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Sir: It was with deep disappointment that I read Rachel Johnson’s article. The illustration accompanying it depicts a gaunt, shabbily dressed young woman in a T-shirt with ‘Polska’ emblazoned on it chatting on a mobile phone while neglecting a child in her care. To drive the message home the article refers to ‘Agnieszka from Gdansk, who doesn’t really give a monkey’s’. While the article’s focus is on certain societal problems, the particularly Polish references are strongly negative.
The story does mention the ‘plight’ of Eastern European au pairs — Iveta who sobs in her bedroom after ironing her master’s underwear. In doing so, it mocks rather than sympathises with girls in similar situations. I would invite you to investigate matters more thoroughly before printing such material. I suspect that Ms Johnson has not conducted in-depth research on the work ethic of au pairs, Polish or otherwise.
Gabriel Olearnik
Secretary-general, Polish City Club, London SW10
Ulster didn’t fight for right
Sir: For 30 years the Protestant people and culture of Ulster sought British help as the IRA tried to destroy them both. For 30 years mainland Britain defended, subsidised, protected, supported, guarded and upheld the Protestant community, politically called the Ulster Unionists. The overwhelming majority of that support came from the British Conservatives, with any support for the IRA coming from the British Left.
Last week in the House of Commons the Tories asked for a bit of loyalty from Ulster to defeat Gordon Brown. The reply of the Unionist rump, the DUP, was to sell their votes to Brown for a mess of pottage. The Tories will one day come back to office and the DUP sell-outs may discover those nine votes were the most expensive they ever sold. Loyalty is a two-way street and only the degenerate cannot see that.
But it gets worse. All that day it was known that Gordon Brown was in conclave with the DUP, seeking to bribe them to vote his way. Everyone in the House knew that. Why did the Conservative leadership not move in and stop it? Was it this that made David Davis, a very passionate man and a non-stop fighter, so utterly exasperated?
Frederick Forsyth
Hertford
Pushkin comes to shove
Sir: Deborah Ross may not have heard of Bodrov’s Prisoner of the Mountains (Arts, 7 June) but she should not try to implicate the rest of us in her ignorance. It is a version of one of Pushkin’s most famous poems which was also rendered as a short story by Tolstoy.
John Milne
Colchester, Essex
The last straw
Sir: I’ve always considered that The Spectator’s otherwise peerless dissertations are let down by a bewildering ignorance of the countryside, but hitherto thought that this was occasionally redeemed by Charles Moore. Unfortunately his most recent column (The Spectator’s Notes, 14 June) displays his ignorance. His assertion that big bales of straw are made into silage will have elicited snorts of ridicule from backwoodsmen up and down the land. And far from straw being more scarce ‘than at any time in British history’, the exact opposite is the case this year, as farmers have tried to put every acre into cereals to meet the world’s huge demand, partly driven by the biofuels industry. However, he may, unwittingly, be right in future as the exorbitant cost of fertilisers will cause many arable farmers to plough their straw back into the ground to help feed the following crop, which in turn could poleaxe the livestock industry, and the strawberry beds.
Jamie Blackett
Dumfries, Dumfries and Galloway
Roll on the glorious future
Sir: As a teacher in a secondary school for the last 18 years, my response to the article by Mr Balls about the government’s educational achievements (‘No child left behind’, 14 June) was probably similar to that of a worker on a collective farm on learning of the Soviet government’s latest figures for agricultural production. I can only look forward with joy to the next Five Year Plan.
Graham Mogford
Wolverhampton
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