For the avoidance of doubt
Ethan Zuckerman (“If in doubt, vote with confidence”, November 2024) rightly raises concerns about the weaponisation of doubt, in an era in which people struggle to know what they can safely believe. It is a threat to all democracies. Without trust, there is no consent. That is why it is important to focus on facts that stand up to statistical scrutiny and on reliable evidence that can form the basis of healthy political debate.
This can be achieved in a number of ways. We should do much more to promote critical thinking in schools and through lifelong learning programmes to ensure citizens have the tools to flourish in the digital age. Internet platforms should label clearly when information has been artificially generated, or proven to be false. Politicians should take the lead in promoting honest debate, and be called to account when they fail to do so. Large language models will dominate the dissemination of information in the gen AI age. The training of them to recognise verifiable facts should be subject to public scrutiny, not left to a small number of wealthy corporations.
Without such measures, misinformation could overwhelm us. But technology can also help us fight back. Full Fact has developed AI tools that allow small groups of people to monitor and expose misinformation at internet scale, which are now being used in 18 countries in multiple languages. We have to give people confidence that there are still information sources they can trust so that they can make informed choices on the issues that matter to them. It is a fight we can’t afford to lose.
Chris Morris, chief executive, Full Fact
Why the arts matter
Sheila Hancock (Long life, November 2024) shared a robust case for giving all young people access to the arts. As CEO of Create, a charity that brings creativity to those who need it most, I have seen the transformative power of the arts. Our nationwide survey conducted last year found 93 per cent of people in the UK think creativity is important to their wellbeing while, according to the World Health Organisation, 3,500 studies have shown widespread health improvements from accessing the arts.
Creativity is also essential to the UK economy. The government estimates that creative industries generated £126bn in gross value added to the economy and employed 2.4 million people in 2022. Despite this, the arts have been underfunded for years. A recent report by the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre warned we are heading for a creative economy skills shortage: creative further education enrolments in the UK are declining at a faster rate than average across all subject disciplines.
Widening access to the arts is a matter of urgency. To make these opportunities available to people from all backgrounds, we must ensure that money is never an obstacle. Create has always provided its workshops for free to every participant. This would be a good principle to implement in wider society as well.
Change can’t come soon enough. There are signs that the new government has a better understanding of the value of creativity. The Labour manifesto promised that the arts “will no longer be the preserve of a privileged few” and it is vital to ensure that supporting the arts doesn’t fall to the bottom of the priority list, especially with budgets being so tight. The creative arts are not a “nice-to-have” that can be scrapped to balance the books. Creativity is a fundamental human need—and a right—and an absolute necessity for both individual and societal wellbeing and growth.
Nicky Goulder, founding CEO, Create
A home is not a house
The Yimby Alliance’s John Myers and Kane Emerson (People, November 2024) have taken inspiration for the UK from the United States, which seems like comparing the requirements of the local corner shop with those of a huge supermarket. Rather than building millions of new houses, the government should prioritise creating new homes, converting existing buildings and building only on brownfield sites, while not casually handing over our countryside to developers and inept local councils.
Much of the destruction and misery wrought by the recent flooding is the result of building on the ever-dwindling green belt. If governments are serious about tackling climate change and lessening its devastating impact, then covering more carbon-absorbing fields with non-absorbent concrete is not a solution. The country has also seen vast increases in immigration, both legal and illegal, and every new arrival must be accommodated. Knowing as they did that housing was in short supply and that the infrastructure wasn’t in place to cope, the recklessness and apathy of our elected politicians has been disgraceful.
Stefan Badham, Portsmouth
Fuel for thought
In this country we stop paying National Insurance when we receive a pension, yet this is also the time in life when many people start using the NHS. The current furore over the winter fuel payment is a reminder that many of Britain’s 12.5m pensioners are relatively well off and, like Shelia Hancock (Long life, November 2024), don’t need the payment. However, as there are probably four million who do need it, it is clear pensioners need to be means-tested by income.
Half of the UK’s pensioners have incomes over £25,000 and could afford to pay some form of national insurance/national care service, say 3 per cent of NI on incomes over £25,000, which could bring in at least £3bn.
This would go some way to stopping the elderly occupying such a large number of hospital beds by funding NHS convalescent and care homes and better pay for social carers. It would also take pressure off local authorities, enabling them to focus on social care for younger people. Many pensioners could afford to pay towards the social care they will use. We are all living longer, and social care costs are only going to rise.
Rosanne Bostock, Oxford
Hostile environment
Thank you Tilly Lawless (Sex life, November 2024) for highlighting this mess of strange US laws about entering the country. I have many Canadian friends in the same situation, not visiting for fear of triggering a 10-year ban due to random interpretation. Unfortunately, politicians won’t address something that primarily impacts sex workers. I’m hoping it ties up enough celebrities that they’ll push for a change that’ll help us.
Greg busymantm, via the website
Soak the rich
Philip Collins (“Hand-me-down economics”, October) is remarkably perfunctory in setting out the case for taxation of wealth. He misrepresents history when he writes: “The distinction between earned and unearned income was barely heard of again until 1978…” For most of the 20th century until 1985, unearned income-—mostly derived indirectly from wealth—attracted a surcharge, latterly 15 per cent. And from 1976 until 1985, gains from securing planning permission were subject to development land tax.
