinion is not true, since that is an opinion. Therefore it is false that every opinion is true.

Even Louise Perry’s dismaying account of how women’s supposed sexual drives are being blamed for their own murder (Spare Rib) has echoes in the past. Herodotus makes one of the earliest claims that rape victims are not really victims: “The Persians say women would not have been abducted if they hadn’t wanted to be.” 

Violence was justified by presenting females as powerful and dangerous. Monstrous females such as Medusa and Scylla were just asking to have their heads chopped off. The Sphinx devoured Thebans who could not answer her riddle. The Furies and Harpies were so terrifying that in Aeschylus’s Eumenides their depiction on stage made members of the audience faint—Clytemnestra made herself Agamemnon’s widow with a two-headed axe. The 50 daughters of Danaus stabbed their husbands to death on their wedding night, and the women of Lemnos, tired of their men’s fighting and fornicating, killed the lot.

Blaming and fearing females started early: parents threatened naughty children that a female monster called Mormo would bite them if they did not behave.

Xenophanes should be our place of safety among the raging bigots of these times: no one has the certain truth, he said, for all our knowledge is but a woven web of guesses.

Michael McManus, Leeds

Seeing red

Richard Russell’s reminiscence (“Martians, mushy peas, leprechauns (and gin)”, August/September) calls to mind the exhibitions at the Galerie Vivienne, Paris, of the Salon des Arts Incohérents. In 1883 the artist and humourist Alphonse Allais exhibited a blank sheet of white Bristol paper, attached to the wall with drawing pins, entitled: “Première communion de jeunes filles chlorotiques par temps de neige”—“First communion of anaemic young girls in the snow”, and in 1884, an entirely red work: “Récolte de tomates sur le bord de la mer Rouge par des cardinaux apoplectiques”—“Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes on the shore of the Red Sea”.

Bohdan Rymarenko, by email

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Mr Sterne, the celebrated author, was taken ill at the silk-bag shop in Old Bond Street. He was sometimes called “Tristram Shandy”, and sometimes “Yorick”—a very great favourite of the gentlemen’s. One day my master had company to dinner who were speaking about him; the Duke of Roxburgh, the Earl of March, the Earl of Ossory, the Duke of Grafton, Mr Garrick, Mr Hume, and a Mr James. “John,” said my master, “go and inquire how Mr Sterne is today.” I went, returned, and said: “I went to Mr Sterne’s lodging; the mistress opened the door; I inquired how he did. She told me to go up to the nurse. I went into the room, and he was just a-dying. I waited ten minutes; but in five he said: ‘Now it is come.’ He put up his hand as if to stop a blow, and died in a minute.” The gentlemen were all very sorry, and lamented him very much.

The Reverend Laurence Sterne (born 1713) had lived in “quiet obscurity” in Yorkshire until December 1759 when the first two small volumes of his masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, appeared. Within weeks he was a celebrity in London and, soon enough, abroad. Seven more small volumes of Tristram were to follow at intervals during the next few years.

What was this “book of books”? Who was Shandy? A contemporary reviewer wondered: “Oh rare Tristram Shandy!—Thou very sensible—humorous—pathetick—humane—unaccountable!—what shall we call thee?—Rabelais, Cervantes, What?”

Some readers condemned the fiction’s bawdiness (Sterne was, after all, a clergyman). Many more loved its eccentric originality, its comic thrust, its disaster-prone narrator and his irresistible cast of characters: My Father, Walter Shandy, retired “Turkey merchant” and educational theorist; My Uncle Toby, a wounded veteran perplexed by his inconclusive amours with the Widow Wadman; Bridget, the Widow’s maid; Corporal Trim, Toby’s prop and Bridget’s suitor; Dr Slop, inept man-midwife; and gentle Parson Yorick, who provided one of the many identities adopted by Sterne himself—and noted by canny John Macdonald.

Tristram Shandy is a “book of books”. Sterne’s imagination shapes all manner of sources into an idiosyncratic encyclopaedia dealing, among other things, with time, chance, hot chestnuts, misguided learning, midwifery, names, wounds, fortification, love, the importance of putting your breeches on efficiently, procrastination, loyalty, impotence, door hinges—and noses: “by the word Nose . . . I mean a Nose, and nothing more, or less”.

The book is a remarkable material phenomenon. It has a black page (of mourning), a marble leaf (“motly emblem of my work!”), a blank page, missing pages, diagrammatic plot lines, asterisks, two illustrations by Hogarth, and a squiggle: the Flourish of Liberty made in the air by Trim with his stick.

Tristram refuses to confine himself “to any man’s rules that ever lived”. To make us laugh he talks to us: “Writing . . . is but a different name for conversation”. His narrative is naturally progressive and digressive: “Digressions, incontestably, are the sun-shine;—they are the life, the soul of reading;—take them out of this book for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them.”

We go where Tristram takes us. He makes Uncle Toby start a sentence in one chapter, puts him on pause and lets him finish that sentence many chapters later. At one point he leaves Walter and Toby talking on the stairs while he gives us his “chapter upon chapters”. Sterne is as tonally flexible as Mozart: laughter becomes tears as we respond to the poignant story of “Le Fever”; we are amused and touched by Uncle Toby’s problems in love.

Tristram’s own problems in “this scurvy and disasterous world of ours” begin early. His conception, birth and christening are all comico-catastrophical. In his early boyhood, a de-weighted window sash accidentally descends upon his most delicate part. Assailed by illness, he laments: “Time wastes too fast: every letter I trace tells me with what rapidity Life follows my pen; the days and hours of it . . . are flying over our heads like light clouds of a windy day, never to return more . . .”. Tristram knows that Death is pursuing him, but (like the agonisingly tubercular Sterne himself) he breaks free for a time and heads for France: “Now, I . . . think . . . that so much of motion, is so much of life, and so much of joy—and that to stand still, or get on but slowly, is death and the devil”.

These nine small volumes celebrate the very liberties that help us live: “True Shandeism, think what you will against it, opens the heart and lungs, and . . . forces the blood and other vital fluids of the body to run freely thro’ its channels, and makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round”.

Constriction or oppression of any creature, human or otherwise, moved Sterne’s soul and Tristram’s pen:

. . . my uncle Toby had scarce a heart to retalliate upon a fly.

