Heritage lottery fund
27th October 2004
In her article on the Heritage Lottery Fund (November), Annabel Freyberg says that the Sheffield pop museum had been funded by the Millennium Commission. This is not the case. She also described the Earth Centre in Doncaster as a failure. We think this is inaccurate.
Mike O'Connor
Director, Millennium Commission
Le grand mystificateur
3rd November 2004
Jonathan Rée's farewell to Derrida (November) divides the world into "an ignorant public that either loved or hated him and a band of esoteric insiders." He omits to note that it is perfectly possible to have read and understood Derrida (as I was ordered to when my PhD was first turned down at UCL in the late 1980s) and still to think him a mere grand mystificateur who lived and wrote a century too late to be of interest to anyone who knows their Nietzsche.
James Hawes
Cardiff
The case for aerobics
28th October 2004
In his article on school sport (November), Matt Cavanagh says, "If competitive sport is better at getting children fit, there is surely a case for making it compulsory." My experience of rounders, hockey and cricket at school consisted of long periods of standing around interspersed with occasional short bursts of running. The same amount of time spent doing a non-competitive sport like aerobics would have been far better for my fitness levels.
Mary Levy
Cambridge
Why is Bollywood so bad?
27th October 2004
While I agree with Mark Cousins's rather bleak assessment (November) of the majority of India's cinematic output, I find his explanations, all in one short paragraph at the end of the article, to be superficial.
I would like to have heard more about the derivation of Indian cinema "from Hindu aesthetics" and on how the policies of the last government "coincided with a spell of cinematic complacency." I hate to jump to conclusions, but compared to the knowledge Cousins displays of other countries, the superficiality of this paragraph makes me think that he has simply repeated clichés he has overheard.
Rajan Venkataraman
Santiago, Chile
Godfrey Hounsfield
25th October 2004
I was the director of systems research at EMI in the 1970s and the late Godfrey Hounsfield reported to me. He was a great, modest, admirable human being. Richard Lambert's references to Godfrey (October) as a typical self-educated boffin did him insufficient justice.
In patent fees alone, his major invention - the computerised tomography X-ray scanner - brought EMI £250m worth of royalties. This covered the whole laboratory budget for a number of years and funded the building of a completely new research centre. Before Godfrey, X-ray images of the brain gave very limited information because all details were superimposed. When he first revealed his brain images at a major US medical conference, the whole audience emitted a loud spontaneous gasp and burst into loud applause.
Alan Blay
Kenley, Surrey
Tories left or right
13th October 2004
Robin Harris's argument (October) that the Tory party is struggling because it is not right-wing enough was elegantly written, consistently argued and completely wrong-headed. He assumes that the problems of Britain in 2004 are the same as the problems of the 1970s which Thatcherism tackled, and in many cases solved. But this is manifestly not the case, so just as the Labour party eventually had to change itself to make itself electable, so does the Conservative party. We Conservatives should not imitate Blair, but we should learn from him. Just as the hard left needed to be pushed to the margins of Labour, so the hard right should not set the tone for the Conservatives.
The main lesson which Robin neglects is the need to maximise support, rather than drive away those he regards as insufficiently ideologically pure. He exults in his claim that: "There is no longer a Tory centre and there are no Tory centrist MPs." Happily for the party, this is nonsense, but the fact that it can be welcomed by someone who wants to see a Conservative government shows how deep and damaging the wounds of 1990s factionalism still are. Michael Howard was right to aspire to leading the party from its centre when he took over, because that way lies both sanity in policy and electoral success.
Damian Green MP
Ashford, Kent
British Euroscepticism 1
27th October 2004
Anand Menon's view (November) that Britain has to date been very successful at preventing further European integration in areas such as tax harmonisation misses the point. The European court of justice has been far more successful than French and German politicians at harmonising the disparate EU tax systems. The court has repeatedly ruled that key planks of national tax law in various member states breach the principles of free movement of capital and freedom of establishment. In the last 12 months alone there have been three cases (the French du Saillant, the Finnish Manninen and the German Lankhorst cases) which will radically change UK tax law.
This is a silent revolution which no one foresaw - either at the treasury or in industry - when Britain joined the (then) EEC. It is appointed judges rather than elected politicians who will drive integration forward.
Brian Mulholland
Richmond
British Euroscepticism 2
4th November 2004
Anand Menon claims that the proposed EU constitution is "far less radical" than the treaties that preceded it. This is a serious misjudgement.
