Minority influences
Sir: In your excellent issue of January 6 two items gave me special pleasure — your leading article, 'Standards in schools' and Clive Gammon's Viet-Taff.' They both prompt further questions. Why does the majority tolerate the increasing influence of the minority in the world of education? Why should a Minister of Education or local education authorities be forced to negotiate with bodies like the National Unionof Teachers and the National Union of Students both of which are led by members of a political party, very much in a minority, whose purpose is to destroy the very society that has to negotiate with them? I have often wondered why the successive 'Black Papers' on education, which seem to me to contain so much unexceptionable good serise, received such a hostile reception in the press. But I find the answer in the revelation in your 'Spectator's Notebook' for December 23 that, of an education correspondents' group of fortyeight, all but one were left-wing, "some extremely so." This raises the further question — "Why does the press which is not left-wing appoint those who are, to be their educational spokesmen?"
Mr Gammon rightly asks why is no opinion poll taken in Wales about the introduction of traffic signs in Welsh at such enormous cost, or about the alleged demand for more Welsh programme time on TV? Why must British politicians, ignorant of the real facts about the Welsh language, accept as gospel what a Welsh-speaking committee tells it, or give in to the threats of a small minority of militant fanatics? It looks as though this country has learnt nothing since Munich about the suicidal folly of a policy of appeasement, and is as ready to believe what an unrepresentative group tells them about the views of the people living in Wales as they were to believe what Hitler told them about the shameful injustices done to the longsuffering Germans in Sudetenland.
Fanatics are never appeased. Every concession leads to fresh demands, and it looks as if there will be no end to the process until Wales is landed in a policy of complete bilingualism at an out. rageous cost, which only a small minority of the people living in Wales have any desire for. H. Justin Evans Glebe House, Church Stretton, Salop
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