Jon Lawrence makes a good case about community life some decades ago (“The good old days? Look deeper and the myth of ideal communities fades”, Comment). I lived that life and always had mixed feelings about it. All my family, including 17 aunts and uncles and 27 cousins, spent the 30s and 40s in two-up, two-down terrace houses in Salford and its neighbourhood.
In my teens, I spent weekends and holidays pushing an ice-cream cart through the streets of Salford and I remember, sentimentally, the car-free life on the streets, the games kids played there, the adults sitting on their doorsteps in the evening chatting. I still feel the closeness of everybody to everybody. And it really was good.
But it was something else, too. Men went to the pub, but women stayed at home and looked after the kids. When I pushed my baby daughter in her pram in 1960, I was scorned. Men should do men-things.
When I was 14, we got a council house. Not one of those we wanted, on the new estate, but one of the old, circa 1921 houses on the edge of that estate. We desperately wanted a house with an inside lav, a tap with hot water and, perhaps, a bathroom. We got all that in the 1921 house. The designers had tried to recreate the old closeness of the terrace streets we all came from. They did it by putting the “front” door at the side so that, as you left your house, you could be face to face with your neighbour. The response by many, perhaps most, tenants was to plant a hedge so that you did not have to see your neighbour.
Jim Johnson
Nottingham
Recently, I spent 10 days in bed with labyrinthitis. There are 23 houses in my close and we have a WhatsApp group that sometimes comes in handy, eg if we need a parcel taking in. Unable to get out, I put out a request asking if someone could get my copy of last weekend’s Observer. Within moments, the offers poured in and for the rest of the week my dog was walked, shopping delivered and concerned messages sent. Communities are alive and well – they just look a bit different now.
Janie Penn-Barwell
Eastleigh, Hampshire
Vital vaccines
Three cheers for Séamas O’Reilly’s defence of vaccination (“I avoid giving parenting advice. But when it comes to infant vaccines, I won’t hesitate”, Magazine). His reasoned, calm and unequivocal support for this tried and natural defence against disease should be adopted by the NHS.
Phelim J Brady
Normandy, Surrey
Beating the butterfly blues
Stephen Moss’s article (“Just a flutter? Why this butterfly summer is so fragile”, Focus) helpfully includes suggestions for action readers can take to make their gardens more attractive to butterflies. It will certainly be beneficial for more people to manage their gardens along the lines suggested but by itself this will not be enough to stem the decline of these lovely insects.
We need government to bring about systemic changes: agricultural policies that promote biodiversity in the countryside much more effectively; a planning system that provides stronger protection to wildlife and requires habitat creation to be a compulsory part of every development; requirements on local authorities to manage verges and other open land with wildlife in mind. Without decisive action, government platitudes about protecting biodiversity will ring hollow and we will lose our butterflies and many other species besides.
Jonathan Wallace
Fenham, Newcastle upon Tyne
Honour went out with the Ark
I was surprised to see Andrew Rawnsley call for people to act with “honour” in parliament (“Mr Johnson’s plot to subvert democracy is more dangerous than Brexit itself”, Comment. That’s a word I’ve not heard for a very long time. Ever since the 1960s, we have been told that rebellion is an end in itself. Politeness, manners, reserve, honour, understatement, rules – all of these were stuffy, outmoded, Victorian hang-ups. Deference was repression. Convention was a straitjacket. All were regressive controlling tools of patriarchy and enemies to be destroyed in class war.
This social campaign to slaughter a previous generation’s sacred cows was so triumphant it’s a victim of its own success – what was once counter-culture is now conventional culture, and the new rebels have taken its lessons to heart.
If Rawnsley is disappointed that people do not “behave properly”, it is the natural consequence of the perpetual state of adolescent revolt our culture has pushed for years. Dominic Cummings has been “in contempt of parliament”? Join the queue!
It is strange to see that people who for decades demanded that parliament be burned as a hidebound imperialist relic are rushing to defend its integrity now it is convenient for them. I ask all progressives belatedly hand-wringing about Boris Johnson’s Brexit bullishness: are you truly appalled at his lack of decorum and disrespect for precedent or are you just frustrated that he is beating you at your own game?
Robert Frazer
Salford, Greater Manchester
Drawing the line on Kashmir
While you are right to condemn India for unilaterally altering Kashmir’s status quo, it was Pakistan, not India, which made the first move in this direction (“Modi’s acts go unchecked in an ever more lawless world”, Comment). In 1963, Pakistan, under the Sino-Pakistan agreement, decided unilaterally to cede a large portion of Kashmir’s territory to China. It acted unilaterally again when, in May 2018, it decided to allow China to build an economic corridor through the Gilgit-Baltistan area of Kashmir, although such construction is illegal under international law.
Both India and Pakistan have been guilty of altering Kashmir’s status quo unilaterally over the last 70 years. Under these circumstances, is it not time that, instead of prolonging this dispute for another 70 years, they considered ending it by converting the current line of control in Kashmir into an international border between the two countries?
Randhir Singh Bains
Gants Hill, Essex
A leaf out of Merkel’s book
Rebecca Nicholson mocks Angela Merkel for choosing as her holiday reading Stephen Greenblatt’s Tyranny (“You’re on hols, so less of the despotic reading matter”, Comment). As Simon Callow put it in his New York Times review of the book, Tyranny “analyses political events in Shakespeare’s world in terms of our own experience” and in so doing subtly explains a great deal about Donald Trump.
The book sounds like ideal holiday reading for a head of government who possesses the considerable intelligence and cultural sophistication of an Angela Merkel, who at school was East Germany’s three-time champion in the national Russian-language competition, was to go on to be awarded a PhD in quantum chemistry and regularly enjoys Wagner operas at Bayreuth.
Furthermore, such a book is tailor-made for the mind of a leader who has shown that she has the measure of Donald Trump and is not afraid to stand up to him, for instance by recently saying that she firmly distanced herself from Trump’s racist attack on four Congresswomen of colour.
It is foolish to ridicule anyone with a significant intellectual hinterland for not choosing to immerse themselves in trivia when taking a break from work. I would find it reassuring if any of the UK’s MPs expressed vacation interest in the political world of Friedrich Schiller’s works. They are more likely to court popular opinion by tweeting about Love Island, which, I suspect, partly explains the mess we are in. Give me the intellectual curiosity of Angela Merkel on holiday any day.
David Head
Peterborough