The counties
Sir: Warmest thanks to the Spectator and to Christopher Booker for the article on 'Restoration of the old counties'. In a world so full of menacing insecurity and unreasoned change, one is left with so few guiding lines. Loyalty to one's family may so easily degenerate into selfishness; loyalty to one's country may develop into aggressive nationalism. There remains only loyalty to one's region and one's roots.
When war or some national calamity unites us, there are still obstacles of dialect, custom and social background. Understanding between, say, a Glaswegian and an East Anglian, a Londoner and a Lancastrian, a man from Somerset and one from Sussex, cannot be as easy or as complete as that between men from the same region. It seems to me that the possible bureaucratic advantages of abolishing entire counties or splitting them apart under new names weighs very little against the deliberate destruction of the regional loyalty deriving from boundaries drawn up by our ancestors generations or even centuries ago.
Vernon Bartlett Middle Barn, Rimpton, Yeovil, Somerset
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