A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 21st May 1990.

Few readers will, I suspect be convinced by Ferdinand Mount’s assurances (article, May 18) that European Union would not affect the position of the Monarchy.

Nor do bland assurances along the same lines from such as Mr Edward Heath and Mr Gerald Kaufman at the time of the Dublin summit carry conviction.  Nobody of course is suggesting that the Queen will simply disappear if Mr Heath’s passionate desire to convert this country into a province of Franco-German Europe is fulfilled.

Nor is it supposed that the Prince of Wales will stop making speeches.  What people see is that the essence of the Queen’s role as Head of State will evaporate as she is replaced in that role by a President of Europe.

In fact the first unification of Germany, after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, provides an exact illustration.  Bavaria Wurtemberg and Baden were kingdoms which were incorporated into the new Germany.  Their monarchs, while continuing on their thrones until 1918, became of vastly diminished significance.  Today these states are simply provinces of the German Federal Republic.

In Britain the queen symbolises the freedom of the British people alone to make their own laws and employ their armed forces to defend that freedom, as they alone see fit – arguably the essential freedm contained within clause 39 of Magna Carta itself.  When that freedom is abolished the single most important aspect of the Queen’s role is abolished with it.

An article, full title “What Price Hope and Glory as Europe’s Net Tightens”, published in The Field magazine in April 1990.

Listeners to the radio recently will have heard the vice president of the West German central bank, the Bundesbank, remark in the course of an interview about the unification of East and West Germany that ” . . . of course a country which merges its currency completely cannot remain independent politically”.  Thus, in the matter-of-fact tones of someone stating an incontestable fact, did Dr Walther demolish completely the claims of those Europeanists, including some prominent members of the Conservative Party, that European monetary union would not jeopardise our status as an independent country.

Later this year, Britain will be forced to attend an ‘EC Intergovernmental Conference’ at which the principles of a new Treaty will be drawn up to bind EC countries into a monetary union – a common monetary and economic regime controlled in practice by a united Germany.  If we were to acquiesce in this process, the disappearance of the Queen’s head from our currency and the substitution of a foreign currency, the Ecu, would remind us daily of the fact of our disappearance as an independent country.

The imminent approach of this Intergovernmental Conference, which the present Government has said repeatedly it does not want, is the crossroads at which we must decide if we wish to continue as an independent country or to be absorbed into a United States of Europe, governed nominally from Brussels, but in practice from Berlin.  We must have the simple courage as a people to say that, despite all the chorus about ‘missing buses’ and so forth we will not travel down that road.

The public approach of committed Europeans to this crossroads follows the classic tactic adopted (by much the same people) in another decisive transformation of our national life since 1945: immigration.  This tactic is to assert in the early years that the changes are small and beneficial and no threat; that to oppose them is to be a ‘Little Englander’ and xenophobic.  Later, as the problems become clear to almost everyone, we are assured that they are ‘transient’.  Then a decade later, we are told we must live with the problems, and more changes are proposed (or avoided) which ensure that we never solve the problem.

In 1973-’75 the British people were continually assured that the EC was essentially a free trade area or ‘Common Market’, the term by which it is still freely described in Britain, despite its single most important feature being the most highly-rigged agricultural market in the world (which is saying something).

Thus, seven years after accession to the EC (in1973), once the predictable budgetary problems were obvious, Britain was locked in battle month after month to reduce the absurdly high exaction placed on it, a battle in which the president of France, a country which received rather than paid, could haughtily describe our Prime Minister as une fille d’épicier – a grocer’s daughter.

Today, ten years on, the German government feeds the Europhile press in this country with a steady diet of remarks carefully designed to jangle the British establishment’s nerves – that if we do not enthuse over German unification, we risk staying ‘on the sidelines of history’, we shall be ‘marginalised in Europe’, our role will be ‘merely that of onlooker’ and so on, all of which sentiments are heartily endorsed it seems by Mr Edward Heath.