—Go,—says he, one day at dinner, to an over-grown one which had buzz’d about his nose, and tormented him cruelly all dinner-time,—and which, after infinite attempts, he had caught at last, as it flew by him;—I’ll not hurt thee, says my uncle Toby, rising from his chair, and going a-cross the room, with the fly in his hand,—I’ll not hurt a hair of thy head:—Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—-go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

No wonder the gentlemen who, all aware that Death was about to come for their friend, had gathered that day in Clifford Street “were all very sorry, and lamented him very much”.

The author chairs the Laurence Sterne Trust at Shandy Hall, North Yorkshire, Sterne’s home in the 1760s. The Trust is a registered charity (No. 1181127). The fee for this article will be given to the Trust. For further information see www.laurencesternetrust.org.uk

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Despite its robust economy, Costa Rica is about to suffer a post-viral slump, with the central bank forecasting a 3.6 per cent downturn in the coming year for a country reliant on tourism. Yet the first world could learn much from the manner in which this third-world nation has handled the ravages of Covid-19.

It certainly feels as though the country is in good hands. While it has been noted that the WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus lacks a medical degree, the Costa Rican Minister of Health, Daniel Salas, has a degree in medicine, another in public health, and a professional background in epidemiology.

The government’s response to la pandemia has been exemplary, preparing the country before the first recorded case. Businesses were issued with contact-tracing protocols and strict disinfectant procedures, and hand-sanitiser was available at the entrance to every store long before friends in Europe told me they had seen this measure in place. Costa Rica is famous for its beaches, but normally crowded beaches were immediately closed and placed under police watch.

Costa Rica has a population of a little over five million and, at the time of writing, has had 2,515 confirmed cases of Covid-19, with 12 fatalities. To return to Costa Rica’s nickname and project those figures onto Switzerland’s 8.6 million population, the European country should have had 4,326 cases and 21 fatalities. In fact, Switzerland has recorded 31,376 cases and suffered 1,682 deaths. Of course, there are differences between the two countries, but not sufficient to explain this huge swing.

Why might comparisons be misleading? The Costa Rican government has freely admitted that it cannot afford the testing regimes adopted by richer countries, and so its statistics may be “light”. A hot climate is also thought to retard the spread of Covid-19. Signor Salas has further emphasised that, with the rainy season now upon us, Costa Rica’s seasonal increase in respiratory illness may lead to a steepening of the infection curve, as is the case. At present, however, the nation has the lowest infection rate in the Americas, with more Costa Ricans dying from coronavirus and its complications in America than at home.

Government policy has also been subtly effective in ways not immediately apparent. Banning unnecessary car journeys between 5pm and 5am seemed unlikely to have an effect on viral transmission. Costa Rica, however, is notorious for traffic accidents, and the driving here may be charitably described as maverick. The country regularly appears in the global top five for fatal car crashes per capita. By preventing night-time driving it is very likely that demand for the mere 140 intensive-care beds nationwide would also be cut.

The government itself, led by President Carlos Alvarado Quesada of the centre-left Citizens’ Action Party, has been forthright and realistic from the beginning of the outbreak, and has been left alone by the media and political opponents to do its job without critical interference. Almost.

Politicisation of Covid-19 appears to be a separate virus affecting Europe and the USA and one which Costa Rica seems to regard as a pointless distraction, but the waters are not completely calm. Dragos Dolanescu is a Romanian-born naturalised politician who leads the small Social Christian Republican Party, and he has caused a minor equatorial tea-cup storm by criticising the government for kow-towing to Beijing.

Costa Rica, like many developing countries, has been the beneficiary of Chinese investment. Football is a religion here, with players going back into training even before the churches were re-opened, and the CCP gifted Costa Rica a $105 million national stadium in the capital San José in 2011.

Dolanescu stated that it was “unfortunate” that Chinese Ambassador Tang Heng was pressurising Costa Rica’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs over his comments, having previously stressed his opinion that Covid-19 began in Wuhan. Dolanescu adds that China’s failure to recognise Taiwan is “blinding itself to the reality of the world”.

For the most part the national response has been indicative of the national character, a smiling optimism. No matter how spurious such data may be, Costa Rica often appears at the top of the “World Happiness League”. The self-styled “Ticos” and “Ticas” will work hard to revive their priceless tourist industry. As restaurants re-open and beaches come back to life, although border control remains firm, the country will be desperate to attract visitors once more to sample the simple and uncluttered life summed up in the national catchphrase; “pura vida!”.

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An Ipsos Mori poll in late May gave Scotland’s First Minister an 82 per cent approval rate among Scots, with a majority thinking Johnson had done badly. Less than a third of the British public think the PM has done well, according to an Opinium poll, with his own approval rate at -6.

In April, Downing Street briefed that Sturgeon was using the crisis for constitutional ends. That doesn’t hold water, but she has enjoyed a credibility boost, and lockdown has cemented the idea of the UK as a place of four nations.

Many Scots caricature Johnson as a wicked pantomime dame, Christopher Biggins’s evil doppelgänger. It’s not hard to look better than him, and Sturgeon effortlessly did so at the beginning of the crisis. She led all the public briefings, and has done so throughout the pandemic. Her own seriousness was reinforced by a spoof voice-over of her daily addresses to the nation by comedian Janey Godley. Combined, the nation was reassured sensible women were in control.

Yet Scotland’s grip on Covid-19 has been no more sure than London’s. There was shock when Boris Johnson missed five Cobra meetings before lockdown. Sturgeon missed six of them. When UK government policy switched against track and trace, so did Scotland. The directive to move the elderly from hospital beds to care homes was copied.

Academic Allyson Pollock pointed out that, as ever, Scotland’s talk of difference was not supported by the evidence. In truth, Edinburgh copied London. However Johnson, Hancock and Rabb lack the credibility chromosome. Downing Street was exuding incompetence. In comparison, Sturgeon looked in charge.

Criticism was heard, but not enough to wound. Scottish government officials were caught out with second jobs and going to second homes. Ministers put in charge of commercial aid made a mess of organising relief to businesses. PPE had not been stockpiled. Bizarrely, Sturgeon at one point asked the nation to dream of a better world, when most just wanted a face mask and loo roll.

