Letters

Your "In Fact" list reached a new level of pointlessness in the November issue. "Winston Churchill never visited Australia." So? Next you will be telling us that Ayatollah Khomeini never wore a top hat.

John Smurthwaite
Leeds

Statistical failure 2
20th November 2006

I was surprised to see your "In Fact" column (December) claiming that parmesan cheese is the most shoplifted item in Italy. A lot of parmesan is stolen in Italy, but it is certainly not top of the list.

We carry out annual research across western and central Europe into shop crime, and produce the largest survey of retail crime in the world (the European Retail Theft Barometer). Our latest findings show that razor blades and cosmetics are the most stolen goods in Italy, followed by different varieties of hard cheese.

Theft of Parmigiano in Italy is certainly a problem, as is saffron in northern Italy and Ricard in France, but in general, the products stolen in Italy are the same products stolen all over Europe. You should not lend your name to the creation of urban myths.

Joshua Bamfield
Centre for Retail Research

Coombs's campaign 1
29th November 2006

If Derek Coombs, Prospect chairman, wishes to use his publishing interests to propagate his own meandering and incoherent diatribes against a particular individual (Letters, December), tradition demands that he should first purchase the Observer.

John Fishley
St Austell, Cornwall

Coombs's campaign 2
22nd November 2006

It is refreshing to see the Prospect chairman communicate openly with editor and readers. Would that Rupert Murdoch dealt similarly with his media outlets. I share Coombs's view of the serious damage done by Bush to America's international reputation through his reckless enthusiasm for unprovoked warfare. But is the Prospect readership really large enough in Washington's corridors of power to justify focusing the magazine's campaigning efforts on the impeachment of an American president? In the unlikely event of the campaign succeeding, the American constitution promises us Dick Cheney in his place. Would that be any improvement? Surely there are better targets much closer to home.

Rob Hull
London EC1

Civil wars 1
20th November 2006

In John Keegan and Bartle Bull's article "What is a civil war?" (December), the current conflict within Iraq is rendered into "knowledge" through the application of an a priori historical framework based almost exclusively on events in Europe and America. Why, given the authors' own invocation of "the peculiarly violent character that has been endemic to Mesopotamia since history began there 6,000 years ago," should they choose to import a set of western historical benchmarks rather than refer to the history of Iraq and its own cultural milieu?

The answer may lie in the stubborn durability of the Orientalist discourse, of which Keegan and Bull's piece is a small but near perfectly formed example. Almost all of the familiar tropes are present in one neat little package, including the sovereign gaze of the "expert" western subject; the extrapolation of specific circumstances in one Muslim country to the whole of "irreconcilably divided Islam"; the eternal, savage stasis of the ancient Orient over 6,000 years; and, of course, the assumption that templates drawn from the historical experiences of Europe and America can be applied universally to explain those of other cultures. History, it would seem, can never be indigenous to the east. It must be visited upon it by the sovereignty of western analysis and intervention.

Derek Bryce
Glasgow

Civil wars 2
27th November 2006

I was somewhat befuddled at John Keegan and Bartle Bull's narrow definition of civil war. I was even more amazed that they do not count the Roman civil wars—Caesar and Pompey—or the Yemen civil war of the 1990s among their approved list.

David Tschanz
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

Civil wars 3
20th November 2006

I was amazed to see the Chinese civil war left out of the list of "significant conflicts." It was one of the determinants of the 20th century. I was also surprised at the lack of discussion of the Vietnam and Korea conflicts. Each case featured two sides fighting to secure control of the whole country. In the case of Vietnam, one succeeded; in the case of Korea, either could have done.

Gwydion M Williams
Old Fletton, Peterborough

Civil wars 4
8th November 2006

According to Keegan and Bull's own definition, the so-called American civil war cannot be regarded as such. In that conflict, one section of the country sought to secede from the rest. The southern states sought regional independence rather than national supremacy, and the American population took sides largely according to geography. While the slavery question stoked passions on both sides, it in itself was not a war objective until the Emancipation Proclamation, which came along three years into the conflict and was an explicit tactical manoeuvre to deprive the south of human resources.

In fact, the misnamed American revolution—a nasty, brutish and rather long affair—satisfies a number of Keegan and Bull's criteria for a civil war: opposing partisans, extended classic warfare between standing armies with wide public participation on both sides, foreign intervention and national control as a prime objective.

And what of the French revolution? Surely that was a civil war of the Russian sort: radical, bloody and enormous in scope.

Ronald Mangravite
University of Miami

Civil wars 5
25th November 2006

To argue esoteric points over whether Iraq is or is not in civil war is a distraction from the real point. Opponents to the war argued that it would lead to "civil war" in Iraq. What they were referring to is precisely the chaos we are now seeing. Whether or not Iraq meets Keegan and Bull's criteria is beside the point.

Humberto Gallego
Minneapolis, US

Scottish independence 1
18th November 2006

Michael Fry's "Scots Away" (December) referred to the SNP's claim to "Scotland's oil," and to the suggestion that this justifies the huge transfer of public funds from England to Scotland under the Barnett formula. It would be good to have some authoritative statement on this from a think tank or some other body studying separation of the countries.
The position, as I understand it, is that a line was drawn horizontally at the border to divide the two sea areas for legal purposes, but should England and Scotland separate, that line would have no meaning. Instead, international rules would come into effect and the line would run at right angles to the border line. This makes a huge difference, because, on the second standard, the oil area falls about half to each country.

