Pick of the week’s correspondence
Too kind to kleptocrats
To The Times
It is welcome to hear Liz Truss say that the UK will limit Russian kleptocrats’ access to the City, but her warning would mean more if it had not been made so often in the past. After every Kremlin misdeed of recent times, from the Salisbury poisoning to the annexation of Crimea, ministers have thundered that oligarchs have no place here, and yet nothing has changed. All Truss’s comments tell us is that those previous promises meant nothing. She should heed how Lynne Owens, director-general of the National Crime Agency, explained her officers’ failure to tackle oligarchs in evidence given three years ago to the Intelligence and Security Committee: “We are, bluntly, concerned about the impact on our budget.”
Oligarchs are rich, but they are not that rich. If the Government wants to rein in the Kremlin’s cronies, it should stop passing new laws and start giving agencies the money they need to enforce the laws that we already have.
Oliver Bullough, author of Moneyland
How the poor get stuffed To The Guardian
The “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness” was actually invented by the character
Owen in The RaggedTrousered Philanthropists
by Robert Tressell, published in 1914.
Owen illustrates it with reference to buying stockings, boots, shoes and underclothes for his family. He says: “This is how the working classes are robbed. Although their incomes are the lowest, they are compelled to buy the most expensive articles – that is, the lowest-priced articles.
“Everybody knows that good clothes, boots or furniture are really the cheapest in the end, although they cost more money at first; but the working classes can seldom or never afford to buy good things; they have to buy cheap rubbish, which is dear at any price.”
If you want to know about capitalism and
socialism, The RaggedTrousered Philanthropists is
still a good guide.
Sally Goldsmith, Sheffield
Don’t thank the Romans To The Daily Telegraph
The Revd His Honour Peter Morrell argues that “the [Roman] invasion in 55BC and subsequent colonisation of Britain was the best thing that ever happened to this country”.
To me, as an archaeologist, this is a contentious claim, and a strange context in which to judge “woke guilt about the British empire”.
The Romans came for our corn. We were civilised farmers, not “hunter-gatherers clad in skins”. Don’t believe Roman propaganda of the time: the Celts were not
barbarians, but an egalitarian people with a rich and largely peaceful way of life – culturally different, but judged by Rome inferior.
Under Roman rule, generations suffered military and economic exploitation, and traditional life was trashed. Civil administration was embedded so weakly that the Pax Romana in colonised Britannia soon broke down after 410AD, and comparable rule wasn’t seen again until the Norman Conquest six centuries later. Hardly “the best thing”.
Peter Saunders, Salisbury, Wiltshire
Old people are scorned... To the Financial Times
Lucy Kellaway’s welcome highlighting of the pernicious issue of tolerance of ageism is framed as “old people are as good as young people”. Should we not be celebrating how older people are differently-abled?
First, their longer experience means they have greater wisdom, having already made the mistakes many of the young are about to make.
Second, older people have a greater tolerance of ambiguity, yielding widerranging responses.
Lastly, among their generation were the original punks. Some of us still pogo within.
Andy Green, Barry Island, Vale of Glamorgan
...but they had it coming To the Financial Times
Lucy Kellaway was eloquent in denouncing the discrimination dished out by the young to the old. But of course it’s our own fault. We boomers invented the cult of youth, gleefully stripping the elderly of the deference they had traditionally commanded. For us now, in our terminal phase, to demand a return to the status quo ante is hilarious. Peter Popham, London
An offer you can’t refuse To Daily Telegraph
Do Transport for London and large supermarkets just prefer mask-wearing, or is it compulsory?
If the former, how is the rule enforced? If you disobey the “request”, can police be called to ensure compliance? Or evict you? I am in a muddle.
Virginia Ironside, London