The Scottish Government tried to restrict freedom of information rules at the early stage of lockdown. Holyrood blocked this. At the beginning of June officials said they didn’t have copies of the briefings Sturgeon claimed to have read in the run-up to lockdown. They later admitted none existed.

Then, Sturgeon’s version of what was known about care home advice appeared not to match that of her health secretary Jeanne Freeman. By this time, people had begun to add up the numbers and come to the arithmetical conclusion that Scotland had one of the worst death rates from Covid-19 in the world, per head of  population.

Grand dreams of post-virus Scotland were dropped from the agenda when the fatality in care homes became obvious. When one home in Skye reported cases, the first on the isle and many weeks into lockdown, public trust took a knock. How could vulnerable people, six weeks into shielding, be falling ill?

Much like England, the answer seemed to lie in the lack of clear direction to care home owners. Just as this might have become the issue which undid Sturgeon, the Cummings scandal broke and Scots thought nothing could be as bad as Downing Street.

The blunders did not stop there. It emerged the Government had not told Scots of an early outbreak of the virus at an Edinburgh conference hotel. Then, that a scenario planning exercise two years ago had not been acted upon. Promises were made that all care home workers would be tested, which had yet to happen a month later.

The health minister Freeman looked out of her depth, unable to get a grip on the bureaucracy of the NHS. The Education minister John Swinney looked no better when he published a return-to-school plan which kept children at home. Another minister didn’t know the distancing rules he was meant to have written. Yet the Scottish National Party, riven by the Alex Salmond sleaze trial, baffled by the independence issue and long out of policy ideas, is polling higher than ever, according to YouGov.

The explanation of this perception gap between two nationalist leaders (Brexit being seen by many Scots as England’s bid for freedom) lies partly in the difference between the patriotic visions. Scotland’s confected image of itself is of a centrist people sharing a common interest. Johnson’s Englishness is more triumphant. Thus Sturgeon’s attitude was always going to play better in a “conflict” the UK was clearly losing.

Since Thatcherism, no Scottish politician has ever lost votes by posing as a defender of the common weal. Perhaps also Scottish political culture is more inclined to rally round, than rail upon. Where welfare and the public sector are held in high regard, a national call to help the NHS could not fail.

Sturgeon gives good podium. Firm stance, clear messages. It’s how she rose through the ranks—fighting against pompous men and a political culture that long hated what she stood for.

After thirteen years in Government, seven as a health minister, she knows the rules of the game. By contrast, Johnson appears baffled that politics involves policy and delivery. Scots don’t like poshos who are at it, whatever “it” may be. The “Boris bounce” at the last election got the Scottish Tories 25 per cent of the vote. Nearly double that number voted for Sturgeom.

Often described as the best leader Scottish Labour never had, Sturgeon embodies a caricature of the upright Scot. When Johnson defended Dominic Cummings, he seemed to highlight all that was wrong with modern conservatism. Most of all, devolution allows the SNP to be both Government and Opposition. When things go well, its thanks to Edinburgh. When things go badly, it is Westminster’s fault. But as that is the UK as designed by unionists, you can’t blame Sturgeon for playing the better politics. 

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In his playful essay “The Decay of Lying”, Oscar Wilde has Vivian defend aestheticism by stating “if Nature had been comfortable, mankind would never have invented architecture”. He maintains that, more than offering shelter and comfort, structural design represents progress and allows us to thrive. While nature is indifferent to human beings, buildings are fashioned solely for our use and in them “we all feel of the proper proportions”.

Modern research in neuroscience and psychology suggests that the built environment can act as a kind of mental balm. We are wired to respond subconsciously to the spaces around us, so that the right design can improve our general wellbeing. Interesting building façades affect us in a positive way, allowing us to feel more cheerful and engaged. On the other hand, experiments show that bland shop fronts can cause our mood states to plummet.

Much like exceptional art, great public architecture transports and restores; the sight of certain familiar buildings can quietly soothe. The sheer height of a ceiling, the intricate patterns in brickwork or sunlight falling through a window on to the curve of a wall can remove us from our more pressing thoughts. There are those national treasures, such as Buckingham Palace, that exude history and heritage and carry with them an undeniable imprint of the past. Other more modern buildings, such as the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, have a vastness of space that changes the sound, softens the air and, with it, the atmosphere. Some have a breath-taking beauty, such as the late Zaha Hadid’s cathedral-like London Aquatics Centre, one of the main venues for the 2012 Olympics, now used as a local authority swimming pool. And then there are those buildings we imbue with our own personal memories. It was to these I longed to be near when restrictions were imposed.

As lockdown began to lift, I dug out my rusty bike and cycled into central London. I wanted to see St Paul’s Cathedral, despite it being closed to visitors. For me, St Paul’s holds memories of my sister, even though we had never been there together. When Kate died, aged twenty-nine, of cancer ten years ago, I had a yearning to go to the place in which she had found hope. A decade before this, she had moved to London, abandoning her degree at St Andrews, things having not worked out, brave but apprehensive. One day she phoned to describe how she had visited the cathedral. She had marvelled at the whispering gallery then climbed all the steps up to the golden gallery to look over the city. As she spoke, I had a sense that it was during this visit she knew she had made the right decision. Her voice was confident; she was excited about the future, settled.

After her death, I would sometimes spend lunch hours, enveloped by the shadows, sitting in the cathedral’s cavernous interior, holding on to my steadfast grief. (I once took her six-year-old son, and we clambered up the 259 steps to whisper to each other in the gallery.) And on what would have been her fortieth birthday, during lockdown, it was there I returned. Although I couldn’t go inside, the immediacy of the building brought solace. As Alain de Botton writes: “It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation.”

At times of uncertainty and grief, public buildings have the ability to connect us to the past, and for this they should be celebrated. But also their presence can reassure. Fifteen years ago, at Tavistock Square, I watched the bus in front blow up. Searching for safety, I ran to the British Museum. Rushing up those familiar steps and then into the Great Court, I felt protected.

