Letters

No easy housing fix

Iain Macwhirter suggests ("How to survive the recession", 25 August) you can protect yourself from the effects of recession by these means: "If you can sell your house, do, and rent instead [because] it's cheaper than getting a mortgage." This is alarming, especially given that he acknowledges the collapse of social housing in the same article.

The unregulated financial market of today's private rented sector affords no security of tenure to those with no other housing options. Private landlords can recover possession of their properties on no other grounds than choosing to, for financial or personal reasons. The families they serve with notice to quit will face having to find alternative accommodation, which usually involves paying advance rent, plus letting agents' fees. Local authorities are unlikely to help. If you sell your accommodation for no other reason than to economise, councils may decide you are "intentionally homeless", and assistance would be limited.

Selling your home to save money should be a last resort, and only after taking professional debt advice. Please be warned - renting may not be an easy solution.

Claire Spiller

Via email

Boom and bust

Your leader (25 August) comprehensively makes the case that Labour has consistently failed to deal vigorously with the consequences of the credit crunch. The government has at every turn favoured bankers over savers and lenders over borrowers - indeed, this was the very logic of the credit-led boom that Labour imprudently fuelled. This led to the dithering over decisive action on Northern Rock - with Vince Cable long having the right solution. What is now needed, as Nick Clegg argued on 12 May, is a new regulatory structure for the banking system, as well as some overdue thinking on taming the bonus culture in the City. Without this we will find boom followed not only by the current recession, but by a severe bust.

Baroness Ros Scott (Lib Dem)

London SW1

Western agendas

It is hard to imagine that President Mikhail Saakashvili ordered Georgian artillery to open fire on the town of Tskhinvali without a nod from his American sponsors ("Superpower swoop", 18 August).

What is truly breathtaking is the hypocrisy of US and UK leaders: having bombarded civilian targets throughout Yugoslavia in response to a military crackdown in the then autonomous region of Kosovo, and then recognising its independence, in direct contravention of a UN resolution explicitly recognising Yugoslavia's territorial integrity, they now tell us how important territorial integrity really is.

In seeking to exclude Russia, and tighten the Nato noose around its borders, Condoleezza Rice and David Miliband are advancing their own objectives in its backyard. For now, they have stopped short, but such an aggressive path can only lead to more war.

Peter McKenna

Liverpool

Taliban heroes

Ziauddin Sardar refers to the Taliban as a "band of terrorists" (Columns, 28 July). I do not understand why freedom-loving patriots, fighting to defend and free their country from foreign occupation, can be described in such a way. This is the same band of terrorists who fought against British imperialism in the three Anglo-Afghan wars of the 19th century to free their country from foreign invaders. They were then called savages, not terrorists. In 1940, when the main cities in Britain came under Nazi air bombardment, Winston Churchill declared: "We shall fight in the air . . . we shall fight on the beaches. We shall never surrender." Churchill was applauded as a great war hero for his determination to fight on. The Taliban are doing exactly the same thing now.

The instability and danger in Pakistan today are the product not of Talibanisation, but of Americanisation - whose fruits are instability, poverty, injustice and brutal dictatorships.

Mushtaque Khan Kayani

London NW10

Science as dogma

Your article "Weird science" (25 August) says more about "Islamic" science than it does about its protagonists, which is no surprise, as the writer himself, in the 1980s, was an ardent protagonist of such a "science". In his book Islamic Futures: the Shape of Ideas to Come, Ziauddin Sardar declared that the quest for Islamic science was the most urgent problem facing Muslims; and that western science was unsuitable, not only because its applications had been harmful, but also because its epistemology was basically in conflict with the Islamic world-view. He then attempted to remedy this, but failed - for, despite his voluminous writings in favour of Islamic science, Sardar could not make clear even the basic meaning of this nebulous term.

Can there ever be an "Islamic" science? The answer must be no: the concept of rationality and Islamic dogma are not just incompatible, the two things are also mutually exclusive.

Randhir Singh Bains

Gants Hill, Essex

Heart of the Labour problem

Iain Macwhirter's article "How to survive the recession" (25 August) goes to the very heart of the problem now facing new Labour. It shows that allowing rampant capitalism is not the way to deliver a stable, ordered society.

A mixture of controlled venture capitalism and public ownership must be the sensible way forward. Progressive taxation and the adoption of policies that protect and benefit ordinary working people, under the economic umbrella of controlled private enterprise together with appropriate public ownership, is the only route to social stability.

This was, of course, the message preached by the Labour Party until the Blair-Brown "new Labour" project took over the party and destroyed its soul. Labour must now return to those policies in order to rescue working families from the economic crisis descending upon them.

Roger Millard

Bristol

Dave the joker

Martin Bright asks how Gordon Brown permitted "David Cameron to play the statesman in Tbilisi" and suggests he was "outmanoeuvred" by Cameron in the Caucasus (Inside track, 25 August).

No, he wasn't. Cameron looked like an opportunistic tosser who had no right being there and who was making a fool out of our country. Imagine this playing out in Moscow and Washington: "Oh well, now David Cameron's involved, we better start looking for a peaceful solution to this game of strategic chicken."

Brown and David Miliband were working the diplomatic back channels, and most voters understand that that's how to play a constructive role in such crises, not looking for the latest entry for the "Me Trying to Win the General Election" scrapbook. Brown won't have made any political gains from his role, but in spotlighting his lack of political stature, Cameron may have made losses that will stick.

Alistair Shaw

Bristol

Men rule, OK?

It is ironic that Allegory of Good Government, the famed fresco in Siena's city hall (Inside track, 11 August), depicts the six great virtues of good government in female form. Here, in the Palace of Westminster, male MPs outnumber female MPs by more than four to one, and it may be more after the next election. Martin Bright titled his piece "Why Prudence needs Justice". May I suggest: "Why Justice needs Prudence".

Tim Symonds

Burwash, East Sussex

Tennant's Hamlet

May I make three points in response to Andrew Billen's review (Arts & Culture, 25 August) of the David Tennant RSC Hamlet (which I have not seen).

The point of seeing the Ghost in the closet scene is not that Hamlet does, but that Gertrude doesn't. As Billen observes later on, Penny Downie plays Gertrude, quite rightly, "as a woman who has closed herself down to everything" - and especially to her complicity in her first husband's murder.

Shakespeare would certainly have written "too, too sullied flesh": a near-homophone that is, with "melt" and "thaw": a good pun, while retaining an important sense of Hamlet's self-disgust that "solid" entirely misses.

And Ophelia's mad scene is far from unplayable, as Helena Bonham Carter showed in, if memory serves, Franco Zeffirelli's filmed Hamlet.

Tony Walton

Yatton, Herefordshire

Crowd control

Elizabeth Speller's tactful reference to "the densest bottleneck" (Arts & Culture, 18 August) does not address the key question over the British Museum's "Hadrian: Empire and Conflict" - namely why the museum is letting in twice as many people as the actual exhibition will bear, and adding insult to injury by charging an extra £3.50 (on top of the £12 entrance fee) for the audio guide, which most people will need in order to make up for the paucity of written information in both the free "guide" and the signage.

The experience compares very poorly with the Chinese terracotta warriors show, where, despite the crowds, it was still possible eventually to see the exhibits. In addition, the signage for that show was placed and designed so that most people could actually read it without having to block everyone else's view of both object and text.

Rosemary Slater

London W5