A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published around the 1st October 1998.

Margaret Beckett’s comment (report, Sept. 29th) on our present voting system – “The British people understand it and know how to use it to get a result they are prepared to live with” – is borne out by the votes and seats obtained over the 15 general elections since the war.

If you add up all the votes cast and seats obtained by the Conservative and Labour parties from 1945 to 1997, you find that 39,500 votes provided Labour with a parliamentary seat, while the Conservatives needed 40,000, i.e. seats have been almost exactly proportional to votes in the long run.

Given that the British people, in the main, voted for either a Labour or Conservative government, our much maligned system has thus exactly reflected their choices.

Of course the Liberals’ view is different, but they have had over 50 years to persuade the electorate that they can constitute a national government alternative to either Labour or Conservative.  Since these two parties are themselves overlapping coalitions, the electorate have clearly concluded they do not want a third coalition overlapping the other two in the centre.  Lord Jenkins’s report will doubtless present a ponderous series of arguments about “fairness”, but its essential thrust will be to overturn the electorate’s verdict, repeatedly given.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 22nd June 1998.

If, as James Kennedy avows (letter, June 20th), there are “stable loving homosexual relationships” of many years’ standing, why should such homosexuals be concerned with reducing the age of consent to 16 years?  No responsible adult would ever try to form such a relationship with a young person of 16.

Not only is there no moral equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual acts, as your leading article (June 19th) avers, there is no emotional equivalence either.  Anyone who has had anything to do with teenagers know that, generally speaking, boys mature emotionally two or more years later than girls.  While most girls are fundamentally young women at 16, boys are, well, still boys.

The freedom which the amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill, if passed today, will give is not the freedom of natural justice, as Shaun Woodward maintains (article, June 19th) but the freedom for adult male homosexuals to inveigle teenage boys into a world of unnatural vice.

Far from it having little practical effect, the amendment will greatly expand teenage prostitution in central city areas, increase still further the anxieties of parents, already beset by worries about drugs, and handicap the prosecution of activities in schools and children’s homes which have been the subject of recent horrifying publicity.

While Tony Blair’s Labour Party may have learnt something about the facts of economic life, it is still bent on extending what its mentor Roy Jenkins once fatuously referred to as the “civilised” society, but many of us thought then – and still think – is the “decadent” society.  Today’s amendment is just that – decadent.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 28th July 1994.

Nothing more greatly exposes the contentless verbiage of Tony Blair for what it is than Labour’s new policy statement on education (report, July 27th).  Declaring that “mediocrity and decline can no longer be tolerated”, it goes on to announce measures which will remove the last vestiges of international standards from our schools.

Few British people seem to realise how pathetic an examination the GCSE is in the key subjects.  As Ray Sherlock showed (In My View, July 20th), GCSE mathematics has been gutted of virtually everything recognisable as mathematics.

Labour’s proposal for abolishing A-levels and replacing them by a so-called General Certificate of Further Education, directly related to GCSE, will complete the destruction of school mathematics, physics and chemistry, long sought by the ignorant egalitarians who advise Labour politicians.

If Mr Blair took the trouble to see what actually passes for further education in this country, he would see that the constant prattle about vocational education merely deflects attention frm the school’s abject failure properly to teach the bulk of our children the foundation elements of any education – the three Rs.

For an industrial country, no subjects are more vocational than mathematics, physics and chemistry, but only a minority of young people can do them – which is why Labour wants to destroy them.

A letter to the Times which was published around 29th May 1987.

In his article “Folly of the compassion stakes” (May 26th) Michael Ignatieff suggests that the fact that a majority of the electorate apparently intend to vote for the parties (Labour and Alliance) which will put up taxes, contradicts Ralph Harris’s view that few people volunteer to pay higher taxes in order to get better services.  There is in fact no contradiction, since those voting Labour, in particular, will do so in the expectation that the better services they think they will get will be paid for by others, especially those voting Conservative.