G H A Cole Professor of Engineering PhysicsUniversity of Hull

G H A Cole
Professor of Engineering PhysicsUniversity of Hull. I was surprised and disappoint- ed to hear that a historic opportunity to create Britain’s first minister for women had been lost in the “fight against red tape”. Our organisation, along with other women’s groups, had welcomed the efforts and time given to women’s priorities by the Labour Party in recent years. We were under the impression that the work carried out by Clare Short, Tessa Jowell and Janet Anderson would translate into an effective department monitoring legislation and its gender impact (known as mainstreaming). Whether or not there are other Universes would seem also to be beyond verification. In science knowledge is gained from experiment and observation while imagination links unrelated situations. But it is required that every imaginative leap must provide predictions capable of being verified, or rejected, by appropriate measurements.

And there must be more than one prediction if a theory is to be valid. Not all the matters developed in the article conform to these requirements. There would seem to be no possibility, for example, of peering into a black hole to see if it contains the seed of another Universe. Apache Tomcat/5.5.25 – Error report HTTP Status 503 – Too many incoming HTTP requeststype Status reportmessage Too many incoming HTTP requestsdescription The requested service (Too many incoming HTTP requests) is not currently available.Apache Tomcat/5.5.25. The article “The end of science? No, the beginning” (4 May) stirred the imagination. A rapid commitment to reform of the voting system is an integral part of any attempt to bring this country into the 21st century.

A failure to appreciate this could see voters at the next election give Labour the kind of verdict that the Conservatives have just received.Andrew PuddephattCharter 88London EC1. I’ve been trying to rationalise your use on the front page of a photograph of an exhausted Cherie Blair (4 May). I’m sure that it was your intention to show the human side of success. Given your sensitive coverage of Princess Diana’s treatment at the hands of press photographers, it couldn’t possibly be the case that you intended to depict Mrs Blair as vulnerable, nor try to show that this able woman does not have control over her life Could it? I shall watch with interest

Alison Clarke
Norwich. In Scotland 500,000 Conservative voters have been robbed of the right to be represented, while 380,000 Liberal Democrats have 10 MPs. This is not right, it is not fair, and it is certainly not modern.

The voting system that has given us Conservative governments for three-quarters of this century turned on them But Labour should beware the hubris of power. This leaves a potentially dangerous gap in Labour’s “project” of modernisation.
As Neal Ascherson pointed out last week, Labour won a majority of 179 seats on barely 45 per cent of the popular vote. Government news managers now suggest otherwise – with only the proposal to devolve power to Scotland and Wales and a White Paper on Freedom of Information likely to appear. Many hope that the Queen’s speech will set out a clear commitment to democratic reform – that at the very least there would be a statement of intent that, in the future, Britain will be governed differently – in an open, accountable way.

An election that was dominated by a fear of change became an election that opened up the prospect of change in a way few of us had dared imagine. In particular, a fundamental transformation in the way we are governed is now before us. But we should never forget, in the excitement, that despite Labour’s huge majority most voters did not vote for the Labour Party. Voters systematically used their votes to throw out the party that had become corrupted by power.