William Davies’s excellent article “Bonfire of the bureaucrats” (Cover Story, 2 May) misses one key point: Britain’s centralised state. One example will suffice. Lawnswood in Leeds is famous for two reasons. Alan Bennett went to Lawnswood School – and it has one of the most dangerous roundabouts in the city. In the past, Leeds Council’s highly qualified engineers drew up plans to improve the roundabout and sent them to the government as part of their annual transport bid. Unbelievably, the Leeds engineers now have to send the plans to the West Yorkshire mayor’s office who examine them, and send them on to London, and the circus continues. Can you imagine Chicago sending plans for a roundabout to Washington, or Lille to Paris? This process is replicated across council departments.
Until Westminster devolves powers to local government, it will be necessary to employ thousands of civil services in London to mark local authorities’ homework.
David Kennedy, Ilkley, West Yorkshire
Digitise It Yourself
The eternal debate about the size and efficiency of taxpayer-funded bureaucracies needs to be broadened from a focus on civil servants to include the wider public service, which, thanks to a combination of austerity and digitisation (and now AI), is undergoing a process of what I would describe as “libraryfication”. This refers to the increasing use of volunteers to run public services that otherwise might disappear. It increasingly includes DIY services where it is assumed that everybody should go online to do tasks previously performed by paid staff. “Bureaucrats” may disappear, but the cybersecurity industry will continue to grow exponentially. And of course we will all have the opportunity to provide “feedback” – even if there’s no one left to read it.
Colin Challen, Scarborough
Changing the narrative
Andrew Marr is wrong to suggest “curbing migration” is one of the four essentials for Starmer to win the next election (Politics, 2 May). The Home Office’s steps to reduce or offshore asylum claims and to limit legal migration numbers only serve to reinforce the legitimacy of the even more extreme and inhumane policies of Reform.
Labour must reframe this narrative. It is absurd that potential overseas NHS staff, care workers, students and researchers are discouraged from coming to the UK because of counterproductive restrictions on family members and very high costs.
Yes, Marr is right that Starmer must finally “find his voice and move decisively”. But he needs to do more with it than sing Farage’s tune.
Gideon Ben-Tovim OBE, University of Liverpool
Young historians
While I endorse Richard J Evans’s praise for Tim Bouverie’s Allies at War (The Critics, 2 May), I want to query his ageist comment that the subject was “a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one still in his thirties”. There are numerous precedents for British historians under 40 making impressive contributions to German history. Think of Alan Bullock’s Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, AJP Taylor’s The Course of German History and Hugh Trevor Roper’s The Last Days of Hitler. From America, there is the young Daniel Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners. There is no doubt in my mind that Tim Bouverie’s is the most formidable – at least until the next 30-year-old historian publishes their magnum opus.
Colin Richards, Spark Bridge, Cumbria
Music to my ears
I found Kate Mossman’s review of Alice Vincent’s Hark: How Women Listen (The Critics, 2 May) profoundly interesting. Yes, I may be a man, but I have never once perceived aural perception as gendered: indeed, as a cellist, I have most often found my deepest connections with others when I have been the only male in a quartet. Perhaps now is the time to reassess why music can deliver? Robert Grosseteste was (perhaps) the first to suggest, in the 13th century, that music can salve the deranged mind and so order knowledge. Vincent and Mossman point to an intriguing idea, that music is universal and, therefore, cannot be retrospectively gendered. Rather, it is simply human, existing above and yet within our temporal lives. A letter sent with greatest thanks to both!
Dr Owain Gardner, University of Glasgow
I read with interest Kate Mossman’s review of Alice Vincent’s Hark. I enjoyed it as I do much of Mossman’s work. But I think she’s on shaky ground to say that the first “music fan(atic)s” were female Beatles fans. Frank Sinatra and Johnnie Ray can claim earlier female fan worship than the Fab Four. (So can Franz Liszt, for that matter. Lisztomania and its transcendent effects could be seen as the prototype for Beatlemania.)
Mossman has spent time a lot of time interviewing rock stars. I’m prepared to bet that they, like countless other men, were inspired to pick up a guitar or write a song because of the Beatles. And the Beatles’ impact on fashion was on men’s haircuts and suits rather than female fashion. So on that, I’m with Mossman: music is not “gendered”.
Pete Goodrum, Norwich
Sister film
Simran Hans’s review of the new Georgian film on abortion, April, is moving and important. She mentions in her opening sentence the book Happening, where the award-winning author Annie Ernaux vividly describes her illegal abortion in 1960s France. Hans later describes the acclaimed theatre adaptation of Ernaux’s The Years, in which the abortion scene from Happening is staged. But she omits any reference to the film adaptation of Happening, which won the Golden Lion award for best film at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. “On-screen portraits of abortionists are rare,” writes Hans, which is why Audrey Diwan’s memorable and powerful film of the above should be highlighted.
Julia Edwards , Winchester
Brewhaha
Reading Andrew Jefford’s take on the greatness and glorious savoury taste of fine British ales (Drink, 25 April) made me smile in agreement but also feel quite sad that my favourite, Newcastle Brown Ale, is now a product of Holland. It has been the best of the beverages I have known since I saw Helen Mirren serving it to Alan Price in O Lucky Man!. I tried some in a bottle with a new yellow label and it just wasn’t the same. Surely it wasn’t my imagination.
Gary Sweet, Lancaster, Texas
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This article appears in the 07 May 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Peace Delusion