Letters and emails: June 3

Neglecting duty
Sadly Georgia will not be the last child neglected by those who should be more responsible, and now she’s an adult, she’s slipped through the net of those who could have done something to help.
Janice Oakley, Woking, Surrey

Weight of responsibility
According to one radio pundit, you would need to eat 13,000 calories a day to get this obese. That’s about 13 generous helpings of fish and chips, which seems to me almost a physical impossibility. That all Georgia was offered on her return from a weight-loss boot camp was fish and chips says it all, really.

To later hear the claim that her father’s death when she was five was the cause of her problem also seems unhelpful. We must stop hanging all our misfortunes on bad events — it’s too convenient an excuse for a lack of responsibility.
Hattie Powis, Parçay-les-Pins, France

No benefits to relaxing employment legislation

I DISAGREE with your criticism of Vince Cable’s dismissive response to the Beecroft report (“Wanted: a business minister for business” Editorial, last week). Cable is right to be sceptical about a document that advocates a further loosening of Britain’s already highly flexible employment protection laws.

Where is the evidence that businesses not being able to sack workers without good cause is a serious problem? Or that removing such protection would boost the economy? The reverse is more likely: it would heighten insecurity, with people reluctant to spend. In Germany, the powerhouse of Europe, laws are much tighter.
John Bourn, Gateshead, Tyne and Wear

Risky business
Too often managers have to jump through hoops to try to dismiss underperforming workers, some of whom may be damaging their firms in a big way. Cable is not qualified to understand business owners’ needs. It is the people who take risks in starting ventures that will move the country forward, and they need all the help they can get.
Alan Sillett, Guernsey

Small-minded
When I was set to buy a small hardware shop, I spoke to the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service about staff contracts. I explained there was one full-time employee, one part-time and one still at school who worked Saturdays. The response was, “Can’t your personnel people deal with that?”. This lack of understanding is still there.
Rod Williams, Blandford Forum, Dorset

Warsi shows Britain rotten from top

BARONESS WARSI is the co- chairman of the Conservative party, even though she failed to get elected as an MP by her home town of Dewsbury (“Top Tory in expenses scandal”, News, last week).

Warsi claimed taxpayers’ cash for accommodation while staying rent-free with a friend, and failed to declare to parliament thousands of pounds in rental income. Is it coincidental that Britain is in the state it is while a person who is either incompetent, or possibly a thief, is having a direct hand in running it?
Ruth Todd, Bath, Somerset

Par for the course
Some Sunday Times online subscribers have written that this is sickening, which it is, but it also comes as no surprise, which is saddening. For those politicians who are caught, I am certain that many others get away. They can claim for all sorts of expenses but to invent them is going too far. Their salary is handsome and the benefits vast.

The rioters and looters were punished for even the slightest offences, and people are often penalised financially for errors on tax returns and the like.

Politicians should be held to account far more than the masses, for they are the ones who represent us — or claim to. Whether Warsi is sacked, reprimanded or demoted, she will be back. She is a politician, after all, and that is the nature of the political game.
Chukwudi Dozie, London

Off key
I don’t understand why “no receipts were required”. As for the GP who allowed the free issue of a room key — was that altruism or a reluctance to admit to taxable income?
Geraldine Bunyon, Cape Town

Taking liberties
It is little wonder the turnout at elections is so low when it can be clearly seen that so many lords, MPs and councillors are on the take.
David Hargreaves, Holywell, Flintshire

Holding court
If it was the jobseeker’s allowance she was collecting under false pretences, she’d be in court. So will she be for this?
San Toi, London

Sliding scale
As an interested observer from afar, I find it lamentable that so many institutions in Britain that once had a reputation for honesty and incorruptibility are now seen as, and have been proven to be, anything but.

Banner headlines in some of the world’s most corrupt regimes trumpet the scandal of the politicians’ dishonesty over parliamentary expenses with glee. No one can be under any illusions as to the reasons for this decline in financial, public and private morality.
Geoffrey Fielding, Manila

Sorry state
This is quite sad. I never liked her politics but admired her bolshie and brave manner.
Jonathan Meldrum, Potters Bar, Hertfordshire

EU democracy is victim of ideology

DOMINIC LAWSON says it all by condemning Ken Clarke in 1996 for simply ignoring David Heathcoat-Amory’s reasoned exposure of the futility of European monetary union without political and financial unity (“The euro — life with a 40-year-old lie”, Comment, last week).

But the really interesting bit is how all these Europhiles can defy reason such as this. The answer is obvious to a historian. It is ideology — the philosophy of fools — and the ideology is fascist. The European Union is built on it, all the way from the 1951 Franco-German coal and steel community treaty from which the EU has been deliberately gerrymandered without a single democratic warrant over the 61 years to date.

Liberal-minded folk have simply been suckered for all these years — the “useful idiots” that totalitarian regimes enlist. Vince Cable, the business secretary, is one, though not himself a socialist — as Adrian Beecroft alleges — but something slightly more slippery. Europe can develop a sensible democratic common market, allowing Germany its full economic influence but nothing more. That is what the German people actually want — just like the rest of us.
Lord Walsingham, Merton, Norfolk

Call the dogs off culture secretary

AS some newspapers fall over themselves in their frenzy to dismember Jeremy Hunt, it was some relief to read your piece (“The hounding of Hunt”, Focus, last week). It was the first article I had read that put some perspective on this rush to judgment. Let us not forget the lengths the culture secretary went to in order to honour his duty to follow procedure.

