Letter to the Daily Telegraph, published on 9th September 2014.
Lord Lexden (September 8th) is surely right to call for a new modern federal constitution for the whole United Kingdom in which Scotland would play a leading part in negotiating as an outcome of its rejecting separation on September 18th. This is the type of positive future that the “No” campaign should have been advocating with the tacit support of the Westminster parties since day one of the campaign.
Instead of applying himself in this way, Cameron has left our fellow citizens in Scotland to fight a rear-guard battle against the pied piper of West Lothian leading Scotland into Nowhere Land: not in the UK, not in NATO, not in the EU, not in the Commonwealth, not in a Sterling currency Union, with a credit rating about equal to Argentina’s.
A speech to a Conservative Party lunch on 20th September 2002, at the County Hotel, Bramhall, Greater Manchester.
To read the text please click on the link to the “Nationism” page of Britain Watch.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph, the first three paragraphs of which were published on 3rd January 1995.
One wonders what sort of distribution of industry Mr Hamish Mitchell envisages with his talk of betrayal of Scotland in the last 10 years. The fact that England has two major steel plants and Scotland none doesn’t mean that Scotland has been “betrayed”. Steel plants have been closed all over England, and indeed in the whole Western World; likewise naval shipyards.
Scotland has less than 9% of the UK’s population. When the number of industrial plants of a given type is down to one or two for the whole UK, is Mr Mitchell seriously suggesting that Scotland should always have one of every type? Every government for years has made strenuous offorts to keep existing industry going in Scotland to encourage new industries to locate there with generous subsidies not available, for example, here in the North West of England. And the policy has indeed been successful for Scotland which now has a computer industry of a size far greater than its population would warrant unless seen as part of the United Kingdom.
Poll-tax experiment or not, the fact is also that Scotland has long received substantially more public funds per head from UK taxation than has England. Nobody I know in England resents that, but we do resent ill-founded accusations of betrayal.
England and Scotland have travelled a long way together for nearly 300 years. It would be the worst sort of tragedy for that union to break up asa result of the sort of ill-informed rancour evidenced by Mr Mitchell’s letter.
A letter to the Times which was published on 28th March 1992.
You play down Tam Dalyell’s posing of the “West Lothian question” by asserting that the Scots have had to put up with “unrepresentative government” since 1707.
It is true that in the last 13 years of Conservative government Scotland has returned a majority of Labour MPs, but so what? In 1974-9 England, with an electorate nine times that of Scotland’s, was subject to a Labour government whose majority derived not just from Scottish Labour MPs, but from the over-representation of Scotland at Westminster which still persists.
On an electorate basis Scotland was entitled to 59 seats instead of 72 in the 1987 parliament and Wales 32 instead of 38. In any case Scotland has not always been a Labour fiefdom. As recently as the 1950s a majority of Scots seats were Conservative.
The fact is that if there are to be assemblies or parliaments in any or all of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there will have to be a parliament responsible to the people of England. The simplest (and cheapest) way of achieving this is for MPs representing English constituencies to constitute themselves, for devolved affairs, as an English parliament, which is after all what they originally were.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 4th February 1992.
Charles Moore is right (article, Jan. 31st). There is something rotten in the State of the Union, and that is the corrosive defeatism which has gripped most of the British political class since Suez. To this defeatism must be added the automatic denigration of our country by the majority of journalists and other members of the chattering classes who gullibly reproduce any claim about the superiority of continental countries.
Dirk Bogarde’s review of two books on Germany (Weekend, Feb. 1st) is a case in point. Beside his fantasies about the three-language abilities of ordinary Germans is the matching remark about our “impoverished, rather smug island”.
According to the OECD, the real disposable incomes per head in Britain, Germany (before unification), France and Japan are only trivially different when calculated in purchasing power parities. Last year a German study revealed that of the best 50 companies in Europe, 27 were British, while the value of the top 500 companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange is greater than those of Frankfurt and Paris combined. Britain’s net overseas assets (at around £130 billion) are the greatest of any country in the world (including Japan).
Yet these facts about our real strength do not prevent George Jones, for instance, referring to Britain’s “declining economic influence” (Jan. 31st) when discussing pressure brought by the Germans and Japanese on Britain to give up its UN Security Council seat.
The increased pressure for the separation of Scotland from the Union is a predictable consequence of Britain’s insane policy of surrendering her independence to the European Cmmunity – itself a direct consequence of post-Suez defeatism.
To paraphrase Ludendorff’s supposed remark about the British Army, we have become a lion of a country ruled by ninnies, and nobody wants to be part of that when there is an alternative. Whichever party announced it was reclaiming Britain’s independence and would not ratify the Maastricht surrender would both win the next election and save the Union.
