More things to ban
Sir: In the light of Mick Hume’s piece about politically correct students (‘The left will eat itself’, 12 March), should not Cambridge University be taking immediate steps to remove the works of Cicero from its classics curriculum? After all, like George Washington, he owned slaves.
I would only add that, as a former member of Jesus College, I was utterly appalled at its abject surrender to adolescent bigotry and ignorance by the removal of the Benin cockerel. The totalitarian impulse is alive and well.
Chris Arthur
Durham
Scotland and the EU
Sir: In half a dozen articles now, your writers have stated that a vote to leave the EU would precipitate Scotland voting to leave the Union. It is sad to see that they have bought this canard propagated by the SNP and its ‘Scotland is different’ argument. In 1975, the worry was the same but in reverse: that Scotland would vote to leave and England stay.
In the end, as in most things, Scotland voted the same way England did. I have no doubt it will be the same this time, whether that means in or out.
Jonathan Lafferty
London N5
Wykehamist outsiders
Sir: James Delingpole (‘Want to leave the EU? You must be an oik like me’, 12 March) cites John Whittingdale, a Wykehamist, as an unusual example of a posh ‘leaver’. But Winchester College does not tend to produce natural insiders. Mrs Thatcher relied on Willie Whitelaw, Ian Gow, and, when it mattered, Geoffrey Howe, in her battles with Etonians. John Whittingdale himself was her political secretary. Most eminent 20th-century Wykehamical politicians — Gaitskell, Crossman and various Jays — were Labour. Now there’s Seumas Milne. Perhaps it goes back to Sydney Smith, the greatest of all Old Wykehamists, who observed that ‘minorities are nearly always right’.
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