LIKE SO many of the Chancellor’s big speeches yesterday’s allegedly historic reform of the public finances

LIKE SO many of the Chancellor’s big speeches, yesterday’s allegedly historic reform of the public finances had been so extensively pre-spun that it was difficult to tell which way up the finished article actually was. When we broadcast it, my employer was bravely standing right at a battle zone (sound effects added) and Russian transports – complete with US Air Force markings – were taking off and landing at Luanda every 40 seconds or so.TIM SYMONDSLondon W1. The difficulty was that my Iranian employer, from the old royal family, did not want to get killed in any trouble spot, and the Iranian cameramen I was obliged to employ could never get the camera aperture right, faithfully under-exposing miles and miles of film.
I remember returning from shooting a thousand feet or so of my employer at the front-line in Angola (in reality we were by a palm tree at Kinshasa airport, in another country) to find none of the film was of any use.I found a palm tree along the then named Pahlavi Avenue in Tehran for the stand-up bit, and then did the round of embassies for footage of heavy Russian transport planes airlifting huge amounts of war material into Luanda airport.All I could find was some interesting promo stuff of an American C141 doing familiarisation take-offs and landings in Florida. I was then the TV director for Iranian Television’s weekly Special Agent current affairs programme. Ideally, my job was to cover events in the outside world of such chaos that it made Iran under the Shah look a haven of peace.

Where there are properly enforced, dedicated bus lanes, the modern bus can solve the congestion conundrum efficiently and quickly.
MICHAEL BARTLETTHead of Media RelationsConfederation of Passenger Transport UKLondon WC2. Sir: Your media correspondent Janine Gibson’s piece on the alleged use of archive rather than contemporary footage in Carlton Television’s The Connection brought back memories of a stint I did for National Iranian Radio/Television (Nirt) in the mid-1970s (Inquiry into Castro fraud, 10 June). Sir: Hattie Hayridge’s amusing piece (“Irritations of modern life”, 10 June) on one-man buses is in need of a little factual input. The modern bus is in fact more passenger friendly than ever before. The industry spends a great deal of time and money researching its customers’ requirements and wishes, before designing the buses accordingly.

These vehicles are not the cause of traffic jams, but the victims. We urged major new experiments in public involvement and discussion, to attune government and industry to these apparently unrecognised concerns. So far there has been not a vestige of response.What does it take to get such concerns taken seriously? Hurrah for the Prince of Wales!ROBIN GROVE-WHITEDirector Centre for the Study of Environmental ChangeLancaster University. And Stonehenge is the place that was anciently designated by our people as a particular power-spot on the surface of the earth. If you’re getting your ceremonies right at Stonehenge all sorts of changes can occur a lot faster and a lot more beneficially for everybody than if you don’t.”So rather than bash down a nuclear reactor, people just start dismantling them anyway.” Maughfling sniffs. “Well, that’s the principle anyway.” The Council of British Druid Orders is a broad church, says Maughfling, that believes in freedom and diversity.

“We’re not here to be some sort of alternative institution where you obey the rules or you’re out. We’re not the Freemasons.”Central to its aims is the restoration of Druidry as the “natural religion” of England, a central and visible part of public life, rather than an esoteric cult.”Our holy days should be open to anybody who wants to come, have a good time and go to the pub afterwards or whatever.”Members of the general public wishing to attend the forthcoming summer solstice, however, will be obliged to watch the ceremony from a distance. This, says Maughfling, will consist of prayers to the earth and the rising sun, for peace in Ireland and for the starving children of Sudan. But the machine rolls on unamended.
Last year, in a study sponsored, to its credit, by Unilever (itself a potential beneficiary of the technology), we found that the panoply of ministerial advisory committees and other regulatory mechanisms is failing utterly to engage with issues of central significance for most people – particularly, the unknowns surrounding future cumulative dependency on genetically engineered crops and foods, with the risks of unforeseen (because unforeseeable in terms of current scientific understanding) synergies and ecological or public health mishaps. Sir: Your leader-writer’s suggestion (8 June) that the Prince of Wales is out of order in giving voice to his concerns about the headlong industrial drive towards genetically engineered foods is hard to credit

The Prince is doing the country a great favour. Over the past 18 months, research reports by Eurobarometer, ourselves and other independent bodies have pointed repeatedly to the degree of well-justified public anxiety and mistrust that surrounds the political and regulatory framework supposedly surrounding this potentially all-pervasive technology.