Your Leader (28 March) rightly concluded: “If Britain is to maintain fiscal stability, bolster national security and improve public services, it must shed its illusions over tax. Middle earners – not just the wealthy – will need to contribute more.” I could not agree more. The tragedy is that this didn’t happen from the start. The damage done thus far is incalculable in my opinion. The green agenda ditched. The poor and those just getting by left struggling. Local government on its knees. The NHS improving, but at a snail’s pace. The care sector? I’m unaware of any progress on that front. And so on.
If anything approaching a better, happier and more equal society is to be attained, then raising taxes from the wealthy and the “comfortably off” is a no-brainer. Is the Labour government so stuck in a Tory-lite mentality that change is simply not going to happen? I hope that Labour’s moral compass, which is currently way off from where it should be, gets a big reset. If it doesn’t, the future is frankly bleak.
Jol Miskin, Sheffield
The power of the people
There is another way of understanding the Democrats’ obsequious manner towards Donald Trump (American Affairs, 28 March). Frédéric Gros in his book Disobey! explains that what secures an authoritarian leader in power is not so much a repressive legal system, but people going the extra mile to support the regime. The Gestapo in Germany were too few in number to effectively suppress all dissent; what made them so effective was the eagerness of German citizens to assist them. Law forbade “anti-German activities”, but Germans were not legally compelled to inform on their neighbours.
Equally, there are no laws that require Democrats to comply with Trump’s power grabs. Their complicity enables him to behave as he does. When Americans criticise the “Vichy Democrats”, they are correct: it’s Trump’s collaborators who are the real enablers of authoritarianism.
Derrick Joad, Leeds
War of the worlds
Andrew Marr (Politics, 28 March) writes that “‘boots on the ground’ might put Britain into immediate military confrontation with Russia”. But we are already in military confrontation with Russia. We are, once again, in the middle of a cold war. That war is engaging us on many fronts, and is involving military personnel at all levels. Of course, it would be very nice to pretend that it hasn’t happened yet and, in the meantime, to carefully rebuild European security. And, of course, it would be preferable to have far greater military resources than we do. But resources without the determination and courage to use them when necessary, driven by principle, are useless.
Michael Cullup, Norwich
Truth is stranger than fiction
I share Laurie Penny’s frustration with the bandwagon-jumping that has accompanied the release of Adolescence (Comment, 28 March). The fact that – as in the case of the Post Office scandal – it was only the release of a high-quality drama that has produced this reaction, when there are many, sickening real-life cases of brutal misogyny is depressingly familiar.
Adolescence, superb though it is, gives almost no coverage to the family of the victim. Hopefully the response will be greater vigilance from parents of boys and punitive sentences for those who are caught. We need our government to take action because doing so is right, rather than because a lot of people are talking about a Netflix drama.
Andy Leslie, West Grinstead, Horsham, West Sussex
Children in need
John Harris’s excellent article outlines an experience that is disgracefully familiar (Reporter at Large, 28 March). Michael Gove created a quasi free-market in which education is a commodity. Markets produce winners and losers. The winners are the children whose schools are in the most prosperous areas. The losers are children with special needs and those who find what they are asked to learn – and how they are asked to learn it – difficult.
Statutory assessment was intended for those children with high special needs – not as a recourse to an appropriate education. Assessment is still the legal responsibility of local authorities, but provision is now the responsibility of schools. Until special educational needs provision is once again the responsibility of a public body, the families of these children will be forced into the labyrinthine process of statutory assessment, and increasingly the only option of a place is in one of the burgeoning numbers of special schools over which local authorities have no statutory control.
Dr Robin C Richmond, Bromyard, Herefordshire
State of the Statesman
James Graham is an excellent screenwriter, but Jason Cowley is too quick to write off the novel with his contention that we no longer have a “national novelist” (These Times, 28 March). “Few contemporary writers can make a success of the state of the nation novel: Jonathan Coe is one of them,” wrote Rachel Cunliffe in your magazine only three years ago. The New Yorker and Harper’s in the US publish more original short stories by British writers than appear in the New Statesman. The last one I remember was “Summer of Light”, in the 2023 summer special, by Coe.
Nicholas Royle, Manchester
Bye Bye Birdie
Ben Forward knocks over a straw dog in his letter (Correspondence, 28 March). If he wants to finger real biodiversity villains, how about the 35 million pheasants (no, really) and ten million red-legged partridges bred and released in Britain every year. No wonder the countryside is bare.
Dave Batchelor, Scotlandwell, Kinross-shire
Down and out of tea
Visiting my local Waitrose to pick up some Assam tea, as recommended by Nicholas Lezard (Down and Out, 14 March), I was amazed to see the shelves were bare. What does this mean? Are Glasgow’s leafy suburbs inhabited by Staggers readers? Has Lezard become an influencer?
Hilary Patrick, Glasgow
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This article appears in the 02 Apr 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What is school for?