Letters: Banks' bail out

Ordinary Americans are increasingly hostile to the idea that greedy and irresponsible bankers should be bailed out with their tax dollars. It's a sentiment I would agree with completely if it was my taxes doing the bailing.

Why, then, does the US government not swap the banks' toxic and potentially worthless assets for cash at face value, with the understanding and requirement that the banks will buy back the "assets" once their finances have improved?

By requiring the banks to buy back the "assets" once they can afford to write them off as having zero value, the banks would be suitably punished for their incompetence. And until they had paid back the government, not only would their balance sheets be clean (and the credit markets hopefully restored to near normality), but they would also have an incentive to return to proper profitable-but-safe lending.

MaRTin Wright

London SW6

Johann Hari suggests a Green New Deal to cope with the recession (25 September). Well, luckily a report explaining in detail exactly what such a deal should consist of already exists.

This summer, a group of finance and environmental experts published the Green New Deal, which sets out the re-regulation of the finance sector required, and explains how to boost Government funding through minimising tax evasion. This would help fund a multi-billion-pound crash programme to make every building in the country energy-efficient, while maximising the UK's use of small- and large-scale renewables. In addition to Government funding, inducements for private investments from pensions and other savings would be introduced, repaid using the profits to be obtained by saving energy. A "carbon army" would need to be created and trained to fill hundreds of thousands of green-collar jobs, including energy finance and analysis, large-scale engineering, installing renewables, draft stripping and loft lagging. These measures would compensate for the job losses and deflation inevitable in the wake of the credit crunch, as well as tackling climate change by reducing the use of fossil fuels.

The Green New Deal's job-creating and business-generating programme will require more taxation and strong Government regulation.

Colin Hines

Convenor, Green New Deal Group

East Twickenham, Middlesex

Dominic Lawson says borrowers must take their share of the blame for the credit crisis (Opinion, 26 September). This is true, but surely the blame must be apportioned fairly and take account of the relative expertise of the borrower and lender. The latter will have negotiated perhaps hundreds of agreements; for the former it may be their first.

David M Bishop

Guisborough, Redcar and Cleveland

Why Hong Kong likes its ID card

Having returned to the UK after one-third of a century in Hong Kong, I am at a loss as to why there is resistance to the concept of ID cards in the UK (Opinion, 26 September).

In Hong Kong, an ID card is a badge of entitlement. Possession indicates the holder's right of residence or abode and is provided to all those legally resident, entitling them to work in the territory. It is denied to non-residents who have no legal entitlement to live and therefore to work in Hong Kong in the absence of a relevant work visa.

The ID card is a convenient and trusted means of confirming one's identity while safeguarding individuals against identity and monetary fraud. It is the ease of exit and entry from Hong Kong and the validation of entitlements that ID cards provide that so appeals to people in Hong Kong, and in a city with a major turnover of visitors, temporary workers and business travellers every year, it is an effective way of reconciling openness with security for those who do possess the right to reside there.

In the UK, the system would need to be reconciled with that in the European Union, so as to validate work and resident rights and expedite effective movement between countries. Once fully established, an ID system could be dovetailed with whatever amnesty a government might offer to those now illegally resident. All these people would need to do is respond to an invitation to apply, by a given date, for an identification card. If they choose not to, they would not be permitted to work, use the health or education system and get access to other benefits.

Chris Forse

Stratford-upon-Avon

So, the Home Secretary thinks the ID card will cut crime. As a dual national, I have a South African ID card. Shall I fly back and report to the murder and rape capitals of the world how things would be much worse without that piece of plastic in their pocket?

Daniel Ford

London EC1

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, is right to call the proposed ID cards a "grotesque" invasion of our privacy (26 September).

There are so many reasons for opposing them, including the cost to the taxpayer, the additional cost to each individual when getting a card, the intrusion into our personal lives, the prospect of some 300,000 people being granted legal access to the database and the philosophical aspects of the threat the cards could pose to our freedom.

I have another reason for opposing ID cards. There is a real possibility that the BNP could control a council at some point in the future – just think of the possible consequences of a racist council with ID cards and surveillance powers carrying out its policy aims with the full backing of the law.

Henry Vann

Liberal Democrat Parliamentary Campaigner for Bedford and Kempston

We need more language teaching

It is disappointing that the new head of the National Centre for Languages (CILT), Kate Broad, used her first press interview to argue that compulsory foreign-language lessons should not be brought back for 14- to 16-year-olds (report, 26 September). This would have been an excellent opportunity to argue for a fresh approach to language teaching in secondary schools.

You quote her as saying, "If you stick everybody in the classroom, are they really learning French or are they just sitting in there, getting bored and disruptive?" This could be said about any compulsory subject, yet an increasing number of secondary school pupils will be bringing with them an enthusiasm for learning languages generated by the innovations now taking place at primary level.

