Letter: Wrong way round

Sir: Alan Simpson ("The Third Way is a scam", 22 September) overlooks an interesting point about government terminologies.

In normal human intellectual development , such as Newton's discovery of gravity or the understanding of DNA, the discovery usually precedes the naming of it. With our present government the contrary seems to be the case. Words or phrases are "discovered" - such as "stakeholder" or "Third Way" - and then and only then are people brought together to invent entities to which they may be applied.

This is an extraordinary reversal of the intellectual norms of the last three thousand years and most certainly deserves the epithet "new" if anything ever did.

IAN FLINTOFF

London SW6