Letters

‘Few seats are really safe anymore,’ James Butler writes in the wake of the general election (LRB, 18 July). Indeed, just 54 out of 650 MPs won a majority of the votes cast in their constituencies. Butler describes Reform’s 98 second places as putting them at the ‘heels’ of a ‘swathe’ of Labour MPs. Actually, in the 89 Labour seats where Reform came second, the average gap in percentage of votes won between the two parties was 25 per cent. The combined vote for Reform and the Conservatives was greater than that for Labour and the Liberal Democrats in just six of these seats. There is no meaningful threat here.

However, in more than 140 seats where the Conservatives came second to Labour, the combined vote of Reform and the Conservatives exceeded the total for Labour and the Liberal Democrats. That Labour has a majority at all is down to the split in the right-wing vote, and – as Butler describes it – the ‘efficiency’ of the left-wing vote. Labour came second in just two of the 72 seats won by the Liberal Democrats, while the Liberal Democrats came second in just six of the 411 seats won by Labour: an unannounced, but highly effective, electoral pact.

In a report published after the election, UCL Policy Lab and More in Common warned that – so anaemic was Labour support compared with 2019 – if voters who supported Johnson in 2019 but abstained in 2024 returned to the Conservative fold next time it would cost Labour 33 seats. The report noted that voting behaviour is far more complex than simple ‘right versus left’ and that it may take some time for the majority of those who defected from Conservative to Reform (as opposed to abstaining) to contemplate supporting the Conservatives again. Yet in the context of an electoral pact between the Conservatives and Reform that reluctance might be far less of an issue: in which case, all 140 of the vulnerable Labour seats could be at real risk, even if not a single 2024 Labour voter changed sides. In such a scenario, Labour might not even be the largest party in the Commons in 2029. Rarely can there have been so fragile a ‘landslide’.

‘It’s not easy to be recognised as statutorily homeless,’ James Meek writes, ‘even if you present yourself to a council as having nowhere to go’ (LRB, 4 July). ‘You have to show you literally have no roof over your head,’ and notice of eviction isn’t enough. You also have to prove you have a ‘local connection’, otherwise ‘you’ll be told to apply to your home council’; that you have a ‘priority need’, because you have young children or are ill or disabled; and that you haven’t ‘made yourself intentionally homeless’, having quit a flat, perhaps, ‘because it was a horrible place to live’.

These tests do not reflect the law, although many homeless people are made to think they do by local council housing officers. This is unlawful gatekeeping, which denies homeless people their right to temporary accommodation and a position on the housing waiting list. Crucially, a homeless person does not have to show they ‘literally’ have no roof over their head: the legal definition of homelessness is much broader than that. Someone may be legally homeless if they are housed but, for example, are a victim of domestic abuse; or if the property is dangerously overcrowded or in a hazardous state of repair; or if it has become unaffordable or unsuited to their medical needs. (Leaving a place in such circumstances does not amount to making yourself intentionally homeless.) A person can also be legally homeless when their landlord has a possession order from the court, which can be months before any bailiffs are due to arrive. A homeless person doesn’t have to show evidence of a ‘local connection’: that is a discretionary power a council does not have to use. Also, the local connection test can only be used to refer an already open homeless application to another area: it should never be used as grounds to refuse emergency accommodation.

The rights of homeless people in England, hard fought for, are relatively robust. Wales has got rid of the ‘intentional homelessness’ test altogether, and Scotland has gone one better by removing the ‘priority need’ and ‘local connection’ tests. Most of the difficulty in getting recognised as homeless is not down to the law, but stems from decisions made in housing offices and their treatment of homeless people, which our mutual support group has more than a decade of experience in challenging. We are often dismayed by the energy and resources that councils use to deny homeless people their legal rights, instead of fighting for the new council housing needed to solve the homelessness crisis.

We take issue with the description of council housing as ‘subsidised housing’. The NHS, like council housing, is run on a not-for-profit basis, but no one describes it as subsidised healthcare. Social housing tenants pay rent for their homes, which pays directly for their construction, maintenance and repairs. By contrast, the government’s Help to Buy scheme, alongside the infamous Right to Buy, has involved the use of billions of pounds in public assets and taxpayers’ money to subsidise home ownership, yet these schemes are not stigmatised as ‘subsidies’.

James Meek writes that ‘families don’t get additional child benefit if they have more than two children.’ Actually they do. It is the child element of universal credit (a means-tested benefit) which is subject to the controversial two-child cap. But it gets worse. If you do claim child benefit for more than two children, and claim universal credit as well, you’re much more likely to be affected by another restrictive policy – the total benefit cap.

