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LETTER OF THE WEEK
Dear Editor
Your article this week about Kemi Badenoch sums up why the Conservatives I have voted for are ‘toast’ for a generation.
The covid reckoning will always be in the way of any progress the Tories hope to make. Robert Jenrick talks about the need to become a trusted party again whilst still in denial of the horrific damage done by way of the covid scamdemic. Until this truth is properly exposed and those responsible held to account, they can all whistle.
I just hope Reform doesn’t sell out to the globalists.
Dick Tate
Regulation could close farm loophole that inspired inheritance tax
Dear Editor
Trades and professions need apprenticeships and qualifications before practitioners can offer their services to the public. But one notable exception is farming. And this opens the door to the tax-avoiding capitalists and aristocrats.
One way (but there are others) of preventing the wealthy from using farms as tax-avoidance vehicles would be to restrict their ownership to those who have appropriate and long-standing farming experience and qualifications and are actively engaged in farming as their main occupation.
Large country estates, of which there many, owned by the Monarchy, landed gentry, aristocrats and capitalists and evading taxation by this means should have these exemptions removed. And these huge estates should be broken up into smaller economic units and made available to only those who hold genuine farming qualifications.
Clearly, Labours blunt instrument of inheritance tax on farmers was intended to target abuses but unfortunately has punished those we should be rewarding: family farmers with generations of experience and a genuine love for farming.
We have chartered engineers, architects, accountants, doctors etc, all of whom must possess qualifications before being allowed to practise. Why not put farmers into this category and stop the wealthy from abusing farming as a tax-avoidance loophole? And this includes the Monarchy, who already profit from our NHS and education systems.
Malcolm Naylor
Ilkley
David Wright misses link between contraception and abortion
Dear Editor
David Wright writes a good article about feminism but spoils it with his closing question to women who have abortions: ‘Why did you have unprotected sex when so many forms of contraception are easily available today?’
All the evidence across many cultures shows an increase in the use of contraceptives correlates with an increase in abortions. This is because the use of contraception normalises uncommitted sexual relationships, and no contraception is entirely reliable; and so as the use of contraception increases, the number of casual or uncommitted sexual acts increases, the contraception used sometimes fails, and people have abortions because they had never been open in the first place to having a child with their sexual partner.
Liberal feminism in fact proceeds from the normalisation of contraception in the 1960s, following the Anglican Communion’s disastrous acceptance of it at the Lambeth Conference of 1930. For as Mary Harrington explains in Feminism Against Progress, this is the moment at which Westerners stopped accepting their human nature as given and instead tried to remake it using their own power; it is when the posthuman project began, a project that now extends to transgenderism, and will soon lead to the integration of humans with computers.
This project also corrupts medicine, which ceases to be the art of restoring normal function to the body and becomes instead a tool of prideful ‘improvement’ of our God-given human nature, as doctors arrogate to themselves the power to decide what is normal and what is not. Finally, it is an attack on womanhood itself, for while a woman is a human who is capable of conceiving, contraception tries to make her like a man, who is not.
Of course, the appeal of contraception in the 1930s was emotive. Having a huge family under the inhuman conditions of the industrial revolution really was a very tough, sacrificial thing, and contraception seemed to promise an end to slum living (though we should not forgot the very strong eugenic motives of pioneers like Marie Stopes, who wanted to reduce birthrates among ‘lower’ races and classes). But its basic premise is that God made human nature wrongly, and so it has the spirit of the Antichrist upon it – the one who will seem to promise Utopia but not through the Cross.
The actual effect has been to make the middle classes decimate themselves, to weaken relationships by allowing men and women to treat each other as artificially sterile instruments of gratification rather than as human persons, and to normalise promiscuity and even sexual violence. Now we have finally reached the point at which serious marital disharmony is seen as normal, and many ‘sexual’ relationships (if contraceptive relationships can even be described as truly sexual) involve as much hatred as love.
If we want to move beyond the destructive liberal feminism of the last century, then we will, I’m afraid, have to go right back to the historic Christian moral tradition on sexual ethics. We will have once again to accept that men’s and women’s bodies have different capacities, and organise our societies from there. Mr Wright sees so much of the problem, but if he endorses contraception then he is but taking a mop to the floodwaters of liberal feminism while the dam remains breached.
Peter Day-Milne
Extreme feminism long predates the Swinging Sixties
Dear Editor
I’m just wondering when the Feminists became both Judge and Jury? Confident that today’s standards of behaviour must be set by them in situ in any situation and their proposed punishment total. I think we have to look much further back than the Sexual Revolution.
Shiner sentencing adds insult to serious injury
Dear Editor
Seldom has Shakespeare’s immortal phrase ‘add insult to injury’ seemed more apt than for the suspended sentence handed down to the former human-rights solicitor Phil Shiner over three counts of fraud relating to serious allegations made against British soldiers who served in Iraq.
Shiner’s conduct undermined both our national defence and justice – the two most fundamental duties of any state. Solicitors are supposed to uphold the law of the land, not undermine it, and most certainly not defraud the taxpayers of large sums in legal aid.
Shiner caused untold grief for individual British soldiers subjected to repeated investigation over entirely false allegations of major war crimes. Reportedly, one soldier was investigated eight times. More broadly, Shiner’s conduct traduced the reputation of the British army, demoralised soldiers and discouraged young people from joining our armed forces.
Normal people outside the legal profession would consider that Shiner’s behaviour amounted to treason. Even serving in full the two years’ imprisonment suspended by Judge Hehir would be entirely inadequate for the wickedness of Shiner’s crimes.
The attorney general must appeal against this manifestly inadequate sentence.
Otto Inglis
Fife
Urgent need for Home Office to raise asylum drawbridge
Dear Editor
For once politicians have not dithered. The Home Office has immediately halted all asylum applications from Syrians following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s brutal regime. Germany, France, Austria and several Nordic countries not only halted asylum applications but began the process of deporting current claimants back to the Middle East. The UK must immediately do the same. It is highly unlikely that Syrians living in the generous UK will go home voluntarily.
Britain is no longer Great Britain so can no longer afford to take in all the world’s waifs and strays and house, feed, educate them and allow them to use our NHS. There are thousands of jihadi being held in prisons in Syria who would become a threat to the West’s security should they be freed or escape. Any renewed violence or instability in Syria would almost certainly trigger fresh waves of refugees heading for Europe. The UK must pull up the drawbridge immediately.
Clark Cross
Linlithgow
Assisted dying and medical error make deadly bedfellows
Dear Editor
I have recently written to my MP on the reason I stand against assisted dying. If you look at the figures collated by NHS Resolution on the various annual claims on which it pays out for people suffering medical negligence, malpractice, breach of data protection and the rest, then questions must be raised.
Is the Government proposing that those with life-threatening injuries caused in one form or another by the NHS be offered assisted dying? I doubt that would be the correct terminology in those cases.
VJLWilliams
