A letter to the Sunday Times which was published on 17th June 2012.

There is more than a whiff of establishment defeatism about the suggestion by Clive Cheesman, Richmond Herald at the College of Arms, and Lord Forsyth that Britain would need to abandon the Union Jack as its national flag if Scotland were to sever ties with it (“Bye-bye, blue”, News, last week).

The Union Jack, the quintessential symbol of Britishness, is the most recognisable flag in the world. Should a tiny majority of the voters in Scotland vote for independence, it won’t deprive the rest of us in Britain and elsewhere of our right to keep and treasure our flag as it is.

In any case, there are millions of Scots living in England and as expatriates abroad. It is not obvious that they would exchange their British citizenship, with all the protection that it provides, for a new Scottish citizenship.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 27th November 1998.

Tom Utley suggests that English Conservatives should forsake the establishment of an English parliament in order to “fight shoulder to shoulder with Donald Dewar” to preserve the Union of England and Scotland (article, Nov. 20th).

There is a persistent belief among the well-to-do English political class that if only we, the long-suffering English people, would appease and subsidise a bit more, the beneficiaries will be deflected from their settled purpose.  As in Europe, Northern Ireland and now Scotland, such appeasement merely whets the appetite for more.

There has been little sentimental attachment to the Union in Scotland for years.  If in due course people in Scotland vote to break the Union with England, it will be because the sentimental attachment to a separate Scots state will have taken precedence over a hard-headed calculation of the disadvantages which separation will bring.  These include the loss of career opportunities – in the Armed Forces, science, corporate business, media – which would follow the Scots’ transfer of citizenship from a major to a minor state.  The cost of the offsetting jobs – all those new embassies for instance – would be borne 100 per cent by the Scottish taxpayer.

While probably a majority of English people today would prefer the Union with Scotland to continue, this could change rapidly once the manifest unfairness of the new constitutional arrangements becomes full visible.  England does not need the Union to support it.  It is a powerful nation of 50 million people, the sixth largest economy in the world, and contains all but two of the strategic industrial and military installations of the United Kingdom.

The re-establishment of the English parliament, while indispensable for democratic fairness to the English people, will also give status to Scotland as a partner in a proper federal United Kingdom.  It should therefore receive the support, not disapproval, of those people such as Mr Utley who support the Union.

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.