Letters: May 2025

Defence in a changing world

Stuart McGurk (“Britannia’s empty vessels”, April) highlights the difficulty in getting defence spending right. In setting its sights on spending 2.5 per cent, and in future 3 per cent, of GDP on defence, the UK government needs to avoid focusing on political signals about how much it is spending and do the difficult work of spending well. For all the attention on set-piece equipment like the aircraft carriers, there has been a lack of investment in all the important-but-boring aspects of defence needed to make such assets work. Repairs, maintenance, logistics and people have been sorely neglected. Submarines and their crews are patrolling for longer because repairs and upgrades are delayed. New investment should focus on those vital things, even if they offer limited photo opportunities for politicians, and on improving procurement.

This is not, though, a missive against the carriers. As McGurk says, second-guessing the equipment needed for future conflicts is fiendishly difficult. Many ministers have been seduced by new tech and ideas, only to find wars were not what they expected. The last decade has taught the west a lesson on reorientating the military towards one threat at the expense of others, with the shift from the war on terror to a focus on Russia. As Europe rapidly reconfigures defence planning around a volatile US (“America’s destruction, April), one of France’s priority investments is a new carrier for 2038. The lesson may be not that it has made this investment, but in seeing if it can avoid the problems that bedevilled the UK.

Olivia O’Sullivan & Robin Potter, UK in the World Programme based at Chatham House

By the time Stuart McGurk had finished working on his informative and entertaining article, the technology of warfare had likely advanced further. And further still by the time I finish writing this response. With this in mind, the long-term capabilities and usefulness of the UK’s twin colossus aircraft carriers are definitely questionable.

It seems certain that future stocks of military hardware across the world will contain a predominance of increasingly sophisticated and ever deadlier remote- controlled drones—ones capable of covering any distance, scaling any height and penetrating any armour. Confronted by such weaponry, any comparatively sluggish multi-storey aircraft carrier would become a very easy target.

If, in the face of such advances, the main purpose of Britain’s aircraft carriers becomes little more than to provide a floating platform from which to launch drones, then a future government might just as well refit and repurpose both vessels for housing, then refloat HMS Victory with a few drone-launching ramps. Alternatively, our politicians could simply desist from squandering billions of taxpayers’ money on ridiculously over-long projects that even halfway into production are already massively over-budget and laughably archaic.

I feel it won’t be long before the carriers are, rightly or wrongly, compared to badly planned, woefully mismanaged and obscenely expensive government vanity projects such as HS2.

Stefan Badham, Portsmouth

Great expectations

In what respect is Donald Trump (“America’s destruction”, April) promising to make America great again? Presumably, “again” refers to some previous state. As at the end of the Second World War? Or when it was prosperous, or influential, that is, precisely when it was all these things that his policies are now repudiating? Or is he harking back to the Spanish-American War in which a young Teddy Roosevelt fought, when the US was an imperial state?

Having handed Europe to Russia, will he compete with China and Russia—as what he refers to as the world’s most powerful nation states—or will he withdraw between two oceans? Whatever the outcome, you can’t see the USA as great in any real sense except as the home of modern science—and even here, in practice it will have expelled or driven out its main proponents.

John A Davis, Cambridge

Randall Kennedy offers an excellent snapshot, but misses the main point, which is that despite Trump’s well-known character American voters gave him a mandate. He is the first Republican in 20 years to have won the popular vote. His behaviour since is still supported, albeit with some small signs of dissent, but the elephant in the room is the economy. All businesses hate uncertainty, which curtails investment.We now live in the most uncertain moment of our lifetimes. Will the tariffs stay or be removed? What other countries will be targeted? What essential services will diminish? Will Trump pick a fight with China? If the economy tanks, Trump will lose his appeal very quickly.

Science is Important, via the website

From Russia with love?

The question of Trump’s Russian links will not go away (“Donald Trump is surely not a Russian asset. But how else to explain his behaviour?”, Prospect online, March). While there is no evidence that he is a KGB agent recruited in 1987, it is a fact that his positions are incompatible with US diplomacy since 1945 and markedly in line with much coming out of the Kremlin. There are also other Maga Republicans calling for American withdrawal from Nato, notably the senator Mike Lee, supported by Elon Musk.

But how to make a judgement when firm evidence is missing? In such cases it is worth making a balance of probabilities analysis. As Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, put it, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the solution.”

Trevor Fisher, Stafford

Is Trump’s obsequious approach to Vladimir Putin best explained by his relationship with his own father? It has been said by some that Trump Senior’s bullying ways destroyed Trump’s older brother, Fred. Did little Donald learn to cope by resorting to sycophancy, a behavioural pattern that became so ingrained he is now subconsciously driven to repeat it with that other monster, Putin?

Mike Waller, Stratford-upon-Avon

News from elsewhere

Despite fears over how it may impact journalism’s function to inform, educate and hold power to account, AI technology has been fast-tracked by many publishers, as well as the aggregators and bots drawing from their work. Excitement is increasing over the prospect of new efficiencies, as much journalistic work is expensive and some tasks are time-consuming and labour-intensive, particularly those that ensure that published journalism has integrity.

