PANORAMA AND GREG DYKE
2nd December 2002
Referring to my history of Panorama (December) David Lipsey asks: "I wonder what Lindley would have made of its recent programme on corruption in horseracing." Far from finding it, as he does, "a Chinese meal, tasty but hardly satisfying," I thought it very good. Immediately following the programme, the minister for sport announced that he wanted "new arrangements for the regulation of racing which achieve the necessary degree of independence and wider accountability." That sounds like a pretty effective programme to me.
It is not Panorama's journalism that is the problem but its diminished status as an occasional series broadcast late on Sunday. That's down to the director general and ultimately the BBC governors, and here Lipsey hits the right target. Greg Dyke's pursuit of ratings does need reining in by chairman Gavyn Davies. As Lipsey says, Dyke "has not grasped the emerging threat to the BBC. It is simply this: if the BBC is just doing the same thing as other broadcasters, what is the case for it?" Exactly.
Richard Lindley
The Media Society
THE UN AND KOSOVO
29th November 2002
I agree that Wesley Clark's article (December) should be widely read but it contains a significant mistake. He is wrong in his reading of UN Security Council resolution 1199 (1998). The resolution did not give or even imply legal authority for military intervention in Kosovo. If it had, there would not have been such a heated debate on the legality of the Nato action at the time.
Nicholas Morris
Cupar, Fife
MOVE THE CAPITAL
6th December 2002
As Paul Barker more or less concedes (December) it is unrealistic to suppose that London will lose its status as capital city. But the problems of excessive congestion in the southeast have to be tackled. I suggest two steps. First, the government should adopt a policy presumption that any major new public investment will not go to the southeast unless there are overriding reasons. Neither the Dome nor the rebuilding of Wembley would take place in London, but the renewal of the Tube would go ahead. Second, there should be financial incentives for new private investment outside the southeast and penalties for such investment in London to reflect the extra social costs it imposes.
David Price
Sheffield
WHO KILLED LIT CRIT
27th November 2002
David Herman's allegation (December) that literary criticism is unpopular and out of touch because it is jargon-ridden is an old one-it was certainly made during what Herman thinks of as criticism's heyday. But there is no reason why literary criticism, a serious academic subject, should not have a technical vocabulary-no one objects to the "jargon" of mathematics or theoretical physics. No doubt the authors of the essays in Untying the Text could write easy-to-read prose like the popular historians and scientists that Herman praises if they wanted to, but academic textbooks are written for academics, not general readers.
Julian Connerty
London EC3
DANIEL DERONDA 1
21st November 2002
Kathryn Hughes (December) clearly did not realise that Daniel Deronda was adapted for television once before in the 1970s. I enjoyed that version so much I read the novel immediately. But nobody has mentioned it in the rush to comment on the new adaptation.
June Benn
London SE3
DANIEL DERONDA 2
27th November 2002
It does not surprise me to find Kathryn Hughes repeating the lazy argument that Daniel Deronda is a "second division novel." But to dismiss the Deronda half of the plot as "unvisual," when it takes readers into the homes and synagogues of 19th century Jewish Europe, is ludicrous.
Tom Sperlinger
Toxteth, Liverpool
PENSIONS CRISIS? 1
In David Miles's otherwise sensible article (December), he fails to mention one of the main problems with Britain's pensions system-that it is now so complex, and the interaction between public and private provision so unclear, that people are prevented from making informed decisions about their future security. Even pensions experts struggle to explain the Pension Credit and an actuarial qualification is needed to decide whether or not to contract out.
Addressing this complexity was one of the drivers behind the IPPR's recommendation to increase the basic state pension to the level of the Minimum Income Guarantee and ensure it retains its value in relation to future earnings. This is the only way to guarantee all pensioners escape poverty, and it also allows a radical simplification of the system. The Pension Credit becomes redundant and the State Second Pension can be closed thereby creating a framework which people can understand. Miles's claim that we find any disincentives to work or save unacceptable is wrong, but this settlement does mean that people are not penalised for their thrift. We concluded that a framework which relies heavily on means-testing benefits is flawed. This did feel an uncomfortable position for a centre-left organisation like the IPPR to have reached. Surely as progressives we support directing limited resources to those most in need? If a means-tested approach was working for poor pensioners, then our views might have been different. But it is not working. Increasing the basic state pension was the only way to reconcile our concerns with tackling poverty, addressing complexity, minimising disincentives and creating a settlement which is publicly supported and perceived to be fair. With a modest increase in the official retirement age to 67, such a proposal would cost about the same as current policies.
