20th July 2006
Are we meant to sympathise with your columnist Dan Kuper (July) for his dreary working life underground? As a commuter who has to fork out a huge sum every year to travel on the tube, I find Kuper's casual attitude to his work most irritating. His admission that staff were bunking off from manning the ticket gates to watch the World Cup is typical. He wouldn't last long in the private sector.
Robert Low
London NW6
Strung out
9th August 2006
I share some of his doubts about string theory, but John Horgan is over-pessimistic (August). It is true that string theory does not yet answer most of the questions asked of it, although as Horgan acknowledges, several key theoretical problems have been solved over the last 20 years. The need for new experimental data is indeed pressing, and Horgan is right that it may never be possible to build an accelerator capable of testing the theory. But he does not reflect on the opportunity of using "nature's particle accelerator"—the hot, dense universe immediately after the big bang. Our current "concordance" model of the universe does not account for about 95 per cent of the energy in the universe; plenty of scope for physicists, stringy or not, to get their hands dirty.
Chris Lintott
University College London
English questions 1
7th August 2006
I suggest that a basic issue driving the current debate on the "English question" (August) is the demise of the Conservative party in both Scotland and Wales. As the party seems unable to recover in these places, owing to the perception that it is an English party, the Conservatives could do themselves a favour by dissolving themselves there. This would make way for local right-wing parties that would provide the Scots and Welsh with an alternative to the present clutter of leftish parties and provide the Conservatives in Westminster with partners; similar to the CSU in Bavaria.
Hugh Gilfedder
Welton, Lincolnshire
English questions 2
26th July 2006
In his piece "The East Lothian Answer" (August), Malcolm Rifkind wrote, "This is not a quarrel between England and Scotland. Every survey of Scottish opinion shows that a very big majority of Scots agree that English MPs should have the last word on legislation in parliament that affects only England."
Among activists seeking an English parliament, Rifkind has become notorious for quoting unsubstantiated Scottish surveys. Real surveys actually reveal that the percentage of Scots wanting to see England with some kind of self-determination is lower than other Britons. YouGov polls of England's governance show that in 2004, 72 per cent of those outside Scotland wanted English votes on English laws, whereas in Scotland it was a grudging 50 per cent.
Frankly, who cares what the Scots want for England? As an Englishman living in England, I was not consulted about Scottish devolution. The English question (not the West Lothian question) should be answered by the people of England (not East Lothian) via a referendum that includes the option of an English parliament.
Stephen Gash
Carlisle
Educating Akello
6th August 2006
I am one of the directors of Kitgum Town College, the subject of Richard Dowden's "Educating Akello" (August). I concur with Richard on how hard it is to educate children in northern Uganda, now entering its 20th year of war. Not only has the war displaced and impoverished 1.5m people, but the trauma it has caused, especially to children, is immeasurable. This is why, as Richard discovered, it can be very discouraging trying to help our children. His experience of finding his support for Akello Corine abused is just one in a thousand cases we have experienced since creating our school in 1999. Many of our students are formerly abducted children, child soldiers, or child-mothers who, in one way or another, were sexually abused in refugee camps.
Kitgum Town College is a young school that has grown rapidly over the last three years. It was founded by a group of young university graduates because there was a ban on recruitment of secondary school teachers in government schools. With limited financial support from parents, well-wishers and some agencies, we have tried to meet the minimum standard required by the ministry of education.
Educating children in a war-torn area requires patience, sacrifice and humility. There is just one thing that keeps us working under these conditions: these are our children and their future lies in our hands. My appeal to those who care about Uganda is to help us save this young generation.
Owot Fred
Director, Kitgum Town College
Lives of crime
9th August 2006
Prospect readers should know that David Rose's "Lives of Crime" (August) is a press release for the "hereditarian" case in criminology. As a journalist, Rose should have taken the trouble to understand the range of informed opinions. Instead he has acted as a press officer for one party in this contested area of academic research. (He does make passing reference to an article I wrote in the journal Criminal Justice Matters, opposing the views he advocates.)
