Poor showing

IT IS disappointing that Lesley Riddoch (Perspective, 21 November) trots out the old liberal chestnut of a simple causal relationship between poverty and lack of educational attainment.

How does that work? Are “poor” children so short of nourishment that they cannot concentrate? Many of your readers will have had an upbringing that was very poor by the standards of today’s so-called relative poverty (including mobile phones, central heating, TV, etc) but very many escaped their background and became useful members of society.

No, the major change is that poor parents then tended more to get married and stay married, thus providing the kind of stable home environment without which children of any class tend not to do well. Nowadays, the unstable home is almost the norm in many areas and the negative effect on boys in particular of the absent father is painfully obvious.

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Another issue Ms Riddoch mentions is drug addiction. Apart from the thousands of heroin addicts, we now have state-sponsored methadone addiction – is it reasonable to expect good academic performance of children from such homes?

It is right to address the issues, but pointless to do so with a mental straitjacket that insists on seeing everything in terms of money. Let’s hope the latest port in the storm for despairing liberals (early intervention) proves more substantial than the poor returns we have seen from the vast increases on state education spending incurred by the previous Labour government.

Alan Oliver

Battock Road

Brightons

Stirlingshire

WHAT a strange country is Britain! Protesters who camp in public places such as George Square, Glasgow, or outside the Houses of Parliament or St Paul’s Cathedral cannot apparently be moved without a court order.

Police are hogtied by human rights legislation and now it is even planned to stop prosecuting people who swear at them. It is no wonder we have riots and a growing drugs problem. The answer is zero tolerance, with police on the beat taking back the streets from protesters, rioters, drug dealers, binge-drinkers, winos and aggressive beggars.

Our once civilised country is fast descending into Wild West chaos, with the police and authorities more concerned with the driving offences of the law-abiding than the life-threatening activities of a growing criminal underclass,

George K McMillan

Mount Tabor Avenue

Perth

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