More than just bricks and mortar, public buildings exist to bring people together, for us to feel we belong. Without this we can feel lost. In 2010, the American architectural critic Paul Goldberger suggested that as so many social experiences were now virtual, public buildings represented a sacred realness. Ten years on, fully acclimatised to the world of video calling, the desire to be in Goldberger’s “temple of the authentic in an age of the virtual” is keenly felt. Buildings represent opportunities, social interactions, and the essence of real people, even when these encounters or individuals have long gone and live only as memories. This should make us all the more appreciative, now that the doors are reopening.

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I read with concern that John Mills (Marketplace, April 2020) is still peddling his long-held theory that British manufacturing needs a substantially devalued pound sterling to encourage its revival. I am a successful British manufacturer who has survived repeated devaluations of our national currency over the past half century. Not for the first time, I assure Mr Mills that his medicine does not work.

In 2014, fearful of Mr Mills’s self-publicised theories gaining a wider acceptance among the business and academic community, I challenged him to a debate. The motion was “This House Believes that Devaluation of Sterling can Revive Growth of the British Economy”. The debate took place on November 14, 2014, at the Judge Business School, Cambridge, under the Chairmanship of Labour peer Lord Eatwell. The audience comprised mainly members of the university from all academic branches. I opposed the motion and in the vote which followed the debate, the motion was defeated by 79 per cent to 21 per cent.

From long experience I can tell Mr Mills that it is quality, efficiency and reliability that will sell British-made products profitably. Yes, price has a place in this, but it is not dominant. In the 1970s, which still counts as the high water mark of British devaluations, a Jaguar car was roughly half the price of the equivalent Mercedes. Did you see many Jaguars on the roads of Germany? No, because they were unreliable and couldn’t stand up to the aggressive and routine autobahn treatment so beloved of the Teutonic motorist.

The one thing which British manufacturers lack is a solid “Buy British” policy by HMG. It is saddening to see the numbers of complete new trains flooding into the country from as far afield as Japan, when so many of their constituent parts could be manufactured in Britain. Maybe, with Britain now freed from the constraints of Brussels, we can look forward to the spending of British tax-payers money being directed more towards British-made goods. I hope so.

Sir Andrew Cook CBE, Chairman,
William Cook Holdings Ltd

Marxist pedagogy

Leaf Arbuthnot’s excellent article  (“Teacher training is a mess. Everyone suffers”, April 2020) missed a major cause of the mess in our teacher training. When I joined the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) in 1983, it had been awarding all the degrees in the polytechnic sector since 1965, and thus for nearly all our teacher training courses, which our universities regarded as rather beneath them.

I managed to infiltrate our teacher training committee, and was horrified to discover that our mission was to permeate the whole curriculum with issues of gender, race and class.

We didn’t appoint external examiners whose CVs did not reveal that they were Marxists, and we refused to validate any course which promoted the phonic method of teaching children to read. The head of one teacher training department, who has since been revealed as a Soviet agent—as many of them were—told me that this was to help to create the lumpenproletariat which would facilitate the Soviet take-over of our society.

I became the CNAA’s honorary treasurer in 1986, and by 1991 had managed to get democrats appointed to all our subject committees; Roger Scruton to our Philosophy Committee, Caroline Cox to our Nursing Committee, and so on.

So the CNAA was about to become a valuable instrument in the fight against the leftist bias in our education system. But Kenneth Clarke brilliantly gave all the polytechnics their own charters in 1992, and abolished the CNAA.

Malcolm Pearson, House of Lords

Tibet and China

I read with great interest Sonam Tsering Frasi’s article “Tibet: suffering in silence”, in the last issue. The Chinese Communist government authorities have been using their economic prowess and superpower status not only to suppress NGOs, individuals and even some governments who raise legitimate concerns about the violation of human rights in Tibet, but also to coerce their policy. As a result, some democratic governments and businesses shamefully kowtow to Communist Chinese government, putting profits above any sense of morality and self-respect.

I will state two examples of their coercion.Tibetans living in Nepal are not allowed to celebrate the birthday celebration of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, let alone to commemorate the anniversary of March 10, 1959—Tibetan National Uprising Day. There have been cases where HH the Dalai Lama’s pre-planned visits to certain countries were suddenly cancelled due to Chinese government pressure.

HH the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile have made an unequivocal statement: “We are seeking a genuine autonomy for Tibet where Tibetans are responsible for their own internal affairs leaving its foreign policy to Beijing.” But the Chinese government after Deng Xiaoping has shown no inclination whatsoever to resolve the Tibetan issue. Instead they continue to rule Tibet imperialistically, with iron grip, as a subjugated colonial subject.

The Chinese Communist government’s belligerent stand towards the Tibet issue must end. It serves no long term benefit to either China or Tibet. It must resume dialogue with the Tibetan government-in-exile and with HH the Dalai Lama, to resolve, peacefully, the issue of Tibet, and it must adhere to basic human rights as enshrined in China’s own constitution.

Kelsang Frasi, London

The name game

Peter Trudgill is right (“Toponymic subjugation”, April 2020):  people think they are “honouring” other nations by attempting to use the home team’s name for a city.  This was brought home to me last year when I asked an Indian lady which part of India she came from and she said, “Bombay.”  I, thinking she was politely using that form of the word because she thought it was the one I would be familiar with, countered her politeness by politely asking whether we shouldn’t now call it “Mumbai”.   “No,” she said, quite firmly.  “You call it ‘Mumbai’, but we still call it ‘Bombay’.” 

Ian Baird, Framlingham, Suffolk

This article is taken from the May/June 2020 issue of Standpoint. To subscribe to the print and digital editions, including a full digital archive, click here.

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Nick Cohen attempting to write knowledgeably about satire (“Extremism gives us little reason to laugh”, March, 2020) is like Kim Kardashian having a crack at particle physics. He finds fault in my character Titania McGrath for talking down to her readers and littering her book with “laborious explanations”. Can it really be that Cohen is so surprised to find a satirical character emulating the qualities of those being satirised? Is his understanding of the genre truly that rudimentary?

Cohen embodies the kind of po-faced, intolerant and slightly deranged commentator that Titania is partly designed to lampoon. He refers to me as “right-wing”, which shows that he is similarly ill-informed about my politics. Predictably, his conspiratorial obsession with the Revolutionary Communist Party does not fail to re-emerge in his criticism. Attempting to connect me with the organisation is highly tenuous, not least because it disbanded while I was still at school. Someone really should let him know.

