Letter of the week: Missed connections

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In her brilliant analysis of the decline of mainstream media (The NS Essay, 7 March), Alison Phillips fails to use perhaps the most important word of all when explaining why the public doesn’t trust journalism: connection. The industry has willingly severed the local connections that brought it the trust it now so desperately needs. As a local journalist in 1990, I frequently wrote about the travails of Grenfell Tower residents battling against local government – an example Alison uses. These stories would sometimes, if we were lucky, find a willing ear in more powerful newsrooms.

National media once benefited from the connections of local journalists, built and nurtured through decades of studiously focusing on issues that mattered to their audiences. That is gone, and yet stories of incompetence, greed and scandal are more plentiful than ever. Journalists, in the audiences’ eyes, are either unaware of or, worse, uninterested in these stories. I appreciate the economics of local journalism are depressing, but its power to forge connections continues to be formidable.
Grant Feller, London, W4

Defend or attack?

Your Leader (7 March) praises Keir Starmer for raising defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2027. But in the recent debates about this there has been scant mention of Trident. The rationale for Trident is that it acts as a deterrent. If we already have a deterrent, why the need for extra “defence” spending? Unless it’s for aggression.
Colin McDonald, St Leonards-on-Sea, East Sussex

Climate conundrum

John Gray is an acute critic of Western societies and their discontents (The Politics Essay, 7 March). The climate crisis, however, is a persistent blind spot that leads him to minimise present and future dangers and berate politicians who have woken up to their responsibilities. He blames “a madcap green-energy crusade” for the loss of industries that have mostly been felled by neoliberal globalisation.

Enabling people to keep more money in their pockets by undermining their future is not an intelligent or moral course of action. His concern for the poor is commendable, but because he deprecates socialism as much as he dislikes liberalism, he’s unable to see that the only way to cut this particular Gordian knot is an all-out attack on the inequalities that have come to define our “civilisation”.
Kevin Hanson, Sheffield

John Gray suggests that the “anarchical world” in which we now live can be traced, in part, to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. From regional instability in the Middle East to the shattering of any moral legitimacy Western foreign policy might have enjoyed, those wars have inarguably contributed to the world Gray describes. But they also gave us much greater clarity regarding the nuclear weapons landscape of the world.

Just six days after US special forces captured Saddam Hussein on 13 December 2003, Colonel Gaddafi relinquished his nuclear weapons programme. This, in turn, led to the dismantling of the Abdul Qadeer Khan network: Khan was the father of the Pakistani nuclear programme, and he facilitated black market sales of expertise to Libya, Iran and North Korea.

Iran retains strong ambitions to possess nuclear weapons. North Korea flagrantly pursues its ambitions. However, 2003’s Non-Proliferation Treaty means the world is much less anarchic than it might have been without intervention in Iraq. If even this is to endure, the myopic transactional politics characterising global affairs must be subordinated to a multilateral focus on non-proliferation.
Jordan Scott, Newcastle upon Tyne

Altered states

I was surprised to discover that the phrase “make the most of every second” causes such consternation for Hannah Barnes and Emma Barnett (Out of the Ordinary, 28 February). My interpretation was not that it was meant literally – an obviously impossible directive. Rather, it was meant as a kind and timely reminder from those who have been there before, that despite the particular hardships that come with early motherhood, this precious time does not last – so don’t sweat the small stuff.

For many women, maternity leave is a seriously rewarding and enjoyable break from the toil and drudgery of modern employment. For many more mothers, it is all too short. For others, forced to give up work due to the cost of childcare, maternity leave becomes a permanent state. Let’s not pretend that mothers are one homogenous group.
Felicity Capon, Folkestone, Kent

Esther and Goliath

I read Pippa Bailey’s empathetic review of Esther Ghey’s memoir, Under a Pink Sky (The Critics, 7 March), with interest and sad recollection of that tragic event. Her daughter Brianna was savagely murdered by two young people who discussed this butchery with no emotion, as if it were an everyday occurrence.

Esther Ghey has gone through so much and emerged with a desire to tackle Big Tech and the easily accessible platforms where susceptible young people can be turned into killers. One can only admire her dedication to fighting such a Hydra of sadistic and inhumane material. Smartphones have so much to answer for, and their addictive quality for children and young people should be a wake-up call for us all. Ghey reaching out to the mother of Girl X and appreciating that their lives had indeed been changed for ever was incredibly gracious. I hope they can both find a way through their own personal nightmares.
Judith A Daniels, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk

Monkeys all the way down

Is spirituality innate or an artefact? Humans are primates and that means we are innately social beings. Our level of intelligence means we need to make sense of our affiliations intellectually. Systems of meaning develop, generating belief systems and ideologies as a source of identity and social cohesion. Kinship, universalism, a divine power, the supremacy of nature, Marxism and other political philosophies are some of these organising principles.

This is the view from social anthropology anyway! Lamorna Ash’s concluding sentence was honest and witty (The Critics, 28 February). Thank you for a stimulating review article.
Dorothy Jerrome, via email

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[See also: Inside the Reform civil war]