Will Hutton makes some telling points about the cross-border tasks that Europe needs to tackle co-operatively – climate change, air traffic control, overfishing, etc (“This crude assault on Europe strikes at the very heart of Enlightenment values”, Comment). But his obsession with the need for open borders blinds him to the real threat to a progressive future for Europe, which is the rising insecurity of its population. This is the inevitable consequence of ever more open markets, a global obsession with international competitiveness and the ability of big business to use the threat of relocation to cow governments into lowering taxes and allowing real wages and conditions to deteriorate for the majority. We need a debate about replacing the neoliberal Treaty of Rome with a progressive “Treaty of Home”. At its core, this would allow governments to take back control of their economies by grouping together, rejecting international competitiveness and maintaining their borders to allow local economies to flourish. This regained ability to overcome economic insecurity might even tempt today’s resentful electorate back to being genuinely pro-European.
Colin Hines
East Twickenham
Cameron mute on tax dodgers
David Cameron goes red in the face and thumps the lectern protesting about the EU’s £1.7bn bill (“Cameron fury over budget risks alienating European partners”, News). But where is his fury about the money denied the Treasury by legal tax avoiders such as Amazon, Topshop, Vodafone etc, estimated at about £35bn in total? Your leader (“Don’t be evil, tech giants. Pay your taxes”) describes clearly the slimy manipulations these and many other companies and individuals make. By refusing to contribute to the very society that provides their obscene profits, these unethical companies display a greed that acts, through its magnitude, as a key driver of unnecessary public service cuts leading to ever-increasing levels of inequality, poverty and exclusion. Cameron doesn’t care, and this is an open goal for Labour – will they take it?
Max Fishel
Bromley
In praise of UK hospices
Ed Cumming’s article (“Should we do anything we can to keep people alive? This surgeon says no”, In Focus) disjointedly combined the stories of the difficult deaths of two British women with the views of an American surgeon (with a book to promote). He apparently advocates “improved hospices, of a sort that have begun to crop up in America… [which] concentrate on quality of life, with pets, music and other activities for residents”. An American surgeon might not know that the British hospice movement has been flourishing for 50 years, providing all of this combined with expert pain and symptom control, compassionate care and clinical research. But a British writer should have found this out and it would have been useful to readers to hear this.
Rosemary Cook
York
Yet more rich consumers
In January last year, the Royal Society published a paper called Can a collapse of global civilisation be avoided?. The message was that civilisation is under threat from the burdens of consumption and population growth. Now your article “High-fliers have more babies, according to study”, (News) tells us wealthy, high-powered women are having large families, up to nine, because they can afford to employ cleaners and nannies. So now we have the biggest consumers producing lots of little big consumers, increasing both population and consumption in one go. And all that an economist can find to say is that it’s “good news for growth”. Oh, joy!
Roger Plenty
Stroud
Problems of Portsmouth
I have lived my whole life in Portsmouth and worked here for most of it. I love it but I recognise many of the problems identified by Mark Townsend (“The Pompey jihadis”, News). Portsmouth is a city whose history and economy has been built on warfare. It is, I suppose in the DNA. Think of Portsmouth and you think perhaps of the country’s most topsy-turvy football club but probably you think of centuries of naval history. Other English cities can be recalled and imagined through their representations in popular culture or art. But Portsmouth? Almost nothing. Alasdair Gray once wrote: “If a city hasn’t been used by an artist, not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively.” Portsmouth may be in the leafy, privileged south but it is not a part of it. Perhaps at last you see that you ignore us at your peril.
Dr Dave Allen
Portsmouth
You don’t need money to get fit
Last week, Barbara Ellen condescendingly asserted that poor people can’t attain or maintain physical fitness because doing so is a prohibitively “expensive and complicated business” (“Poverty, not gluttony, is the cause of obesity”).
A quick look at the world outside of the middle-class professional bubble suggests otherwise. Human beings have always kept in shape in a variety of ways without need for personal trainers, private gym membership, DVDs or flash clothing. What’s more, they still do: are we expected to believe that, for example, the many world-beating athletes from rural Ethiopia and Kenya are either from affluent backgrounds or are unfit? Try exercising the grey matter, Ms Ellen.
Sean Cordell
Whalley Range, Manchester