I would be doing something very wrong if the likes of Cohen found Titania McGrath funny. The dogmatic and the narrow-minded are not the target audience. They are the target.

Andrew Doyle, Hitchin, Herts

Robust responses

We are rather perplexed by Frederic Raphael’s response to our article on antisemitism (Letters, March 2020). Our piece was written quite deliberately as a collaborative intervention from a Jew and a Christian working together, both of us historians, both of us with some experience of Christian-Jewish dialogue at its most demanding. Neither of us had any intention of softening, let alone denying, the guilt and complicity of Christians in anti-Semitism over the centuries. Neither of us would dispute the history of atrocities perpetrated by Christians or the failure of so many modern Christians to be honest about that history and to work at changing the still widespread ignorance and prejudice against Jewish people. Both of us deplore superficial and cosmetic gestures—which is why we raised the question of whether the resources that would be needed for the proposed Victoria Tower Gardens memorial might be better spent on more positive educational work along lines of proven effectiveness. What exactly is Raphael disagreeing about? Has he an alternative programme?

His argument would also have been stronger if his historical examples had been more accurate. The 1066 Granada massacre was perpetrated by a Muslim ruler, not a Christian; plenty of instances of Christian pogroms would make the point better. And as regards the Church of England, the “General Synod” did not exist at the date mentioned. There was a discussion of related issues by the Church Assembly in 1935 (in which the Bishop of Durham made a powerful intervention in support of Jews in Germany); Raphael’s account of this is misleading, to say the least. To state the obvious: this does not mean that there is any shortage of egregious instances of anti-Jewish or pro-Nazi utterances from some in the Church of England in that period, or before and after. But the importance of the subject is such that it is essential to argue on the basis of absolutely undisputed fact, giving no ground to any objector looking for an excuse to dismiss or belittle the question.

What we hoped, in writing our article, was to underline as strongly as we could the need for a more robust and intelligent response to resurgent anti-Jewish speech and action. That remains our priority; we might have expected a less hostile reaction from someone who evidently shares our deep anxiety and sense of urgency.

Irene Lancaster, Manchester
Rowan Williams, Cambridge

Sustainable seas

Lisbet Rausing (Bright Green, March 2020) writes out of despair for our oceans and their depleted resources. I could despair too. But with decades of experience in fish-farming, I regard it as a great privilege to be part of a growing counterrevolution. Very powerful forces are moving the global diet away from total destruction. Indeed they are having a Genesis effect on the oceans. For wild fisheries, the Marine Stewardship Council certification scheme already covers a fifth of the world’s oceans. In parallel to this we have seen the launch of the Aquaculture Stewardship Council, whose audits require zero negative impact on the environment. At one of my co-owned enterprises, Kampachi Farms Mexico, we rear Seriola riviolana (Longfin Yellowtail), a sustainable alternative to tuna. I would challenge anyone to read the Aquaculture Stewardship Council’s audit of our work and say we are not sustainable. Near us Earth Ocean Farms, owned by an American billionaire, Chrissy Walton, is not only sustainable but is also breeding totoaba, a near-extinct fish from the croaker family, and carrying out releases into the wild. I could name other projects.

If we do our job right, in our lifetimes we will make the wild fish an occasional luxury item, like game is today, with the oceans providing the farmed sustainable protein. We will turn back the dial on land-based farming, living and farming in harmony with nature and breathing more life into the oceans.

Toby Baxendale, Welwyn Garden City, Herts

The UK needs a Senate

Colin Kidd has the right direction of travel (“UK should wrongfoot Scottish ultras”, March 2020), but will what he offers work? I doubt it. We need to move away from a position where the Scottish tail wags the UK dog. The next independence referendum must not be confined to Scotland. It must involve the whole of the UK.

Our present constitutional settlement is not fit for purpose, to use a well-known phrase. We need to have an English parliament that will sit in Westminster. And a Senate, binding the constituent countries together.

A Senate would have four-country representation to deal with defence, security, and UK-wide taxation. Each national parliament could add to the tax burden, if it wished to do so. On population-size only, the English would dominate the Senate, so representation would have to be weighted to give the other countries a larger say. Any decision would need more than just English votes.

Proposals like this need to be worked up for approval by all parts of our country. When Scotland next votes it should be on proposals for a new constitutional settlement for all four UK countries and not simply one.

Frank Field, London SW1

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In their article “Confronting a noxious new age of Jew-hate” in last month’s issue, Irene Lancaster and Rowan Williams are full of noble sentiments. But what? Drill-sergeants include in their repertoire of exercises what is known as “doubling on the spot”. This involves imitating the vigorous activity of running without actually getting anywhere. What then can be done about the human tendency to diabolise people who can be deemed both sub-human and the source of whatever is wrong with society and life? Certainly not enough to make sure that, as the cant always has it, “nothing like this can ever happen again”. 

Pious education and solemn memorials render the topic dull for most, salacious for not a few. TV’s habit of wheeling out bearded rabbis, happy to play “community” leaders, ignores the largely secular, assimilated manners and achievements of British Jews. The passing off of brief gestural decency as evidence of British virtue is another regular number. Who mentions the reluctance with which the pre-war Kindertransport was suffered to cross the Channel? The implication was that only prepubertal Jews were innocent. TV recently celebrated, with patriotic pride, that 300 survivors, from the million and a half children done to death by the Germans, were allowed, in 1945, to come and to recuperate by Lake Windermere. The sorry comedy of handwashing, preceding self-applause, was typical of all the victorious allies. 

There is something to be said for not putting on full canonicals when dealing with human malice and delusion. Put charmlessly, antisemitism has a key place in the wilting belief in a benevolent or omnipotent Christian deity. Carl Gustav Jung thought that the Trinity should have been a Quadrilateral, with the devil integral to it. Christianity has made do with casting the Jew as Satan’s understudy. As Lord Williams does not care to mention, in 1935 the Synod of the Church of England voted, with the Archbishop of York the sole dissentient, against allowing any German Jews to take refuge in Great Britain. The same policy was continued, in secular form, by the sainted Clement Attlee’s government in 1945. That working-class icon Ernie Bevin remarked that he wasn’t going to ’ave the Jews pushing to the front of the queue.

