Surviving the big freeze
21st January 2005
Michio Kaku's cover article (February) misses the point. Rather than all trying to move to another universe when the energy from our own runs out, we should simply draw energy out of another universe.
Geoff Canyon
Los Angeles
Frothing poets
20th January 2005
Thank you for passing on (In Fact, February) the New Scientist's view that no words in English rhyme with orange, silver, purple and month. No doubt you have poets across the country frothing with rage. What English do we mean? I immediately thought of chilver: "a ewe-lamb" (SOED). Presumably the NS meant perfect rhymes. But don't half-rhymes count? Many modern writers prefer them. "Lozenge" is a half-rhyme for orange, "dunce" for month.
Lesley Chamberlain
London N6
France profonde thrives
1st February 2005
I am astonished that Tim King (February) should be so ignorant about rural France. How could he have ended up in such a dead part of this lovely country? Everybody knows that although Millau is beautiful, only a hermit would wish to live near it. No wonder he thinks rural France is dying. I have lived here for 13 years, and in my commune we are about to add two new classrooms to the primary school.
Roz Jefferies
Languidic, France
Which globalisation?
7th February 2005
Martin Wolf's response (Letters, February) to my review of his Why Globalisation Works, evokes a dark and dangerous world. For him, the shadow of the Holocaust divides everyone into the reasonable or fanatic. Wolf spares me from the label fanatic, but he still thinks I have a foot in each camp. Of course, the world is risk-laden in many respects, but Wolf's rhetoric is overblown.
Wolf lists a number of countries that have enjoyed economic success. But the point is to explain their success. For example, he cites Chile as an instance of successful liberalisation, but Chile has travelled quite a long distance from the monetarist experiments of the 1970s and now implements a number of significant industrial policies designed to develop its export industries.
It is true that poorly designed labour laws can harm employment levels, but this situation is more typically found in the countries of southern Europe than those with strong social democratic traditions, above all the Scandinavian. They have enjoyed high levels of employment, with strong elements of labour regulation and welfare measures.
The conclusion cannot be escaped: liberalisation has failed to deliver many of the gains it was expected to in diverse corners of the world, and cannot adequately explain economic success where it has actually occurred. Hence my rebuttal of Wolf's accounts of China and India.
Far from the social democratic agenda being dangerous, as Wolf suggests, it is his one-size-fits-all model of economic development—liberalisation plus global market integration—that needs to be avoided. The whole thrust of the global democratic agenda is to ensure that countries have sufficient space to develop their own economic policies according to their own circumstances and priorities.
David Held
LSE
Comatose canaries
15th January 2005
Richard Jenkyns, in his discussion (January) of Orwell and imprecision in language, devises an unfortunate simile: "You can diagnose weak thought from dead language as you can diagnose firedamp from a dead canary." As clear as this meaning is to most of us, any underground coalminer would scoff. First, canaries were used to detect carbon monoxide, known in coalmining as "white damp," not "firedamp" (which is largely methane). Second, the canary would most likely not be dead, but agitated or unconscious. Weak thought, it seems, can arise not only from dead language, but also from presumably dead canaries.
Doug Linzey
Hantsport, Nova Scotia
NHS tinkering 1
2nd February 2005
My views about the NHS are not as daft as some of those attributed to me by Simon Stevens (February) in his review of my book Hippocratic Oaths. When I criticise the constant structural reorganisation of the NHS, this is not because I am "a defender of an inadequate and haphazard status quo." Clinicians are instinctive reformers; they have led the introduction of new treatments and new ways of delivering services. What we object to are endless ill-thought out, evidence-free ideas, interminable policy U-turns, and initiatives—like the current bunch: foundation trusts, payment by results, diagnostic and treatment centres, patient choice, and the mandatory use of the private sector—which undermine each other. Unremitting turbulence is bad for an organisation in the complex, serious business of caring for sick people.
I am unenthusiastic about PFI not because I am reactionary but because it is a terrible deal for the taxpayer. As Allyson Pollock has shown in her brilliant NHS plc, this, and the wider involvement of the private sector, is turning the NHS into one of the biggest pork barrels in history.
I cheered when Labour came to power in 1997. I cheered even harder when in 2000 Blair committed his government to resourcing the NHS properly. I didn't realise the price tag: the marginalisation of frontline expertise by think-tanked-up political power. This is why I stopped cheering.
