Is The Independent’s readership now presumed only to include people whose children are at private school?

Many bright children, especially in London, who a generation ago would have gone to grammar school are now unable to do so because of the ridiculously high level of competition (over 1,000 applicants for 93 places locally). Sir: Your leading article sneering at plans to offer bright children extra tuition in state schools on the basis that it will not tempt Mr and Mrs Range Rover into the state system is really quite astounding (22 March). We love our children and give them as much support as we are able, and to find that we might be judged unfit to be parents on the grounds of our beliefs is depressing.We are constantly told that Britain is a multi-cultural society, but when confronted with exponents of its oldest idea of society it seems to recoil in dread.N J DAVIESHorley, Surrey. When questioned further he told the teacher of our religious leanings. His teacher made the head of the school aware and when she telephoned the area’s religious co-ordinator she was informed that it might be “a case for social services”.
By all the gods, the last anti-witchcraft law was repealed in 1953, but 46 years later our children are still regarded as at risk because of the religious beliefs of their parents. This became apparent to teachers because our son had been on a visit to a local church and the class had been discussing religious artefacts when he admitted that we have an altar at home. Sir: I am a happily married man with two children aged five and five weeks.

Imagine my surprise when I came home to hear from my wife that we nearly had social security knocking on our door concerned about the welfare of our children

The reason is that my wife and myself are Witches. However, he omits to mention that this is true not just of single mothers, but of the divorced, separated and married. There are millions of devoted fathers who, from their experience and that of their children, find it hard to believe that many mothers have any real love for their children. The CSA, and its advocates and apologists, speak not of the welfare of children, but of cash for women. They do nothing to advance the role of parents, but attack men for being unwillingly excluded from acting as parent to a child they have taken part in conceiving. Many of these fathers’ children are merely their mothers’ meal tickets, and vehicles of their mothers’ malice.
I fought long and hard to maintain a truly paternal relationship with my eldest daughter, but my limited success is shared by a minority of my peers.Women should consider why more women and children than men attended the protests that greeted the launch of the CSA. Not only do men not have the leisure and freedom of their wives or partners, but those women and children do not recognise their husbands and fathers in the demonised image they are presented with.Neither do they recognise another woman’s right to run around in a BMW and pay nothing towards her child’s upkeep, at second families’ expense.Dr SIMON FORDHAMLiverpool.

Sir: John Griffiths (letter, 24 March) is right to remind readers of the often suppressed fact of mothers excluding children from a relationship with their fathers. It will be a pity if Mr Brown’s epitaph has to be: Worse than Lawson.
Renewable energy has always been at a disadvantage in Britain because Whitehall is under the spell of the rich and powerful lobbyists for nuclear power, oil and gas. They will go on creating environmental damage until ministers can be found with the courage to stand up to the established energy industries, and to the trade union barons who support them, and recognise the need to find something better.DAVID ROSSLondon SE5. In the Budget, Gordon Brown put a tax on energy, refusing to discriminate between fuels which pollute and those, such as wind and wave, which do not. It is a depressing contrast with the one successful policy in this area introduced, strangely enough, by Nigel Lawson when he gave a price- differential to lead-free petrol. Sir: Your report “Labour rows back on wind power pledge,” (23 March) understates the extent of the Government’s abandonment of a policy designed to help the environment.

The “KLA”, financed and organised from Western countries, carried out murders of Serbs and loyal Albanians, including postmen, in order to provoke Serb reprisals to justify the irruption of the USA and its satellites and their operation as the KLA’s air force, along the same lines as in Bosnia, where the Americans are arming and training the Muslims for a new war of conquest against the Serb Republic.The author should ask why the Americans have fomented conflict in the Balkans, and why Britain should allow itself to be manipulated to that end.DJORDJE MIJALKOVICCounsellorEmbassy of the Federal Republic of YugoslaviaLondon W8. There, the Hungarians, Slovaks and other minorities work within the constitution to further their own interests. The Albanian nationalists in Kosovo have refused to do this, boycotting elections, refusing to use the state education system, persecuting and often killing those Albanians who tried to co-operate. It is not true that Mr Milosevic ended Kosovo’s autonomy in 1989. He rescinded Tito’s 1974 constitution, introduced to please Muslim powers he had been corralling into his Non-Aligned Movement by giving the Albanian- dominated government in Kosovo rights no other unit in Yugoslavia possessed, and fewer obligations.
Kosovo was left with the same rights as the Vojvodina. But Mr Reagan made the mistake of wanting to be loved as well Mrs Thatcher never made that mistake.”.

Sir: Anne McElvoy’s call to arms in a war in which she will not have to fight is stronger on emotion than fact (“Kosovo is part of Europe – that is why we must fight to save it”, 24 March). As Crisp once said about our leaders: “Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan both wanted to rule the world That is normal for a politician. When Israel was created, suddenly there was a new Jewish persona. No longer was the Jew a victim; he was the boss and often the bully-boy.