Peter Preston asks who is in charge of the BBC's response to the recent horrific revelations about Jimmy Savile ("The Savile affair has exposed the sorry chaos at the heart of the BBC", Comment). The short answer is that, as the charter dictates, BBC management and the trust both have clearly defined roles.
The trust's role as the BBC's sovereign body is to represent the public interest in our oversight of the corporation. So we have approved the management's proposals for the two inquiries being launched. Above all else, we will ensure that the public gets what really matters here – genuinely independent inquiries that are run by credible experts: former high court judge Dame Janet Smith and former head of Sky News, Nick Pollard. The questions the BBC faces will be answered comprehensively and transparently. When the time comes, the trust will publish the resulting reports and determine what action the BBC needs to take in response.
I struggle to see what is particularly confusing about that.
Lord Patten of Barnes CH
Chairman, BBC Trust, London W1
'Pernicious' families? Really?
I find it absolutely bizarre that Jon Keighren, Manchester University's admissions spokesman, should find it both "natural" and "pernicious" that parents should help applicants with their personal statements ("Sixth-formers pay up to £350 in bid to cheat admissions system", News). Are the candidates to be locked in their rooms and not allowed out without a completed application in a sealed envelope?
Families work together, in this as in much else, and while this produces inevitable advantages for some, this one is a hardly a serious inequity. When I was an admissions officer, it was the academic profile that mattered; personal statements were usually used to help decide difficult cases and we knew perfectly well how to read them – when we needed to. The contempt for the middle-class family in Keighren's remark about families who help their student members "across the dinner table" suggests to me that someone else should be doing his job.
Alan Shelston
Bowdon, Greater Manchester
The case for the badger cull
A number of scientists have offered their opinion on the government's policy of culling badgers as part of a package of measures to reverse the sharp rise in TB in cattle ("Top scientists launch attack on 'mindless badger cull'", News).
We have great respect for the scientists involved and we believe there is broad agreement on the science underpinning the government's policy – that proactive badger culling can result in an overall beneficial effect on the disease in cattle. This aligns with the view expressed last year by a specially convened meeting of scientific experts to discuss the issue, including several of the scientists who signed the open letter criticising the government's policy.
In these circumstances, the government has decided to introduce a policy of culling designed to maximise the reduction of TB in cattle. The policy is based on sound analysis of 15 years of intensive research. Critics are not able to cite new scientific evidence or suggest an alternative workable solution for dealing quickly with this rising epidemic.
Culling is just one of a range of measures the government is taking to arrest the increase in new bovine TB cases, including intensifying testing to remove infected cattle, tighter cattle movement controls, guidance to farmers on stopping badgers from contacting cattle and further research into vaccination.
Professor Ian Boyd chief scientific adviser, Defra
Nigel Gibbens chief veterinary officer, Defra, London SW1
Politics needs to move on
Our democratic structure is no longer fit for purpose; we need to upgrade to a new version ("Politicians are failing to reach the electorate", Editorial). The party system that defines our democracy is increasingly irrelevant to most people. Society is more atomised, less tribal than it was in the heyday of political parties; simply picking one "team" isn't how life is lived. Single organisations that demand loyalty to a breadth of diverse issues aren't representative of the way most people think. The head-to-head oppositional nature of party politics is not how people live their lives; for most people, politicians' antics are alienating; achieving in life, success, is achieved by co-operation and compromise.
What this society needs, and what it won't get from our dumbed-down politicians and media, is a broad reform of our political system that will take it out of the 19th century and into the 21st.
Paul J Burrows
Nottingham
Pip, pip…
"Orange, a word that has no rhyme" you say ("How charm, luck and guile saved the prize that used to be Orange", News) and this is a popular misconception, as one of my poems shows:
Near Monmouth, while climbing the hill of Blorenge
with no more than mintcake and a bottle of orange,
I found a parsley fern. I was sure, from the shape of its sporange.
It was the first to be found on the hill of Blorenge.
Copland Smith
Chorlton Cum Hardy, Manchester
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