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Mr Frost should have slowed down and moved over to let the cyclist pass, stopping if necessary. It does not really matter that the cyclist may have been in the wrong — Mr Frost should have taken appropriate steps for his own safety and that of others. Perhaps he should reflect on how he would have felt if the cyclist had died, but he had saved the ‘dear Welsh terrier’.
Michael D. Varcoe-Cocks
London W6
Ukip falsehoods
Sir: As an admirer of — and subscriber to — The Spectator (albeit I am member of the Parliamentary Labour Party) I am dismayed that you should have printed an article based on such blatant falsehoods as that by Stuart Wheeler (‘Why I’m voting Ukip’, 23 May).
As anyone could readily ascertain from published statistics, our net contribution to the EU budget at present is some £6 billion a year, not £120 billion. So Mr Wheeler exaggerates by 20 times. Typical maybe of Ukip propaganda, but I am dismayed that you have sunk so low as to publish such rubbish without apparent editorial checks.
Moreover, they know they are telling fibs. These gross exaggerations have been acknowledged by their spokesmen in the House of Lords over many months as a ‘mistake’.
Lord Lea of Crondall
House of Lords, London SW1
Reader error
Sir: Peter Florence, founder of the Hay Festival, gives a glowing plug for the Sony Reader — ‘the gadget of choice this week’ (Diary, 30 May). Might it not have been honest of him to mention that Sony Reader sponsored Hay?
Jill Green
Via email
Miliband mistaken
Sir: The Foreign Secretary’s attack on the Conservatives’ European policy (‘Hague’s EU policy would be suicidal’, May 9) richly deserved the rebuttal it received from William Hague (‘Britain is on the fringes of Europe’, 30 May). Mr Miliband identified four ‘crucial’ policy areas as benefiting from EU integration: strengthening the single market; leading the world on climate change; increasing international financial supervision; and rationalising European foreign policy. In each case his argument crumbles under analysis.
Far from averting ‘a global slide towards protectionism’, the single market (more accurately, the Common Commercial Policy) has repeatedly shown itself to be an instrument of protectionism, responsible for more than its fair share of the failure of world trade negotiations. Internally, the single market has developed into the EU’s principal means of furthering bureaucratic integration at the expense of competitiveness.
‘Leading the world on climate change’ has come to mean proposals of stupendous expense to achieve unilateral reductions in CO2 emissions that would have a minuscule effect on global warming even on the most unlikely and melodramatic IPCC projections. The politicisation of science is a denial of scientific method; allied to the disregard of cost-benefit analysis, it becomes economically suicidal.
As for financial regulation, last year’s Financial Services Action Plan, and now the proposals to hobble hedge funds and private equity, show that the EU’s political aim is to undermine the Anglo-Saxon economic model and capture for Frankfurt and Paris a share of the City’s market dominance. That regulators in Brussels, with little knowledge of wholesale markets, should be awarded a raft of new rules to enforce over an industry located exclusively in London reflects both contempt for the subsidiarity principle and a depressingly retrograde ideology.
Finally, Mr Miliband asserts that further EU ‘institutional tinkering’ is precluded by ‘a self-denying ordinance’ agreed with Gordon Brown in 2007. So that’s all right then — just as it was all right when Maastricht guaranteed us independence over foreign policy, social policy and criminal justice; or when Mrs Thatcher won our rebate; or when Britain was exempted from the fisheries policy; or when we were promised a referendum on the EU constitution. Mr Miliband is too young to remember every hope betrayed, but he cannot expect the rest of us to forget so easily.
Lord Leach of Fairford
Chairman, Open Europe, London SW1
Unorthodox behaviour
Sir: Surely, the Daily Mail and Hugo Rifkind (Shared Opinion, 30 May) notwithstanding, it will have been the Greek Orthodox Church, not the Catholic Church, which was offended by lame-brained, ill-habited, bare-buttocked British caperers prancing around as nuns in Crete.
Tom Aitken
Via email
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