Sue Regan,
Associate Director, IPPR
PENSIONS CRISIS? 2
4th December 2002
I was surprised to find that David Miles's analysis of pensions did not refer to what happens in other countries. Although it is indeed an exaggeration to say that Britain has a pensions "crisis," it would not be so in other European countries. Both Germany and Italy, for instance, have a combination of unfavourable demographics and generous pension provision that makes their current systems unsustainable, probably even in the medium term. Britain is in a relatively good position on pensions compared to other EU states; and a large part of that is due to the fact that its governments have been mean to their citizens. But in the future, other EU countries' problems could become Britain's problems. We should be wary of dismissing the idea that by 2050, pension provision will have become pan-EU. Healthcare and social security benefits already have an EU dimension, why not pensions?
Robert Satchwell
Haarby, Denmark
JAPAN'S FAKE FUNK
2nd December 2002
Eamonn Fingleton's statistics (November) seem to have little connection to official data. He claims that OECD figures show that Japan ran large budget surpluses in the first eight years of the 1990s, but the actual data show an average deficit of 2.8 per cent and one which is expected to amount to 8 per cent of GDP this year. And he claims that Japan's national debt is lower than "most other developed countries." The relevant OECD data list 19 countries, all of which, excepting Italy and Belgium, have lower ratios than Japan.
Fingleton's selection of anecdotal evidence is also questionable. Only a blind visitor to Tokyo can have failed to notice the explosion of the homeless, living in the parks under blue plastic sheets. Nor could any but the heartless fail to be moved by the terrible fact that the 1990s produced the only postwar year in which average life expectancy for the male Japanese fell, as the suicide rate rose in response to economic misery.
Andrew Smithers
Smithers & Co, London EC3
BRITISH FOOD 1
18th November 2002
The debate (November) between Will Skidelsky and Peter Gordon on the state of British food is easy to explain. Both writers live in London, the largest city in Europe and so miles from any place where food ingredients are produced. They then find that farmers' markets are thin on the ground and authentic ingredients of quality are hard to come by. For the same reasons, good restaurants are overpriced, with those that are deemed acceptable limited to a few fashion items. Both debaters mourn the loss of proper markets for authentic food but fail to note that most places in the country from Oxford to Carlisle still support them. In my own town, the farmer still has his own stall. I can pick up pheasant, quail, local meats and cheeses and vegetables of all kinds. I will continue to enjoy great food from my local market, safe in the knowledge that city folk are missing out.
John Staveley
Todmorden, Yorkshire
BRITISH FOOD 2
25th November 2002
Peter Gordon and Will Skidelsky only touch upon the prime reason for our patchy culinary merits: the class divide. If you are rich you can eat well without being able to cook; even better if you can. But if you are poor and you cannot cook, there is no hope of making something nutritious and delicious out of a ham hock, a handful of pulses and a cabbage. If you never learned to cook you buy Pot Noodles or Jaffa Cakes, take-away Indian and cheap pizza. You know your children will eat it. You are not going to risk your benefit money or wages on experimenting with Delia or Jamie.
The answer is to teach every child in the country to cook. Hands-on cooking is the proven way to break the cycle of "Yuk, I'm not eating that." The RSA's "Focus on Food" programme does this in about 5 per cent of our state schools, and perhaps another 5 per cent do it anyway. The rest struggle on, underfunded, under-equipped and understaffed.
Prue Leith
Nr Moreton in Marsh, Glos
DID KANT BELIEVE?
3rd December 2002
AC Grayling (September) writes that Kant, who got a tenured position at the University of K?nigsberg in 1770 at the age of 46, was an atheist and that it was this that slowed down his academic career. I doubt that anybody informed about Kant will give any credence to this. Nothing in the fine recent biography of Kant by Manfred Kuehn, which is the one Grayling mentions, or in any other biography known to me, suggests that Kant was out of favour with the authorities because of his supposed atheism. Indeed, if they had regarded him as an atheist and thus a danger to society, a tenured position, or even a mere venia legendi (permission to teach), would in the 18th century have been absolutely unthinkable. Grayling's claim is astonishing. We cannot say that the evidence for it is flimsy-it is non-existent. One hopes that his forthcoming biography of Descartes will be free from surprises of this kind.
Thomas Mautner
Canberra, Australia
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