Modern migrant families

Sir,
In recounting the positions in print of the likes of Miranda Devine from the Right, and Jeff Sparrow of the Left ( Rebels with a jihadist cause, Spectator Australia, 2 May), Tanveer Ahmed just demonstrates that one can use and twist any situation to fit into and prove your pet peeve ( atheism and divorce in Devine’s case, and the well-worn, perennial evils of free-market capitalism from Sparrow).

I think Ahmed’s take on things, i.e. attitudes and beliefs from the home environment, are closer to the mark.

For what it’s worth, and allow me to take my own dogma for a walk here, in looking at the family situation. Firstly, there is the aspect of plain and simple bad parenting. This of course, cuts across all religious, ethnic and socio-economic lines.  This is where you have parents who neither know nor care where their children are in the evenings or on weekends, nor who they associate with, what they read, what they listen to or what they look at online.

Secondly, there are the less desirable changes to the fabric of community life brought about the grand social engineering lab experiment that is Multiculturalism. When I went to school in the 1960’s and early ’70s, we all had classmates who came from migrant backgrounds, mainly Greek or Italian at that time, where there was a strong belief in duty to family and adherence to their specific culture in the home.  But that seemed to end at the front door.  Outside, in their interaction with the wider community, there was encouragement from parents for their children to “fit In” with Australian customs, values and society, rather than teaching them that our culture was morally deficient or evil, as seems to be the case in some circles today.

Tanveer Ahmed is also correct to comment on the research that shows adolescent brains don’t fully mature until around age 25 years. I am sure that is a factor in this as well, but that also plays out in other risk-taking behaviour. But I do feel that as a society, until we firstly decide that we are primarily a country operating under liberal, western values,  and then expect and demand that migrants and their families do far more than pay lip-service (if that much) to those values, this problem will persist.
David Gerber
Sydney, NSW

Scotland’s silent majority

Sir: Hugo Rifkind’s article (‘Scotland’s nasty party’, 9 May) is a first for the media. It expresses the dismay, disbelief and incomprehension felt at the rise of the SNP by least one — and I suspect many — of the silent majority in Scotland. When will the media confront Nicola Sturgeon’s claim to speak for Scotland, as opposed to allowing her to deliver an unchallenged party political broadcast? She can only speak for the SNP, who at best can speak for half of Scottish voters. Not in my name. I want no part of her strident, demanding, aggressive brand.

The article did omit one issue. Thousands of young Scots work in England and abroad, developing and enhancing their expertise before returning home. That wider world view and knowledge benefits Scotland but, with the spectre of independence, how many of these young people will now chose not to return, making us a socially, intellectually and financially poorer, more parochial place?
Name withheld (I really don’t want my windows broken), Glasgow

Top tipster

Sir: The Conservatives and Labour were ‘neck and neck’ or ‘too close to call’, according to all the so-called professional pollsters in the lead-up to the events of last Thursday. In five years’ time they should just ring up the dentist/jockey Sam Waley-Cohen, and save themselves time and no doubt a reasonable amount of wasted expense. He was spot on in his Grand National notebook (11 April). Now, who does he fancy in the 4.30 at Doncaster?
Mark Peeters
Bigbury, Devon

Remembrance of lost Time

Sir: Taki’s obsequies for Time magazine (High life, 2 May) were most evocative. In my teenage years, much of my knowledge of foreign affairs came the local cinema and the March of Time shorts. The stirring signature music and the closing slogan, ‘time marches on’, remain permanently in my memory.

As for the magazine itself, over the past few years it has become progressively more boring. Taki did, however, take me back to the days of its pomp when the letters pages were fascinating: I recall during the Eisenhower years an example of lèse-majesté when the President was referred to as ‘that golf-playing idiot in Washington’.

There was also the response to an article on the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who had been exploring the sexual habits of South Sea islanders and condemned the masculinity of one tribe where the wives had to withdraw the special soup of the area until the men had performed. One correspondent replied: ‘I don’t think that the men are sexless — they just don’t like soup.’
Ken Wortelhock
Orewa, New Zealand

Keeping parsonages

Sir: Could I please clear up the confusion caused by the letter from Canon John Fellows (9 May)? He asks where the vicar is to live when a parsonage is let out. Our lettings proposal relates to former parsonages that are no longer in clergy use. Having declared a house redundant, against the wishes of our members in the parish, the Church then sells it off. It should be keeping it to preserve its capital value, and letting it out to the hedge-fund manager cited by the canon for valuable income, rather than selling it off.

My point about the importance of keeping the traditional parsonage in the first place is that it gives the Church the vital presence, both symbolic and practical, that it loses when the vicar is hidden away on an anonymous suburban estate.
Anthony Jennings
Director, Save Our Parsonages
London WC1