Letters: benefits of genetic testing far outweigh the costs

Mary Warnock is right that consent has to be assumed from the child if genetic modification can avert a serious and often distressing condition (“We need to use gene editing wisely but also embrace its vast potential,”Comment, last week). The test is of whether the procedure is “in the child’s best interest” and, if confined to serious diseases, as Warnock alludes to, then I believe that most appropriately informed parents will agree that it is.

Cost is harder to assess. Not all serious conditions are immediately fatal or life-threatening and the initial expense of testing must be balanced against that of potentially many years of expensive medical care and, quite likely, social support and special educational needs. In addition, the cost of many tests becomes relatively cheaper as they become better established and more readily available.

With successful treatment, perhaps a fulfilling career may ensue, with the opportunity to support the economy for many years, so maybe an initial investment could be well rewarded. Finally, how do you balance the scale of physical and emotional pain and distress in a currency of pounds sterling?

And so to Warnock’s final point: Stephen Hawking championed the fact that even severe disability need not abolish a fruitful and meaningful life if one nurtures areas that were not affected by the disability. He spoke out against euthanasia. The world will be eternally grateful that he existed but I strongly suspect that, given the choice, he would have favoured maintaining his physical faculties.
Dr John Trounce
Hove

Underestimating the unions

It was exasperating to read such old-fashioned, sexist references to a woman standing to be general secretary of the Labour party, never mind misleading caricatures of unions (“Don’t look to Len McCluskey and his sorry ilk to defend workers’ interests”, Comment, last week).

But that’s what happens when unions are seen through the narrow lens of Westminster politics, instead of real workplaces far beyond.

Day to day, unions are defending jobs, keeping workplaces safe and organising against exploitation. Far from forgetting the victories of the match women and the dockers, their example inspires us.

At Sports Direct’s warehouse, amid an atmosphere of fear and intimidation, Unite won more than £1m for workers cheated out of the national minimum wage. Unison struck a huge blow for the low paid by getting tribunal fees abolished. The GMB took on Uber, Hermes and Addison Lee over bogus self-employment in the courts. Members of the bakers’ union at McDonald’s went on strike against zero-hour contracts – and won a pay rise. Prospect’s cinema workers have stood strong in demanding a living wage. But UK unions are held back by some of the harshest laws in the world. Our right to strike is under threat and we have no rights to enter a workplace to recruit members.

If Nick Cohen is really concerned about turnouts, he should direct his fire at the government for denying unions the right to use safe and secure online balloting, just as political parties already do.

With insecure work on the rise and wages stagnating, working people need unions more than ever. Anyone who stands for a fairer society would do well to get behind union organising, rather than taking pot-shots at our leaders.
Frances O’Grady
TUC general secretary
London WC1

Rock’n’roll will never die

I read Barbara Ellen’s article with waves of nostalgia (“Farewell NME – irreverent, acerbic, essential”, Comment, last week). From 1954 until 1966, I had every copy, stacked in a yellowing pile at the foot of my bed. This was surely its golden era, as it covered a revolution in popular music, the like of which has never been seen before or since.

In the mid 50s, it wrote about skiffle and its king, Lonnie Donegan. In the late 50s and early 60s, it charted the rise of rock’n’roll, through Bill Haley, Elvis and Buddy Holly to the black musicians who founded it, such as Chuck Berry, Fats Domino and Little Richard and eventually to the first British rock’n’rollers, Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Marty Wilde. And in the mid 60s, it was there to report the explosion of British bands who conquered the world and played a big part in changing the face of our society, led by the Mersey sound of the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers and the Searchers, followed by bands such as the Rolling Stones, the Animals, the Hollies and the Who.

Every week, we pored over the Top 40 chart and every year, we voted in the NME poll. The winners were the best of the best and all appeared at the annual NME poll winners concert, which took place at the Empire Pool, Wembley, as it was then called. Sadly, when I married in 1966, my mother’s ultimatum was “You’re not leaving those old newspapers here” and my wife’s retort was that I wasn’t bringing them to our new home. So I got rid of them – a decision I regret to this day.
Mike Worthington
Hexham

A battle won, a war lost

Donald Macintyre’s memories of the battle of Grosvenor Square (including my failure to rescue him from the forces of law and order), and our antipathy to the Wilson government has underlined one of the more regrettable consequences of those times (“My part in the anti-war demo that changed protest for ever”, Focus, last week). It is that a whole generation of the left turned its back on the Labour party and on careers in parliamentary politics. Virtually none of our contemporaries, unlike those who came before or after, followed this path. We can only speculate about the consequences for social democracy – something that we belittled at the time but was grievously extinguished soon after and seems a distant prospect today.
Michael Harloe
Oxford

Donald Macintyre’s list of events of the “year of the soixante-huitards” omitted the civil rights march in Derry on 5 October 1968, the ramifications of which continue to influence British politics.
Rodney Brunt
New Ross, Co Wexford

Reasons to be miserable

Andrew Hindmoor might accuse me of miserabilism (“Why the left’s hellish vision is so ruinous”, The Sunday Essay, last week), but I think he underestimates the challenges we face in the 21st century.

Yes, there are great advantages to living here (compared, for example, with the United States, where I’m originally from), but those advantages have been under increasing threat.

The most fundamental role of government is to provide public services and public goods. These crucial functions – local government, the NHS, social care, transport and other services and industries that have been outsourced and privatised – have been undermined by both Tory and New Labour governments since the Thatcher era. It is not merely neoliberalism that is the problem, although that provides the ideological excuse for both the right and much of the old centre-left. It’s austerity.

George Osborne once said that we will go from “austerity to prosperity”. The opposite is happening.

The private sector requires profitability and “shareholder value”. Unfortunately, in key sectors these are not available, and pursuing them just runs down those sectors. The result is more and more inefficiency and poorly run oligopolies.
Philip G Cerny
Professor emeritus of politics
University of Manchester