Ms Broad's defeatism suggests that CILT is shutting the door on discussion about reviving foreign languages in secondary schools at a time when it is important, in the geopolitical and global business contexts, to encourage and facilitate foreign-language and cross-cultural competence.

Professor David Head

Dean, Faculty of Business and Law, University of Lincoln

The PR battle over South Ossetia

Mary Dejevsky ("The biggest loser from Georgia may be Russia", 17 September) pursues a dangerous line when she repeats the readily accepted argument that my country has "won the PR war". What she seems not to realise is that, while the fighting has stopped, the communications battle is continuing every time Messrs Putin, Medvedev or Lavrov peddle the line that poor old Russia was out-spun by a slick PR operation from Tbilisi.

If international public opinion has begun to swing behind my country's right to determine its own future, it is because we have consistently sought to tell the truth. We don't use the shameless tactic of repeating a lie a thousand times hoping it might become the truth – un-like Russia, which continues to peddle outright lies, such as the claim that 2,000 civilians were killed by Georgian military forces in South Ossetia (Human Rights Watch speaks of a few dozen), or that Georgian military forces razed Tskhinvali to the ground (the UN's Unosat says 94 per cent of the town's buildings are undamaged), or denying the ethnic cleansing of Georgians (which has been reported by your newspaper).

Please think twice when Russia laments its inability to get the world to buy its "facts".

Alexander Lomaia

Secretary, National Security Council of Georgia, Tbilisi

New terms in the evolution debate

Professor Anthony C T North suggests that scientists should start referring to Darwin's Theory of Evolution as "Darwin's Laws of Evolution" in order to avoid confusion with the non-scientific use of the word "theory" as meaning a hunch or guess (letter, 22 September).

This seems to me to be a dangerous route to take, as it is likely to move us from frying pan to inferno. In non-scientific terms, laws (like "commandments") are immutable, are imposed by some higher authority and enforce particular behaviour. In science, "law" is usually adopted for fundamental invariable facts of the physical world. Scientific theories, however, are coherent descriptive models that fit observations, allow predictions to be made and are falsifiable. Above all they demonstrate the humility of science, as theories are ready to be modified or abandoned altogether if new knowledge finds them lacking.

I suggest that, rather than abandon a perfectly good word, which is correctly used in the case of evolutionary theory, we should encourage the frequent use of other excellent words that indicate ideas that are less well-founded than are established scientific theories. Hence "The God Supposition", "The Creation Hypothesis" and "The Intelligent Design Conjecture".

Ian Quayle

FOWNHOPE, Herefordshire

The sad decline of UK nuclear power

It is a national disgrace that the British Energy Group is being sold off to the French company EDF (The Big Question, 25 September). This is the result of decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s that were based not on logic and rational thought but by listening to the hysteria of misguided environmentalists.

The insane, short-sighted decision to listen to Greenpeace et al and not build nuclear-power stations has left us in the position we are in today: going nuclear (thank goodness) but having to ask other countries to build the stations for us.

At one stage Britain led the world in nuclear-power generation; if we had continued to develop the technology, we would not today have to rely on unstable, unfriendly states for our energy. Furthermore, we would be able to export this technology, much like our rather more savvy neighbours across the channel.

Sadly, Britain today has no longer the technical ability, the money or the pride to supply something so essential to a country's long-term future as its own energy supply.

Michael Ford

Bocking, Essex

Pillowcase talk

Peter Day's problem of his pillowcases ending up in his duvet in the washing machine (Letters, 25 September) is easily sorted out by applying the physics of time and space distortion: turn the duvet inside out, and the pillowcases will be repelled.

John Wells

West Wittering, West Sussex

Last train

Your correspondents have complained of missing the last train back to London after RSC performances in Stratford-upon-Avon (Letters, 26 September). Some 25 years ago, when I was administrator of the Oxford Playhouse, we had an arrangement whereby, if we had a late-running show and there were audience members going back to London, we could ring the station and they would hold the last train for up to 10 minutes. That, of course, was in the days when stations actually had stationmasters, who were allowed such powers of discretion.

Barry Sheppard

BRIGHTON

Lennon in America

Stan Brennan thinks that John Lennon "would never have played Israel" (Letters, 27 September). Lennon performed in the US at the height of its brutal assault on the Vietnamese people. Or does the US not count when it comes to boycotts?

Peter McKenna

LIVERPOOL

Taxing child care

Deborah Orr gets to the guts of the issue about childcare in her last paragraph (24 September). Looking after children in the home is not capitalised and so cannot be taxed and does not appear in any economic activity statistics. If the parents work and the child is looked after by a childminder or in a nursery, then the Government benefits from taxing both the parent and the childcare worker. There are also two lots of capitalised economic activity, allowing the Government to crow about a booming economy.

Alan Sykes

Ilminster, Somerset

First flight

You say that "French Concorde made the first crossing of the Atlantic" in September 1973, travelling from Washington DC to Paris (26 September). And here was I thinking that Concorde was a European aeroplane.

Derek Bradstreet

Thurso, Highland

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