Martin Bell makes an excellent case for the great importance of maintaining the BBC World Service (Having risked my life in war zones for the BBC, I know this: cuts to the World Service will be disastrous, 14 May). Shortly after reading his article, I began to read a Norwegian novel, Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson, translated by Anne Born. It includes the telling comment: “The good thing about the BBC’s World Service … is that I can get updated on the position of countries like Jamaica, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka in a sport such as cricket; a game I have never seen played and never will see … But what I have noticed is that ‘The Motherland’, England, is constantly being beaten. That’s always something.’
Clare Addison
Marston, Oxford
• The cuts proposed for the BBC World Service come on top of plans to deny BBC radio programmes to anyone living outside the UK by limiting access to BBC Sounds. Yet I can listen to French, Polish and other overseas radio here in the UK with no restrictions. Why shouldn’t we share our news, music and culture with the rest of the world?
Eddie Tulasiewicz
London
• The BBC’s Russian language service and its World Service (Ministers demand BBC World Service plan for cuts as aid budget slashed, 11 May) were major sources of reliable and objective news for the samizdat (self-published) material that was printed and distributed sub rosa in the Soviet Union. When I was in Russia in July 1959, I would hide copies in the pages of Pravda.
When I drove through rural Russia, I saw no samizdat. There, it was the BBC’s overseas services that people tuned in to. Spending £70m on broadcasts is a far more effective way of protecting democracy than spending £70m on drones.
John Griffiths
Monmouth
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