Raymond Tallis
Salford
NHS tinkering 2
24th January 2005
Simon Stevens, the government's former health adviser, says in a casual tone which probably illuminates the received wisdom in Downing Street, "Watergate helped to poison political journalism." No it didn't. Nixon's crimes helped to poison democratic politics. The journalists who exposed them remain role models.
The present debate about the allegedly "corrosive" effect of modern British journalism often emanates from less than disinterested parties. I would have preferred it, for example, if Simon Stevens had made it clear, during his interesting analysis of the fluid role of the market in the NHS, that he has been the target of some "corrosive" journalism himself in the Guardian, as a result of leaving his government position to take up a post with the US corporation UnitedHealth.
David Leigh
The Guardian
Political Islam
21st January 2005
Michael Hirsh's attack on Bernard Lewis (February) makes trenchant points, but it overlooks some facts: 1) Kemalism succeeded in producing a durable democracy in Turkey, and did so by marginalising Islamic law and Islamic customs; as yet there has been no rival success story for democracy among middle eastern countries with a Muslim majority. 2) The example has been followed in one respect throughout the middle east—namely by the creation, adoption or imposition of the nation state rather than the religious community as the core political unit, and by the adoption of European codes of law in place of Shari'a. 3) The tensions in the region arise partly because the nation state sits unhappily on communities which define themselves by their religious obedience. Iraq was created by the Sykes-Picot accords, and corresponds to no real territorial loyalty among the people who live there.
Finally, Hirsh identifies the Arabs with Islam. The Arabs are a linguistic and not a religious group. And of the two Arabic-speaking provinces of the old Ottoman empire that have evolved towards a shared sense of national identity one—Lebanon—was, until recently, largely Christian, and the other—Egypt—possesses a big Christian minority committed to constitutional government.
Such facts are relevant to the question of Islamic democracy, as raised by Bartle Bull in the same issue. Noah Feldman's hopes for Iraq crucially depend upon a national loyalty that can broker the competing loyalties of tribe, faith, language and ethnic group. It is true, as Feldman emphasises, that Islam stresses the sovereignty of law, but the law in question is laid down by God, and gives no authority to a nation, a territory or a man-made constitution. The centuries-old attempt by Christianity to find divine authority for a purely secular jurisdiction has no parallel, to my knowledge, in Islamic political thought.
Roger Scruton
Brinkworth, Wiltshire
Myth of Islamophobia 1
30th January 2005
Kenan Malik (February) redefines Islamophobia to mean violent and overt hostility towards Muslims on our streets by racists and the police. But Malik's conception is at odds with virtually every source cited in his article. Ever since the term "Islamophobia" entered the mainstream after the 1997 Runnymede report on Islamophobia, it has been understood to entail a fear of and prejudice against Muslims. This may manifest itself in ways other than physical attacks by racists or disproportionate arrests.
Malik also fails to recognise how and why the likes of the BNP, for fear of being prosecuted under our incitement to race hate laws, switched their strategy from targeting racial groups to explicitly targeting British Muslims as a faith group. Malik omitted any mention of the northern riots of 2001 and the key role played by the BNP's Muslim-baiting. Gallingly, he then criticises the government's proposals to close the loophole in our legislation and prohibit incitement to religious hatred. Does Malik—who describes himself as an anti-racist—think that the BNP should be allowed to continue its incitement because it is merely anti-Muslim?
Inayat Bunglawala
Muslim Council of Britain
Myth of Islamophobia 2
7th February 2005
My own experience among Muslims, in my role as a GP and as an active member of the community, is that hostility towards Muslims because of their religion has dramatically increased since 11th September 2001.
The statistical data is neither large nor specific enough to prove or disprove the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Malik is critical of those who draw firm conclusions from such statistics, yet does the same. It is absurd to say that the 300 per cent increase in stop and search "among Asians" is a consequence of their living near Heathrow, or that only about half of these are Muslims because only about half of all Asians are Muslim.
Neither seeking "victim status" nor new legislation is likely to curtail what I see as the main cause of the hostile atmosphere to Islam in society: a climate of fear of political Islam deliberately inspired as part of the "war on terror." In the long run, robust expression and explanation of Islamic thoughts and practises will do more to address these root causes of Islamophobia.
Many of us are actively engaging in this but have met with mixed responses. The chattering classes, it seems, prefer a chat with those whose views differ very little from their own. The real challenge is to embrace an "intelligent conversation" with those who admit to differences with the mainstream of society.
