Running the asylum

Sir: The interview with Robert Buckland must be the most depressing article I have read for a long time (‘Let them contribute’, 5 November). He notes that the many months of lockdown when no one came into the country presented the perfect opportunity to cut the asylum backlog. Instead it got bigger. He suggests reforming the system so that all information material to a case must be presented upfront, instead of cases being subject to endless appeals. (There’s also the fact that many asylum claimants have confused matters by tossing their passports in the sea during their transit.) One wonders how the Tories allowed this mess to develop, and why they can’t take commonsense steps (including his own suggestions) to resolve it.

The spectacle Buckland offers is of a government without ideas or resolve, and a Britain in which immigration is permanently at the mercy of a Home Office which has gone native.
Richard North
Hayling Island, Hampshire

Triple jump

Sir: I am concerned about the tendency for comfortably off pensioners to say that the triple lock should be abolished, as it illustrates a worrying disconnect between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in society. I was disappointed to read Charles Moore’s comments on the subject (Notes, 5 November), as he no doubt enjoys a substantial private pension from his past employment together with ongoing earnings. The state pension therefore will be a minor component of his monthly income.

There are millions of OAPs who have worked for small businesses on low wages all their lives, whose employers did not have a pension scheme. For them, private pension schemes would have been unaffordable. To these people, the old age pension is the major, if not the only, component of their monthly income: roughly £1,500 a month for a married couple. The triple lock is needed to protect them. And even hinting at dropping the triple could be electorally catastrophic for the Conservatives, as Theresa May discovered to her cost in 2017.
David Norris
Quorn, Leicestershire

A debt delayed

Sir: Douglas Murray asks: ‘Why should our descendants be forced into a worse situation because of the selfishness of your own actions?’ (‘The negligence of “not in my lifetime”’, 5 November). The vast costs of the Covid debacle have yet to be properly calculated but the monetary loss alone has been estimated to be roughly £130 billion. And this sum fails to include the cost of the setback to our economy and the social cost to healthcare and education.

This is the first time in the history of the UK that the cost of an illness – which mainly afflicted the elderly and infirm of today’s generation – has been put on the national credit card to be paid by future generations. Murray claims that ‘almost nobody… appears to see (this) as a moral issue’. I have 11 grandchildren, and I do.
Tom Benyon
Bladon, Oxford

Stirling effort

Sir: I was touched by Taki’s tribute to the Grand Prix heroes of the 1950s (High life, 5 November). Sir Stirling Moss was a lucky survivor and remained an iconic figure in the sport for the rest of his life, able to provide commentary on the most apparently trivial aspects of his career, from lap times at obscure races to dinner dates and haircuts, having kept diaries throughout. He narrowly missed out on the World Championship crown in 1958, losing to Mike Hawthorne by just one point – Moss having won four Grand Prix to Hawthorne’s single victory. When Hawthorne’s Ferrari spun during the Oporto Grand Prix and returned to the circuit via the Boavista road circuit’s pavement, race stewards threatened him with disqualification for going against the direction of the race. But Moss sportingly spoke up for him, enabling Hawthorne to keep his Portuguese points, and thus eclipse Moss in the championship standings by that single point. Different days, for sure.
Johnny Tipler
Cromer, Norfolk

Natural born thrillers

Sir: Katja Hoyer’s tacit linking of the bizarre practice of biodynamic agriculture with political extremism (‘Long live the Kaiser’, 5 November) ignores the fact that many of the best wines in the world are produced by biodynamics. Some of the practices do seem nutty, but the proof of the pudding (wine) is in the drinking. They are clearly doing something right. I have met only a very few extreme characters on my wine travels, and none of them dangerous so far as I know.
Edward Ash WSETdip
London SW20

Russia’s affliction

Sir: I strongly endorse James Delingpole’s review of the BBC’s TraumaZone (Arts, 29 October). All the seeds of the chronic insecurity that afflict Russia today are laid bare in this superb series, among them violence, incompetence, grinding poverty and rapacious corruption, all delivered with a mendacity that only a communist system can manage. As a student who spent a year in the Soviet Union from 1985-86 and as a regular visitor until 2014, it is a tragedy that so very little has changed.
James Butterwick
Burnham Market, Norfolk

Joining the Dots

Sir: I’m surprised at Dot Wordsworth’s account of her memory loss (‘Multiple’, 4 November). Did she not attend one of the Oxford women’s colleges? Plurimi pertransibunt et multiplex erit scientia is unmissably inscribed above the south staircase of the (Old) Bodleian Library. I’m grateful to her, however, for revealing the origin of the sentence in the Vulgate, ambivalent though it seems.
Brigid Allen
Charlbury, Oxfordshire

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