The constitution contains many specific policies and objectives which would mark a radical transfer of power. Making the charter of fundamental rights legally binding will have a major impact on our legal system and our economy. The moves towards majority voting in foreign policy are dramatic. The constitution's proposals in home affairs, which would mean the harmonisation of both legal procedures and sentencing, would also have big implications.
The heart of any decent constitution should be a clear division of powers. But the text defines most powers as "shared," meaning that member states can only act if the EU chooses not to. This institutionalises the gradual drift of powers to the centre.
Over the coming decades EU member states will face serious economic challenges from powerful competitors in China and India. Europe's workforce will age and shrink, and will have to support a growing number of pensioners. The constitution does nothing to tackle these challenges.
What makes this all so disappointing is that EU leaders had at last seemed to acknowledge that Europe has serious problems. The Laeken declaration of 2001 said that citizens "feel that deals are all too often cut out of their sight" and called on the EU to stop intervening in "matters best left to member states."
Vote No has been set up by leading businesspeople and economists who believe that if Europe is going to succeed in the modern world it needs a fresh start. Real pro-Europeans should vote "no." By rejecting the constitution, we can make Europe's leaders listen and come up with a better plan.
Neil O'Brien
Campaign director, Vote No
British Euroscepticism 3
25th October 2004
Anand Menon argues that the EU constitutional treaty "introduces only minimal changes." Nevertheless, he says the referendum "has to be won." But if the effect of the treaty is so small, why is it imperative that British voters accept it? Menon's answer is that much of the debate in the run-up to the vote will concern EU membership itself rather than the details of the treaty, so that a "no" vote "would be viewed in many quarters as a vote against continued British participation." The merits of membership will enter the debate. That won't, however, alter the actual subject of the vote. A "no" vote would reject the treaty, no more and no less, and would be a poor basis for inferences about the outcome of an EU membership vote.
Menon observes that the French press has been full of articles wondering whether to support "a text that enshrines an 'Anglo-Saxon' EU." So it has. But that hardly supports his claim that if Britain votes "no," other member states may implement as much as possible of the treaty without British participation; and might even form an "EU mark 2" for that purpose, leaving Britain in a "rump EU." Are we to suppose that national governments in the rest of the EU will go out of their way to adopt a treaty that has minimal effect and that they perceive to be Anglo-Saxon?
Brian Hindley
London School of Economics
John Gray on atheism
25th October 2004
John Gray's critique of atheism (November) misses the target. Let me count some of the ways. "Few unbelievers know much about the diversity of contemporary religious thought and practice," he says. True, but few believers do either, so the criticism applies as much to the religious as to atheists.
"It is a commonplace that atheists are often extremely dogmatic in their unbelief - more so than many Christians." A commonplace, but a false one. As I argue in my book on atheism, there is a difference between having a settled, firm belief and being dogmatic in it. Most atheists are fully aware of the fallibility of their beliefs. In contrast, the religious often say that they "know" that God exists, with as much misplaced certainty as Gray has in his diagnosis of atheist errors. Gray argues that, "the core of most religions is not doctrinal... its heart is in practice." There is some truth in this, which intelligent atheists accept. That is why both I and Simon Blackburn have recently talked about the value of the religious attitude without religious belief. Nonetheless, the major religions of Europe and America do persist in preaching doctrines, and so long as they do so it is perfectly reasonable for their critics to address them.
Gray also repeats the myth that "atheists... emerge only in reaction against monotheism." The absurdity of this is shown by the fact that if no one in human history had ever believed in the divine or supernatural, we would all be atheists.
He goes on: "No values follow logically from the denial of the Christian God." Who ever thought they did? What kind of naive atheist believes that "unbelief goes with liberal values," as Gray suggests? Gray does not want us to judge religion by the simple-minded followers who preach jihad and believe in the literal resurrection of Christ, so he should not judge atheists by the more rashly optimistic who see atheism as a panacea for all ills. Similarly, it is as facile to judge atheism on the record of fascism and communism (which in any case were rarely entirely atheist) as it is to condemn all religion on the basis of the inquisitions.
The real pity is that Gray has many interesting things to say, things with which atheists would agree. Why then does he persist in framing his critiques as anti-atheist diatribes? The atheists and humanists I know simply don't recognise themselves from Gray's caricatures.
Julian Baggini
London N22