Abdul Wahid
Hizb ut-Tahrir, London
21st January 2005
Michio Kaku's cover article (February) misses the point. Rather than all trying to move to another universe when the energy from our own runs out, we should simply draw energy out of another universe.
Geoff Canyon
Los Angeles
Frothing poets
20th January 2005
Thank you for passing on (In Fact, February) the New Scientist's view that no words in English rhyme with orange, silver, purple and month. No doubt you have poets across the country frothing with rage. What English do we mean? I immediately thought of chilver: "a ewe-lamb" (SOED). Presumably the NS meant perfect rhymes. But don't half-rhymes count? Many modern writers prefer them. "Lozenge" is a half-rhyme for orange, "dunce" for month.
Lesley Chamberlain
London N6
France profonde thrives
1st February 2005
I am astonished that Tim King (February) should be so ignorant about rural France. How could he have ended up in such a dead part of this lovely country? Everybody knows that although Millau is beautiful, only a hermit would wish to live near it. No wonder he thinks rural France is dying. I have lived here for 13 years, and in my commune we are about to add two new classrooms to the primary school.
Roz Jefferies
Languidic, France
Which globalisation?
7th February 2005
Martin Wolf's response (Letters, February) to my review of his Why Globalisation Works, evokes a dark and dangerous world. For him, the shadow of the Holocaust divides everyone into the reasonable or fanatic. Wolf spares me from the label fanatic, but he still thinks I have a foot in each camp. Of course, the world is risk-laden in many respects, but Wolf's rhetoric is overblown.
Wolf lists a number of countries that have enjoyed economic success. But the point is to explain their success. For example, he cites Chile as an instance of successful liberalisation, but Chile has travelled quite a long distance from the monetarist experiments of the 1970s and now implements a number of significant industrial policies designed to develop its export industries.
It is true that poorly designed labour laws can harm employment levels, but this situation is more typically found in the countries of southern Europe than those with strong social democratic traditions, above all the Scandinavian. They have enjoyed high levels of employment, with strong elements of labour regulation and welfare measures.
The conclusion cannot be escaped: liberalisation has failed to deliver many of the gains it was expected to in diverse corners of the world, and cannot adequately explain economic success where it has actually occurred. Hence my rebuttal of Wolf's accounts of China and India.
Far from the social democratic agenda being dangerous, as Wolf suggests, it is his one-size-fits-all model of economic development—liberalisation plus global market integration—that needs to be avoided. The whole thrust of the global democratic agenda is to ensure that countries have sufficient space to develop their own economic policies according to their own circumstances and priorities.
David Held
LSE
Comatose canaries
15th January 2005
Richard Jenkyns, in his discussion (January) of Orwell and imprecision in language, devises an unfortunate simile: "You can diagnose weak thought from dead language as you can diagnose firedamp from a dead canary." As clear as this meaning is to most of us, any underground coalminer would scoff. First, canaries were used to detect carbon monoxide, known in coalmining as "white damp," not "firedamp" (which is largely methane). Second, the canary would most likely not be dead, but agitated or unconscious. Weak thought, it seems, can arise not only from dead language, but also from presumably dead canaries.
Doug Linzey
Hantsport, Nova Scotia
NHS tinkering 1
2nd February 2005
My views about the NHS are not as daft as some of those attributed to me by Simon Stevens (February) in his review of my book Hippocratic Oaths. When I criticise the constant structural reorganisation of the NHS, this is not because I am "a defender of an inadequate and haphazard status quo." Clinicians are instinctive reformers; they have led the introduction of new treatments and new ways of delivering services. What we object to are endless ill-thought out, evidence-free ideas, interminable policy U-turns, and initiatives—like the current bunch: foundation trusts, payment by results, diagnostic and treatment centres, patient choice, and the mandatory use of the private sector—which undermine each other. Unremitting turbulence is bad for an organisation in the complex, serious business of caring for sick people.
I am unenthusiastic about PFI not because I am reactionary but because it is a terrible deal for the taxpayer. As Allyson Pollock has shown in her brilliant NHS plc, this, and the wider involvement of the private sector, is turning the NHS into one of the biggest pork barrels in history.
I cheered when Labour came to power in 1997. I cheered even harder when in 2000 Blair committed his government to resourcing the NHS properly. I didn't realise the price tag: the marginalisation of frontline expertise by think-tanked-up political power. This is why I stopped cheering.
