I found your article “Everybody’s talking” most interesting and inspiring (Magazine). Although the circumstances outlined differ from mine (growing up in rural Wales in the 1950s), I see many parallels with issues and concerns raised by parents whose first language was not English.
I remember the debate among adults as to whether they should speak English or Welsh to their children. The arguments centred on whether it would confuse the child and prevent successful language development and, anyway, you “needed English to get on” in life. Welsh was widely seen as a dying language. Thankfully, that has been assuredly disproved.
Looking back at how a working knowledge of both languages helped me, it provided me with an unconscious resource. When learning French, I found it no trouble to understand that tenses could be expressed in different ways; nor did we need an explanation of tu and vous (Welsh ti and chwi). There was an elasticity of the mind. Added to that is the richness of the culture – stories, songs, history, poetry – most of it effortlessly listened to and embraced. This has never left me even though I have spent most of my adult life in England. I have been very fortunate and benefited greatly from the richness of both languages.
Susan Hook
Westbury on Trym, Bristol
Muddled thinking on schools
Kenan Malik says that what he calls the regulatory state has “created organisational incoherence and fragmentation” and gives as examples railways, water, energy and the NHS (“It’s no wonder I couldn’t see a GP: limiting access to services is the point”, Comment).
School education in England is an equally striking example. Turning over as many state schools as possible to a disparate array of private owners has brought muddle and lack of local accountability. At the last count there were more than 2,500 trusts responsible for nearly 10,000 schools and the government wants to cover the whole system. The size of trusts varies from one school to 75, there are huge regional differences and major problems of oversight. No other comparable country has gone down such a radical road, for good reason. This kind of shift has the merit of shielding the state from democratic pressures because the structures are so bemusing and impenetrable.
Emeritus Professor Ron Glatter
Boxmoor, Hemel Hempstead
Hertfordshire
Objective truth? Hmmm
Clive Myrie rightly champions “objective truth” as part of the BBC’s mission (“Opinion is cheap and easy. The BBC’s mission is to deliver facts and evidence”, Comment). However, the much trumpeted term “impartiality” entered the lexicon of “Newspeak” when David Jordan, the BBC’s director of editorial policy, told a House of Lords committee that “if a lot of people believed in a flat Earth we’d need to address it more”. False equivalence is not a bulwark against bias: it is moral relativism.
Tom Hardy
London N5
Austerity doesn’t work
Phillip Inman claims that in his first budgets George Osborne worked every trick to prevent the national debt ratio from reaching 100% (“Now we’re in the 100% debt club, where’s the plan to spend our borrowings wisely?”, Business).
Yes, but unfortunately they were the wrong tricks. Through his shock doctrine austerity, he sucked confidence and demand out of the economy and the debt-to-GDP ratio grew massively instead of shrinking. Alistair Darling had got the economy going again with his more balanced stewardship and all David Cameron and Osborne had to do was continue on his path, but balance and moderation are not in the Thatcherite textbook.
Why is there all this fuss about 100%? After the Second World War, the debt was about 250%. Well, this is a wartime situation in peacetime. History is plain: Eric Geddes in the 1920s, Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe in 1980 and Cameron and Osborne in 2010. Friedmanite shock therapy simply makes things worse.
David Redshaw
Saltdean, East Sussex
Johnson’s unjust deserts
I was incredulous to read in Andrew Rawnsley’s article that ex-premiers could claim £115,000 a year from the taxpayer (“Boris Johnson’s dreams of a comeback will be a nightmare for Liz Truss”, Comment). What can possibly be the justification for this, when we know of the potential for excessive high earnings that these individuals enjoy and so many in our society are currently suffering financially?
Hilary Callaway
London SW15
Dredging up the dirt
Shanti Das nicely highlights the denial of the authorities over dredging and the poisoning of sea creatures at, and south of, the Tees estuary (“What is killing all the crabs on these beaches? Is it nature… or dredging?”, News). Longshore drift is the phenomenon whereby sediment and pebbles are moved parallel to the coast by tides and currents. On this bit of coast, the predominant direction of this drift is north-south, so pollutants in the river or delivered at its mouth would be driven south to Redcar and Saltburn, as Das points out (Seaton Carew, although north of Teesmouth, would get pollutants by tidal backwash exceptionally taking them north).
Unless a land-based polluter can be isolated, dredging has to be the source of the chemical pyridine and longshore drift is taking it to the aquatic organisms and the beaches.
Jonathan Hauxwell
Crosshills, North Yorkshire
I’m rich… get me out of here!
There is nothing new in the idea of the wealthy using money to distance themselves from the hardships of poverty (“Step this way and avoid the apocalypse”, the New Review). The concept was described in Ben Elton’s 1989 masterpiece Stark, a fictional tale of a secret consortium of the super-wealthy planning to leave the Earth they have condemned to death and live in self-supporting space stations.
Over the centuries, rich people have elected to seek escape from hardship. The people of the coastal regions of the Arabian peninsula would move to oases when the summer heat by the sea was unbearable. Rich families in India would move up into the hills where it was cooler. Industrialists in Europe have seaside homes to escape from the oppression of the summers and the pollution they have helped to cause. The greatest frustration of the super-wealthy is that, although money can buy immunity, it cannot buy immortality.
Matt Minshall
Batz-sur-Mer, Brittany, France
