Letters: More devolution

More devolution will not silence the West Lothian Question

Sir: Sue Stirling (Opinion, 1 May) presents a strange vision of how to put right the anomalies of devolution. Proclaiming that the West Lothian Question is the wrong question she claims that the real question is how England should be governed.

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Her solution is more "devolution" in England. This may well be desirable but in no way is it an alternative to the West Lothian Question. Does she propose that English regions should legislate like the Scottish Parliament? Or that university tuition fees should be levied in East Anglia but not south-west England? Or that residents of Yorkshire would have free prescriptions while those in Lancashire would not?

Devolution in England has no bearing on the major anomalies thrown up by Scottish devolution. The West Lothian Question is still very much the right question. As things stand not only do MPs from Scottish constituencies vote on England-only legislation but the average size of a Scottish constituency is smaller than an English one so there is a disproportionate number of Scottish MPs. Add in the Barnett formula and it is no surprise if electors in England increasingly come to feel that something needs to be done to put things right - and they will not consider regional assemblies are the answer.

Sue Stirling says devolution will be regarded as one of the great triumphs of the Blair years. On a par with Iraq, I assume.

MALCOLM CHAMBERLAIN

PETTS WOOD, KENT

Brought low by a trivial lie

Sir: Help me out here. Lord Browne says that he met a guy in a park rather than on-line - a now ordinary practice - and he pays for that lie with his honour, privacy, and reputation? What am I missing?

He has obviously been of great value to BP, and his leadership on global warming issues has been invaluable. OK, he lied. But let's keep some perspective. There are lies and then there are lies. For the sake of argument, let's say a certain other chief executive lies about a third world country possessing weapons of mass destruction to justify an unprovoked war. When his claim is proven to be a lie his resignation, voluntary or otherwise, should naturally follow.

I only know what I read in the papers, but it would appear that Lord Browne is the victim, and I don't mean financially. The Mail no doubt will sell more advertising and more papers. Character assassination and gay-baiting always will. When will this kind of thing finally become as banal as death in combat, poverty, and malaria?

STEVEN T BRANCA

RACINE, WISCONSIN, USA

Sir: Your leader (2 May) must echo the sentiments of many of your readers, including this one, and Jeremy Warner's assessment is spot on in saying that generation and embarrassment were factors in this case.

I believe, also, that Lord Browne's mother, an Auschwitz survivor, was a powerful influence on her son and his need for secrecy about his private life will have been driven in large part by the fear of what such a revelation would do to her. All gay people can sympathise with this position. But what we cannot condone is his lie to the courts.

RICHARD RUTTER

LONDON N10

Sir: As more details emerge of BP's involvement in the deaths of 15 people in a fire in Texas it is a sadly ironic reflection on modern day western and capitalist values that their chief executive is brought down by a lie over a matter that should be trivial in a decent society.

JONATHAN DA SILVA

FELTHAM, MIDDLESEX

Blair's self-righteous critics on Iraq

Sir: I think Tony Blair would agree with your headline on his Iraq legacy (1 May) . Nothing in all the words that have filled your pages on this subject have come near to demonstrating that another course of action was available or would have led to less terrible results.

If all those people who stupidly thought they could stop the action to remove Saddam had instead applied their energies to ensuring it was done and followed up in a less disastrous manner, the bloodbath could have been mitigated. Instead, in their own self-righteousness they took every opportunity to discredit the motives of those who were simply incompetent, and by so doing are themselves responsible for the encouragement of meaningless violence.

JAMES BARING

PASSENHAM, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE

Sir: Steve Richards (May 1) writes he is "sure that he [Blair] was certain about the political positioning. He will have concluded that a Labour Prime Minister had to back the Republican President." But Richards offers no supporting evidence for this observation. Here is some.

