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The people of London have a right to know how we are performing. All major police forces in the world are held accountable for cutting crime. If we scrapped crime figures, we’d be castigated for preventing the public from knowing how we are performing.
The author — a ‘long-serving’ officer — apparently witnesses inappropriate behaviour but appears to have done nothing to address it. Good front-line supervisors have no time for malpractice. It is all too easy to hide behind anonymity when passing criticism, and I would welcome any officer who has constructive, informed feedback to work with us to help improve our services.
The Met I see on a daily basis may not be perfect but is not consumed by slavishly following target regimes. I’m proud to say that the vast majority of officers remain committed to keeping London safe and to policing with integrity.
Steve Kavanagh
Deputy Assistant Commissioner
Metropolitan Police Service
Sir: I was a policeman in the 1950s and 1960s when performance targets were very few indeed and police officers shared the streets with their public, as they had done for over a century. Year after year the police public approval ratings were consistently over 90 per cent. As the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s progressed, however, politicians came to meddle more and more in police affairs, with terrible results. Now we have the travesty of poor administration and mismanagement described by the anonymous officer in your magazine last week. Police officers are weighed down by unnecessary and amateurishly thought-out targets, their removal and alienation from daily contact with ‘their’ public and the inevitable consequence of a dreadful public approval rating of less than 40 per cent.
Paddy Murphy
Sheffield
Motoring on
Sir: Sophia Waugh (Travel, 28 May) writes charmingly about Somerset, but is perhaps too young to remember motoring (not driving) holidays, or for that matter Cadbury’s Milk Motoring
chocolate. James Lees-Milne, in his diaries, was perhaps the last English user of the verb ‘to motor’, although by the 1990s he used it mainly in the sense of ‘being
motored’.
Brigid Allen
Charlbury, Oxon
Roth’s America
Sir: I share Michael Henderson’s admiration for the work of Philip Roth (‘Philip Roth is a genius’, 28 May). However, I would question the limitation in his view that ‘his
novels will be read generations from now by book-lovers who want to understand something of Jewish American life in the second half of the 20th century’. His work certainly provides a window
into American Jewish life, but its additional and permanent value is that he uses that perspective to describe much more — American life as a whole. The view that our national culture is so
conflicted and fragmented, as well as so continuously subject to vertiginous changes, that a description of it as a whole by a single novelist is impossible is plausible. However, Roth comes as
close as anyone else, and does better than most.
Professor Norman Birnbaum
Washington DC
A sad story
Sir: I read with some sadness the Diary of a Call Girl by Helen Wood (28 May). Her life seems to have disintegrated after her removal from foster care with a vicar and his wife, as she puts it. At
16 years of age she would still have been a child. Sixteen is too young to be uprooted and expected to live alone. I strongly believe that there should be a review of this policy which casts young
people adrift, away from loving foster parents.
Sally A. Williams
Pembrokeshire
Are renewables needed?
Sir: Congratulations to Matt Ridley for his exposé of the deceitful, if not downright scandalous, financing of the government’s dubious new emissions target (‘A green dark
age’, 21 May). Given the content of the article, rather than calling the levy on electricity bills a ‘stealth poll tax’, ‘subsidy by stealth’ may be a better
description. Even the most cursory analysis of the history of subsidies reveals that if a government decides something needs subsidising, one must always ask: do we need it at all? In the case of
many forms of renewable energy, clearly not.
Peta Seel
France
The BBC tunes out
Sir: For those of us brought up in a world where you could always believe in the BBC and acknowledge its global coverage, it is sad to read how it has been diminished by its own hand (‘Who
speaks for the world?’, 21 May). In the eight years I was the Commonwealth Secretary General (from 2000-08), there was a continuing loss of interest by BBC TV in all Commonwealth issues with
the exception of Zimbabwe. It was Al Jazeera that sought out information on notable Commonwealth issues in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Uganda, Cameroon, Fiji, Guyana and of course Zimbabwe. I hasten to
add that BBC radio was more enquiring than the television arm.
Rt. Hon. Sir Donald McKinnon
New Zealand
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