From Roger Taylor
Your comments on migration were excellent but your plea for an intergovernmental agency to “promote research” and “make and defend evidence-based decisions”, while eminently sensible, flies in the face of long-established political reality (9 April, p 5). It is not just an immigration agency that is “long overdue”: it is the use of reason by politicians generally, on any topic you care to mention.
I suggest that you focus your efforts on determining how we might coax our representatives into rational problem-solving – most of us “plain folk” manage it most of the time. Given reasoning politicians, many of the problems we face, from immigration to real horrors like climate change and antibiotic resistance, will be in with a chance of being solved, and setting an example to other governments can only do good.
Meols, Wirral, UK
