Letters: Terminal illnesses

Your leading article (3 October) on the case of Debbie Purdy makes several statements which are not just erroneous, but which suggest that death may indeed be preferable to life for people with degenerating disabilities.

The claim that Mrs Purdy is "not seeking a change in the law" is debatable. The campaign group Dignity in Dying, formerly known as the Voluntary Euthanasia Society, which is supporting her, has made it clear that they do want a change in the law to give people with terminal or "unbearable" suffering the opportunity to die "at a time of their own choosing".

It is also unclear whether Debbie Purdy has a "terminal illness" as you state. Doctors now say that people with multiple sclerosis can live a near-normal lifespan, albeit with deteriorating health.

My own situation is, if anything, even more desperate than Mrs Purdy's. I have several severely disabling conditions, including spina bifida, hydrocephalus, emphysema and osteoporosis. I use a wheelchair, and am doubly incontinent. Due to the osteoporosis, my spine is twisting and crumbling, trapping nerves as it does so. This causes extreme pain which cannot be fully controlled even with morphine. When the pain is at its worst, I cannot move, think or speak. Recently I asked my doctor what my prognosis was. He said "it will get worse".

The difference between my case and that of Mrs Purdy is that I am fortunate enough to have a carer who does not say, whether or not in an apparent attempt at being supportive, that he will "assist" me should I want to die. Rather he sits with me, holds my hand, and promises never to leave me, even when it does get worse.

It was not always thus. Twenty years ago I, too, wanted to die. It was a settled wish that lasted 10 years, and I attempted suicide several times and was saved only by the intervention of friends.

But now I choose life, and I urge Mrs Purdy to do so, too. Life can be sweet, even when there is much pain and suffering. Choosing a deliberately induced death is the end of all autonomy, and the end of hope. My sincere wish is that Mrs Purdy will be enabled and supported, as I am, to choose life until death comes naturally.

Alison Davis

Blandford Forum, Dorset

ID cards will not make us any safer

I'm afraid the question will keep coming round until someone has the courtesy to reply to it. In what way will a universal, compulsory, expensive and error-strewn identity-card system make any difference whatsoever to whether Mr Brisbourne's house, car or personal space get broken into (letters, 2 October)?

The police are obviously very keen on the idea, but for some reason are unwilling to put forward so much as a single practical example of ID cards helping them to keep Mr Brisbourne safe.

The truth is that the fight against crime, in which ID cards are utterly irrelevant, is being shamelessly used by proponents of ID to make it more palatable. Even if the system proved useful in solving crimes after the event, it would still cost an obscene amount of money that would have been better spent preventing crime in the first place. But then, when did preventing crime ever make a Home Office minister look good?

Tim Hinchliffe

Beckenham, Kent

Having listened to the opinions of experts in the fields of security, cryptography and IT, my opinion is that ID cards would do little or nothing to protect Mr Brisbourne's car from vandalism, but would provide yet another excellent opportunity for the Government to demonstrate its unflinching prowess at mucking up technology projects, invading our privacy, and then losing all of our data on public transport.

Given the scheme's invasive nature and vast cost (even before the project runs over budget, which it will) I think it's fair to say the line of compromise should exclude ID cards.

Richard Marr

London SW15

Chris Forse ("Why Hong Kong likes its ID card", letters, 29 September) clearly spent too long away from these shores. He misses key objections to the UK ID card programme.

First, compulsory fingerprinting, facial and iris-scanning (the last currently in abeyance but sure to return) of the entire UK population. DNA will surely follow.

Second, within weeks it will create an electronic analogue of your daily life and mine: a file which New Labour, under its "transformational government" agenda, is committed to spread like chaff across hundreds of agencies, contractors and commercial organisations. From Blunkett on, the card has been peddled as the "one-stop" replacement for that burdensome wad of plastic we now carry. If it doesn't start out that way, "function-creep" will guarantee it. Then, the ID Cards Act 2006 requires a record of every card usage. And better not lose it, or life will stop!

This will make us strangers in our own society; for being a citizen is mostly about taking and being taken on trust. Do we now need fingerprinting, facial scanning and a vast, fallible database to prove who we are and our rights to pension or health treatment we've paid for all our lives? I think not.

Chris Coppock

Milton Keynes

The possession of ID cards will not prevent anybody from attacking, breaking into houses, or vandalising cars, because they have no intention of being caught. In fact, they will give burglars one more thing to steal: John Brisbourne's ID card.

David McNickle

St Alban's Hertfordshire

Creationists shut out of the debate

Richard Burnham (letter, 2 October) scorns proponents of creationism and intelligent design for, he claims, publishing no scientific papers. This is both untrue and unfair.

Untrue, because there are a number of creationist journals publishing papers around the world, but presumably, being creationist, these are dismissed as ipso facto "unscientific".

Unfair, because where else are creationists to publish? The hysteria that has driven Professor Reiss from his job – who, after all, was not even seeking to advance creationism, but only wanting it to be understood and critiqued – shows that no one openly espousing creationism is likely to be offered a job in the scientific establishment; and any mainstream journal daring to publish a creationist article would be pilloried to the point of extinction.