The long-term consequences of the phone hacking scandal, the Leveson inquiry and the open season on the part of some newspapers to rip asunder other print empires (and all the man hours being spent on this) are that politicians will become less open, texting will become a thing of the past (too dangerous), more conversations will be held on camera, less will be committed to paper and there will be even more coded dialogue.
Roger Woodgate, Spratton, Northamptonshire

BBC impartial in reporting BSkyB bid

Martin Ivens is mistaken in two respects about the BBC and News Corporation’s bid to buy the whole of BSkyB (“The BBC has a dog in this Murdoch fight”, Comment, last week).

The first is that the BBC was, or is, opposed to the bid itself. We weren’t and aren’t. Our point was only ever that the bid should be referred by ministers to the relevant competition authorities.

The second error is in relation to the implication that any corporate position the BBC took on the bid was likely to impair our ability to cover the story with strict impartiality. When it became clear in 2010 that the BBC would take a corporate view about the referral of the News Corporation bid, I recused myself from my duties as editor-in-chief as regards both the bid and the wider phone-hacking story and handed responsibility for both to senior colleagues within our news division. That separation remains in place.
Mark Thompson, Director-General BBC

Badger cull justified in battle with TB

THE research by the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute and Liverpool University does not say that the tests for bovine tuberculosis (BTB) are seriously flawed (“Badger cull based on flawed TB tests”, News, May 20). In fact, it shows that bovine TB tests still confirmed the disease in the animals that had liver fluke. Nobody wants to cull badgers, and we certainly aren’t intending to cull 70% of England’s badgers. However, we will not succeed in eliminating this serious disease unless we also tackle the disease in badgers.
Caroline Spelman, Environment Secretary

Matthew Baylis, chairman of veterinary epidemiology at Liverpool University, comments: Caroline Spelman’s second sentence is correct, in that the six co-infected cattle all gave skin-test results that indicated a positive BTB infection. However, the scale of the response was much less in these animals than in those just infected with BTB; and, applied on a large scale under natural conditions, such a reduction should lead to infections being missed.

Health scheme
TB-infected cattle are slaughtered but we don’t cull TB-infected badgers. Yet the badger, with no natural predator, has to be managed. By doing so, you create a healthy and sustainable population — and healthy cattle. You cannot have one without the other.
Susi Althorpe, Tiverton, Devon

Points

Clear conscience
You report the death of Eberhard Schaaf, a 62-year-old German doctor, who died having collected 110lb of litter from Mount Everest’s slopes (“I had to climb over corpses in Everest’s traffic jam”, News, last week). Schaaf is, so far as I know, the first person to have given his life to protect the world from the scourge of litter. He should be remembered.
John Julius Norwich, London W9

Her Majesty’s service
In “One’s age of austerity” (Magazine, last week) the singer Gary Barlow talks about how HRH gives him sleepless nights. The Queen is HM (Her Majesty), not HRH (Her Royal Highness).
Angela Waller, Felpham, West Sussex

Insult to injury
I am writing to protest at the remarks Michael Winner made in “Picasso, Bricusse, me — all the greats have eaten here” (News Review, May 13): “Leslie [Bricusse] has so many residences he could single-handedly house the homeless in India. He’d love to do this but he’s afraid they might make a mess of the carpets.” This is a gross insult to a nation of billion people.
Nitin Mehta, Croydon, London

Corrections and clarifications

IN “Mickey taking comes as standard” Rod Liddle last week said the board members of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) “have hardly appeared in person at all for their regular meetings but are still eligible for the full” £400 attendance fee. Ipsa tells us that in seven meetings this year by the five board members, including the chairman Sir Ian Kennedy, there were three complete absences and 11 attendances by conference call, and that those who do not make a physical appearance are paid an undisclosed pro rata portion of the fee. Ipsa also says that in its first year there was a reduction of £14.5m in MPs’ expenses compared with the final year of House of Commons self-regulation. We are happy for it to clarify this.

Complaints about inaccuracies in all sections of The Sunday Times, including online, should be addressed to editor@sunday-times.co.uk or The Editor, The Sunday Times, 3 Thomas More Square, London E98 1ST. In addition, the Press Complaints Commission (complaints@pcc.org.uk or 020 7831 0022) examines formal complaints about the editorial content of UK newspapers and magazines (and their websites)

Birthdays and anniversaries

Wasim Akram, cricketer, 46; Anderson Cooper, CNN journalist, 45; Kelly Jones, Stereophonics frontman, 38; Rafael Nadal, tennis player, 26; James Purefoy, actor, 48; Suzi Quatro, singer, 62; Alain Resnais, film director, 90; Penelope Wilton, actress, 66

1865 King George V is born; 1871 Jesse James and his gang steal $15,000 from an Iowa bank; 1925 birth of actor Tony Curtis; 1981 Shergar wins the Derby; 1982 Israel’s ambassador to Britain, Shlomo Argov, is shot and wounded on a London street, sparking war in Lebanon