Patrick McGuinness contrasts the expensive sourdough from bakeries in a gentrified patch of Oxford with the bread in the small, once industrial town of Bouillon in Belgium, where ‘there is excellent bread (known, simply, as “bread”, the alternative being unimaginable)’ (LRB, 6 June). Indeed. After living near a small town in rural south-west France for many years, and having a favourite small bakery for most of them, my wife, chatting to the baker one day, discovered that they grew the wheat for their bread in their own field. Imagine the fame of any British bakery that could claim the same. And the price of its bread.

Simon Murray writes that his great-grandfather Gilbert Murray ‘remains the youngest person ever appointed professor [at the University of Glasgow] at the age of 23’ (Letters, 18 July). Lord Kelvin, or William Thomson as he was then, became professor of natural philosophy at Glasgow in 1846 at the age of 22. When I was an undergraduate many years ago in the same department (still then called Natural Philosophy), I would pass a glass case containing some of Kelvin’s scientific instruments on my way to labs. Later, lecturing in various institutions, I would make a point of explaining to physics students the reason one of the seven base units of the International System came to be named after a tributary of the Clyde.

Mary Wellesley writes eloquently about the nightingale (LRB, 6 June). However, I fear she falls into the anthropomorphic trap of believing that these birds enjoy singing in response to music played to them by humans. It seems more likely to me, though evidence either way is lacking, that their response is a counter-attack against a threat to their sound-space – as Wellesley says, the nightingale sings to attract a mate and to defend its territory.

Steven Shapin says Margaret Thatcher ‘made England and Wales the first countries in the world to have a wholly privatised water system’ (LRB, 4 July). The Welsh Water Authority was indeed privatised in 1989. Renamed Hyder in 1996, the company collapsed in 2000. Since then water in most of Wales has been managed by Glas Cymru, a not-for-profit company with no shareholders. This is one of several ways in which Wales has in recent history taken a different path from its English neighbour, which is burdened with debt-laden, profit-gouging water companies. That said, the more benign governance structure at Glas Cymru did not forestall an instruction from Ofwat in March that the company should pay compensation to the tune of £40 million for having ‘misled customers and regulators on its performance on leakage and per capita consumption data’.

James Vincent suggests that early automata were given the form of ‘religious men and courtly women’ because the voluminous clothing of such personages allowed the internal mechanism of the automaton to be well hidden (LRB, 22 February). This reminded me of a remark made by Charles Dickens in Pictures from Italy (1846) about the port of Genoa:

Two portentous officials, in cocked hats, stand at the gate to search you if they choose, and to keep out Monks and Ladies. For, Sanctity as well as Beauty has been known to yield to the temptation of smuggling, and in the same way: that is to say, by concealing the smuggled property beneath the loose folds of its dress. So Sanctity and Beauty may, by no means, enter.

Colin Kidd’s review of Robin Douglass’s Mandeville’s Fable: Pride, Hypocrisy and Sociability anticipates that the reader will see associations between Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees of 1723 and Hayek’s ‘spontaneous order’ of society and its economy (LRB, 18 July). In fact, Hayek himself devoted his 1966 British Academy lecture to the argument that Mandeville (perhaps unconsciously) developed this idea. Hayek’s anxiety for this precedent faces certain textual difficulties, and, as Douglass demonstrates in his book, distorts Mandeville’s legacy.

Hayek ignores and Kidd skirts around Mandeville’s notorious attack on charity schools, which along with ‘everything else that promotes idleness, and keeps the poor from working, are more accessory to the growth of villainy, than the want of reading and writing’. Mandeville also writes that the sooner ‘men who are to remain and end their days in a laborious, tiresome and painful station of life … are put upon it at first, the more patiently they’ll submit to it for ever after’.

Though he plays with provocative satire elsewhere, these passages are deadly serious, as is his vigorous praise for capital punishment. Hayek’s advocacy for Mandeville was not without its success. In 1979, Keith Joseph and Jonathan Sumption wrote in their book Equality: ‘It is more comforting to think that one is poor, because one belongs to the class whose lot is to be poor.’

Andrew O’Hagan was on a visit to Malawi when he came to appreciate the extent of David Beckham’s fame (LRB, 18 July). I lived for a time with the Evenki nomads of Inner Mongolia. During introductions, I asked which other English people they knew. Theresa May? No. Tony Blair? No. They then smiled, gave a thumbs up and said: ‘David Beckham!’ Apart from the queen, he was the only English person this family of reindeer herders isolated in a forest soundproofed by snow could recall.