Tales from the City

Sir: Simon Jenkins’s article on Liverpool Street Station (‘Horror storeys’, 9 May) is inaccurate, and an insult to every councillor on the City of London planning committee, whose professionalism I defend. Saying the committee was ‘clearly going to approve’ the application amounts to an allegation of predetermination. That is a serious charge against every councillor present. It is also untrue: 22 members heard the case and three voted against.

Sir Simon writes that ‘both schemes were presented to a packed City planning committee’. This is also untrue. There was one planning application before the committee that day. The McAslan ideas referred to by objectors were embryonic: no application had been submitted, none was imminent and the committee had nothing to determine on them. A planning authority that refused a viable application because a third party had sketched an alternative would be acting unlawfully. Sir Simon, who spoke as an objector at that meeting and does not declare this in his piece, will know that objectors and applicants had identical speaking time.

The picture he paints is of a delinquent planning authority. That is hard to square with the record. Permissions granted in the City over the past decade delivered more than £250 million towards the Elizabeth Line and over £33 million for affordable housing in neighbouring boroughs. Schemes approved during my chairmanship so far will, when built, add some 10,000 jobs to a City that already supports 676,000.

The application is now with the Mayor of London under Article 5 of the Town and Country Planning (Mayor of London) Order 2008. The Secretary of State retains his power to call it in.

Sir Simon’s London is a museum, beautifully preserved but economically stagnant. The alternative is a working capital, alive because it keeps being built.

Tom Sleigh

Chairman, Planning and Transportation Committee, City of London Corporation

Discordant times

Sir: I was much moved by your leading article (‘The virus of anti-Semitism’, 9 May). It managed to encapsulate an unwelcome change in the views of an increasing number of people in Britain. My parents, who fled Nazi persecution 90 years ago, came to love and admire their adopted country. As a Jew born here, I feel myself totally British, with an enduring love of these islands. Like most people born here or arriving as refugees, I cherish the sense of fair play and balanced opinion for which British people have always been known.

But this is changing, and the emerging antipathy to Jewish people and to Israel is deeply upsetting. It is perhaps one of many symptoms of anger and disharmony. Whether it is the desire of devolved nations to float free from a united kingdom or a disregard for the rule of law in our high streets, I fear for the future of this nation. We must again place the highest value on kindness, an understanding of ‘the other’ and tolerance if we are not to go down the path to social discord, of which anti-Semitism has so often been an early herald.

Cecil Reid

Harrow, Middlesex

Won’t get fooled again

Sir: Talk of removing Sir Keir Starmer assumes that changing the occupant of No. 10 will somehow restore public confidence (‘Starmergeddon’, 9 May). Yet in the past ten years we have seen six prime ministers – four of whom took office midterm – come and go, during which trust in politics has only deteriorated. Perhaps the problem is structural rather than personal. For example, when governments claim that freezing tax thresholds does not raise income tax, though every working adult can see that it does, they are treating voters as fools. It should hardly surprise them that the public returns the sentiment in spades.

John Megoran

Weymouth, Dorset

Festival lights

Sir: Philip Sober is right in drawing attention to the part played by Sir Gerald Barry in promoting the concept of the Festival of Britain, but mistaken in describing him as the ‘originator of the concept’ (Letters, 9 May). Charles Wintour in The Rise and Fall of Fleet Street describes the events as follows: ‘Barry left the paper [the News Chronicle] in 1947 to run the Festival of Britain, an idea from his excellent deputy, Ralph McCarthy, that he had promoted to the full.’ Both Ralph McCarthy (my father) and Gerald Barry deserve to be recognised.

Callum McCarthy

London SE3

Holding the trigger

Sir: I enjoyed reading about the Puffin quiz books (The Spectator’s Notes, 2 May) and it made me search out a book that was issued to every schoolchild in the borough of St Pancras in 1953 for the Coronation. I was 11 and my sister was five. It is a history of London and it doesn’t hold back. You get the Black Death, the murder of the Princes in the Tower, the execution of the Gunpowder Plotters and the heads on spikes on London Bridge. I looked for a ‘trigger warning’ but found none.

David Edwards

Leighton Buzzard, Beds

Leagues apart

Sir: Rod Liddle’s column about the secret to our footballing success (9 May) made me wonder whether the ‘greed’ he describes might rescue other sports too. As a Wigan Warriors supporter, I have always thought it a shame that rugby league remains such a stubbornly northern sport. Its recent international ambitions are encouraging, but it still lacks the commercial instinct needed to reach a wider audience. With talks ongoing with the NRL, and broadcasting rights soon up for renewal, rugby league’s administrators might do well to study the Premier League. Proper financial ambition, sensibly managed, can allow a sport to flourish rather than fade into irrelevance.

Adam Fawcett

Upholland, Lancashire

La vie en rosé

Sir: In his ‘Notes on… rosé’ (2 May), Henry Jeffreys quotes Sir John Junor telling Alan Watkins – his parliamentary sketch writer – that ‘only poofs drink rosé’. However, the Sunday Express travel editor, Lewis de Fries, claimed the remark was made to him, after Junor had read his description of a meal he had enjoyed in some far-flung destination. In his version, though, Junor’s declaration concerns white wine. Perhaps, like many Fleet Street tales, this is one that can be adapted to suit the circumstances.

John Carter

Shortlands, Kent

Do you think that’s wise?

Sir: Sinclair McKay (Books, 9 May) might be interested to know that the Home Guard lives on in West Sussex in the form of the Rustington District Home Guard Rifle Club. Formed by the original members in 1943, it has battled on to this day, though it might soon be extinct since the current Duke of Norfolk has decided to expel the club from the rifle range on his estate.

R.G. Hawkes

Middleton on Sea, West Sussex