He quotes with apparent approval Denis Healey’s reported comment that he “found it impossible to draft [a wealth tax] that would yield enough revenue...”. It is unclear how hard Healey tried; and HMRC’s access to data has surely improved since the 1970s. Collins also touches on the 2020 report of the Wealth Tax Commission led by Arun Advani, but writes that “because data was hard to come by, the Commission proposed narrowing the focus of analysis to households with a net worth of £10m or more”. Although a case can be made for a higher or lower threshold, £10m seems to reflect a consensus on a level of riches unambiguously above what anyone can claim to need, and meets the requirement for efficiency by not drawing too many people into the net.
Chris Dunabin, London
Zombie news apocalypse
The decline in local print media analysed by Duncan Campbell has been accompanied by a rise in “zombie newspapers” (“Out of time”, October). These appear to be real newspapers until one discovers there is a hole in the middle: the readers’ letters page has vanished. Without a space for the public to raise issues of local concern and demand some democratic accountability, a publication forfeits the claim to be the genuine article. A national “name and shame” list of such titles should be compiled.
Ivor Morgan, Lincoln
Boarder lands
I wonder if Lucy Lethbridge and your headline writer unwittingly touched on a psychological point in the round-up of children’s literature (“Forever young”, October). Although there was just one incidental mention of the boarding school novel (Tom Brown’s School Days), there have been plenty of children’s books about these places (jolly japes, midnight feasts, etc).
I can all too readily see the metaphors inherent in the two most famous children’s books, and both Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and JM Barrie were, like me, ex-boarders. When sensible, middle-class Alice falls down the rabbit hole she enters a nether-universe inhabited by eccentrics, sadists, bores, poseurs and authority figures whose characters have somehow been knocked out of alignment by staying too long in this strange world. Peter Pan flies out of the nursery window and gets lost. He meets up with other lost boys and is adopted by Wendy, who appears to be both his girlfriend and mother figure, a fantasy common to single-sex boarders and disastrous when they emerge into the real world.
The heyday of boarding schools was in the era of high empire. We don’t live there anymore but still we fail to see the “boys inside the men” as Nick Duffell calls them. John le Carré, who ran away from Sherborne, wanted to close boarding schools down. He must have been amazed and dismayed to have died without seeing it happen.
David Redshaw, Saltdean, East Sussex
Country reads
I think it’s better to go to non-fiction (“Beyond Vance”, November 2024) to try to understand Appalachia and its diversity. JD Vance’s book shows only a slice of it, and though I dislike his politics, I thought Hillbilly Elegy was good. Susie Mesure claims that Vance doesn’t show nuance, but the quotes she uses from the book indicate that he does. For starters on other works, one should go to Albion’s Seed, the classic work by David Hackett Fischer, on four different American regions. His section on Appalachia, which digs deep into the cultural roots of the area, is excellent.
Michael Jindra, via the website
Meloni’s threat
Ever since Girlfriend in a Coma I’ve admired Bill Emmott’s knowledge of Italian society and politics, but I disagree with his account of Giorgia Meloni (“The right side of wrong”, August/September 2024). She is not a conservative. When she was 15 she joined the MSI, the direct successor to Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. In other words, Meloni is a trimmer cutting her cloth tactfully to retain power.
Emmott seems strangely sanguine about three significant developments. First, her agreements to have asylum seekers processed offshore, in Albania, preceded, before she became prime minister, by her anti-immigration rhetoric and support of Matteo Salvini, who barred a ship full of refugees from docking in any Italian port.
Second, her interference in the national broadcaster Rai, when she got Antonio Scurati’s political monologue cancelled and published the text herself, knowing that few people would read it. Third, and most worrying, her proposal to amend the constitution to have prime ministers directly elected is a dangerous step towards demagoguery. If this gets as far as a national referendum, people will likely vote for it. This is the trouble with a written constitution: it can be amended.
Her social attitudes are deplorable and on abortion she has taken Italy a major step backwards. Her long-standing anti-EU position now has to be hidden since Italy is a huge beneficiary of its post-pandemic recovery fund—and also because she visibly enjoys this new arena of power.
Ann Lawson Lucas, Edinburgh
Europe’s populist backlash
Nathalie Tocci’s analysis of European nationalism (“In pieces”, October) gave an excellent characterisation of the motivation and dynamics of Europe’s populist right. Mature and accurate, when so often we see the right described as embracing hate and racism. Where many of us diverge is in describing this as “dangerous”. Probably it is for those bureaucrats whose life is bound up with an unelected and unrepresentative drive to full European integration. But for many the EU project is an experiment carried too far; we were happy with the 1990s Europe of Nations Tocci so glibly condemns. Europe does not have a common cultural heritage. Our languages, religious beliefs and even our written scripts vary widely. Is it any surprise that so many are urging, “Stop, think again before it’s too late”?
As she implies, Britain would have been better to remain in the EU and pursue its reformist agenda, joining and strengthening those like-minded parties. We should also listen to Tocci when she lists the faults of such agents as the AfD. But the unthinking integrationists have only themselves to blame for such ugliness by forcing an unwanted political regime on a richly diverse continent.
Jeremy Dyer, Poole, Dorset
Still game
Not only is Tom Martin a consistently excellent reporter of farming life (“A pheasant surprise”, November) but also one of Mother Nature’s gentlemen. His heart-warming account of saving the six unhatched eggs from the combine harvester was a delight. One can only hope that less compassionate participants in farming life won’t shoot them out of the skies for their Christmas dinner.
I would also like to compliment Tom’s “Lives” colleagues for their frank, unembellished and lucid reportage from a fascinating variety of backgrounds.
Gregory Rosenstock, Chichester