Europeanists frequently talk about Britain’s role, or lack of it, in Europe, of allegedly ‘missed’ opportunities of ‘leading’ Europe.  Their predecessors in the soft-centre of British politics in the ’20s and ’30s would wax lyrical about Britain’s role in the League of Nations, and about the moral leadership that we should give to a waiting world.

In fact, among nations it is influence, not leadership in the personal sense, which governs relationships – and influence follows power.  Today it is industrial power which counts.  Britain is acceding to a wholly unequal treaty with the EC because it has been, and still is, industrially weak by comparison with its principal European competitor, Germany, and to a lesser extent, France.

The causes of Britain’s decline since its pioneering of the Industrial Revolution have been extensively debated by economists; but perhaps two aspects stand out.  One is that the nadir of Britain’s industrial performance, in farming as well as in manufacturing, probably occurred in the years just before the First World War.  Over the 80 years since then we have slowly improved, with some slipping back and some spectacular successes.  Of course, all but a few saw Britain in 1910 as immensely powerful, but a huge trade deficit was disguised by interest on overseas investments made by earlier generations.

The second obvious fact about our weak industrial performance in the last 100 years is that it has depended entirely on ourselves.  We have not been ravaged by foreign conquest; we have not been denied access to vital new materials.  However, rather than give our industry, and above all manufacturing industry, the primacy it must have if we are to survive as a modern nation, each generation of political leaders this century, with few exceptions, has sought redress from our loss of influence in the quack remedies of ‘special relationships’, international conference attendance, EC membership and, recently, ‘services’.

Politics and politicians in Japan, Germany and even the USA are essentially in the entertainment category; only in Britain are they taken seriously.  With an industry led mainly by accountants and lawyers we have lost industrial battle after industrial battle because we have not really fought.  We have been like an army led, not by infantrymen and gunners, but by the Pay Corps and the Legal Branch with off-stage exhortation by Parliament.

Can anyone seriously believe that more of the same, this time from Europe in the shape of Mr Heseltine’s Euro-Senate pantomime, can do anything to help Britain pull itself up into the ranks of a fully-competitive industrial power?  Can anyone believe that Germany, dominating the EC, would lift a finger to allow Britain to become a serious competitor?  Even today West Germany, with an overwhelming balance of trade surplus (the largest single element of which, nearly £10 billion, comes from Britain), will not allow Britain a devaluation of the green pound to give our farmers the returns from the CAP which other EC farmers enjoy.  This is because Germany’s net EC budget contribution would rise in consequence.

The steady fall in the real price of manufactured and agricultural products since the Industrial Revolution has dramatically improved our standard of living.  Services show little, if any, productivity rise.  During six years of the last war, British agriculture changed from relative backwardness to being one of the most mechanised and productive in the world – yields rose by 50 per cent, output doubled, and labour productivity rose by 90 per cent.  This was brought about by a national act of will, the skill of farmers, the products of a new agricultural machinery industry (the number of tractors increased fourfold) and the application of synthetic nitrates made by our chemical industry.  This achievement continued up to 1973, with productivity gains averaging 7 per cent per annum in the 12 years before that, which compares with the average for industry as a whole of about 2.5 per cent.  Over the last 50 years, agriculture and chemicals, by commitment, skill and technology, have been our most successful major industries.

The same blend is urgently needed in the rest of our industry before it shrinks still further or passes into foreign hands.  To revive our manfacturing industry, on which all else depends, we need above all a national commitment to making it happen.  If we cease in any meaningful sense to be an independent nation, it cannot happen.

We need specific measures, such as the power to protect ourselves against foreign dumping of products – power which we have lost to the EC.  Above all, we need to convince our young people that we are still in business as a nation and that it is their duty, as well as in their interest, to help us survive.

Without this commitment to our independent future our most talented people will drift away to the industrial heartlands of Germany and the USA; already German firms are actively recruiting our engineering and science graduates, while the flow to the USA continues, as any visitors to the hi-tech industries of California will find.  Of course, free people have a right to move to other countries.  but it is folly then to give these countries the right to fashion your economic policy and determine your currency.

A suggestion three months ago by Mr Andriessen, the Dutch EC commissioner, that we and the Danes should resume membership of an enlarged European Free Trade Association (EFTA) linked to the EC in a wider European Economic System (EES), offers us everything we could possibly want, though derided by the Foreign Office.  This is clearly the way to accommodate our own deep desire to remain independent, the aspirations of the newly-independent nations of Eastern Europe, Denmark’s wish to rejoin Scandinavia, and the desire of the other ten EC countries to unite.

From this position we could trade freely with the rest of Europe and engage in sensible, non-bureaucratic, technical co-operation through the Eureka programme.  We could arrange our own trade agreements with the rest of the world, reduce food bills and balance of payments deficit and exploit our unique links of language and history with the Pacific basin – centre of more than half the world’s manufacture.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 16th March 1990.

George Walden (article, March 14th) should realise that this politicians’ fear of Britain being marginalised that we hear so much about in the press is not shared by the mass of the people of Britain.

A nation’s influence is not determined by how many international conference top tables its politicians get invited to, but by its industrial strength, as the example of Japan makes so very clear.  Many of the people who work in our industries are quietly confident about Britain’s ability to hold its own in a fair trading system.

What they really fear is that Britain’s independence and ability to negotiate fair terms of trade will be further sacrificed to the Euro-roleplaying ambitions of politicians of the Heath-Heseltine stamp – ambitions which led last year to our subsidising our Continental competitors to the tune of £4,500 million.

An article which appeared in The Field in their August 1989 edition.

A letter which followed from this article under the title “The Surrender to Europe, What We Give Away” can be found in the letters section.

Three years ago the Yorkshire town of Ripon celebrated the eleven-hundredth annivesary of its Charter, a set of rights given in 886 by Alfred the Great.  Following defeat of the Danes eight years earlier, Alfred had put together a new law code, based on custom and the code of the earliest English King 300 years before.  At a time of extreme danger and upheaval, by pragmatic good sense our greatest King laid the foundation of England with boundaries which have barely moved a mile in 11 centuries.  This continuity is unmatched in history.  Indeed, until the recent insensitive disruption, even the county boundaries had hardly changed.

Three hundred years after Alfred’s death, King John was reminded in Magna Carta that Kings of England are bound by the same law as binds their people.  A further 300 years on, Henry VIII broke with Rome over precisely the issue which faces our nation today: namely, who or what is to be the supreme source of law in this country?  For all the politicians’ talk about ‘pooling’ sovereignty, that is what the issue is about and that truth is clearly dawning.

Just as in the 1530s, so in the 1980s the inclinations of the governing establishment are divided between those whom Henry VIII called ‘Englishmen papistical’ and ‘Englishmen entire’.  Thomas More, the leader of the former, in specifically defining limits on English sovereignty declared, “I am not bound to conform to the Council of one realm against the General Council of Christendom” – words which, with the substitution of Europe for Christendom, are precisely those enjoined on our Prime Minister by the ‘Europeanists’ today.  England in the 16th century faced immense danger from the hostility of a vastly stronger Continent.  Thoms Cromwell’s robust reply, “This realm is an empire”, ultimately carried with it the support of the English people, as will the Prime Minister’s Bruges speech in due course.

From 1534 until the present, the single most significant statement of the way we are governed is the 300-year-old (this year) Bill of Rights, which reaffirmed the ancient liberties of the subject and his right to be governed by laws sanctioned only by the Parliament of this country.  Doubtless because of fear of drawing attention to the incompatibility of this most fundamental of our freedeoms and what is being proposed by the European Commission, the authorities have offered no public celebration.  The Post Office, ever subservient to passing fashion, has issued no stamp commemorating this momentous event, preferring instead to remind our people of such riveting events as the Telegraphic World Congress and the International Postal Union.

The contrast of our national continuity with the situation on the Continent could hardly be greater.  There, most states (with the exception of Denmark) are of recent creation – West Germany 1953, Italy 1870, Belgium 1831 and so on.  Whole countries have been chopped up, put under other regimes and put back again.  Even France and Spain date only from the 15th century in anything like their present boundaries.  Parliamentary government is of even more recent creation – unstable (Italy has had 40 governments since the war) and tending towards frequent lapses into tyranny and revolution.  In the last 200 years every EEC Continental country has been freed from its own or its neighbour’s tyranny at least once, and in the case of France three times, by British soldiers on their own, or in company with their English-speaking allies from the British Empire and the United States.

Because national boundaries and systems of government on the Continent have changed so frequently, there has arisen a strong tendency to rely on bureaucracy – the one permanent feature – issuing instructions on the basis of general enabling laws.  It was the civil service in France which provided the strong defence of French interests as governments came and went in the third and fourth Republics.

It is clear that the EEC Commission is a precise reflection of these tendencies, having a strong preference for issuing directives and instructions using an enabling Act – in this case the Single European Act (SEA) – as its legal cloak.  It was a deception to represent this Act, which was smuggled through the British Parliament in 1986 despite the misgivings of the Prime Minister, as merely another stage in completing the common market.  It is a device adopted by European federalists to achieve by stealth what would be rejected by the British people if they were given chance to vote on it.

The imposition on our country of rules issued by the European Commission using the majority in the Council of Ministers, allowed by the SEA, now impinges directly on every one of us.  ‘EEC threat to British farmers’, ‘EEC VAT ruling will hit hospitals and school fees’, ‘EEC will bar upland forest grants’, ‘EEC threatens village halls’, ‘Britain bows to EEC over lorries’, ‘EEC restricts bird shooting’, are but a selection of recent news headlines.

Voting techniques in EEC affairs are a travesty – many decisions in the Council of Ministers are taken now on the basis of one country, one vote, Holland, Denmark, Belgium, Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Luxembourg, whose combined population is 51 millions, have seven votes to the one vote for Britain’s 57 millions. Even where weighted voting applies – as in the European Assembly in Strasbourg – the aforesaid seven countries have 134 seats to Britain’s 81.

The extraordinary thing, unbelievable if it were not happening, is that the British people pay huge sums of money to belong to this system.  Something in the order of £2 billion per annum is now pased to Brussels and this figure is achieved only after time-consuming applications for grants and rebates from a much larger gross sum initially paid.  Put in perspective, this sum is about the annual cost of the whole British university system.  Between 1973, when Britain joined the EEC, and 1988, £11 billion was paid, enough for instance to rebuild over the same period the whole of the railway network from scratch.

Why, it may be asked, are we doing this?  The reason usually offered by Europeanists is that of belonging to a large free market of some 300 million people.  The key point, which they never mention, is that this market is open to any European country whether they belong to the EEC or not. Britain’s trade with Sweden, a non-EEC member, and theirs with Germany is as free as Britain’s with Germany – freer in many cases because of smaller non-tariff barriers to trade.

Another reason often advanced is that membership of the EEC is necessary to prevent our technological domination by the USA and Japan.  The technological benefits of large units are, however, vastly overstated by politicians eager for roles to play.  With the possible exception of a moon-shot and certain nuclear missile projects, there are probably no technological goals outside the competence of an industrial nation of 60 million people.  In the USA, the world’s most powerful computers and the most advanced work-stations are made by relatively small firms staffed by gifted individuals.  In Britain, three companies produce three out of the five best-selling therapeutic drugs in the world – an astonishing achievement.  Most, if not all, European joint ventures are essentially there to guarantee sales in the participating countries, rather than for production or technology reasons, Concorde being perhaps the outstanding example.

So if free trade and technology are not the reasons for our membership, what is?  We are left with simply a word, ‘Europe’, and a sense that we must belong for fear of being left out.  It is the belonging for its own sake rather than any calculation of national advantage which motivates the main advocates of European unity in this country.  In fact, over large parts of the political establishment ‘Europe’ has become a matter of blind faith – the more disquieting the facts about it, the more we are led to think that we must believe in it.

