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Sue MacGregor's objection to newsroom-speak shows that she is part of the problem. Questioning the use of "set to" in the phrase "the government is set to announce...", she writes:

"What's wrong with 'about to' or expected to'?" What's wrong with it is that it is speculation and not news. There is far too much of the future tense in news columns and bulletins. I don't want to read or hear in the latter about what Alastair Campbell has told journalists he thinks the Home Secretary will say/announce! unveil next Thursday. This can only be either agenda or prophecy. News it is not.

Richard Cook

Cambridge

Theywere believers

In his response to John Gray's excellent article in your Christmas issue on the religious roots of modern liberalism, Brian McClinton (Letters, 6 January) claims that liberalism and secularism are not Christian inventions but "the legacy of religion's strongest critics such as Voltaire, Diderot, Paine, Mill, Marx, Freud, Russell, etc". Yet all the thinkers he names were direct inheritors of the very religiosity he disparages. Tom Paine, far from being an unbeliever, was a passionate deist who wrote in The Age of Reason: "I believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life". Voltaire was another deist whose avowed aim was not to destroy religion but to purify it of superstition. "We should not seek to nourish ourselves on acorns," he wrote, "when God gives us bread." John Stuart Mill was not a deist, but the historian Linda Raeder is right when she says that "religious preoccupations dominated Mill's thought and structured his endeavours throughout his life". Bertrand Russell did not be lieve in God, but he did worship mathematics with religious fervour and sympathised with Plato, who "regarded the contemplation of mathematical truths as worthy of the Deity". Marx and Freud were both profoundly Messianc thinkers who believed they were leading their followers towards a promised land. Which leaves us only with Diderot, who wrote, with the cruel finality of the true apocalyptist, that "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest

If Brian MeClinton believes that he has correctly identified in these thinkers the true genealogy of something he calls "the quintessentially humanist approach of sceptical open-mindedness", then be is perhaps more dangerously deluded than any religious believer.

Richard Webster

Oxford

lmmiqration pays

John Lloyd argues that mass immigration has a greater negative effect on the native poor and low skilled than on the wealthier classes ("Is the Daily Mail right about immigrants?", 6 January) and that high-skilled immigration deprives developing countries of talent.

Guardino "Ross" Rospiqliosi

The day before his article appeared, the BBC's Crossing Continents interviewed a qualified doctor in Afghanistan who could not afford to practise his profession. If he had been employed in England, remitting loper cent of his salary, he would have trained another doctor at home, while he helped British public services to look after the poor.

Bristol

John Lloyd argues that the wages and job opportunities of the low-skilled, low-paid and workless poor have disproportionately suffered from the effects of migration. The Low Pay Unit has yet to find any evidence to support these claims. Indeed, the theory that increasing the supply of labour through migration will reduce indigenous wage levels is equally applicable to higher-skilled labour as it is to low skilled. In reality, migrant workers tend to be concentrated in employment sectors where there are unfilled vacancies but also tend to be residentially concentrated in geographical areas of high unemployment and deprivation. The decline in value of low-skilled wages and the increasing wage gap between high and low paid is now a long-term phenomenon and to lay the blame at the feet of low-skilled migrant workers is at best simplistic.

Richard Towers

Director, Low Pay Unit

London WC1

John Lloyd's attention should be drawn to the latest Home Office research, which concludes that "an increase in immigration of 1 per cent of the non-migrant population leads to a nearly 2 per cent increase in non-migrant wages".

David Griffith

via e-mail

Render unto Caesar...

Contrary to what Bryan Appleyard ("Can God stop the war?", 6 January) implies, Jesus's words "Render unto Caesar" did not surrender worldly affairs to people such as George Bush and Saddam Hussein. Their message is "Render God's things to God lest Caesar takes the lot".

Frank McManus

Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Self-inflicted

Surprisingly at times, I often find myself agreeing whole heartedly with Will Self (Books, 6 January), but this time I do have to object. Any 1960s American schoolboy (of which I am one) will tell you that "Dylan" (ne Zimmerman) derived - by the bard's own admission - from Matt Dillon, the TV marshal of Gunsmoke, not from some dead Welsh poet.

Greg Parston

London SW6

Wrong reactionary

Did Barbara Gunnell write her review of My Life and Travels by Wilfred Thesiger early on New Year's Day (Books, 6 January)? The idea of T E Lawrence (born 1888) and John Buchan (born 1875) being "contemporaries" of Thesiger (born 1910) is puzzling. As for the entertaining notion of Kingsley Amis reporting on Haile Selassie's coronation, surely even Lord Copper would not have sent an eight-year-old boy to Abyssinia.

Gavin Stamp

Glasgow

It was Evelyn Waugh who reported on Haile Selassie's coronation. The Editor

Life beyond Shaftesbury Avenue

The Donmar Warehouse, according to Sheridan Morley, is "the most... revolutionary theatre company in London" (Theatre, 6 January). Does Morley never leave Shaftesbury Avenue? Has he ever seen the work of the Royal Court, BAC, the Arcola, Improbable Theatre, the Red Room - or any theatre venue that prizes innovation over stagnation?

Ian Max Davies

London SW11

Could we just clarify? A number of readers have kindly inquired after my health following your "Sheridan Morley is unwell" italic of a few weeks ago. Ever since Jeffrey Bernard, the word "unwell" has carried a distinctly alcoholic subtext, and theatre managements have enough to worry about without adding the prospect of legless critics lurching around their first nights. What felled me was in fact the diabetes, not the drink.

Sheridan Morley

London SW11

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