Far from protest from the sidelines, evangelical churches and societies of all denominations will want to offer practical resources and support. In too ma n y, neither the frequency nor the quality reaches the standards we would wish to see maintained. Thus the thrust of this particular suggestion is not a reduction from daily to twice-weekly worship but an increase to a recognised minimum of twice-weekly w o rship where this does not occur.The Prime Minister’s reiteration of Government commitment to a daily act of worship is commendable The need now is to make this policy work in practice. Wherever authentic worship is held daily we would emphasise our desire for this to continue Sadly, this does not happen in a majority of schools. Our education coalition produced a briefing paper, expressing concern over the non-performance of acts of school worship. This was intended to stimulate public debate so that the law does not become dead by default.
We sympathise with those who want to see the 1988 Act carried out in relation to school worship.

There are a variety of views on the Church-state relationship but none of them is compatible with concern about collective worship in schools. From the Rev Clive Calver and Mr Martyn Eden Sir: Your leading article “Ritual, the common thread of religion” (15 December) unfortunately confuses two issues. Cards go the opposite way to skirts: the worse people feel, the smaller they get. Even those who can afford the glitz feel they must draw a veil of modesty over it You might call it putting off the style.. A walk along any high street will show you that the present decadeis testing the Laver thesis to destruction Confusion reigns.Off with the old theory, on with the new. Is it correct to send your elderly, chain-smoking uncle a card whose slim profits will go into combating heart disease? Or is this too much of a memento mori, and you should send him that pretty Save the Children Fund item instead?The fashion historian James Laver put forward the theory that women’s skirts get shorter in good times (the Twenties, the Sixties) and longer in worse times (the Thirties, the Seventies). They slide, half-ashamed, out of their office-franked covers.

Company cards, like company cars, uncomfortably evoke the boom years of the Eighties. They lack the desirable Nineties aura of public service: no litt l e logo from ever-more obscure charities They are irredeemably private Not that charity cards are problem-free They need a new etiquette guide of their own. No more vast fold-outs, half the size of a playing field, dripping gilt and glitter.Corporate cards have shrunk most of all. They are shrinking so fast that they fall through your letter box not with a sati sfyingclatter but with the silence of snow or confetti. The Royal Mail, fortunately, sets a lower limit on the size of envelopes it will accept (about three inches by four). Otherwise, if present trends continued, cards would end up smaller than the stamps on them.
The feel-good factor failed to reach the electors of Dudley West last week Nor has it reached the senders of Christmas cards.

Have you noticed that your Christmas cards have been getting smaller this year? Not perhaps the ones you have been generously sending out, but the ones you received. His reported failure to refer the proposed merger between Halifax and Leeds does not. But his most important task is to appoint a competition hawk to replace Sir Bryan – and not to stand in his or her way.. The best way to forge them is by domestic competition, not to patch them together in state-sponsored alliances.Mr Heseltine should recognise this and return to the “Tebbit doctrine” of 1984 under which domestic competition is the central concern of merger investigations.His decision to refer the bids by GEC and British Aerospace for VSEL, the submarine maker, to the MMC bodes well. But this is a flawed view of how world-beating companies develop. He argues that domestic market conditions are increasingly irrelevant in a world of international competition: blocking mergers and takeovers might prevent the development of world-class companies in Britain. The MMC ruled that consumers were more concerned about exclusivity than price.Mr Heseltine claims that his decisions, and those of the MMC, are in the consumers’ interest.