At the Labour Party National Executive Committee in January 2001, according to the contemporaneous record of the meeting that NEC member Ann Black has posted on her website (annblack.com/nec_jan2001. htm), Tony Blair said: "We need good working links with the new President because the Tories will exploit any cooling in the 'special relationship'."

Three days earlier, George W Bush was inaugurated as US President. Mr Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul O'Neill, has revealed in his memoirs that invading Iraq was "topic A" at the very first meeting - on 30 January 2001 - of President Bush's National Security Council, on which Mr O'Neill sat. This was more than seven months before the terrorist attacks against New York and Washington.

So it seems Mr Blair's nemesis was decided in January 2001, when to outdo the Tories in their Atlanticism, he backed Bush, before finding out what the President's pre-emptive, neo-con interventionist foreign policy would mean. Something else, fatefully, Mr Blair did not know on Iraq.

DR DAVID LOWRY

STONELEIGH, SURREY

Sir: It speaks highly of the intelligence of the British electorate that, despite Iraq, the verdict on Tony Blair's 10-year record as Prime Minister is 61 per cent in favour, according to your poll (1 May). This ignores the constant drip of anti-Blair venom dished out by the media, sadly including The Independent.

When historians of a future generation come to assess the last 10 years, the real legacy of Kinnock, Blair and Brown will surely show that New Labour managed to improve the lot of the population, in the face of serious problems - large scale immigration and terrorism, to name just two of them. I cannot remember a decade in my adult life when the economy was as sound, and the living standards as high as they have been since 1997.

Iraq will of course remain a blot, but Tony Blair has been a good prime minister. Perhaps what the Labour rebels and some of the malcontents need, and may possibly get, is a dose of good, old fashioned Toryism.

FELIX FRANKS

LONDON N3

Sir: The choreography of Tony Blair's exit is becoming ever more surreal. We now have a timetable for the announcement of his handover timetable.

TARIQ RASHID

RICHMOND, SURREY

Time to close the EU travelling circus

Sir: This is the perfect time for the European Parliament to stop its ridiculous monthly travelling circus to Strasbourg, having just formed a new climate change committee to develop policy options for the 27 countries in the European Union.

The first study of the climate change impacts of having two European Parliament bases warns that having two "seats" produces an extra 20,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year - more than some countries - and such practice is damaging the environment and undermining EU efforts to cut CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2020.

This farcical uprooting involves the relocation of 2,000 parliamentary staff and interpreters, nearly 1,000 assistants, journalists and lobbyists, 785 MEPs and 15 truckloads of trunks and documents every month. This is a pointless trip done only to appease the French. The fact that six mini-plenary sessions will be held in Brussels this year proves that there is the capacity to vote in Brussels.

The time has come for common sense to dictate that enough is enough, that this "travelling circus" can no longer be justified on environmental grounds and is just pouring money down the drain - around £200m a year.

ROBERT STURDY MEP

(C, EASTERN REGION) HARDWICK, CAMBRIDGESHIRE

Limited selection of great brains

Sir: To find out who has the best brains you asked 22 leading thinkers (Extra, 1 May). Not surprisingly, given that 20 of them were men, of the 62 people they lauded just eight are women. You are not displaying much investigative skill if you can only find two female thinkers and eight women considered clever.

The Government continually worries about not integrating the 9 per cent or so of ethnic minorities in our society. But we still haven't really got to grips with fully integrating that 50 per cent of us who are women. The bias against women is still so ingrained that even your relatively thoughtful publication apparently does not notice the blatant misogyny. Unless this prejudice against half of all human brains is consciously eradicated we (people/humankind) will never be able reach our full potential in any endeavour.

At least this week no women have died yet (unlike the several men who grace your obituary pages every day).

HILARY CHIVALL

WHITTLESEY, CAMBRIDGESHIRE

Secular society under attack

Sir: Thomas Sutcliffe's warning (1 May) not to take our secular society for granted is timely. National and local secularist groups (like ours here in Leicester) have experienced recent growth but we must not ignore the fact that the Blair government's attempt to revive religious influence through "faith" schools will bear the fruit of separatism and conflict in years to come.

