Letters: Gay men aren't the only ones to frequent 'edgy' spaces

Deborah Orr has got it all wrong ("I'm all for gay rights. I'm also for the right to use London's parks," 27 September). The people doing most public sex these days are young heterosexual men and women. They call it dogging – group sex in car parks, motorway lay-bys and local beauty spots. The police ignore it.

As for Hampstead Heath, gay men haven't taken over. Most have sex in one tiny section, usually late at night when no members of the public are present. In contrast, I have seen heterosexual couples having full sexual intercourse on the heath in broad daylight. It is therefore odd that Deborah picks out public sex by gay men for condemnation, ignoring the fact that straight couples are doing it too.

No one – gay or heterosexual – should have sex in a public place where they might be seen by passers-by who could take offence. But if people want to have discreet sex in a forest in the middle of the night, good luck to them, whatever their sexual orientation.

Peter Tatchell

OutRage! London Sw14

Deborah Orr's article, with its reference to "sweaty . . . leather-clad young men" stumbling out of the undergrowth in Abney Park Cemetery to watch a public art performance would have done Joe Orton proud. I'm sorry that their loud mobile conversation "in a thick foreign accent" spoilt her enjoyment of the live opera, but as any good social historian of urban life would report, men have been meeting with other men (as have men with women and women with women) in ruined cemeteries, docks, after-dark parks and other out-of -the-way corners for centuries. In my view this has nothing to do with civil partnerships or "gay rights". Nobody has a monopoly on such "edgy" spaces and their varied use makes for the vibrant sense of city life that many of us live-and-let-live Londoners respect and enjoy, straight or gay, "families" or singles.

On the question of common rights, the day my civil partner and I can simply walk hand-in-hand in a London street or park without fear of attack is the day that the sort of equality Deborah blithely talks about will have been achieved.

Chris Breward

London E9

Please give us boring bankers

As Andreas Whittam Smith says (29 September), providing mortgages to homebuyers is a simple business, not requiring whizz-kids. I would go further: banking is a simple business and does not need whizz-kids. It requires staff with enough numeracy to understand the time value of money and a great deal of experience through several economic cycles to understand risk.

There is no alchemy in lending or investing; banks do not create money – they move it around, paying a little to those they borrow from and charging more to those that they think can repay it. Investment managers move investments around, hoping to make a profit because someone else has sold cheap or bought dear. Traders encourage everyone to keep moving investments so that they can take their turn.

The trouble is that financial institutions deal in large sums of money and it is easy for the staff to pay themselves sizeable sums. They then fall into the trap of people who are exceptionally well paid thinking it is because they are exceptionally clever rather than because they are exceptionally lucky to be in the right place at the right time. The result is that they lose whatever common sense they have and think they can walk on water, defying market forces. Those around them are too over-awed to question them and instead copy them.

Boring, experienced bankers and investment managers are the best – cleverness is all too likely to end up in too-clever salesmanship, internally and externally, too-clever twisting of the rules on capital adequacy or too-clever packaging that conceals excessive fees and risk. The troubling question is, what other toxic assets have these very clever people stuffed on to the banks' balance sheets?

Jon Hawksley

London EC1

Andreas Whittam Smith's commentary on the sad demise of the demutualised building societies is very necessary reading as we move forward from the present crisis.

My late uncle retired some years ago at the top of a building society which was and still is mutual and proud of it. During his career he had known personally almost all of the building society chiefs who had steered their organisations through demutualisation. He was disappointed in every single one of them. His view was that they had betrayed their members, motivated by nothing other than personal greed.

The business of a mutual society may indeed be boring, but at least it is stable, reliable and almost indestructible. The fact that none of those that converted to banks remains is a lesson which we should learn when imposing new forms of regulation on those organisations which we trust with our money and our economy.

Chris Shore

Cambridge

As the descendant of generations of entrepreneurs, I have never been able to recognise what happens on Wall Street or the City of London (where I worked for a time) as having many traits of "capitalism".

The reason left and right are united in condemnation of commercial banks, central banks and governments is that they recognise the prevailing system in America and Europe as being not capitalist (free markets, individual owners of capital constrained by competition and law) but corporatist (employees of large corporations with links to government, owning no capital in the companies they control, playing games with "other people's money").

This is not a class question but a question of responsibility, and the greatest of all responsibility lies with the governments and central banks in Japan (past interest rates 0.25 per cent) the USA (past interest rates of 1 per cent, now 2 per cent) and Britain who have for years promoted a money-printing binge, forcing financial institutions to compete in the ever more irresponsible investment of that devalued money.

As Gresham's Law has it, "Bad money drives out good." To resist financial irresponsibility in such an environment can cost executives their jobs – for who knows how long it will be before the music will stop? Well, it has stopped now and it is not the banks and hedge funds who should carry the principal blame but the governments who printed the money.

Rodney Atkinson

Stocksfield, Northumberland

Now that private financial institutions are toppling about our ears and governments are digging deeply into our pockets to bail them out, will New Labour see the light? The market does not provide all solutions and it is sloppy to allow it to become the arbiter of a nation's future and negligent to denationalise and deregulate without rigorous analysis of probable consequences. The market does not recognise a public service interest and has no conscience.

