Tony Blair has lost his sense of direction on economic growth

Tony Blair’s piece (“The future demands a radical response based on understanding the world we live in”, 30 May) is sharper and more honest than many of his critics allow. But its central flaw goes deeper than policy disagreement: he uses a causal model that no longer fits the world we live in. His chain runs like this: AI and technology produce productivity gains, which generate growth, which creates financial room to act, which enables social justice. But he treats trust, inequality and state capacity as consequences of growth, when the evidence increasingly suggests they are preconditions for it.

The loop runs the other way. Inequality weakens social trust. Weak trust makes reform harder to sustain. Failure to reform  undermines productivity. Weak productivity feeds stagnation, which deepens inequality further. This is not a sequence but a system, and Blair has the arrow pointing the wrong way. Growth is essential. But it depends on conditions he treats as secondary.

There is a second problem. Blair’s defence of technocracy draws on the Greek techne and kratos – skill and power. But kratos is also the root of democracy: power held accountable, not merely exercised competently. His piece never answers the basic democratic question: competence on whose behalf, accountable to whom, legitimised how?

That is not a procedural quibble. Without answering it, his model risks assuming away the very conditions that make its own success possible.

Anthony Lawton Church Langton, South Leicestershire 

Proportional representation (PR) would not have to be a “democratic earthquake” (“Andy Burnham: I am committed to proportional representation”, 31 May). But it could lead to a more dynamic shifting and settling of tectonic plates. The argument against a first-past-the-post system is that, even in a landslide victory, a government can claim a mandate to rule when two-thirds of the electorate voted otherwise. Any winner-takes-all system of democracy risks leaving a majority of citizens feeling that their opinion has been shelved.

PR, as your graphic illustrates, looks to deliver a more fragmented political result. But, it is that very spectrum of representation that would reflect wider and fairer views. The term “parliament”, stems from the verb to speak, to talk and to listen to each other.

The urgency of the case for PR is underlined by political analyst John Curtice who claimed in the past week that, although support for Reform UK could be about to plateau around the mid to high 20%, a vote of 30% under the current system could put the party in government with a seemingly decisive mandate for some policies that would hardly be fair to the population as a whole. Were PR to be introduced before the next election, it would do much to encourage a range of parliamentary alliances that could listen to and act upon difference rather than merely amplifying it.

Austen Lynch Garstang, Lancashire

Malala’s courage and persistent campaigning for the rights of Afghan girls to education and to a life free from the gender apartheid under the Taliban must obtain international support, (“Malala Yousafzai: ‘The more women accomplish, the scarier it gets’”, 30 May). The new misogynistic Taliban law legalising child marriage, following a ban on contraception and education for girls after the age of 11, means that in a few years there will be no women doctors, nurses or midwives in the country. Maternal mortality and neonatal deaths will soar even higher, since women and girls are forbidden treatment delivered by male healthcare providers.

One way we in the UK could help Afghan women now, and in the years to come, is for our well endowed independent schools to offer A-level science bursaries to bright Afghan girls who have acquired English language fluency who wish to study medicine and return to their homeland to provide essential care to their sisters. This could also provide some necessary line of sight on what exactly justifies the schools’ charitable status. I am in correspondence with such a girl, aged 15, whose longing is to become a surgeon. She attends secret schools, but there is no science being taught. 

Even if there may be problems with visas, the offering of these sorts of life-saving opportunities would at least keep the situation of Afghan women and girls living under such gender apartheid in the news.

Margaret Owen OBE, London W14

Rachel Sylvester returns vividly to the censure of a decades long and shameful dereliction of duty over children and young people. (“The crisis in Britain’s youth justice system”, 31 May). Already in danger of heading for incarceration, there they have continued to wallow in conditions and under pressures more or less guaranteed to turn them into despairing and hardened re-offenders.

However much this scandal has been neglected over my 47 years of criminal defence advocacy, let us acknowledge that this government is now striving to pursue a more imaginative strategy. That said, the specialist services required can scarcely come cheap. But those services have a proven record for succeeding at a far lesser cost than Youth Offender Institution places, where they might have been designed to make faltering youngsters fail.

Also, in the past when the likes of the Jamie Bulger case coincided with administrations in electoral trouble, all rehabilitative bets were off and, as the sentencing reviewer David Gauke has shrewdly identified, along come the “bidding wars” with each party  going for ever longer sentences in the hope of winning those races to a tawdry bottom.

And see where that has got us. No more.

Malcolm Fowler, Solicitor and Higher Court Advocate (now non-practising), former chair of the Criminal Law Committee of the Law Society of England and Wales, Kings Heath, Birmingham

I enjoyed Anthony Seldon’s column on Brexit, as it chimed with some of my own instincts, particularly with regard to the risk that rejoining, at this point, would pose to our already polarised society – and the media firestorm it would generate (“Brexit sent me into a pit of rage. I now know we can never return to the EU”, 31 May). 

And if Germany and France elect hard-right or far-right governments, we might be glad of our relative insulation from the EU, despite the losses that leaving has involved. Rules on wonky bananas or “citrus marmalade” might then look like relics of a golden age if a rewired European Commission were to draft waves of illiberal legislation and torch progressive regulations.

Nigel Pollitt, London E17

Pages in last week’s edition of The Observer were dedicated to what different heavyweights of the Labour party believe needs to be done, but the most coherent case for action was to be found in Sue Pritchard’s article (“British farming has a choice: bounce back, or bounce forward”, 31 May). Embracing Pritchard’s recommendations, which she acknowledges are already being adopted in many countries, would help the country address both food security and the cost of living: two issues of primary importance to any electorate – and therefore government.

Dave Hunter, Bristol

I was interested to read “Into the wide green yonder,” 12 May, which displayed an image of Birgitta Hedin-Curtin, who runs County Clare Smokehouse, with a “wild organic salmon” from the area. Unfortunately the caption misrepresents the fish held, which is an organic farmed salmon and not wild.

This isn’t just semantics, there is a big difference between wild and farmed salmon. Farmed salmon are associated with a range of environmental concerns that can impact on truly wild, native Atlantic salmon, which are in global decline and now classified by IUCN as endangered.

Scientifically demonstrated impacts include the effects of sea lice transfer from farmed to wild fish, genetic introgression from escaped farmed fish when they breed with wild salmon and disease transfer. All of which can contribute to the global decline of our precious wild Atlantic salmon. Welfare and mass mortality issues with farmed salmon are also of concern to many.

Brian Davidson, Dunbar, Scotland

Jamie Bartlett refers to a grim consensus: “We are becoming more reliant on systems we do not fully understand, cannot fully explain and may not be able to control.” So what’s changed? Has this not been a description of the human condition for 300,000 years?

Ursula Hutchinson, Newport, Isle of Wight 

Photograph by Victoria Jones/PA