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. We have not asked for it, and it can be terrible.’
Dr Tim Hudson
Chichester
Sir: What a pity that Charles Moore, a man whose views I generally respect, should have jumped on the same anti-assisted-suicide bandwagon as Lady Finlay and the bishop with the funny foreign name. Perhaps he is more of a predictable RC than he claims after all. Does he think he knows more than I do about what I should have done about my first wife’s death? I would suggest that he try minding his own business. (Those who have forgotten about it — it was news about three years ago — can refresh their memories and read all about it by Googling my name + ‘suicide’.)
Michael Grosvenor Myer
Haddenham, Cambridge
Gay wrongs
Sir: The kind of taboo but extensive homosexual activity which John Bradley (‘Gay Damascus’, 18 June) describes in Islamic countries is also widespread in other, relatively primitive parts of the world.
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