Letters and emails: August 23

Opperman’s article does little to alleviate fears regarding a slippery slope and gradual shifting of goalposts around legal assisted suicide, and many other concerns this development raises.
Andrew Whiteley, Consett

DIFFICULT CHOICE

As the new proposed legislation for assisted dying will only apply to patients who are expected to die within six months, this will not help the large number who every year are diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

Patients can survive for many years but as there is no cure, they will ultimately suffer a long and humiliating decline in their quality of life. At this point these patients should have a choice too.
Barbara Burford, Hemel Hempstead

DOCTOR’S DUTY

Opperman mentions the importanceof safeguards. With regards to the medical profession — whose views are no doubt divided as to what its role should be — any future bill must make it clear that doctors will be under no obligation to comply with the request of an individual to end their life.
John MacGillivray, Dundee

Bubbling over with joy at football’s soap opera

DOMINIC LAWSON (“Chelsea’s female doctor shows us football is all fakery, no manliness”, Comment, last week) attacks football’s ethics, which were laid bare as a result of an incident in which a Chelsea player seems to have been faking an injury. Lawson is mystified as to why football is, by some margin, the most popular sport in this country. It is the theatricality that makes it so. Besides being the “beautiful game” when it is played with the skill and verve of the Brazil side of 1970, it is also the cheating, the arguments, the terrible tackles, the red cards, the obscene transfer fees and the big personalities. It is indeed a soap opera — and long may it continue.
Patrick Edwards, Newport, Gwent

HURT FEELINGS

A lady at a match summed up the difference between football and rugby: “Footballers spend 90 minutes falling over pretending they’re hurt. Rugby players spend 80 minutes getting up, pretending they’re not.”
Philip Morris, Pudsey

BLOOD DONOR

Lawson contrasts the lack of morality and manliness in professional football with the values of rugby, in which a poleaxed player gets up “as quickly as he can”. Really? Or does he occasionally rely on the use of fake blood from the team’s physiotherapist?
Ralph Houston, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

IN YOUR HEAD, SON

Lawson fell straight into the trap that the master psychologist Jose Mourinho sets for the unwary. Far from being a misogynist or defending a scam, Mourinho was merely diverting attention from the inept performance of his team. Jose 3 Dominic 0.
John Ball, Barnet, London

Luton airport’s parking prices cleared for rip-off

THE charges for car parking at Luton airport are certainly extortionate (“The great airport rip-off”, Focus, last week). It costs £2.50 just to drop off a passenger with a five-minute walk to the arrivals gate (if you can actually locate it amid the rebuilding chaos).

It costs about £10 an hour to park in the short-term car park when collecting a passenger, and the pay machines have now been relocated into the car park itself, just to increase the time it may take to get back to your vehicle, which involves crossing several slip roads.

Using a luggage trolley costs a non-refundable £2 and the airport has pre-check-in weighing scales — for an extra £1 a bag.

No wonder the owner of Luton airport enjoyed a big payout last year, taking dividends of £28.5m.
Kay Bagon, Radlett, Hertfordshire

CLAIMING RESPONSIBILITY

Ali Hussain gives a comprehensive account of the Civil Aviation Authority’s efforts to enforce the flawed European Union regulation on flight-delay compensation, which is overdue for revision or — preferably — withdrawal (“Airlines take fright”, Money, last week).

Alas, both the regulation and the CAA have obscured passengers’ inviolable rights to damages for delays (not confined to economic loss) in accordance with the 1999 Montreal convention.

This convention is in force in more than 100 states, including all EU ones. Regardless of anything in an airline’s contract conditions, the carrier is liable for damages arising out of delay of a maximum per passenger of more than £4,000 and delay to baggage (not included in the EU regulation) of up to about £1,000 per passenger.
Harold Caplan, Quadrant Chambers

All the world’s a stage in the house of Cumberbatch

The cast list for Harrow School’s 1994 Shakespeare play is indeed remarkable in that so many boys went on to make a career in the theatre (“Kid Cumberbatch tames the shrew”, News, last week). If it is true that the teenage Petruchio “was advised by his drama teacher not to pursue a career in acting”, Martin Tyrrell may not have been alone in offering this advice. I was the school’s careers master and was approached by Cumberbatch’s mother and father at a parent-teacher meeting. They were very concerned that Benedict seemed determined to seek a career on the stage. Not wishing to discourage the teenager’s dramatic ambitions, I looked for guidance by asking what line of business they were in. “Ah, well, that is the problem — you see, we are both actors,” they replied.
Simon Berry, Harrow on the Hill, London

Dealing America a bad hand with the Trump card

SEVERAL years ago we were diverted to make way for Donald Trump’s private jet bringing him to the Isle of Lewis to “touch base” with one of his Scottish relations (“My war with Donald Trump”, Selina Scott, News Review, last week). The poor woman can scarcely have had time to brew the tea before he was outside the door of her croft, arm in arm for a photo opportunity, then off into the blue yonder and away. This was, of course, part of a PR exercise to help with the purchase of his golf course in Balmedie, Aberdeenshire. Like Scott, I well remember the empty beaches and the wonderful sand dunes and — no longer — “the untamed majesty of this coastline”.

