None of them would be printable, even in a paper as liberal as yours.Professor BARRY FANTONI London SW4Sir: I am relieved I didn’t buy Nigella Lawson, David Bowie et al a Christmas present they didn’t really want. Would they have accepted it with good grace (and then binned it) or sent it back by return?ANGELA ELLIOTT Welton le Marsh, LincolnshireSir: I solemnly swear that I shall not refuse any honour Her Majesty deems fit to offer me. But is the same procedure applied to selection for appointment to the House of Lords? If so the arguments for appointment rather than election to the Upper House seem greatly weakened.GEOFFREY MYERS CroydonSir: Colin Blakemore need not fret too much about an award. And what about those who would have refused if only they had been nominated? You can put me on the B-list for now.KENNETH WILSON WolverhamptonSir: It is not just that the honours system is anachronistic, it is also extremely partial.
Despite the fact that Toby Harris, who was head of the political wing of the labour movement in Haringey, North London, has long since had a peerage, I can report that as the leader of its industrial wing I have still not had the opportunity to refuse such an honour.KEITH FLETT Chair, Haringey Trades Union Council London N17Sir: That an eminent medical scientist, honoured by his peers, can be denied a knighthood on the judgement of a civil servant on the grounds that a vocal minority might be offended is lamentable, but not disastrous. However, please can you also give more prominence to the B-list – those like Professor Colin Blakemore of the Medical Research Council who ought to have been offered an honour, but were not. I wonder if Sir Mick Jagger may now be pausing for further reflection on his decision to accept his title despite the criticism of his colleagues.As a believer in democracy and equality for all I find it difficult to understand the inflated vanity which must lie behind these titled democrats, of all political persuasions, which compels them to insist on being referred to as Baroness, Dame, Earl, Lord, Lady, Sir, etc. However, I believe the problem runs far deeper than the honours system alone. The fact that an un- accountable committee of self-serving civil servants can decide that a favoured individual may be elevated to the House of Lords, and thus participate in government as an unelected “representative”, is a significant part of this problem.Like Ms Alibhai-Brown, I am in awe of those who have risen above the accepted, asinine convention and rejected a proposed honour from this flawed process.
The Opposition actually want to make cuts in income tax.W J HYDE Offham, Kent Asinine awards do UK no honour Sir: I support Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s criticism of the honours system and the return of her MBE following Benjamin Zephaniah’s rejection of his own putative “award” (Opinion, 22 December. The usual suspects like diet and heredity factors have been shown to be insignificant compared with social stress.The prime cause of our social stress is income inequality, relative poverty, not absolute. The nations with the greatest inequality suffer most, including their rich, who are more likely to die younger, and suffer infant death than their opposite numbers in more egalitarian societies.As Adam Smith, darling of the right wing said: “When a man cannot afford what is generally affordable in his society, then he is poor.” Unfortunately, in the UK we can do nothing about it because our governing party is willing to raise income tax for graduates on £15,000 pa, but not for those earning £150,000. The record shows too, that medical care does not reduce overall death rates significantly; its effect is to improve the quality of life. Detailed studies, medical and epidemiological, have identified the pathologies, and their causes. The findings are confirmed by numerous studies in other countries, the biggest being the Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trial covering 300,000 white Americans for six years.Careful analysis has shown that in the advanced countries, where starvation no longer occurs, the biggest killer is social stress. Major efforts, like our long term study of 17,000 Whitehall civil servants, and the tax and mortality records of 680 electoral wards in northern Britain, all confirmed that death rates of the poorest are four times that of the richest.
No we don’t.A substantial body of research pinpointed the cause many years ago. They are only sophisticated, that is, because a number of sophisticated artists at the turn of the last century decided that lack of sophistication was the most exciting thing around. So, around a hundred years later, archaeologists can get away with describing the first lumbering steps towards artistic representation in terms that would be suitable for a Michelangelo or a Picasso The truth is that your child and mine could do better
More from Thomas Sutcliffe. Social stress is the reason for worsening death rates
Social stress is the reason for worsening death rates
Sir: Professor Sian Griffiths says more research is needed to explain why our death rates are worse than other countries, and worsening (report, 13 December), and why our poorer citizens have much worsening higher death rates than the richer ones. They are beneficiaries of a relatively recent aesthetic shift that exalted the primitive and the primal over and above more rarefied and schooled forms of depiction. The leap to a mind that’s capable of recognising resemblance is not a small one, let alone to one capable of creating it from scratch (rather literally the case here).