Dogs

Chapter and verse on Islam Sir: Irshad Manji’s generally very sensible article on ‘Reclaiming Islam’ (29 March) suggests using the Qur’an sura 3:7 as a verse to challenge Islamists who claim a fundamentalist reading. She quotes the verse as saying that ‘God and God alone knows the full truth of how the Qu’ran ought to be interpreted’. I don’t speak Arabic, but unfortunately in my English translation this isn’t quite what the verse says. What it says is ‘only God and insightful people know their true meaning’. Sadly then the verse, I suspect, would be next to useless in challenging fundamentalist interpretations — as most Islamists would, I suspect, consider

Why we need a free press Sir: As bereaved parents and (to borrow from some signatories of last week’s advertisement) victims of public authority abuse we wholly oppose adoption of the politically endorsed Royal Charter of Press Regulation. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Christopher, our mentally ill son, had been denied his right to life as a result of failures by the prison service, the police and the NHS. Our experience was that, in the aftermath of our son’s death, the primary objective of the public authorities involved was to protect themselves from criticism because of those failures rather than to achieve justice for our son. If

Tax breaks for families Sir: Hugo Rifkind is wrong to imply (6 July) that the current income tax system is indifferent to family structure, and thus the Conservative party’s attempt to give tax breaks to married couples is ‘a blatant attempt at social engineering’. Is it not social engineering when the current system demands more tax from a single-earner family than a dual-earner family, even if the total income is the same? Milton Friedman once said: ‘We tend to talk about an individualist society, but it really isn’t, it’s a family society.’ Hugo makes the mistake of seeing society as a collection of individuals, but in the real world most important

MPs are incomparable. This may seem an odd thing to say in the current climate of opinion, but I mean it exactly: they cannot be compared with others. Now that a big rise is being suggested by Ipsa, the ‘independent’ body which sets their pay, people say they should be compared with local authority chief executives or head teachers, or that they are a profession. They cannot, and they aren’t. They are our elected representatives. We elect them to make our laws and to vote ‘supply’, i.e. to decide how much of our money government may spend. They therefore constitutionally must decide, in public, on their own pay (if any)