Espousing evolution today is a bit like joining the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union. It doesn't make a lot of difference to the daily work of most scientists whether they explain their findings within an evolutionist framework or any other – except that if they tried to do the latter, they would find themselves unpublished and unemployed.

And just as those outside the inner circle of the Party recognised its stridency and oppression of dissidents as a sign of weakness rather than strength, so doubters of the evolutionist orthodoxy read the strident tone displayed by some of its proponents as a sign of insecurity.

Dr Nigel Halliday

Liss, Hampshire

Concorde's first trip to Washington

Bob Perry (letters, 2 October) asks: if the Concorde made the first transatlantic flight from Washington to Paris, how did it get to Washington in the first place? By boat, perhaps?

He is either being disingenuous or he misunderstands. It was a publicity stunt. The Concorde took off from Paris bound for Washington shortly after a Boeing 747 going to the same destination. Concorde then made the trip to Washington and returned immediately to Paris within the time it took for the 747 to make the single journey. Although there seems to be some dispute as to whether or not the Boeing flew a little more slowly than usual to ensure that the stunt was successful.

Terence Hollingworth

Blagnac, France

Peter Mandelson's unwelcome return

Donald Macintyre's analysis of Gordon Brown's and Peter Mandelson's current relationship (4 October) begs the question: who cares? Mandelson's appointment to the Cabinet destroys the last shred of ideological credibility remaining for New Labour. At a time when the until recently fashionable dogma of unregulated free-market capitalism is dead in the water, the man who asserted that we're all Thatcherite now is brought back in from the cold. What chance of radical Government policies to reign in the casino economy now?

Even more depressing is the singular failure of the conventional left in Labour to seize this auspicious moment to challenge the political belief systems of the past 30 years. Clearly, it is now the mission of those of us outside the Westminster village to build a new left movement, capable of challenging all three mainstream parties, both inside and outside the ballot box.

Cllr Richard Denton-White

Citizen Party, Portland, Dorset

The elevation of Peter Mandelson to the peerage will no doubt be of concern to all of us because he will have be Lord Mandelson of Somewhere. Fortunately he cannot be Lord of the manor I live in, because an MP who was kicked out by his disgruntled constituents was shortly afterwards imposed upon us as Lord Bradley of Withington. The nonsense of unelected peers, so deliberately maintained by the Labour Party despite its pledges, is bad enough without the names of our towns being sullied by association with these pompous cronies.

Colin Burke

Manchester

As a Life Peer Mr Mandelson will not only be unelected: he will not be accountable to any elected body. He cannot be questioned in the House of Commons and may only be invited (not summoned) to appear before Select Committees.

Geoffrey Myers

Croydon

If Mandelson has been advising Brown over the past few "gruesome" months, the sort of advice he has been giving must have been pretty poor.

Katie Gent

London SW13

Just when the free market has shown itself to be a major problem, and New Labour is widely despised, Gordon Brown has brought into the Cabinet a rabid free-marketeer who was the architect of New Labour. Even better, Mandelson has twice demonstrated he is not fit for high office. Is Brown clueless, or working for David Cameron?

Bill Robinson

London W2

I'm on the train

In Jon Cruddas's diary of his week at the Labour conference (27 September) he tells us that on Wednesday: "I get on the train back to London in the morning. I spend the whole journey on the phone".

That trip takes over two hours. I wonder just how irritating and distracting his conversations were for those passengers who had the misfortune to share his carriage? Perhaps, atypically, he talks in a normal voice rather than shouting...

MIKE PHILLIPS

Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire

Weather watch

One of the most fascinating places to hear the evolution of our language is the weather forecasts. Over the past few weeks I have heard the following descriptions on various TV channels: "The clouds will bubble up"; "There will be a peppering of showers"; "The weather shimmied"; "The isobars will cosy on up"; "Fog will fizzle out"; "There will be bits and pieces of weather"; "There will be spits and spots of rain" and "Tomorrow will be a nippy day".

Colin Bower

Nottingham

Art vs porn

With regard to Lily Cole's appearance in Playboy magazine (report, 4 October), can anyone tell me where else in Europe it would warrant so much as a mention, never mind a full-page piece with spokespersons from the "Is it art?" or "Is it porn?" camps offering their thoughts?

Andrew Calvert

Ruislip, Middlesex

Only the cognoscenti of the real art world can explain the difference between "nude" and "naked". When I was teaching photography, I once "borrowed" the nude model from the art class to pose naked for my students and, suddenly, the activity became very dubious.

Tim Pike

Malvern, Worcestershire

Threats to the planet

A year ago, the gravest threat facing humanity was climate change, resulting largely from unfettered market capitalism in reckless pursuit of unsustainable growth. Today, our greatest fear is losing our jobs and homes because of the global economic crisis, resulting largely from unfettered market capitalism in reckless pursuit of unsustainable growth. No connection there.

Lindsay Camp

Paris

Duvet dangers

Please, please, please do not try the suggested experiment of washing two duvet covers together! (Letters, 1 October.) Each will end up inside the other. The resulting re-entrant twist in spacetime, or black hole, will suck into itself the washing machine, the house and, eventually, the whole universe!

David Wheeler

Carlisle, Cumbria

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