A good outcome from this bedlam would be if it forces the government to review its strategy to allow private finance to become a central driver for change in the National Health Service.

Dr Jan Tate

Hayling Island, Hampshire

If the taxpayer (the likes of yours truly) bails out the banks in their current time of woe, then when (if?) things return to normal, will the City fat-cats on £1m bonuses return the favour and bail me out when I lose my shirt playing the horses in my local turf accountant? No? Thought not.

Dave Morgan

Beddington, surrey

A conversation from the archives:

"Let's demutualise, Mr Bradford."

"A capital idea, Mr Bingley. It will deliver us lots of cash and an exciting new business plan."

"And with our solid and bankable reputation, how can it possibly go wrong, Mr Bradford?"

Rupert Read

Norwich

Now that banks are being taken over by the Government, can we expect banking executives to be subject to public-sector pay restraint?

Geoffrey Payne

London W5

It might be nice if Margaret Thatcher lived long enough to see complete nationalisation of Britain's financial services.

Peter Lazenby

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Nuclear power: a chance wasted

An irony of the sale of British Energy to EDF (letter, 29 September) is that until recently the UK, through British Nuclear Fuels, owned Westinghouse, the US nuclear power company. It was recently reported that Westinghouse was to submit a design for the UK competition, and had signed agreements with BAE Systems, Rolls-Royce Group and Doosan Babcock to take part in building the AP1000 reactor in the UK.

Westinghouse now belongs to Toshiba, and is hardly likely to get a look-in if EDF becomes the sole UK nuclear generation company. It would seem that the Government authorised the sale just before its conversion to a nuclear future for UK generation. In the annals of misjudgements this must rank at much the same level as Gordon Brown's sale of our gold reserves at the bottom of the market.

Frank Donald

Edinburgh

Keeping drugs out of drinking water

Your article "Tests for drugs in tap water" (29 September) is an important one and touches a key public health issue. It is not only chemotherapy drugs which end up in aquatic systems: medicines for pain relief, heart drugs, the Pill and antibiotics do too. Some have biological effects at very low concentrations.

Three areas need prompt consideration: improved sewage treatment, evaluation of the use of sewage sludge on farmland, and "take back" schemes whereby the general public should return all old medicines to pharmacies for correct disposal. The last is now in UK law, but the public has not been properly educated about what to do.

Jamie Page

The Cancer Prevention and Education Society, London E14

Creationist myth of transitional fossils

Adnan Oktar has offered to pay about £4.4 trillion to the first scientist who can produce an "intermediate-form" fossil (report, 29 September). Presumably he decides what constitutes intermediate.

What are these "strange-looking creatures in the course of development of the kind supposed by evolutionists"? Evolutionists understand that if you had been present at any time since the beginning of life, you would have seen "finished" organisms, well-adapted to their environment. Eohippus was not trying to become a horse any more than the lung-fish is trying to become a newt.

David Ridge

London N19

Bard for today

The answer to catching the last train from Stratford-upon-Avon after RSC performances is in the RSC's own hands (letter, 29 September). Shakespeare took no account of the demands of a modern economy operating in a global market. Cut a few superfluous soliloquies, streamline the battle scenes, get the actors to speak their lines more quickly and everyone can be at the station in good time.

Andrew Spackman

Byfield, Northamptonshire

Jobsworth's charter

ID cards will make me a foreigner in my own country (letter, 30 September). I will lose my freedom to travel the UK without a pass. Once they are created I will have to get one in my name to prevent criminals from doing so and impersonating me, and I will be asked for it constantly once the opportunity is there. They will give jobs-worths a wonderful excuse to demand to see one for whatever trivial reason.

Patrick Wise

Cirencester, Gloucestershire

French first

Derek Bradstreet (letter 29 September) disputes your report that a French Concorde made the first crossing of the Atlantic in September 1973. He adds: "And here was I thinking that Concorde was a European aeroplane." Wrong on two counts. Concorde was an Anglo-French joint project and not European as such. Two prototypes were built, one in Bristol and one here in Toulouse. The crossing was indeed made by the French one, with a French crew.

Terence Hollingworth

Blagnac, France

Imperative

Now that we are getting a bit bored with the apostrophes (apostrophes'? apostrophe's?) dispute, I suggest we move on to discussing the subjunctive mood. It is currently dying out of English and is being hurried on its way by your newspaper. For example, in Thursday's article about Ruth Kelly's resignation, you write: "...ministers have demanded that Gordon Brown shakes up his 'dysfunctional' Downing Street machine...". It should be ". . . that Gordon Brown shake up his. . ." If I were/was you, I would look to my subjunctives.

Chris Sanderson

Hastings

Pillow talk

Further to recent letters regarding smaller items always ending up inside a duvet cover, to really observe nature's forces in conflict, try washing two duvet covers together.

Steve Hynes

Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire