Letter to The Times, published on 11th February 2017
Your extract (10th February) from a government paper about negotiating priorities, reveals what can only be described as a supplicant approach to our fishing position post Brexit, which may also apply to other industries.
After leaving the EU, Britain as a sovereign power and signatory of the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea 1994 (UNCLOS) will automatically take over sole responsibility for all commercial rights, including fishing access and control of stocks, in its own Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Continental Shelf (the North Sea and English Channel principally). In this matter, there is nothing whatever to negotiate about.
There is the matter of historic fishing by foreign countries such as Spain (since 1995 in their case) but we are not suppplicants. The Civil Service negotiators should understand this. While there may well be some horse–trading over fish stock management, the conditions to be applied to the continuation of foreign fishing in its EEZ are for Britain to decide, just as the EU and Norway will continue to do in theirs.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 27th October 1994.
Anne Applebaum (article, Oct. 25th) is right to point out that, unlike the Palestinians, the Catholic Irish do have their own state, but she is wrong to say that the fight in Northern Ireland is over a “resource-free tract of land”.
On the contrary, by hard work and dedication over the centuries, the Protestant people have created the network of efficient well tended farms which has so distinguished Northern Ireland from the Republic of Ireland. In addition, the Unionist population has made contributions to British technology, and to the British Army out of all proportion to its numbers.
Despite the mayhem and economic sabotage systematically carried out by the IRA, northern Ireland continues to deliver the best secondary school results and to have one of the most skilled and willing industrial workforces in the whole of the United Kingdom, as I have direct reason to know.
For a government to say, as this one does, that it is neutral about whether such citizens go or stay is a shameful disgrace. Perhaps it cares more about mineral rights. If the Republic of Ireland finally manages to get its hands on Northern Ireland, it would also obtain rights to around 1,700 square miles of the Continental shelf.
A letter to the Times which was published around 30th August 1984.
As is not unusual in articles on Ulster, Phillip Whitehead (August 28th) talks of the Ulster Unionists’ “fear” of joining the Republic of Ireland.
Individual Unionists will speak for themselves, of course, but in my view Unionists see their Britishness and specifically, loyalty to the Crown, as fundamental to their national consciousness. Doubtless most present Labour party politicians find this difficult to comprehend, being themselves pretty lukewarm about these concepts, but a large number of Britons on the mainland recognise and respond to the devotion of the Ulster majority to their British heritage in the face of terrorism and the grudging support from the Government at Westminster.
Phillip Whitehead correctly discerns that there are two nationalisms in competition for space in Ireland. What he does not seem to recognise is that one of the nationalisms is British – ours.
It is about time that the fight against terrorism in Northern Ireland should be seen as our fight, not just some local squabble, with the British Army holding the ring. The Unionists in Ulster are, by and large, descendants of English and Scottish settlers from the seventeenth century. Proportionately they occupy much less territory in Ireland than the nationalists. The legitimacy of their political status is older and greater than that of most states in the New World and not a few in Europe.
Ulster people have made their full contribution to British national life, most notably in the military and technological spheres. Besides our people there, the land itself, the corresponding continental-shelf mineral rights and airspace are valuable assets for the United Kingdom which should be vigorously, not half-heartedly, defended against acquisition by the Republic of Ireland.
Contrary to much political and media opinion the Republic of Ireland, whatever the views of its individual citizens, is not a particularly friendly state. Throughout its sixty years’ existence as free state and republic it has taken a generally anti-British stance in foreign affairs and has consistently acted as a haven for wanted terrorists. In EEC matters it is usually ranged against Britain.
To surrender Northern Ireland to it would be another abject British defeat and seen as such by friends and enemies alike.
