Letters | 2 July 2011

Child benefit? No thanks!

Sir: I was particularly struck by Melanie McDonagh (‘What women want’, 25 June) trotting out the same old complaint about the ‘cloth-eared’ decision to take child benefit off families in the higher tax bracket. How and why have we got ourselves into a situation where even middle-class journalists think that they should be clients of the state? I was glad when the government saw sense and discontinued my child tax credit. Why should the government automatically give me money I don’t need, when my hard-earned taxes could be much better spent elsewhere?

Rachel Maclean
Solihull, West Midlands



Assisting suicide


Sir: Charles Moore doesn’t divulge the main reason why religious people oppose the idea of assisted suicide: that life being God-given we have no right to reject the gift (The Spectator’s Notes, 25 June). For those who don’t believe in the existence of a God, this is unpersuasive. As the philosopher Richard Robinson wrote in An Atheist’s Values (Oxford, 1964), ‘The chief argument for the legitimacy of suicide is that life is a trap.