Cultural conservation, animal rights and others

Cultural conservation is more important than rebuilding Buddhas

Cultural conservation is more important than rebuilding Buddhas

Sir: I write in support of your leader rejecting calls for the rebuilding of the Bamiyan Buddhas (28 July). Your report quotes an estimated cost of £20m for the reconstruction of the two main colossal Buddha figures.

A far more worthwhile investment of this huge sum would be in the stabilisation and conservation of other, less thoroughly documented and less thoroughly vandalised monuments; in the repair and redisplay of damaged material in the National Museum in Kabul (a project in which the British Museum is already involved); in the protection of known sites, including a programme to raise awareness of the need to preserve the country's past; in the further surveying of the archaeological sites of this little-known region; and in international co-operation in training Afghan staff to implement this. In Bamiyan itself, a centre could be established to display salvaged and excavated antiquities, perhaps with a focus on the Buddhist heritage, and to revive and maintain craft traditions disrupted by the horrors of the recent past.

However remote from us, Afghanistan is central to the history of the Eurasian continent, the meeting place of cultures at a cross-roads of routes running from east to west, and from north to south, and thus is central to the history of world culture. The world needs to understand it in order to understand itself.

The temptation to opt for showy reconstructions rather than the less glamorous work of conservation, and the difficulty of maintaining security where law and order are fragile, are not unique to Afghanistan. I hope that Unesco will support the substantial, rather than the superficial, rebuilding of the relics of a tragic country.

PETER HARDIE
Bristol

Time to open up the animal rights debate

Sir: Rather than introduce yet more legislation to curb the rights of animal rights protesters ("Animal rights picketing to be criminalised", 28 July), which will in turn, history suggests, cause them to revert more to the underground and probably turn more extreme, while many animals continue to suffer in the cages and the police commit boundless resources to the issue, would not it be a new strategy to open up the issue of animal research to wider public scrutiny?

This would either completely discredit the activist argument and take away the ground swell of support they need to pressurise these companies or alternatively turn the population against animal research, thus taking away the need to resort to criminal acts to expose the issues. Either way we have nothing to lose by trying. And I for one would like to better understand what it is they do on my behalf in these places.

KEITH MANN
Clanfield, Hampshire

Sir: A German surgeon, Dr Werner Hartinger, said: "There are only two categories of doctors and scientists who are not opposed to vivisection: those who don't know enough about it, and those who make money from it." The vivisection fraternity that has had it too good, for too long. It has been avoiding a real, open, scientific debate for decades, hiding behind the "your child or the rat" argument and, in recent years, behind animal rights violence.

BEATA GAJEK
London W13

Sir: However much one may sympathise with the anti-vivisectionists' views, they are very foolish to allow themselves to be associated with the militant activists. If, through intimidation, the activists do force the laboratories to close, no animals will benefit: the cash-rich pharmaceutical industry would go abroad to countries where there are no animal welfare safeguards at all.

JOAN HAGGARD
Chorleywood, Hertfordshire

Sir: I am 65, have had polio since the age of 18 months and am now permanently in a wheel chair. People say, "What a pity they didn't have the vaccine back in those days." I reply: "I would rather be as I am, disabled, in a wheelchair, than to know that hundreds of thousands of chimpanzees suffered the cruel experiments involved to save me." I believe that until the day comes that humans respect all creatures they will also abuse themselves and their children.

It also seems to me that the side-effects from drugs pushed on us by the pharmaceutical industry are responsible for far more suffering to humans than any illness or disease.

GEOFF POWELL
Newton Abbot, Devon

Sir: The most fundamental human rights are those to life, and to liberty. In possession of the latter, Johann Hari ("I've changed my mind on animal rights", 30 July) has never been bought and sold, or even given to a new owner. He has not been spayed, and his mother did not belong to a dairy herd. If we were to extend human rights to mammals, we should have to set free all our domestic and farm animals. And shouldn't we have to give back all the land and sea we have stolen from the wild ones?

ANDREW COULSON
Musselburgh, East Lothian

Prognosis for the NHS

Sir: Raj Persaud has a short memory if he has forgotten what our hospitals were like a few years ago ("A doctor's diagnosis: the NHS is not recovering", 28 July). Since 1997, 132 new hospital developments have been started, more than 2,000 GP surgeries have been revamped and we've recruited thousands of new doctors, nurses and other staff. Waiting times for treatment are at their lowest in years and the NHS is making huge strides in tackling the biggest killers: cancer and coronary heart disease.

I have never claimed that we have solved all the problems nor that there isn't more to do. But following years of neglect and under-investment, the NHS is getting better and the extra money is making a difference. To continue the transformation I agree we need to carry on improving the quality of patient care by making services more personal to individual patients. That is why the Prime Minister and I emphasised the issue of "quality" when we published the NHS Improvement Plan and promised to step up progress to help people living with long-term conditions.

Doctors like Raj should play a leading role in improving the quality of care but should also help improve how we measure it. Taxpayers are right to expect a more accurate measure of NHS improvements.