Israel was, to no small extent, a rubbish dump for Europe’s unwanted yids. Once they reached the unpromised land, they were recycled as brutal oppressors of the fabricated “nation” of Palestine. Oh, wait a minute . . . you mustn’t say “Yids”. No? Legislation which enforces repression of the vernacular is a neo-Puritanism with dubious benefits for civilised culture. Its side-effect is to exempt absurd ideas from derision on the grounds that we are all entitled to our opinions. We would do better to honour the long English tradition of linguistic rough and tumble. The modern Greeks invented a formal language called katharevousa, a laundered fabrication without Turkish or low-class elements. Its lack of roots in the vernacular rendered it fruitless.

Antisemitism, in organised, ecclesiastic form, did not take off before Christ’s failure to return at the Millennium. Something, it seems, had kept Him. Guess who? A massacre of 6,000 Jews took place in Granada (known previously as “Granada of the Jews”) in 1066.

What Freud called the Narcissism of Small Differences is never more evident than in Christian un-apologetics. The attempt, by Palestinians, to detach Jesus from his Jewish shadow, by making Galileeans a separate “race”, is only the latest effort to make Jews the world’s untouchables. Oh but surely . . . Yes, yes, of course: the Palestinians have been ill-used. So have all manner of people, including the Congolese; millions were murdered by the Belgians before 1914, when Belgium became “gallant little Belgium”. Anti-Zionism is the antisemitism which dares not speak its name. 

Do any English history lessons mention what happened to the aboriginal Tasmanians after the arrival of Captain Cook and others? The Palestinians have been used in all sorts of ways, which does not diminish their suffering, but (there always is one) they have served not least as a means of finding something new and inexcusable to allay any sense of shame at what the cant calls the Holocaust. At the top end of the scale, that capital H has been deplored, with professorial fatuousness by Christopher Ricks, on the grounds that not all the Jews were burned. Ricks’s little pagod, Mr Eliot, wanted to deprive the Jew of his capital letter, a literate form of decapitation. But that was on one of Tom’s bad days. Uncouth to mention it? Good reason for doing so.

The Christian Walrus and the Marxist Carpenter strut their lamentations throughout the process of despising and killing Jews. Tearful complacency is integral to the comedy which declares itself in recurring need to blame the victims. The roundabout, Christian and post-Christian, Islamic and crackpot, never stops turning, Jew grease in its axis, and never gets anywhere but where it was before: typical of what a 13th-century Pope called, “the World’s Game”, a blood-sport always in sorry season.

Frederic Raphael, London SW7

Offside

Helen Joyce’s article last month, “Speaking up for female eunuchs”, was a fact-filled, highly-informative piece. My only criticism would be in the area I know most about, namely sport. The comment regarding “mediocre” male athletes potentially beating women perhaps detracts from the incredible performances of elite, female athletes: no “mediocre” male is honestly going to beat them.

Briefly, women who compete at the Olympics (for example) in any event are truly exceptional athletes and will easily beat most men in their chosen events. Whilst I am fully aware of the typical performance differences between males and females in sport, for a man to “transition” and have a chance of winning women’s events, I would argue that prior to transition he will need to be producing performances equal to, or better than, the current women’s world record in any event. In short, his performances might be nothing special for an elite male competitor, but he is certainly not “Mr Average”. How many men off-the-street can sprint 100 meters in 10.49 seconds or 400 meters in 47.6 seconds for example? There is a danger, I would argue, of the general public misunderstanding just how good elite women are at sport—and how hard they train—when putting the common argument forward that “mediocre” men will beat them easily; especially when the usual examples (e.g., McKinnon; Telfer; Hubbard) are given.

This is the reason, I would suggest, that trans-activists can point to the fact that there have been (as far as we know) no transgender athletes who have won a Gold medal at the Olympics. It is not that there is no “male advantage” following transition as trans-activists like to claim; it is that the males who have transitioned to date and decided to compete are actually not that good. They would need to be reasonably talented male athletes to begin with, with a decent history (several years) of training and competition. Hubbard in weightlifting is one of the competitors who perhaps supports this observation, although there are several exceptional female lifters who are capable of beating Hubbard easily in global competitions. An analysis of the performances at the recent weightlifting World Championships illustrates this.

Invariably, media outlets focus on the cycling performances of age-group cyclist Rachel McKinnon/Veronica Ivy. You even used McKinnon to illustrate this article. If you consider performance times, you will see that McKinnon is nowhere near the standard required for Olympic selection in female track racing at (open age) world level. McKinnon is not, in performance terms, an elite cyclist. With due respect to the cyclists themselves, master’s track cycling is a niche sport attracting hardly any competitors. There were just eight competitors in McKinnon’s event last year. The year before, two age groups were combined to ensure that competitors had someone to race against. The overall standard is often poor.

The other transgender athlete who typically makes the headlines currently is CeCe Telfer. Telfer’s best in the 400 meters hurdles is a little over 57 seconds. The women’s world record is 52.16 seconds. The men’s 400 meters hurdles world record is 46.78 seconds—Telfer is over 10 seconds off this despite now competing over lower hurdles. This is not actually that good.

The facts are that a “mediocre man” who transitions is not going to win anything at the Olympics: such people are not even going to meet the qualifying standard for selection. A reasonably good (yet perhaps “mediocre” on the world stage) male athlete, with several years of training and competition “in the bank”, capable of women’s world records prior to transition would appear to have a good chance.

I apologise in advance if, in the context of Joyce’s excellent overview, this seems like nitpicking. To date, it appears that when it comes to sporting prowess, transgender (male to female) athletes have typically “cherrypicked”, poorly contested, relatively modest standard, age-group events to compete in; for reasons known only to themselves. They cannot be criticised unduly for this, of course, since the rules allow it. My criticism on such matters is aimed squarely at the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the national and international sport governing bodies who have written their rules based on the IOC guidelines, and what appears to be remarkably little good science.

Dr Tony Lycholat, Normandy

Unlawful and illegal

Making her case for illegal immigrants (Letters, February issue), Sheona York bases her defence in the overtly emotive language so often used by pro-immigration lawyers and campaigners, with much speculation, some contradiction and deliberately employed euphemism (“unlawful” in fact sounds no better or worse than “illegal”, and ultimately amounts to the same thing, and anyway migrants should not be confused with immigrants).