One example will suffice. Rose reproduces without question the oldest hereditarian argument in the book: "Studies of twins and adopted children had already established that anti-social behaviour is likely to be partly inherited. Identical twin pairs, who share the same genes, have been shown to be more likely to share antisocial traits than fraternal, non-identical ones."
The technical arguments against these twin studies have been established and re-established for over 30 years. Rose hasn't taken the trouble to report them. First, when twin pairs are given questionnaires, identical twin pairs often give more similar responses than do non-identical fraternal twins. This extra similarity is then simply assumed to be the result of the extra genetic similarity of the identical twins. This, in the jargon, is the confusion between parameter estimation and hypothesis testing. The investigators assume the result they need to prove.
Second, there are no experimental controls. No twin study over the last 30 years has compared same-sex fraternal twins to opposite-sex fraternal twins to see if these differences in similarity are comparable to the differences in similarity that may be observed between identical and fraternal twins.
Third, standard errors are routinely omitted in calculations of heritability estimates. In one famous paper, a heritability estimate of 70 per cent proved to be not significantly different from zero once standard errors of the estimate were taken into account.
Joseph Schwartz
John Bowlby Centre, London
Talking to terrorists
22nd July 2006
Breadth of vision is not to be expected from Dean Godson as he peers out from the mental bunker in which he has taken refuge from the modern world. But I resent the suggestion of his article "Gone Native" (July) that I am defeatist with regard to terrorism or scornful of parliamentary procedures. Establishing connections with the IRA leadership in the early 1970s (as I did) was not an enterprise for the faint-hearted. The steps were minutely monitored by the then government at the highest level, and the result of the 1975 ceasefire with which I was associated was a sharp decline in the willingness of the nationalist community to countenance terrorism. Years later, Martin McGuinness said it had caused irreparable damage to the IRA.
Subsequent moves which facilitated the start of the "peace process" also had nothing to do with misrepresenting the true position of government, as Godson alleges. Quite the contrary. It was a main concern in such discussions to represent the government's determination to maintain the rights of the majority in Northern Ireland and to illustrate the security forces' capability to sustain indefinitely the policy of "containment."
The impulse to terrorism is a contagion fed by discontent. The causes of discontent, and the means of its transmission, must be studied and understood if the mix of responses necessary to making progress against terrorism, beginning with imaginative and powerful security measures, is to be formed. Lazy minds prefer to simplify such a complex problem. Terrorists and those who sympathise with them are "evil" or mad, their behaviour calling for ever more repressive legislation. But now we learn that a significant portion of the Muslim population of Britain regards the July bombers as martyrs. Should we write off that part of our community as deranged? Or should we make the effort to understand why and how they came to this position? In promoting understanding of this and other aspects of the phenomenon, Alastair Crooke—Dean Godson's other target—makes an important contribution.
Michael Oatley
Sherborne, Dorset
Global inequality
24th July 2006
Robert Wade's article on globalisation (July) was half right. As he argues, if you take China out of the statistics, the much-trumpeted reductions in global poverty and inequality look distinctly shaky. However, China is not the only Asian success story. Wade argues that it is valid to airbrush China out of the picture because it "got richer with a form of capitalism very different from that enjoined by the liberal argument." While it is true that financial intermediation and the drivers of corporate expansion are different in China compared to the capitalist north—for example, Chinese capital-account liberalisation has been much more gradual and has really paid off—the gap may be narrowing.
On Latin America, Wade is quite right. Bar the last few years, growth in Latin America was much higher during the postwar mixed economy era than in the era of purer market economies (except in Chile). Indeed, perception that market-oriented policies have had limited success in Latin America has encouraged voters in much of the region to move left.
Perhaps the most interesting issue posed by Wade is the question of when, if ever, inequality will be dealt with by rich countries out of self-interest. Wade is pessimistic—the rich are unlikely to address inequality as long as "liberal globalisation is working so well for them." But soon the rich countries will need large middle classes in Brazil, Indonesia, China, India and South Africa to purchase their goods and services. Will they then redesign the international trade and finance regime to help developing economies sustain growth? The worry is that growing global inequalities will precipitate an economic or political catastrophe before this self-interest is recognised and acted upon.
Lawrence Haddad,
Stephany Griffith-Jones,
Institute of Development Studies
