Will Hutton states that living standards have risen fortyfold in the past 250 years thanks to capitalism, science and technology (“Innovation will save our warming planet – so where is the investment?”, Comment). He then says, as though it were a separate issue, that similar transformations now need to be made in global energy production. He misses the fact that this stunning growth in living standards, not to mention the eightfold increase in world population, is almost entirely the result of exploiting cheap fossil fuels since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Without them, today’s capitalism, science and technology may not even have evolved.
Climate change has been well described as a “wicked” problem; it leaves us with this vast global economic edifice that was built on the naive, unthinking expectation of endlessly burning cheap fossil fuels to drive equally limitless growth. We are now left facing utterly profound transformations from our short-lived “consumer society”, far beyond the blinkered, fossil-fuel era ideologies of our politicians and economists.
Aidan Harrison
Morpeth
Northumberland
Give regional museums a boost
Steven Parissien raises some interesting questions about the relationship between the national museums and the rest of the sector (“Share your hidden art treasures with all of us, London galleries are told”, News). He is surely right to say that they could make better use of the existing network of regional museums to make their stored collections more accessible to the people who pay for them. It does seem strange that the V&A plans to open an outpost in another area of London
Free admission to the nationals is admirable, in principle, but it comes at a cost. There are families in the regions for whom even a day trip to London is prohibitively expensive. To add insult to injury they may find that their local museum is introducing charges or even closed as a result of the chancellor’s cuts to local authority budgets.
Ian Lawley
Chair of Trustees, Friends of the Potteries
Museums & Art Gallery
Newcastle-under-Lyme
What makes a word wibbly?
“Wibble” and the other invented words deemed funny in the Alberta University experiment display prominent use of the lips in their pronunciation (“It’s such a lot of wibble: why nonsense words make us laugh”, News). The non-funny words, making more use of the tongue and teeth, sound more synthetic (itself an example of teeth/tongue prominence). Even “suppect”, with the bilabial plosive in the middle, is predominated by teeth-tongue sounds and so is unsurprisingly rated unfunny.”
What your article does not state is whether this experiment was conducted in a purely English-language environment, so we don’t know whether its conclusions are universal.
Rob Harris
Westbury-on-Severn
Gloucestershire
No collapse in Labour vote
In Rob Ford’s otherwise well-researched article “Why Labour has good reason to feel nervous about its poll test in Oldham”, Comment), he repeats the misconception that in the Heywood and Middleton byelection of 2014 Labour’s majority was much reduced by “a collapse in the Labour vote”.
In fact, it was the joint collapse of the Tory and Lib Dem votes that led to Ukip coming second. From the 2010 general election, when the seat was held by the late and much loved Jim Dobbin, to the 2014 byelection, the Tories share of the vote dropped by 14.9% and the Lib Dems by 17.6%. The Labour percentage of the vote actually increased slightly, from 40.1% to 40.9%. Clearly no collapse there!
I’m proud to have been given a mandate to continue to represent the people of Heywood and Middleton with a 43.1% share of the vote in the 2015 general election and a majority of 5,299. Although comparisons between the two neighbouring seats are inevitable, it is simply false to state that the Labour vote collapsed in Heywood and Middleton in 2014.
Liz McInnes MP
Heywood and Middleton
James, you’re kidding yourself
We’re on the path to an independent Scotland, if James McAvoy is right, and he’s blithely sanguine about what he says will be “an amicable divorce rather than a messy break-up” (“This much I know”, Magazine). Already an expat in all but name, he would say that, wouldn’t he? He clearly didn’t experience the nasty divisiveness of the referendum process and is hardly likely to be taking the high road home soon, but then home is not here for him, Alan Cumming, Sean Connery et al. Maybe it’s that thespian thing, “engaging your imagination all the time”. Well, this much you should know – reality bites, even in Brigadoon.
Carolyn Kirton
Aberdeen
No rhyme or reason
Alas, not a single poet consulted as to their books of the year (New Review).
What warrants our demotion?
Michael Benenson
Poet and playwright
Yalding, Kent
