Jennifer Dixon’s grim but realistic piece on the financial, staffing and social impact crisis enveloping the NHS could have been written, with little adjustment, about the education service (“The NHS has social objectives as well as economic ones. Can we reconcile them?”, Comment). This is not surprising since Jeremy Hunt seems to have adopted Michael Gove, in his incarnation as education secretary, as his role model.
Both Hunt and Gove have gone out of their way to antagonise their respective groups of professionals, through a confrontational, punitive approach implemented through an imposed menu of outright or semi-privatisation (outsourcing in the NHS, academisation in education, endemic use of expensive, unknown agency staff in both), inspection regimes focused on failure rather than good practice and competition – wholly inappropriate and damaging in a public service context. Those of us on the front line would have to answer the headline’s question by saying: “Yes, but only if there is a change of government.” The urgency of this for 2020 cannot be overstated.
Max Fishel
Assistant headteacher
Bromley
Bring back the tax offices
I’ve held on for as long as an hour when phoning the HMRC before hanging up (“Revenue office fails to answer thousands of tax credit calls”, News). Until 2014, there were 281 local tax offices where people could sort out their tax affairs. Then every one of them was closed. It was an incredibly stupid decision. Cynical, callous and shortsighted. It needs to be reversed.
Kevin McGrath
Harlow
Understanding the Bedouin
Your analysis of the growth of terror in Sinai (“Jihadi ideology, regional chaos and government crackdowns – how Sinai became a magnet for terror”, News) makes many valid points but fails to distinguish between north and south Sinai. As a result, you misrepresent most Sinai Bedouin.
The vast majority of Islamist activity is focused within a few miles of the Israeli border and Rafah, aggravated now by the security forces’ tendency to see every local Bedu as an enemy and to exact reprisals from the innocent as well as the guilty. However, south Sinai’s 50,000 Bedouin are not radicalised: just 2% cite religious leaders as a key influence. They are not militant. They are much poorer than most Egyptians: 80% live in food poverty. They depend for their livelihood on desert tourism. The post-revolution downturn robbed many of their means of feeding their families.
North Sinai militants seek to wreck Egypt’s tourism. South Sinai Bedu are desperate to preserve it. By treating all Bedouin as enemies of the state, Egypt is missing a golden opportunity to secure and stabilise the south. Presenting all Bedu as terrorists can only hasten the appeal of jihad in the suffering south.
Dr Hilary Gilbert
Research fellow, University of Nottingham, chair, South Sinai Foundation
Grantham
This is bad medicine
Andrew Beggs of the University of Birmingham (“How to make sure the medicine goes down well”, Big Issue) writes that the AllTrials campaign will “lead to a climate of fear in science that will suppress legitimate research”. This is baffling and unsupported. AllTrials calls for all clinical trials to be registered and their results reported. We cannot make informed decisions about which treatment is best when the results of trials are routinely withheld from doctors, researchers and patients. Nor can we do good research when we cannot see what other researchers have found.
AllTrials represents hundreds of thousands of patients, doctors and researchers who say it’s time to fix it for good. The corner of academia that would still prefer science to be done behind closed doors is shrinking but, Andrew Beggs’s letter indicates, not fast enough. We are disappointed to see a medic acting to perpetuate the secrecy that has undermined public trust for far too long.
Ben Goldacre and Síle Lane
AllTrials campaign
London EC1
Don’t get in a stew over this
I feel you took a comment I made in a magazine interview out of context last week (“Women hit back as MasterChef judge sparks row over ‘career v family’”, (News). I absolutely did say that women have to think carefully about a career in a professional kitchen – and I stand by that. It is hard work, but it isn’t impossible. I am a case in point: I have a supportive husband and a wonderful daughter and I balance my job with my family life. But far from wanting to put young women off a career in a professional kitchen, I want them to see from my example – and those of my peers – that it is possible to combine family and work as a chef.
Monica Galetti
London
Brought to book
John Naughton’s assumption that Theresa May’s proposals herald an end to the privacy of reading is disingenuous (“Theresa May’s threat to the privacy of reading”, New Review). It was our first order on Amazon that was the beginning of the end to privacy of our reading.
Professor Peter Lantos
London NW1
