PLEASE send your letters (as short as you like) to info@conservativewoman.co.uk and mark them ‘Letter to the Editor’. We need your name and a county address, eg Yorkshire or London. Letters may be shortened. There is no guarantee of publication.
***
Mark Steyn does not deserve this treatment
Dear Editor
A broken world to see Mark Steyn lose his gig on GB News and have no one support him, and now this, humiliation and financial ruin for the man who deserves it least. There are plenty of people who I’d give this fate to – definitely not courageous Steyn.
Peter Willoughby
Devon
***
Why Steyn lost his case
Dear Editor
The problem with the Mark Steyn case was his avoidance of evidence of the errors in the hockey stick thing. The case descended into mutual personality attacks, it was not about the ‘science’ of the climate nonsense. He rightly lost the case. Trying to destroy the Mann bloke was pointless and handed the other side an open goal.
Unfortunately much of the debate about climate ends in a shouting match about how many scientists say this or that or who is supposed to be getting money from whom. We want to hear the data, not opinions.
When GB News has ‘experts’ on to discuss climate stuff, they shout over each other and I turn off the sound.
Dan Pallant
Kent
***
Engineers know better than to buy EVs
Dear Editor
I have just been to a talk on the UK Motor Vehicle Industry attended by around 50 Chartered Engineers from Sussex.
The speaker finished by covering the change from ICEs (Internal Combustion Engines) to EVs (Electric Vehicles).
When he asked how many in the audience had an EV, not a single hand went up!
I doubt if he would have got a much different result amongst a similar group of professionals anywhere else in the UK.
Roger J Arthur
West Sussex
***
The curse of smartphones
Dear Editor
I sincerely applaud journalist Daisy Greenwell’s efforts to remove smartphones from childhood https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/feb/17/thousands-join-uk-parents-calling-for-smartphone-free-childhood and the momentum her movement has sparked is exemplary. I am sceptical as to how she or anyone can achieve a full delay of smartphones until late teen years, when children see us all handle these blasted machines the entire time. They are the remote control to our lives. Godspeed to the initiative however.
Julian Kingsbury
London
***
The harsh reality of the countryside
Dear Editor
As a rural, white farmer based on the Cumbrian shores, I read with interest your article https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/britains-countryside-is-a-racist-colonial-white-space/ on alleged racism in the Countryside.
To recap, Wildlife and Countryside Link provided parliament with evidence to show that the British countryside is a ‘racist colonial’ white space. They are the ‘largest environment and wildlife coalition in England, bringing together 82 organisations to use their strong, joint voice for the protection of nature’.
I must say that their report raises a lot of questions.
Why is the countryside a white space? Perhaps, given the rubbish wages, high levels of rural deprivation and the high cost of housing, people who aren’t on serious money don’t want to move here?
As for visiting, I suspect that for people who are financially struggling, whatever their skin colour, the sheer cost is enough to put them off. When you’re struggling to cope with the increased cost of living, something must give.
As for farming, to be fair I know a lot of people who weren’t born in this country who have a good work ethic. I would happily employ them but there are two problems. The first is that I don’t make enough money to take on employees, and the second is that they’re too smart to work ridiculously long hours in poor conditions for damn all reward when they can, with the same sort of commitment, make a decent living and build up a good business in a more urban setting.
But I have two problems with the Wildlife and Countryside Link pronouncements. The first is that we have a lot of well-paid, predominantly metropolitan people who obviously haven’t a clue what life is like in the countryside. Even Suella Braverman is switched on enough to describe the wildlife groups’ claims as ‘naïve and based on a Beatrix Potter version of the countryside when, in fact, rural communities suffered poverty and deprivation as acute as urban areas’. As always, we have those with money pontificating about the failings of the poor. But in point of fact, I once met an old chap who as a boy saw Beatrix Potter, or Mrs Heelis as she was known, walk up from the ferry, just another farmer’s wife with a sack thrown over her shoulders to keep the rain off. She had forgotten more about rural reality than some have ever known.
Then there’s this talk about the countryside being colonial. I looked up what the word really means (other than when it’s used as a generic insult meaning ‘a bad thing’.) Colonialism is ‘the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically’.
Like when rich metropolitans lobby to get control over rural policy so they can go in and tell the peasantry (who are obviously too stupid to run their own lives) how things should be done?
I’m sorry that the good and doubtless adequately compensated people at Wildlife and Countryside Link feel that the indigenous population are failing to meet their high standards.
Perhaps, to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht, The Wildlife and Countryside Link should have had leaflets distributed in parliament stating that the rural peasantry had forfeited the confidence of the elite and could win it back only by redoubled efforts?
Would it not be easier in that case for the elite to dissolve the rural peasantry and select another? Is that why farmers are being squeezed to the point they have to shut up shop and close down their farms?
Me? I’m so damned indigenous that it’s almost embarrassing. Apparently, my family have been mixing a bit of farming and fishing along this coast since before the American colonies revolted. Will I have to be ethnically cleansed to put things right? Or if I just tick the ‘white, other’ box on forms, will that suffice?
Jim Webster
Cumbria
Both the original article and this letter first appeared in Country Squire Magazine and are republished by kind permission.
***
‘Be in the world but not of it’
Dear Editor
Your thoughts in your Review of the Week correspond very well with the state of mind of David Sorensen, founder of Stop World Control, where he has his Christian faith intact as well as seeing the best and worse that human kind can throw at each other.
If I did not have a strong Christian faith I would be blown around by the four winds and be unable to make any useful contribution. So long as the Spirit of God dwells in us He will supply us with the necessary gasoline. I have been maintaining my 5G and covid sites for the best part of five years and I just keep on going, which for a Gemini with a short attention span is saying something. Whoever reads it – who knows – but it keeps me on my toes.
We have to live in the spiritual world and, as St Paul said, be ‘the world but not of it’.
Brian Snellgrove
***
The unasked question: How did Covid-19 get here?
Dear Editor
I am very disappointed that Baroness Heather Hallett’s Covid-19 Public Inquiry did not study the problem of how the UK got Covid-19 in the first place.
The route is not ‘rocket science’. It entered the country by air.
In Edinburgh we had the Nike Conference when delegates went tourist shopping in the tartan shop in Princes Street, Edinburgh, in March 2020. The staff started to feel unwell and Covid-19 was found to be the cause.
In Aberdeen, four French tourists came into Dyce Airport and went to a pub/restaurant and very soon the staff were falling ill with Covid-19. These staff then spread Covid-19 like wildfire around Aberdeen.
When Nicola Sturgeon was giving her soapbox announcements on a daily basis, I was emailing Simon Calder, the travel expert, to ask what Covid-19 testing was being carried out at the airports, Dyce, Dalcross, Turnhouse and Heathrow etc. His answer: none. So we will never know the true extent of the virus coming into the country.
Michael Baird
Bonar Bridge
***
A tale of two decisions
Dear Editor
In 2019 the US Federal Aviation Administration reluctantly grounded the Boeing 737 Max after defects had been hidden and regulation was too lax. Other authorities had forced the issue.
In 2024 the US Food and Drug Administration has a different response to vaccine errors, equivalent to –
Planes routinely crash every day and the growing deaths are normal and to be expected.
Correlation is not causation.
Other authorities remain quiet.
J Tumilty
Co Durham