JOHN REID MP
Secretary of State for Health
House of Commons

Sir: Dr Persaud's article was beautifully counterpointed by a quotation from management, retold at a GPs' lunchtime meeting. A manager was heard recently to observe that the tail must not be allowed to wag the dog - the clinicians being the tail and management the dog.

The gulf between rhetoric and reality grows daily. None of the additional funds have found their way to the front line. In 1989 we had 75 under-fives and half a health visitor - now we have 190 under-fives and half a health visitor. Fifteen years of constant campaigning for more health-visitor time and not a scintilla of action from management or change in the perennially deficient funding.

So much clinician time is dissipated in non-clinical activity that patient contact is becoming a minority activity. As Dr Persaud says, management is itself the problem. Interminable planning, the pursuit of funding, meetings in place of consultations, box-ticking ad infinitum - we are being managed to death.

Dr STEVEN FORD
Hexham, Northumberland

Sir: I agree with everything Raj Persaud says. As a sometime BMA official I have seen at first hand the shortcomings in the NHS. The management (with some honourable exceptions) is under-resourced and inefficient. Things will only get worse when the European working time limits are applied to junior doctors' hours next month.

I believe that things will continue an inexorable slide downwards unless the Government learns to keep its hands off the service. It has acted over the past 20-odd years as though the NHS must be cleansed in the fire of constant revolution. We must find that Maoist in the Department of Health and put him or her to Gordon Brown's sword.

JIM MILLIGAN
Newcastleton, Roxburghshire

Textile producers

Sir: The end of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement this year will indeed cause upheaval in the textile and clothing industry, but the developing world as a whole is expected to gain ("Stitched up: the human cost of cheap clothing", 27 July).

India and China, the two countries that are expected to benefit most from the lifting of quotas, between them contain over 300 million people living on less than a dollar a day. With better employment conditions, expansion of the textile and clothing industry in these countries could have significant impact in reducing global poverty.

For the world's very poorest nations, the best hope is that the United States and European Union will live up to their promises to provide duty-free access for textile and clothing imports from Least Developed Countries. The US currently collects three times more from taxes on Bangladeshi exports than it gives to the country in aid. The EU penalises Cambodian garment manufacturers for using fabrics from India or Mexico. The rules of trade are rigged against the poor and only when these are changed will we begin to see a reduction in world poverty.

JUSTIN FORSYTH
Policy Director, Oxfam
Oxford

Romanian response

Sir: In an article on 12 May about the Romanian village, Ruscova, where Michael Howard's father was born, you said that 30 people had died here in the last year from alcoholism and alcohol-related problems. According to local medical officers, this figure is totally untrue. Alcohol is only consumed here in a significant amount on special occasions such as celebrations and festivals.

Your article also claimed that this is a poor village. Yet the fact that large numbers of buildings are currently being built suggests this is not so. There are houses here which are as big as many homes in Britain. The recent economic development in this village is the result of hard work by local people who don't have time to drink. We are also helped by the work which some of our people do abroad. They then return with their earnings and build large houses.

British people are invited to come and visit Ruscova and see that this is an attractive community. We are strong Christian believers. And the villages maintain a good ecological balance. You can find fields and forests all around us; there is abundant wildlife; there are many different birds; and local rivers and lakes are full of fish. We have everything we need.

We don't expect pity and we are very proud that the next prime minister of Great Britain should have had his family origins in Ruscova. That suggests the people of Ruscova are capable of supplying people with leadership qualities.

VASILE POP
Vice-Mayor
Ruscova, Romania

Sven will it end?

Sir: Perhaps it's because I'm an unreconstructed liberal or maybe I'm simply unmoved by the modern-day cult of the celebrity, but can anybody explain to me why I should be interested in employees of the Football Association having consensual sex with other employees? Surely it is only a matter for the individuals directly involved. Maybe we really do inhabit a tabloid world which is seemingly obsessed with sex, yet when anybody actually manages to have some we shriek and howl.

MICHAEL O'HARE
Northwood, Middlesex

Defence of the realm

Sir: It is worrying that John Kerry thinks he was "defending his country" when he was in Vietnam ("Kerry: Our country needs to be looked up to and not just feared", 30 July). Vietnam presented no threat whatsoever to his country: millions of its citizens were slaughtered and its environment devastated in a purely ideological crusade against Communism. What does the future hold for the world if a potential US president thinks this past atrocity of a war constituted self-defence?

PETER McKENNA
Liverpool

Hardy perennial

Sir: Might Nelson's last words have been "Kiss Emma, Hardy" ("Our battle to fathom the truth about Nelson and Trafalgar", 29 July)? His dying thoughts would almost certainly have been of his beloved mistress, and with the lungful of blood caused by his wound the first consonant of Emma's name might well have been missed. Hardy's two kisses could have been the simplest way to indicate that he understood and would carry out his friend's wish.

JOHN GRIFFITHS
Hereford

Drug culture

Sir: If we really want to stop young people taking drugs then don't just legalise them, make them compulsory. And while you're at it, why not throw in cigarettes, alcopops, junk food and violent computer games? I look forward to the sight of rebellious teenagers skulking behind the bike sheds, furtively stuffing themselves with fruit and vegetables and getting fresh air and exercise.

JOHN SHEPHERD
Cockermouth, Cumbria