These religious academies are being set up by the dozen, governed by boards packed with sectarian nominees and staffed by teachers who must publicly profess their allegiance to the faith in order to get a job. Few believe that Brown will be any different in respect of this dreadful policy.

The arrival of hundreds of thousands of Catholic immigrants from Eastern Europe has emboldened the Catholic church enough to make public demands on politicians over gay rights.

Even an ostensibly secular institutions such as our national press (including The Independent) has been intimidated by the threat of Islamist violence from publishing the details of a major news story on the Mohamed cartoons.

Meanwhile, there are rumblings from within Islam for the "right" to use Sharia law courts to deal with Muslim family issues. This would lock Muslim women and children into an oppressive patriarchal system right here in the UK from which attempted escape would be punishable by beatings and death.

British secularists, like their Turkish counterparts, need to awaken from the complacency engendered by generations of secular progress to challenge the growth of religious influence before it is too late. There is a cynical religious alliance emerging which is aiming to limit freedom and impose bizarre doctrines on the rest of us.

H D PERRY

LEICESTER

Climate change? Just enjoy it

Sir: Your front page "When Britain reaches 40°C" ( 28 April) was striking, but your commentary unconvincing. Most of us enjoy the excellent weather; it is like living in Tuscany or Florida and the inhabitants of those places do not complain. Indeed it is like being back in Tudor or Roman times when Britain last enjoyed spells of excellent weather. Your journalists who want to go back to the cold and wet British summer perhaps ought to emigrate to Greenland.

Britain is benefiting enormously from the higher temperatures, but we might have to take the lead in seeking United Nations help for countries who do not have the resources to offset climate change.

J G HUNTER

INGLETON, NORTH YORKSHIRE

Supermarket waste

Sir: It is a relief to know that I am not the only consumer irritated enough to abandon my plastic ball soap dispenser on the supermarket shelf, muttering as I do so and sometimes alarming fellow shoppers (letter, 2 May). This is as a consequence of the wretched things accumulating in the cupboard and rolling out, to be chased across the room, and of a complete failure to recycle them. I tried incorporating them into my hanging baskets, having pierced them with a skewer several times, to act as a water reservoir. It wasn't particularly successful.

ELIZABETH MILLS

NOTTINGHAM

Swift riposte

Sir: Despite stating that the swift (Apus apus) spends most of its life airborne (report, 26 April;), you showed a picture of perched birds. Unfortunately, they were swallows (Hirundo rustica).

MICHAEL FAINT

LONDON SW6

Not worth voting for

Sir: I have now received leaflets from all the major parties in Thursday's local elections. Despite a 115 per cent rise in average council tax in our area since 1997, not one of them offers to lower the tax. Or to even slow the rate of increase. Or to reduce waste, inefficiency and incompetence. Or to provide good value for the huge amounts of tax extracted from us. How depressing! As a consequence, I do not feel inclined to vote for any of them.

DAVID KILPATRICK

ST ALBANS, HERTFORDSHIRE

Stormy weather

Sir: Letters criticising weather broadcasts (24 April) strike a chord. I abandoned radio and television forecasts years ago because I loathed the patronising, false mateyness of the forecasters and the way they murdered the natural cadences of English, with pauses in the wrong places and stresses on the wrong words. The mawkish familiarity they affect, and patronising injunctions to take our "brollies" when rain threatened, or our "woollies" if it was going to be "chilly", caused me to dive for the off switch. It's nice not knowing what the weather is going to be.

RUPERT BULLOCK

SHAPWICK, SOMERSET

Confusing signs

Sir: On a recently opened tin of beans, the label contains the information that the tin is "recyclable steel, suitable for vegetarians". I always wondered what they ate.

MORRIS GLOBE

DROYLSDEN, GREATER MANCHESTER