If, as suggested, the burden of proof should not be on immigrants, then on whom should it be? Why should it, moreover how could it, fall on others? Until any immigrant is established as legal they are, by definition, illegal. Awaiting a decision on settlement may very well be unsettling, but it need not necessarily be “precarious”. To claim it is suggests a deliberately created, wide-reaching, cruel atmosphere of uncertainty which, despite the government’s understandable, justified attempts to curb illegal immigration (something repeatedly demanded by many voters), remains a policy subject to much speculative heresay and anectode, all largely unproven.

The author bemoans the “lamentable” IT failures, “poor” record-keeping and Home Office “incompetence” in respect to immigrants, but the general public, frustrated and enraged by a perceived lack of control over immigration, themselves point to these very same inexcusable Home Office failures as a reason for so many illegal immigrants disappearing off the radar in the first place.

To claim that “possibly half” of illegal immigrants are family members of British citizens is pure speculation and, as a defence, should be wholly irrelevant to anyone who campaigns on their behalf. After all, is it not the liberal view that all immigrants to the UK, whether legal or with a familial connection in Britain or not, should be prioritised and treated the same? In circumstances where there is a family connection, it seems unlikely that no attempt would, or could, be made by that family to successfully raise any appropriate regularisation fee, and it seems highly unlikely that a decision given against settlement would be made due to nothing more than a “tiny” mistake in an application.

If, as stated, “hostile environment” measures do not work in deterring or removing immigrants then why are some leaving after being “ground down by years of Home Office refusals and delayed appeals”? If such measures constitute a hostile environment, and immigrants are leaving because of them, then clearly they are working.

The opinion of many British voters, borne out by the recent European and general election results showing people opting for less liberal politics and policies, would indeed likely propose criminalising landlords and employers for providing services to illegal immigrants, so to say “no one” would propose it is naive at best, and at worst wilfully perverse. The same public would also probably understand, likely expect, bank accounts and driving licences to be restricted, certainly until any legitimate citizenship had been established. A recent increase of random terrorism targeting European countries, and an already overstetched UK infrastructure, have understandably led to a more wary public.

The suggestion that anyone would want to criminalise immigrants, legal or not, for shopping in any store (with the far-fetched connection to a lack of access to a car being cited), or that the store itself should be criminalised for selling food to immigrants is as deeply offensive as it is utterly ridiculous. The majority of the British public wants a robust but fair, humane immigration system. They do not want or expect immigrants, whether legal or not, to be starved of food. To suggest otherwise shows a deep ignorance of humanity in general, the British people in particular and insultingly disregards the latter’s remarkable capacity for tolerance.

The “broad-brush decision-making” approach favoured by Sheona York (was such an approach not a contributing factor in the Windrush scandal?) sounds very much like the ill-conceived, impetuous open-door policies adopted by both Tony Blair’s Labour government and Germany’s Angela Merkel. Such arbitrary, illogical and irresponsible approaches to immigration have, ironically, only created more social unease, through both increased resentment and decreased empathy. The result, despite the best intentions of those implementing and calling for such measures, is a counter-productive, hostile environment for the majority of would-be settlers.

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth

The post Letters: confronting antisemitism; trans athletes; immigration and the hostile environment appeared first on Standpoint.

Jennifer Arcuri is an American technology entrepreneur. She founded the consultancy Hacker House.

Christopher Bray is a journalist and writer. He is the author of Michael Caine: A Class Act (Faber & Faber).

Nick Cohen is a columnist for the Observer and author of What’s Left? How the Left lost its way (Harper Perennial).

David Cox is a writer and television producer.

Edmund Fawcett is a political journalist and author. His next book, Conservatism, will be published this autumn.

Jonathan Gaisman is a QC practising in commercial law. He used to preside over criminal trials as a Crown Court recorder.

John Gerson is a former diplomat. He is
visiting professor at the Policy Institute, King’s College, London.

Daisy Goodwin is a writer and television producer. She is the creator and writer of the ITV television series Victoria.

Simon Heffer is an academic and journalist. His latest book is The Age of Decadence: Britain 1880 to 1914 (Random House).

Ileana von Hirsch is the author of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Chemo (Short Books). She runs Five Star Greece, a travel company.

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the Mail on Sunday and author. His books include The Rage Against God: Why Faith is the Foundation of Civilisation (Continuum).

Christian House writes about photography.

Helen Joyce is on a sabbatical from the Economist while she writes a book on gender self-ID.

Irene Lancaster is a scholar of Jewish history and thought.

Mark Lawson is a writer and broadcaster. His latest book is the novel, The Allegations (Picador).

Maureen Lipman is an actress, comedian and writer. She currently plays Evelyn Plummer in Coronation Street.

Victor Madeira is an intelligence historian and consultant. He is the author of Britannia and the Bear: The Anglo-Russian Intelligence Wars, 1917-1929 (Boydell & Brewer).

Melanie McDonagh is a journalist.

Jane O’Grady co-founded the London School of Philosophy. Her latest book is
Enlightenment Philosophy in a Nutshell
(Arcturus).

Kathy O’Shaughnessy is a journalist. Her new novel is In Love With George Eliot (Scribe).

Cindy Polemis is an art historian and official guide at Tate Modern and Tate Britain. She curates art tours and spent many years working for BBC World Service.

Lisbet Rausing is an academic and philanthropist.

Benedict Rogers is a human rights activist and journalist and author of From Burma to Rome: A Journey into the Catholic Church (Gracewing).

Victor Sebestyen is a writer and historian. His books include Lenin the Dictator (Weidenfeld & Nicholson).

Anthony Seldon is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham and is a contemporary historian and political author, most recently of May at 10 (Biteback).

Samir Shah runs Juniper Communications, a production company, and is a former senior BBC news and current affairs executive.

Robert Singh is professor of politics at Birkbeck, University of London. His books include In Defense of the United States Constitution (Routledge).

Ian Shircore is an author and ghostwriter who has written a dozen books under his own name, including Loose Canon: The Extraordinary Songs of Clive James & Pete Atkin (RedDoor Publishing).

Kathleen Stock is professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex. She is currently writing a book on the importance of material reality to feminism.

