14th December 2006
What I find objectionable about Tom de Waal's piece (January) concerning two recently murdered Russian dissident heroes is the unwarranted slur on Boris Berezovsky's character. I hold this simple view—anyone who is against Putin is on the right side. Remember, there was a murder attempt against Berezovsky which almost succeeded.
Jeremy Putley
Harrogate, Yorkshire
No to Nasdaq
4th January 2007
Michael Prest says (January) it doesn't matter if we don't defend the London Stock Exchange (LSE). He is wrong. The LSE has been very successful and has brought vast amounts of business to this country; beneficiaries include the legal, accountancy and banking professions. Nasdaq, the American exchange which wants to take over the LSE, is likely to be much less successful and will have to borrow heavily to carry out its proposed bid.
There is no level playing field. The LSE is effectively prevented from making a successful bid for Nasdaq—Nasdaq's internal rules prevent any shareholder having more than 5 per cent of the total votes. The prospect of the LSE becoming a branch of Nasdaq makes me shudder; the head office would always win out against the branch office. So let's go to the barricades.
Keith Loudon
Redmayne-Bentley Stockbrokers
The China debate 1
14th December 2006
The most interesting point of the debate on the future of China between Will Hutton and Meghnad Desai (January) was not about China at all. What was really at issue is whether capitalism and liberal democracy are synonymous. Hutton referred not to liberal democracy per se but to "Enlightenment structures." Yet when Desai repeatedly interpreted this as meaning "liberal democratic," Hutton did not correct him—presumably because he was not in error. For Desai, capitalism "has no unique path, nor does it require a liberal democratic infrastructure to flourish." The existence of China, a one-party state, as the world's most successful capitalist economy (if growth is used as the yardstick) would appear to prove him right. But Hutton insists that China is not capitalist at all and is, in fact, "corporatist." Thus the equation of capitalism equals democracy has been saved.
To argue that capitalism is synonymous with liberal democracy, and that this coupling is inevitable, is to accept, consciously or otherwise, Francis Fukuyama's famous "end of history" thesis. It is depressing to see Will Hutton tacitly endorse this position. It probably explains why one of his concluding remarks has a strangely neocon twang to it: "We need to be confident about so-called western values and processes—and strengthen them at home and abroad." Perhaps first we need to decide whether "western values" are primarily capitalist or primarily democratic.
Sean Swan
Spokane, Washington state
The China debate 2
15th December 2006
Meghnad Desai says, "The Chinese do not suffer from western amnesia." I was dumbfounded to find an informed person spouting such nonsense. The Chinese are nothing if not masters of amnesia: just look at the way that modern as well as ancient Chinese history is still being taught to every student in the country. There is no bigger distortion of fact, no more egregious forgetting of events, on earth, except possibly in North Korea. I have lived in China for four years and can both speak and read the language. Desai obviously has never read a middle-school Chinese history text.
Lennet Daigle
Shaoxing, China
The China debate 3
24th December 2006
Will Hutton chooses to ignore the four decades at the start of the 20th century during which China did try to follow the western model, perhaps because China remained as much of a mess in the 1940s as it was in the 1910s: its economy actually shrank over this period. And only after China grew strong under Mao was America willing to let post-Mao China into the world market on favourable terms.
Gwydion M Williams
Old Fletton, Peterborough
The China debate 4
28th December 2006
I salute both Hutton and Desai for their rich dialogue about China's future. Having lived in China for the last three and a half years, and in the 1990s for nine years, I found myself agreeing sometimes with Hutton and sometimes with Desai. This is probably because we don't have one China, but two different Chinas, side by side: the modern and the backward, the promising and the deceiving, the authoritarian and the pluralistic. Yet there is a major risk: if the Chinese elite does not succeed in managing these conflicting forces, China will splinter into pieces and east Asia will face its greatest political crisis since the occupation of the major part of its territory by the Japanese. This is something the west and China's neighbours don't want to see at any cost.