At Impress, we’ve seen examples of whole news sites publishing based entirely on AI deployment, and hyper-personalisation of content for users is not far behind. While this might make it easier to monetise people’s attention or propagandise to them, if we want to ensure journalism is a product people can rely on and that creates a consensus on reality we have to act now.

When BBC News put four popular AI assistants to the test with simple questions about the news, drawing on its own articles for answers, they misrepresented over half of the stories, with 19 per cent of answers including “factual errors”; this isn’t surprising when the data sources used to develop most of the open market technology out there are not subject to any standards of accuracy (even when refracted through BBC reporting). For news brands concerned about maintaining accuracy and their reputation, this evidence may be reason for pause.

Impress became the first regulator to introduce guidance on AI use in newsrooms back in 2023, requiring publishers to flag content that has used the technology and ensure all output maintains human editorial oversight and control.

But with new uses for AI constantly emerging, regulators cannot stand still, which is why we will be releasing new guidance on responsible use of AI in newsrooms to our publishers this year. If we want to safeguard journalistic quality, ensure responsible use of AI and that the news it assists in (or wholly produces) is accurate and reliable, ethics must part of its development and implementation.

Lexie Kirkconnell-Kawana, CEO of the Independent Monitor for the Press (Impress)

AI adoption is happening relatively steadily within mainstream journalism even in the so-called Global South (though the usual inequalities apply), but the technology is more limited than the hype might have suggested. The paradox of AI technology is that yes, you should be using it because it will make you more efficient, effective and innovative as a journalist. But ultimately if everyone can use it to do basic journalism then it could put a premium on the added value of the human elements of journalism: curiosity, expertise, judgement, creativity, compassion, witnessing, conversing and listening.

AI won’t make much difference either way on issues such as misinformation: there is plenty out there already, and most of it comes from humans not technology. The news industry is possibly being over-optimistic about how much AI might save it through efficiency gains. And, as Rasmus Kleis Nielsen writes (“Yesterday’s news”, April), it will probably continue to underestimate its real problem: the gap between mainstream media and most people’s real lives and interests. If we want the BBC to do a better job, with AI or anything else, then perhaps we should stop cutting its funding.

Charlie Beckett, professor of practice, director of Polis and the Polis/LSE JournalismAI project, LSE

Regarding David Caswell and Mary Fitzgerald’s article on AI and the media, I take issue with the description of copy-editing as a “relatively mundane task”. I have spent over half my career as a copy editor and have never found it mundane—relatively or otherwise—and I am confident that the other circa 3,000 members of the Chartered Institute of Editors and Proofreaders (CIEP) do not find that their work fits such a description either. The very many appreciative comments that clients have made to me over the years certainly does not indicate that they find the task mundane either but, rather, essential to ensuring the clarity, readability and accuracy of the texts they publish.

I have seen some quite disturbing reports of the errors that are introduced by AI systems used to “copy-edit” texts: they are a long way off from being useful for this work and no one should be encouraged to think that they can substitute for a good copy-editor.

Frances Follin, advanced professional member of CIEP

Britain’s poverty trap

Philip Collins (“Richard Titmuss and Labour’s attachment to welfare”, Prospect online, March) is right to recognise Richard Titmuss as, alongside William Beveridge, one of the principal architects of the postwar welfare state. One of the few social scientists to have a blue plaque marking his modest former home, he was a key egalitarian thinker who emphasised the umbilical link between poverty and inequality. Britain achieved a low-point for poverty in the 1970s in what was the greatest achievement for postwar egalitarianism. But with the subsequent dismantling of a pro-equality governing philosophy, the UK is back to its long-term norm of high inequality and high poverty.

The scale of the task today is shown by the size of the “poverty gap”—how far the median household in poverty falls below the poverty line. This gap currently sits at around 30 per cent—over £6,000 a year for a couple living in poverty with two children. This gap stood at around 23 per cent in the 1990s. Tackling today’s near postwar high of relative poverty requires a boost to the depleted share of national income enjoyed by those on the lowest incomes. And that means restraining the power of those at the top to colonise the gains from economic activity.

Stewart Lansley, visiting fellow at the University of Bristol and author of The Richer, The Poorer (Policy Press)

Han time

Fiammetta Rocco offers a fascinating insight into Han Kang’s writing (“The queue-jumper”, April) and the public reaction in Korea to her renown, which reeks of misogyny. I have read most of Han Kang’s translated novels and Human Acts is undoubtedly the most powerful.

Josie Glausiusz, via the website

The man-machine

Shortly before his death WH Auden (“England’s national poet?”, April) said—with powerful irony—that every state’s foreign policy should be decided by women. (This was at a time when going to war with elements of one’s own native population was presumed incomprehensible.) “There is,” he once wrote, “in all males a strong Manichaean streak, an unacknowledged secret contempt for matter, both animate and inanimate.” While men would still be permitted to make machines, he argued, it should be for women to decide which machines should be made. I think Sheila Hancock (Long life, April), who writes that women have “superior skills of understanding, nurture, problem-solving and diplomacy” and could “restrain the surge in authoritarian leadership”, would have many male allies.

Laurie Melville, via the website