A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 27th February 2010.
Blackouts from 2015-17 were indeed implicitly admitted by the Department of Energy and Climate Change.
As someone who has repeatedly highlighted this reality in public and raised it directly with Malcolm Wicks when he was energy minister, in 2003, I would like to say that besides the obvious need to accelerate the nuclear electricity building programme, there is something that the Government and the opposition parties should do now to avert the crisis: to tell the European Commission that on grounds of overwhelming need Britain will not comply with the Large Combustion Plant Directive.
This directive will cause the closure of around one third of our coal-burning electricity plants or about 12 per cent of our total generating capacity by 2015.
The point is that the plants earmarked for closure have already used some of their permitted 20,000 hours of run-time (starting from 2008) and are therefore likely to close earlier than 2015 unless they receive assurances from the Government that they can continue to operate until Britain has replacement capacity in place.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 1st June 2000.
The European Commission’s alleged competition objective in breaking up national post offices’ monopoly of postal deliveries (report 31 May) is nothing of the sort. If they were really interested in competition they would have a go at France Telecom, French electricity, German coal mines, nationalised airlines, and so on.
The real EU target is the system of stamps bearing national insignia – in our case the Queen’s head without any country name. The EU objective is an EU stamp which would be the only legally valid mark of postage paid – on the grounds of course that it would “improve the transparency” or whatever vogue phrase was in fashion at the time. After all if you have a single market, a single currency, a single driving licence, why should you not have a single stamp?
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 14th May 1992.
Mr Major’s assertion that the sovereignty of Parliament “is not a matter that is up for grabs” (report, May 13th) is destined to be placed alongside the remark of another Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, who said on the eve of the referendum in 1975 that the threat of economic and monetary union “has been removed”.
The 1988 Merchant Shipping Act, which was passed by the House of Commons without a single dissenting voice, in effect has been completely set aside by the European court.
If that is not handing over the sovereignty of Parliament, perhaps Mr Major could explain what he thinks it is.
On the eve of ratifying the Maastricht Treaty, MPs should ask themselves if the present Prime Minister is merely deceiving himself, or actively trying to deceive the British people as to the true import of this Treaty.
Behind a smokescreen of babble about democracy, trade and level playing fields, every single act of the European Commission, from which this profoundly undemocratic Treaty stems, is directed at one goal and one goal only, the incorporation of this and other countries into a single state, like America, Australia or India.
No MP who cares about the actual foundations of our democracy, as expressed, for instance, in Clause 39 of Magna Carta (1215) and Section 1 of the Bill of Rights (1689), can possibly in conscience vote for this Treaty.