Yorick Wilks
Oxford

Scottish independence 2
17th November 2006

As one of your Scottish subscribers, and having been tempted by the cover of the December issue ("Why Scotland should go it alone"), I looked forward to the answer. I got it, although not from Fry's article. I found it in the very first sentence of Ben Lewis's "Private view": "We have Damien, they've got Douglas."

This is yet another example of what seems now to be an accepted truth: that south of the national border, or, more specifically, within the M25, "you" see "us" as being separate, just as "we" in Scotland see ourselves likewise. Anything else is like a Tory politician in Scotland—almost irrelevant.

Bob Pritchard
Edinburgh

Scottish indepedence 3
24th November 2006

Over 800,000 residents of England and Wales took the trouble to define themselves as Scots in an optional question in the 2001 census. Given that probably at least half as many again (me included) didn't see the point, there are probably well over 1m Scots living in England (not including English people who can count at least one Scots parent). Yet we—getting on for 20 per cent of the Scots population of Britain—will presumably have no influence whatever on a decision that may compel us to change our nationality. Of course, we cannot assume that all Scots residents of England are enthusiastic unionists, but it does at least seem likely that they have more of a vested interest than most Scots in remaining British—an option that may not survive.

Perhaps this is the West Sussex question?

David Paterson
Lightwater, Surrey

Scottish independence 4
16th November 2006

Tony Blair has said independence would be "disastrous" for Scots. But in a recent interview on the BBC website, his cabinet colleague Jack Straw seemed more concerned with the effect of Scots independence on England. Straw is quoted as saying: "Historically, England called the shots to achieve a union because [it] was seen as a way… of amplifying England's power worldwide. And the reverse would certainly be true.… [England's] voting power in the EU would diminish. We'd slip down in the world league GDP tables. Our case for staying in the G8 would diminish and there could easily be an assault on our permanent seat in the UN [security council]." Straw is effectively saying that countries like Scotland and Wales should be expected to give up aspirations to independence so that England can enjoy "amplified" international status.

But most people in Scotland want more powers for their parliament and the only way those powers will be delivered is by voting for independence. Support for independence has grown in recent years, and the non-party-political referendum campaign, Independence First attempts to maximise this support by uniting the Scottish people around our campaign for a democratic referendum.

People vote for political parties for a variety of reasons. But independence is supported by individuals on the left and right of politics, as Michael Fry's article demonstrated. The only way to get a clear idea of the Scottish public's desires on independence is to ask them directly. The current executive isn't asking because it doesn't think it will like the answer.

Joe Middleton
Independence First

Failures of the FSA
17th November 2006

In his article on the City (December), Michael Prest describes the Financial Services Authority as "one of the world's most formidable… comprehensive financial regulators."

Formidable and comprehensive it may be, but it is also one of the most incompetent and ineffective financial regulators operating anywhere in the world's financial system.

In any financial institution operating in Britain, the most junior clerk is made aware on his first day in the office that the FSA is a toothless tiger whose rules and regulations can be circumvented with ease and substantially ignored.
The policy-holders and pensioners dependent on Equitable Life and the zero dividend preference shareholders in the split level investment trusts learned to their cost that the FSA is reactive rather than proactive and does too little too late. The next fiasco—where millions will be lost while the FSA wrings its hands rather than taking preventative action—will be the failure of one, or maybe many, of the hedge funds.

Like the failure of BCCI, Polly Peck or the Maxwell empire, these events are always predictable, and experienced City operators make their plans accordingly. At least they can escape the fallout.

Robert Arnheim
South Zeal, Devon

1 per cent solution
16th November 2006

Paul Skidmore (December) is right to criticise the feeble recommendations of the Power report, but his own "1 per cent solution" takes one's breath away. You would need to go back long before 1832 to find a narrower elite. As Skidmore's critics rightly point out, his "small core of committed people" will most likely involve the usual suspects.

As Prospect has previously highlighted, a more democratic approach would be to build on US experiments in deliberative democracy, where citizens' juries are appointed by random lot to vote on issues after hearing the competing arguments of informed advocates. Patricia Hewitt has used citizens' juries as an aid to decision-making in health matters and Harriet Harman has suggested they might be valuable in foreign affairs.

But why not go the whole hog and get rid of the rusty Victorian ballot box? My book, The Party's Over: Manifesto for a Very English Revolution, shows how an executive appointed on merit could be held to account by a randomly selected legislature, which would be statistically representative of the whole population.

Keith Sutherland
Exeter, Devon

Security and liberty
26th November 2006

Former GCHQ director David Omand's recipe for balancing national security with justice for terror suspects (December) contains two double standards.

First, he calls for more surveillance but dismisses the call for phone-tap evidence to be admissible in court on the ground that if it were so simple, it would have already been done. But most countries, including the US, allow wire-tap evidence. They give their security services extra administrative resources, to type transcripts of bugged calls, for example. Allowing wire-tap evidence would reduce—although not entirely eliminate—the use of detention without trial and, for some non-nationals, deportation to Guantánamo Bay-type quasi-torture camps and worse.

Second, Omand supports Tony Blair's plan to deport foreign suspects to friendly despots, as long as they sign no-torture promises not worth the paper they're written on. Outsourcing torture is beyond the pale, whether in the guise of US-style, secret rendition (which ante-dates 9/11) or Blair's bogus legalism.

Joseph Palley
Richmond, Surrey