Hannah Barnes’s otherwise excellent article on censorship (The NS Essay, 27 September), “The intolerant age”, is let down by one inaccurate example. The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) guidelines no longer recommend cognitive behavioural therapy and graded exercise therapy for chronic fatigue not because of the influence of “patient experience”, but because of concerns about methodological flaws in the research that had claimed to demonstrate their benefits. These doubts arose after the data in the PACE study was re-analysed by other experts following a freedom-of-information request. An independent regulator taking a view on whether evidence for a treatment reaches the appropriate threshold is entirely different from the other cases cited by Barnes, where jobs and careers were lost, research papers suppressed, books rejected or disciplinary procedures started. Should Nice recommend treatments without robust evidence of their clinical effectiveness?
Anna Lyndsey, Basingstoke, Hampshire
Where’s the humanity?
Lawrence Freedman exposes in his analysis (Cover Story, 27 September) that the Middle East is as much exposed to the “strongman” concept as the rest of the world. These are men who, because of ego or psychopathy, see war as a validation of obscure ethnic or religious difference. That the majority of families, be they Jewish or Arab, just wish to lead their lives in peace is not of interest to them.
Felicity McGowan, Cardigan, Wales
Keir vs Qing
Andrew Marr is right in his judgement of the government: “It isn’t the Qing dynasty” (Politics, 27 September). That lasted from 1644 to 1911. Neither Keir Starmer nor Labour can expect even a tenth of that period of time in power. Nor does the newly elected Labour government share the initial prosperity and power initially enjoyed, and then squandered, by its Qing counterpart. But the latter’s final years were tumultuous. In that respect perhaps, for good or ill, there might be a parallel.
Colin Richards, Spark Bridge, Cumbria
When two become one
Kevin Maguire’s report of two Labour MPs having been discovered having sex together in parliament (Commons Confidential, 27 September) might have been more noteworthy had they been caught having sex separately and on their own.
John Young, Usk, Monmouthshire
Listen up
I was sorry to read that Michael Rosen didn’t manage to land his suggestion for a radio programme about Trieste (Diary, 27 September). Could I (immodestly) recommend the Radio 3 documentary I made with the novelist Paul Bailey on just that subject? James Joyce, Stanislaus Joyce, Italo Svevo, and all that jazz.
David Perry, Cambridge
Hot take
John Gray suggests the UK should not take action on global warming (These Times, 27 September), without any evidence to back up his claim. He writes that “working-class communities… will be ruined by climate targets that… would have zero impact on global warming”.
If we look online at the World Population Review’s figures for CO2 emissions in 2022, we find that the UK’s contribution to the world total is indeed only 0.88 per cent, suggesting an almost negligible contribution. However, we are ranked 17 out of 205 countries. If we were to suspend our efforts to reduce global warming, why should any of the 188 countries who emit less than us not do the same? Taken together with the UK, the combined CO2 emissions of these countries is 23.89 per cent of the world total, nearly double the emissions of the US, the second largest emitter, which is second only to China.
In her excellent review of The Burning Earth in the same issue, Kathleen Jamie reminds us of the need to “think global, act local”. John Gray would do well to pay attention to this.
Dr David Applebaum, Sheffield
Totally ordinary, actually
I enjoyed Finn McRedmond’s column about celebrity book clubs (Out of the Ordinary, 27 September), but I would suggest that there is nothing at all new about aspiring to appear cool or fashionable by holding the latest Sally Rooney, or Albert Camus’s The Stranger. As Abigail Williams describes in The Social Life of Books (2017), 18th-century readers were keen to be seen with the latest works : “Anna Laetitia Barbauld claims that when [Samuel] Richardson’s novel first appeared, among the ladies circulating at the Ranelagh pleasure gardens ‘it was usual for ladies to hold up copies of Pamela to one another, to show they had got the book that everyone was talking of.’”
Michael Robb, Essex
Twitchers’ corner
Reading Simon Armitage’s elegy/eulogy for the cuckoo (Nature, 20 September) reminded me of a wonderful, warm and sunny June afternoon on Mull in 2023. Through a telescope and binoculars my two children and I took turns watching a white-tailed eagle chick on its nest, as well as an enormous adult bird perched on a sturdy branch in an adjacent tree. The soundtrack to this thrilling scene? A chorus of cuckoo calls. It felt like paradise.
Apparently cuckoos are faring better in Scotland than their counterparts south of the border, but the outlook for these extraordinary birds remains bleak. We are witnessing a crisis in biodiversity and the cuckoo is sadly yet another casualty of the age of extinction. Can we do anything to help arrest this dramatic decline?
Ian Pickford, Glasgow
While sharing Simon Armitage’s lament for the cuckoo, I cannot accept his claim that moon rakers came from Southwaite. Everyone knows they came from Wiltshire!
Charles Nettlefold, Pewsey, Wiltshire
Top marks
I wonder if your crossword setters could refrain from showing how clever they are and simply give us cryptic clues instead of Bletchley Park entrance exams.
Peter Lee, Mexborough
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This article appears in the 02 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The fury of history