Democracies choose their head of state

This is the year the real democrats among us despair that we have been deprived for another 60 years of the right to elect our head of state.

We are then assaulted by the spectre of our very ordinary Windsor family hobnobbing with many other leaders of undemocratic regimes from around the world, including the well-known despot the King of Bahrain. What a disgrace and yet how typical of the Duke of York to be photographed with him.

How like birds of a feather they really are under all the pretensions.

How ridiculous and pathetic of Denis MacShane MP to try and blame the King of Bahrain’s invitation on the Foreign Office. The Queen, as head of state, had every right to decide on every person on the guest list. It’s her jubilee, not the Foreign Office’s.

You can be sure that if ever there was a serious threat to our monarchy by pro-democracy activists that there would also be blood on the Windsor family’s hands.

The Queen is the head of the armed forces. That’s how desperate all monarchies are to keep their unearned and undeserved titles, privileges, palaces and huge amounts of our money. The jubilee bank holiday itself will cost the nation £6bn in lost production. No-one is worth that.

Shedding a little light

From: Coun Elizabeth Nash, Leeds City and Hunslet Ward.

I respond to your comment column when you refer to potential “penny pinching” by local authorities which may decide to cut down on street lighting during the small hours. I would hardly put the savings of £1m in the same category as pennies!

When the city of Leeds moved from gas to electric street lights, every alternate light in residential streets went off soon after midnight.

Two of the first problems I had to deal with as a young councillor in the early 70s was a complaint from a man who had a public footpath running down the side of his house and he wanted the light outside his house to remain on, and another complaint from a woman who did not want her bedroom illuminated by the light outside her house and wanted it to go off.

I also recall my parents, during the winter months, relying on their street light, which came on at 6am, as an additional wake up alarm.

A decision was taken around 1980 to leave all street lights on through the night, not for safety reasons, but because the switch off mechanism on each lamp cost more than the several hours of the then cheap electricity.

Whether street lights in residential areas during the small hours will be dimmed, go off alternately or go off altogether will be looked at very carefully by my council colleagues.

At the moment, fewer than 10 per cent are being considered in areas of little pedestrian or vehicular movement.

Readers may be interested to know that there are some villages on the outskirts of Leeds, when joining with the City of Leeds in 1974, campaigned to keep street lights out of their villages. They still have no street lights today.

Pernicious nonsense

From: Dr Brian Jordan, Moorlands Crescent, Huddersfield.

I was pleased to see your prominent article (Yorkshire Post, May 21) on the dangers of some “free” faith schools teaching pseudoscientific nonsense. However, in the case of “young earth” creationism, there is worse – to distort teaching to support the idea that the universe is under 10,000 years old requires the denial of whole swathes of science – encompassing biology, geology, chemistry, physics and cosmology.

It is not so much pseudoscience as anti-science.

Incidentally, although Michael Gove has prohibited such teaching in free schools, he has failed to do so in academies. Even within free schools, we see such as Bethany School claiming that “Our science curriculum will be broad and well-balanced, looking at the assumptions, evidence and interpretations behind scientific theories.”

This is a standard creationist tactic, from the United States, of claiming objectivity but focussing only on non-existent scientific “controversies” in subjects such as evolution which run counter to their fringe religious interpretations. All done, of course, after a thorough indoctrination with the “creation story” as a “faith position”.

In the case of the private “Christian Schools Trust” behind the Sheffield application, this teaching is buttressed by their having their own inspectors, from the Bridge Schools Inspectorate, which they share with private Muslim schools – ordinary OFSTED inspections being considered too careless of their religious sensitivities. Their “success” is shown by research by one of the trust’s own directors, which revealed that a majority of children leave its schools disbelieving in evolution by natural selection.

Parents who wish their children to have a proper education in science need to be vigilant and resist any encroachment into our schools by this pernicious nonsense.

All smoke and mirrors

From: Neil Craig, Woodlands Road, Glasgow.

The new French President, Francois Hollande, is being given a considerable amount of credit for being for “growth not austerity” and by implication Britain’s Labour party gets the same. In fact, this is all smoke and mirrors.

The Conservative Party in Britain is not practising “austerity” – borrowing £100bn a year is not austere by any normal definition of the word.

Nor is Labour supporting growth. All they are proposing is to slightly increase this “austere” £100bn and let spending provide the illusion of growth.

Growth is being achieved outside the EU – the world is growing at an average of six per cent annually, and has been doing so since our politicians first blamed the non-existent “world recession” for their achievements. What the world’s fastest growing economies have in common is growing economic freedom and allowing cheap energy.

Every single MP (and economic journalist) knows that this is the formula that could get us out of recession and into fast growth within days if they wanted it.

Thus, by definition, no single remotely honest MP denies this. Admittedly this means all the honest MPs and MSPs would fit in a minibus.