‘Europe’, including its topical controversy, the European Monetary System, is in fact merely the latest in the futile quest for external quick fixes to Britain’s economic problems.  “I wish to dissipate, if I can, the ideal dreams of those who are always telling you that the strength of England depends on what it possesses beyond these shores.  Rely upon it, the strength of Great Britain lies here within the United Kingdom.”  So spoke Gladstone in 1879.  It is entirely apposite today.

None of the improvements in our manufacturing industry in the last few years owes anything to the EEC entanglement, any more than Germany’s industrial renaissance did.  It is the labour and capital efficiency of our industries which matter – as farming has demonstrated continuously whether inside or outside the EEC – together with access to world markets and that farsighted commitment to long-term research so clearly shown by our pharmaceuticals industry.

The political establishment, largely ignorant of the requirements for a successful modern industry, but still anxious to play a world role, gave up on Britain after Suez in 1956, taking directions first from Washington and, increasingly now, from Brussels.  Fear has been a dominant emotion in the British political establishment for a long time – fear of Germany before the Second World War, fear of Washington’s disapproval after it, and now, most absurd of all, fear of being left out.

This timidity has been accompanied by a carelessness with our national assets which no French government, for instance, would contemplate.  The Continental Shelf Act of 1964 handed to Norway large sections of the North Sea oil rights to which it was not entitled under international law, while British fishing rights in those same waters were put into a common EEC pool by Mr Heath’s Government in 1973.  Even our supreme asset, the English language, was compromised by the assurance given to France that Britain would not contest the position of French as the EEC’s official language, a language which is only the third most widely spoken mother tongue in the EEC and, in the world, less widely spoken than Portuguese.

Language is, perhaps the most fundamental point of all.  When in 1929 the French foreign minister, Briand, circulated his project of a European federal union, it was rejected by the then British Government in language which admitted of no ambiguity.  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Snowden, declared that Britain would not be the ‘milch cow’ of Europe.  While in the intervening 60 years Britain has consistently opposed a federal union, signs are that powerful, probably predominant, Continental interests are determined to realise the Briand concept of European unity.  By this is meant a sovereign Government, the only meaning of the world ‘unity’ to which its Continental advocates attach any importance.

We are at a crossroads for which Alfred’s and Henry VIII’s England provide the only parallels: whether or not to continue to exist as a self-governing nation.  We have nothing of substance to fear from a separation from the EEC.  As a member of the society of English-speaking nations, we have an enormous asset.  English provides a channel to the wider world beyond Western Europe as important to the entrepreneurs of Elizabeth II as the sea was to the merchant venturers of Elizabeth I.  In freeing ourselves from this latest Continental entanglement we have everything to play for and nothing to fear but fear itself.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 28th June 1989.

The juxtaposition of your headline “Thatcher to take first step on European union” and the photograph of the Queen opening the New Zealand collection of plants (June 24th) exactly captures the crisis now facing our country.

Despite the fancy words from certain Conservative politicians about sovereignty being out of date (tell that to the Russians or the Swedes), European monetary union is completely incompatible with the sovereignty of the Queen in Parliament, which is the way our country has been governed for 700 years.

Not long ago, British politicians of all parties would have erupted with fury at foreigners like Andriessen and Delors telling us what we must and must not do.  Yet today Mrs Thatcher is left by her Cabinet and party to fight alone, as if our continued independence from foreign domination was a personal idiosyncrasy rather than a duty laid on every Member by their parliamentary oath.

The incredible thing is that the British people pay huge sums of money for these humiliations, and these are sums which will grow rapidly if Delors gets his way.  If the British people’s patriotism and pride have been emasculated by years of media propaganda in favour of “Europe”, one might have thought they would still have had concern for their pockets.

Mrs Thatcher has made her view of our country’s future clear.  It is now long overdue for Mr Edward Heath and Mr Michael Heseltine to be asked: “Are you in favour of Britain ceasing to be an independent country in the way the world recognises it?  If not, at what point would you part company from Continental countries in their ambition to have a European state with its own president over our Queen, government over our government and laws over our laws?”