Scotch myth
Andrew Neil’s lament at the decline of the so-called ‘Tartan Raj’ (‘The last days of the Tartan Raj’, 20 August) is a Scottish view of what, to the rest of the country, is a non-phenomenon. Englanders aren’t looking jealously over their shoulders at Scottish success, and never have done.
Gordon Brown will be a wildly unpopular leader, not because he is Scottish, or Scotland-educated, but because he is surly and tax-happy, more concerned with shafting his ‘Scot-lite’ boss than doing his own job. Brown might resent Oxbridge, but Oxbridge is broadly indifferent to him. If the Raj was really as all-powerful as Neil suggests, then why didn’t it do anything to arrest the decline in elite education in Scotland and elsewhere? The preponderance of Scots in the broadcast media in particular occurred because the Scottish accent is classless to the English ear, not because a generation of would-be Scottish TV presenters got off their backsides and decided to exploit a post-war meritocracy.
Robert Westbrook
Trinity College, Oxford
Doubly ungallant
While normally an admirer of Mark Steyn’s abrasive and incisive style, his assertion (‘Hold your tears’, 20 August) that Cindy Sheehan, the anti-war protester camped outside Crawford Ranch, ‘is having a mental breakdown in public’ was ungallant and therefore reprehensible.
He made an excellent point — that certain Democrats are cynically exploiting her grief at the death of her soldier son in Iraq — but then to describe her as indulging in ‘a narcissistic rage’ was to be doubly ungallant. If she is ill, then any further comment on her behaviour is just plain bullying.
Please continue to tilt amusingly at the whingeing lefties, Mr Steyn, but don’t become infected by their churlish habits.
Matthew Hall
Monmouth
Wrong about us
The article on the anti-war movement by Douglas Davis (‘United in hate’, 20 August) contains a number of factual errors.
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