Tacitus is an army officer.

Nick Thomas-Symonds is MP for Torfean, where he was born, and shadow security minister. He is a barrister and academic, and author of Attlee: A Life in Politics  (I.B. Tauris).

Giles Udy is a writer and historian. He is the author of Labour and the Gulag (Biteback).

Rosie Whitehouse is a journalist and author. She advises Centropa, a Vienna-based Jewish history project, specialising in Holocaust survivors and their stories.

Rowan Williams was Archbishop of Canterbury from 2002-2012. He is master of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

The post Contributors: February 2020 appeared first on Standpoint.

David Goodhart’s article (“Wafted by goodwill onto the rocks of error”, December/January issue) makes a valiant attempt to defend the Home Office from criticisms following the Windrush debacle, but unfortunately makes some errors of his own.

First, it is not just lack of resources which places the burden of proof on migrants, but the law—and that law lies at the basis of Home Office decision-making. So long as the burden of proof lies entirely on an applicant, and specific documents are required to establish entitlements to remain in the UK, to work, obtain medical treatment, etc, a person without those documents is for all practical purposes “illegal”.

Second, the Home Office “bureaucratic nightmare” did not just affect the Windrush generation. Lamentable IT failures, poor record-keeping, administrative incompetence resulting in two declarations of “not fit for purpose” in 20 years—all amount to culpable negligence in relation to migrants.

Of the more than a million estimated unlawful migrants in the UK, possibly half of them are family members of British and settled people unable to afford the fees to regularise, or people who have made a tiny mistake in a complex application, or failed asylum-seekers faced with going back to a country everyone accepts is dangerous. “Hostile environment” measures don’t work against such people. Goodhart suggests that an increase in voluntary returns may show that the hostile environment is succeeding. Sadly, at least some of those who have left have been my clients, ground down by years of Home Office refusals and delayed appeals, who have given up on ever living with their British spouse and children—rather than the nasty drug-dealers or chancers everyone hopes would be encouraged to leave.

British voters, including me, want a well-run, effective border control system. But no one would propose criminalising landlords and employers for providing services to an unlawful migrant identified by Home Office records with over 10 per cent errors. No one would restrict bank accounts or driving licences on the basis of immigration status. When the Home Office takes over a year to decide a case, during which the unlawful migrant may not work, why shouldn’t he use the family car to do the supermarket shopping? Should we criminalise unlawful migrants for shopping in Tesco’s—or criminalise Tesco’s for selling food to them?

David Goodhart is right: it is difficult to devise a humane non-racist and effective system of internal controls without requiring UK residents to hold formal ID. My own conclusion is that since a national ID card system has been formally rejected by both major political parties, we have to accept an alternative based on a shared burden of proof; flexible documentary requirements and broad-brush decision-making aimed at enabling regularisation rather than meeting spurious deportation or removal targets. Anyone who has satisfied an acceptable immigration policy should not be defined as “precarious” and placed on a grinding, expensive route to settlement, but integrated as rapidly as possible into British civil society, to encourage genuine democratic solidarity between citizens and non-citizen residents.

Sheona York, Kent Law Clinic, Canterbury

So is Peter Hitchens

Kit Wilson’s letter (“Down with tribalism”, November issue) is one of the best things I have seen in print. In the same spirit, for the moment as a small-l liberal, may I respond to Peter Hitchens’ article (“The delusions of literary dystopias”)?

Pullman, Atwood and Harris do not aim to develop an academic critique of current social trends; they do not need to acknowledge nuance and complexity, or make fair and balanced judgments. They are just writing stories, making things up—appealing to our imaginations not our intellects. They need to hold the attention of a large readership (as indeed does Hitchens), so they simplify, intensify, dramatise. Their references are Christian merely because that is the dominant religious tradition of the societies to which they and their readers belong; if they were writing for Saudi Arabia or Myanmar the references would naturally be Islamic or Buddhist.

Hitchens makes some important individual points which it would benefit us liberals to reflect on. But overall his approach is too rhetorical and too partisan; there is even a hint of victimhood. Whether in fiction, journalism or academia, nobody is waging war on Christianity. The issue is neither Christianity nor any of the creeds as a whole, but certain of their manifestations. For example, it is possible to be outraged by the style of Roman Catholicism prevalent until recently in the Irish Republic, without dismissing all Catholics as life-denying oppressors; the protestantism of Rowan Williams is a far different thing from the debauched puritanism we see all too often in the USA; and Ismaili and Sufi strains of Islam are unrecognisably distant from Salafi and Deobandi.

Of course Pullman and the others are not just entertainers, they are serious, thoughtful people. They illustrate for us how religion can be used to control and oppress, to deny essential human values. They too may be guilty of viewing religion too broadly, as a vast abstraction, but they are not “deluded”. Yes, many of my fellow liberals have reacted to these fictions over-emotionally and simplistically; but looking at Russia, Poland, and Hungary, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran, Pakistan, India and Myanmar, is our anxiety at the growing misuse of religion not justified?

Robert Bunting, Shropshire

Gut reactions

In response to Rachel Kelly’s thoughtful piece (“In the bleak midwinter”, December/January) on mental health, research is currently underway to investigate the link between mental health and the micro-biome. Micro-organisms both secrete and react to the neurotransmitters—e.g. serotonin and dopamine—with which we think. Indeed, there is more serotonin in the gut-biome than in the brain. The gut/brain axis exists; a “gut-reaction” is a reality. Antibiotics reduce the variety of gut organisms. Without the provision of a pro-biotic and counselling on the importance of a pre-biotic diet, patients with a therapeutically restricted biome easily become dependent on foods that deliver instant energy. It has been said that sugar is more addictive than cocaine.

My own opinion is that evolution is organism—not gene—driven and that the ever-adaptive immune system (of which gut-organisms constitute the driver) is the crucial link between parent and offspring. On this analysis, you cannot separate nature and nurture. Crucially, with our ever present gut-reaction to our own thoughts we have (volitionally) left behind energy-expensive instinct and developed energy-efficient, self-conscious, free will.

Christine Wheeler McNulty, Hertfordshire

The post Letters: David Goodhart is wrong — and so is Peter Hitchens appeared first on Standpoint.