Arnaldo Gonçalves
President of Luso-Asian Forum
Maths in schools
21st December 2006
Ian Benson (January) draws attention to the work of Caleb Gattegno in developing and publicising Georges Cuisenaire's ideas about maths teaching. During the late 1960s I spent three years lecturing, writing and demonstrating on behalf of the Cuisenaire Company, with the clear aim of propagating the then revolutionary idea of "algebra before arithmetic."
Despite a few brilliant successes among primary school teachers and in colleges of education, the overwhelming pragmatic response was that such a wholesale transformation could never be fitted into the timetable. And as primary teachers were not required to specialise in mathematics, an additional impediment was that successful implementation of Gattegno's ideas quickly led to small children working with concepts such as powers and set theory to levels beyond the teachers' own understanding.
David Leighton
Pewsey, Wiltshire
Canada the brave
31st December 2006
Your piece about Canada (January) describes a country many foreigners do not know of or appreciate. All too often, the image of Canada is that of a milquetoast, a boring place with no virtues apart from being a safe place to visit. I suppose that the Swiss have to endure this indignity too. But the military history of the 20th century shows that when Canadian troops were called into action, they responded with bravery and combat skill.
J Wroblewski
Vancouver, British Columbia
Myths of ancestry 1
26th December 2006
It is true, as Stephen Oppenheimer says (October), that, "The genetic evidence shows that three quarters of our ancestors came to this corner of Europe as hunter-gatherers, between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago." This is the R lineage group and most European males have an R Y chromosome.
But what is rather silly is this statement: "Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons; in fact, neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands." Angles, Saxons, Celts and Basques are not lineage groups. They are ethnic groups that developed within the last 2,000 or 3,000 years. Like most Europeans, they probably belonged to the R lineage. Most Germans, Poles, French, Spaniards and Russian also belong to the R lineage group. None of this negates the established history of the British Isles. Has Oppenheimer read the research of Weale et al—"Y Chromosome Evidence for Anglo-Saxon Mass Migration" (2002)—which shows that the male populations in two central English towns were genetically very similar, whereas those of two north Welsh towns differed significantly both from each other and from the English towns? Using novel population genetic models that incorporate both mass migration and continuous gene flow, they concluded that this was best explained by a substantial migration of Anglo-Saxon Y chromosomes into central England—but not into north Wales.
Douglas Forbes
Greenfield, Indiana
Myths of ancestry 2
4th January 2007
Interestingly, Robert Graves, in his book The White Goddess, developed a theory about early settlement of these islands similar to Stephen Oppenheimer's. Graves's evidence is based on early literary sources, mythology, local tradition and the archeology known at the time of writing. I gather that Graves is not popular among archeologists. But if you are prepared to tease out strands of DNA from human body fluids, looking through The White Goddess should be no greater challenge.
Christine Peace
Polruan, Cornwall
Scottish independence 1
5th January 2007
Michael Fry (December) says that Scotland is exceptional in Europe in having a nationalist party of the left. Not so: Sinn Féin is a party very much on the left. So much so that it was described by the Tánaiste (deputy Irish PM) Michael McDowell as Marxist.
Conn Corrigan
London SE2
Scottish independence 2
16th December 2006
There are many good arguments for Scottish independence and many against, but I can't count Michael Fry's exercise in begging the question as contributing to the former. It boils down to saying that Scots should decide for Scotland. What about the British for Britain or Shetlanders for Shetland? As to independence fostering cultural progress, Fry has forgotten his history. He may recall "the men who first brought the medical or educational advances of the modern era, far ahead of anything in England at the time," but he has chosen to forget that this happened after the Act of Union.
Any country is an idea; this certainly applies to my own country, Switzerland, but also to Britain and to Scotland. Anybody who doubts this need only consider that some of the classics of Welsh literature were written in modern Scotland; that the invaders after whom the country was named were only one of four or five peoples who contributed to the mix at the union; that by the time of the union the true Scots (Gaels) were a marginalised minority; and that Scots was not the language of the Scots but of the English. Modern Scotland owes more to Walter Scott than Robert the Bruce. Fry's argument boils down to saying that he doesn't like the idea of Britain but still signs up to that of Scotland. This is a choice to be made rationally—but not one to be disguised as natural or necessary.
Stephen Senn
Glasgow
