Letters

A second chance

I found your cover story "Thou shalt not hug" (30 June) extremely interesting. As a youth and community worker, and now as a lecturer in youth and community work, I realise it is essential that we check potential workers to safeguard our young people. The issue for local authorities is which criminal convictions are acceptable and which are not. There are many people with convictions for drug possession or violence, particularly from their teenage years, who have turned out as excellent workers five, ten or 20 years down the line. In the current climate of fear, people who are called to make a decision generally determine that anyone with any criminal convictions is unsuitable - just in case anyone should accuse them in future of having made a bad decision.

Baljeet Gill

Oxford

Equity and trust

Marek Kohn makes some interesting points ("Who can you trust?", 30 June). He could have added another factor to his comments on relationships: the role of inequality in reducing levels of trust.

The United States provides a good example of how a wide division between "rich" and "poor" corrodes social relationships, but more equality does the opposite. In 1997 Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce Kennedy published data which showed that people in US states with greater income equality not only had better life expectancy, but trusted each other more. Unequal states did badly on both counts.

There is also evidence that the negative effect of inequality on levels of trust is a phenomenon widespread across the world. Robert Putnam has argued that very divided countries such as Brazil score badly in this area, while egalitarian Sweden does very well. Evidence from former communist states provides similar evidence.

I suggest that any Labour minister who is interested in social cohesion take note.

Graeme Kemp

Wellington, Shropshire

Khat fights

"Racist" is a good description for the Tories' proposed khat ban (Observations, 30 June). Khat laws specifically target Somalis and East Africans for criminal punishment for continuing a harmless cultural practice.

Banning khat would be intolerant and hypocritical. Its effects are not much different from those of coffee beans.

Careful analysis of the World Health Organisation report Chewing Khat reveals that khat produces the same daily use patterns found among caffeine users. Any honest appraisal indicates that its use is far less dangerous than that of coffee, which causes well over 20,000 deaths annually in the US and Canada because of coffee-induced ulcers, strokes and heart attacks. Coffee is also implicated in cancer and foetal injury. Khat has not been implicated in these problems.

Any violence connected to khat consumption is the result of a black-market drug market operation, not the pharmaceutical properties of khat itself.

Redford Givens

San Francisco, US

Criminalising the unemployed is not a new Tory policy, it is an old one. We have a Tory government in Canada, and it wants to make almost everything illegal and fill the jails with people of colour and people under the age of 30.

If banning khat goes anywhere near as successfully as the ban on cannabis, teen use of khat should triple in the next ten years.

Russell Barth

Ontario, Canada

Save our surgeries

It is not true that there is no government plan to impose polyclinics (Ben Bradshaw, Letters, 30 June). All primary care trusts have been told that they must have a "GP-led health centre" or polyclinic by year end.

There may be no plans to "close" surgeries but the effect of placing these "open-all-hours" clinics right next to existing surgeries will threaten their viability and lead to closures. Normal practices can't compete. It is not physically possible to open those hours and also provide continuity of care.

The "any GP will do" proposal, where patients can see a general practitioner in the new clinics for non-urgent problems, while remaining registered with their own GP, is risky. It assumes that all problems have got the same, easily identified, "technical" solutions.

In primary care many problems are due to a complex mix of social, psychological and physical issues. A GP with contextual knowledge and a personal relationship with the patient is better able to elucidate such problems and agree a mutually satisfactory treatment plan. This proposal will undermine what is most valuable about British general practice and lead to duplication, lack of co-ordination, higher rates of unnecessary referrals and investigations, less safe prescribing, lower patient satisfaction and worse outcomes. There is no evidence base for it and it should be ditched.

Dr Marie-Louise Irvine

London SE8

Why children need strangers

Last week's NS cover story ("Thou shalt not hug", 30 June) pinpoints the way in which our culture is increasingly putting its fingers in its ears and singing "CRB checks, CRB checks" very loudly. As Martin Narey of Barnardo's points out, "the risk comes . . . from people known by their children - often relatives". This view is held by most experts in child abuse.

It strikes me that, as children are taught to fear and mistrust almost any adult who isn't a relative or known to them, the circle of abuse will be drawn even tighter. There will be fewer kindly but disinterested adults in whom an abused child might confide, or who might take the small step required to help a child at risk.

Anne Jackson Smirnoff

Crediton, Devon

Who's a liberal?

I have noticed before your tendency to define liberalism very precisely. You could be forgiven for thinking from Martin Bright's 23 June article (Inside track) that anyone who supports the European Convention on Human Rights, is opposed to the reduction in the time limit for abortions, and is in favour of reducing the age of homosexual consent is a liberal - and that anyone against is not.

Easy, isn't it? And that is one of the reasons why we have such a low turnout at elections - because you are supposed to embrace all or nothing.

Neil Salmon

Ball Hill, Hampshire

A useful EU

You are right to say that Labour politicians need to make the case for Europe a passionate rather than a managerial exercise (Leader, 23 June). It is difficult for voters to enthuse about changes to the EU's rule book. But, it is important that the institutional reforms contained in the Lisbon Treaty are not just abandoned because we can't be bothered to seek a solution acceptable to Ireland. David Miliband's argument that the EU can be "the motor of progressive politics" is right. For that, we have to fix the motor.

Above all, if we get the institutions right, then the EU's second 50 years can be about tackling the issues that matter to people - man-made climate change, and ensuring that our single market balances economic growth with social protection, consumer rights and energy security.

Just as Jacques Delors was right in 1988 when he told the TUC conference that "nobody falls in love with a market", so it is true that no one is going to fall in love with revised voting weights in council and an expansion of co-decision powers for the European Parliament. And yet, more effective, transparent and democratically accountable institutions will lead to the legislation that can best answer the question: "What did the EU ever do for us?"

Richard Corbett MEP

Leeds

Lessons in outrage

Catherine Fieschi talks of emotion being the key to politics ("Truly, madly, politically", 23 June). Does outrage count? Peter Wilby writes sensibly of the link between "failing schools" and disadvantaged children (Inside track, 23 June), but may I add to these a further injustice we never expected from a Labour government?

In local authorities such as Kent and Buckinghamshire, secondary selection is retained. Surprise! Kent and Bucks have a high percentage of schools in the "failing" category according to the extremely blunt measure that Ed Balls, the Secretary for Children, Schools and Families, has chosen. So, in these local education authorities, 30 per cent of children are selected to grammar schools at 11, while the rest feel labelled as failures. Now their school is also a failure, as it has not succeeded in achieving average results for those same children!

Maybe Balls is just trying to make it look as if the government is doing something useful. What he actually achieves is unreasonable pressure on schools, often schools which are doing an excellent job in difficult circumstances, and a double sense of failure among the children.

Miriam Wood

Deal, Kent

Wall crimes

I have to say that I found Robert Macfarlane's barefaced admission of vandalism unedifying (Travels, 23 June). He describes pushing past a sign on the Great Wall of China that clearly stated "No Tourist!" and scrambling across a fragile historic monument to sit upon "a crumbling crenellation". I am only surprised that he didn't take a piece home with him as a souvenir.

Dr Stephen Burwood

Hull