Raymond Tallis
Salford
NHS tinkering 2
24th January 2005
Simon Stevens, the government's former health adviser, says in a casual tone which probably illuminates the received wisdom in Downing Street, "Watergate helped to poison political journalism." No it didn't. Nixon's crimes helped to poison democratic politics. The journalists who exposed them remain role models.
The present debate about the allegedly "corrosive" effect of modern British journalism often emanates from less than disinterested parties. I would have preferred it, for example, if Simon Stevens had made it clear, during his interesting analysis of the fluid role of the market in the NHS, that he has been the target of some "corrosive" journalism himself in the Guardian, as a result of leaving his government position to take up a post with the US corporation UnitedHealth.
David Leigh
The Guardian
Political Islam
21st January 2005
Michael Hirsh's attack on Bernard Lewis (February) makes trenchant points, but it overlooks some facts: 1) Kemalism succeeded in producing a durable democracy in Turkey, and did so by marginalising Islamic law and Islamic customs; as yet there has been no rival success story for democracy among middle eastern countries with a Muslim majority. 2) The example has been followed in one respect throughout the middle east—namely by the creation, adoption or imposition of the nation state rather than the religious community as the core political unit, and by the adoption of European codes of law in place of Shari'a. 3) The tensions in the region arise partly because the nation state sits unhappily on communities which define themselves by their religious obedience. Iraq was created by the Sykes-Picot accords, and corresponds to no real territorial loyalty among the people who live there.
Finally, Hirsh identifies the Arabs with Islam. The Arabs are a linguistic and not a religious group. And of the two Arabic-speaking provinces of the old Ottoman empire that have evolved towards a shared sense of national identity one—Lebanon—was, until recently, largely Christian, and the other—Egypt—possesses a big Christian minority committed to constitutional government.
Such facts are relevant to the question of Islamic democracy, as raised by Bartle Bull in the same issue. Noah Feldman's hopes for Iraq crucially depend upon a national loyalty that can broker the competing loyalties of tribe, faith, language and ethnic group. It is true, as Feldman emphasises, that Islam stresses the sovereignty of law, but the law in question is laid down by God, and gives no authority to a nation, a territory or a man-made constitution. The centuries-old attempt by Christianity to find divine authority for a purely secular jurisdiction has no parallel, to my knowledge, in Islamic political thought.
Roger Scruton
Brinkworth, Wiltshire
Myth of Islamophobia 1
30th January 2005
Kenan Malik (February) redefines Islamophobia to mean violent and overt hostility towards Muslims on our streets by racists and the police. But Malik's conception is at odds with virtually every source cited in his article. Ever since the term "Islamophobia" entered the mainstream after the 1997 Runnymede report on Islamophobia, it has been understood to entail a fear of and prejudice against Muslims. This may manifest itself in ways other than physical attacks by racists or disproportionate arrests.
Malik also fails to recognise how and why the likes of the BNP, for fear of being prosecuted under our incitement to race hate laws, switched their strategy from targeting racial groups to explicitly targeting British Muslims as a faith group. Malik omitted any mention of the northern riots of 2001 and the key role played by the BNP's Muslim-baiting. Gallingly, he then criticises the government's proposals to close the loophole in our legislation and prohibit incitement to religious hatred. Does Malik—who describes himself as an anti-racist—think that the BNP should be allowed to continue its incitement because it is merely anti-Muslim?
Inayat Bunglawala
Muslim Council of Britain
Myth of Islamophobia 2
7th February 2005
My own experience among Muslims, in my role as a GP and as an active member of the community, is that hostility towards Muslims because of their religion has dramatically increased since 11th September 2001.
The statistical data is neither large nor specific enough to prove or disprove the phenomenon of Islamophobia. Malik is critical of those who draw firm conclusions from such statistics, yet does the same. It is absurd to say that the 300 per cent increase in stop and search "among Asians" is a consequence of their living near Heathrow, or that only about half of these are Muslims because only about half of all Asians are Muslim.
Neither seeking "victim status" nor new legislation is likely to curtail what I see as the main cause of the hostile atmosphere to Islam in society: a climate of fear of political Islam deliberately inspired as part of the "war on terror." In the long run, robust expression and explanation of Islamic thoughts and practises will do more to address these root causes of Islamophobia.
Many of us are actively engaging in this but have met with mixed responses. The chattering classes, it seems, prefer a chat with those whose views differ very little from their own. The real challenge is to embrace an "intelligent conversation" with those who admit to differences with the mainstream of society.
Abdul Wahid
Hizb ut-Tahrir, London