I feel so sad and frustrated to think that a country such as America is looking seriously at a bombastic idiot like Trump — full of sound and fury, signifying nothing — as a possible candidate for the presidency. I spent a few years in the 1960s when the Kennedys — the myth has been demystified since then but at least they held out hope for a better America — and the more gentle intellectuals such as Eugene McCarthy were candidates for what is still the most important political appointment in the world. As Scott says, God help America and the world should Trump become president.
Valerie Wharton, Canterbury

BBC RADIO GA GA

I share the disillusionment of Paul Donovan and the 290,000 lost listeners of the Today programme (“Puffs for breakfast”, Radio Waves, Culture, last week). Its total obsession, especially in the past two years, with party politics, opinion polls and referendums almost to the total exclusion of other news, especially world news, is highly off-putting. Furthermore, many of us are heartily sick of the presenters’ sneering and patronising treatment of politicians, frequently talking across them, not allowing them to complete a sentence, let alone answer the question.
Dr Derek Wight, Cambridge

RESPECT FOR REFUGEES

Well said, India Knight (“What would Jesus do? Join the migrants in Songs of Praise from Calais”, Comment, last week). And well done, BBC. These people are human beings, not a “swarm” of locusts. Britons should wake up and see how hundreds of thousands of refugees are being taken in by other European nations and stop obsessing about a few thousand unfortunate people in Calais. They should be respected, not demonised.
Peter-Joseph Hegarty, London SE1

AGE APPROPRIATE

I was shocked you gave the film Pixels only one star, and said “the action scenes aren’t bad, but will any modern child be interested?” (Culture, last week). I am 11 years old and I went to see it for my birthday and all my friends enjoyed it. Whoever reviewed Pixels obviously isn’t a child and so doesn’t have the same interests. Maybe you should think about sending kids to such movies. You could have a sort of lottery and whoever gets picked goes to the film and writes the review.
Patrick Walsh, Galway

WALKING PACE

Your article “Shhh... Yes, we athletes cheat” (News, last week) was accompanied by photographs of three race walkers declaring themselves “clean” from drugs. I can think of no other sport where [technical] cheating is more prevalent.
J Gerard Osborne, Dublin 13

ENERGY BOOST

The UK needs a “responsible, long-term energy policy” and one that moves away from polluting coal (“Our country needs shale gas, let’s go get it”, Comment, August 9) but simply pushing for shale gas exploration will not provide the affordable, reliable and low-carbon energy system it needs. The government must also act to improve the efficiency of poorly insulated buildings, continue to expand renewable energy (the cost of which is rapidly falling) and support innovation in technologies such as power storage. Businesses stand ready to invest but they respond to the market opportunities created by stable support, rules and policy goals.
Nick Molho, Executive Director, Aldersgate Group, London SW1

LONG ARM OF THE LAW

Camilla Long suggests British police officers would be better deployed to the world’s trouble spots as opposed to seemingly having a good time in Spain (“That’s enough selfies in Magaluf, PC Plod. Kos is dialling 999”, Comment, last week). There is a long history of officers from the UK being successfully deployed to various trouble spots, from the Cyprus emergency, where a number lost their lives, to Zimbabwe, Bosnia and more recently Iraq. The British Transport Police make regular deployments to France and Belgium and further afield during high-profile sporting events, while the Civil Nuclear Constabulary conduct long-range sea patrols around the world escorting nuclear material.
Dave Cousins, Nottingham

Corrections & Clarifications

Our report “Racing comes second to jockeys’ scheming and bribery in Palio” (World News, last week) confused the origins of the Palio. There were public games in Siena’s central piazza in the Middle Ages, but the first record of the horse race comes from 1656.

In the article “Kid Cumberbatch tames the shrew”(News, last week) we confused Thomas H Hodgkinson with Tom Hodgkinson, the editor of The Idler magazine. We apologise to both.

Complaints about inaccuracies in all sections of The Sunday Times should be addressed to complaints@sunday-times.co.uk or Complaints, The Sunday Times, 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF. In addition, the Independent Press Standards Organisation (Ipso) will examine formal complaints about the editorial content of UK newspapers and magazines. Please go to our complaints section for full details of how to lodge a complaint.

Birthdays

Mark Butcher, cricketer, 43; Geoff Capes, shot putter, 66; Eliza Carthy, folk singer, 40; Saskia Clark, Olympic sailor, 36; Shelley Long, actress, 66; Gary Mabbutt, footballer, 54; Queen Noor of Jordan, 64; John Rocha, fashion designer, 62; Willy Russell, playwright, 68; Shaun Ryder, singer, 53; Sir Roy Strong, art historian, 80

Anniversaries

1305 William Wallace executed in London; 1914 the British Expeditionary Force fights Battle of Mons; 1926 death of actor Rudolph Valentino; 1939 Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union sign a non-aggression treaty; 2006 an Austrian teenager, Natascha Kampusch, escapes from her kidnapper after eight years of captivity