A speech at the first Goldsmith Memorial Lecture on 22nd May 2007, at University College in London.

To read the text please click on the link to the “Governance of Britain” page of the Britain Watch website.

A letter to eurofacts which was published on 20th October 2006.

Your report (eurofacts, 22nd September) on the findings of the cost-benefit analysis for Switzerland of EU membership, commissioned by the Swiss government, prompts one to wonder what if anything will induce any likely British government to do the same for Britain.

One piece of data which would, I believe, resonate well with the British public is that for the last several years the aggregate trade with the EU of the United States, Canada and Australia is broadly the same as Britain’s.  If you add in Japan, the aggregate comfortably exceeds Britain’s, yet these four countries pay precisely nothing to the EU for the privilege.  Their trade relations with the EU are subject only to the rules of the World Trade Organisation to which virtually all countries and organisations involved in trade, including the EU, belong.

The so-called ‘Single Market’ may or may not be an advantage for those countries selling into EU countries but it is not something countries outside the EU feel they should pay for.

When put this way, a very wide range of people would, I believe, actively question our EU membership and its colossal annual fee (£12 billion and rising), particularly when this government cannot, apparently, afford proper provision for the care of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan or pay them properly.

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 which was published on 11th August 2000.

An unemployed painter rescued 10 times in 12 months by the Coastguard and Lifeboat services at a cost of £30,000 reportedly remarked that “they are there as a [free] service” (report, Aug. 10th).  This is all of a piece with people summoning helicopters to help them down Ben Nevis because they are “tired”; failure to catch and punish criminals; and providing council homes for asylum seekers ahead of British citizens.

Such sloppy, indulgent attitudes are typical of the Liberal-New-Labour social consensus, the effects of which its advocates are either personally immune from or, as with the human rights law, actually profit from.

In a properly run country such as Switzerland, calling out the emergency services is followed promptly by an invoice – typically £1,000 plus for a 20-minute helicopter rescue.  As a result, people take out insurance against such risks – insurance which is refused for people who are plainly incompetent at activities they indulge in.

Nothing will improve the public services in Britain until the personal financial connection between rights and responsibilities is re-established.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 29th April 2000.

The proposal by Lords Owen, Healey and Prior to extend the referendum principle to Government Bills of “first class constitutional importance” (report, 26th April) is a welcome move towards a more direct democracy in this country, but it could be carried much further.

Switzerland has long had both a right of Initiative and a right of Optional Referendum which are triggered by a minimum number of electors, 100,000 in the case of the Initiative, 50,000 in the case of the Referendum.  In addition, all government proposed constitutional change is automatically subject to Referendum.

The Initiative allows electors to put their own proposal for constitutional change to popular vote, along with the government’s counter-proposal.  Scaled to the British population, this would required about 850,000 electors.  There is a minimum time before essentially the same proposal can be voted on again.

The Optional Referendum right allows electors to call for any Government measure to be put to popular vote.  Scaled to the British population this would require about 425,000 electors to obtain a referendum.

Of course such a massive extension of democratic rights, which can be extended down to local government level too, would be resisted by most of the political class.  But with government by representative democracy giving way to government by pressure group, it may well be that the people themselves would welcome direct democracy à la Suisse.

Paper presented to the Manchester Statistical Society in October 1999.

S F Bush
 
It was revised and extended and printed as a booklet ISBN 0 85336 155.

To read the text please click on the link “On the importance of Manufacture to the Economy” which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 12th April 1994.

The dawning realisation of the inescapably federative tendency of the European Union, to which Niall Ferguson refers (article, April 8th), is very welcome.  There is indeed no middle way between Britain’s independence and our extinction as a self-governing nation.

Escape from the European Union nightmare is not only possible but also the only way to secure our future as a happy and prosperous nation.

The fourth quarter of last year saw Britain’s visible exports to the EU fall below 50 per cent of total visibles.  When invisibles are added the EU probably took less than 45 per cent, refuting once again the constant Europhile refrain about the ever-increasing importance of the EU market to Britain.

In any case, free trade in industrial products has long existed between all European countries, whether inside or outside the EU, and will continue when we eventually leave.  Britain’s trade with non-EU Switzerland – per capita the richest country in the world – is as free as it is with Germany.

The North American Free Trade Area is visible proof that free trade arrangements do not need large, EU-type bureaucracies. As important, the failure of the United States to grapple with its huge crime and public education problems, and the EU’s impotence in the face of massive structural unemployment, should discourage anyone from believing that large, multi-ethnic federated states do anything but provide employment for functionaries.

With national self-determination regained, Britain would be free to reallocate the massive resources of taxpayers’ money and civil service effort presently expended on mitigating the worst effects of EU membership.  This effort would be in part transferred to determined support of our trade and culture in the Americas and other parts of the world which have been neglected because of the European fixation.

Accompanying this would be a re-evaluation of the Commonwealth as an asset, not a burden; as a vehicle for practical idealism; and perhaps, by virtue of its containing about a quarter of humanity, as informal guarantee of our UN Security Council seat.

A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 3rd November 1982.

The Rt Hon Geoffrey Rippon (Oct. 29th) and Mr Christopher Tugendhat, in their efforts to prove the impossible, namely that the European Economic Community brings economic benefit to this country, continually confuse the issue of EEC membership with the issue of free trade in Western Europe.

They know very well that the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries negotiated tariff-free industrial trade with the EEC as long ago as 1973.  British trade with Switzerland, for instance, is as free as it is with West Germany or France.

In fact, British exports to Switzerland rose 6.4 times in the seven years to 1980 compared with six times for the EEC excluding Britain, and unlike the EEC this is a trade which is fundamentally in balance.

As for American and Japanese investment location preferences, these are far more to do with pre-existing geography and English language and local workforce skills than with EEC quangos.

It is laughable to suppose that were Britain to leave the EEC, the EEC would in some sense shut Britain’s exports out.  Preferential access to Britain’s oil and her home market are far too valuable for the Nine to imperil them by some sort of spiteful trade war.

What would be imperilled by Britain’s withdrawal would be the jobs of dispossessed British politicians, but I think Britain could survive that.

A letter to the Financial Times, the first paragraph of which was published in March 1970.

Paul Lewis (F.T. March 20th) has got to be joking when he suggests that Britain proposed that French be the sole official language of an enlarged EEC including this country.  Are there no limits to the national self-abasement which “informed” opinion is prepared to inflict on the rest of us?  English is the main world language not only because of the first and second British Empires, but because as a language it has enormous advantages of adaptability and subtlety of expression.  Cannot Mr Lewis see that the French objective all along has been to use the power of other members of the EEC to promote the national ambitions of France, and that any wider recognition of the French language as a medium of communication does just that?  We are in fact in competition with the French on the language issue, and our national interests will be served by aiming to make English the most widely used language in any European community.  I can envisage no limits to the resistance which would be made to any Government which attempted to bind our country to a form of French empire with a capital at Versailles (another Lewis “idea”).

No, the real way forward for Britain is to negotiate not to join an EEC based on the 1957 Treaty of Rome which simply does not suit our interests, or those of Germany for that matter, but to negotiate a new Community of Europe treaty.  Britain’s real interests require a free trade area in Europe, excluding only agricultural products, not an elaborate system of official price-fixing, and more urgently, our interests require a new defence treaty which allows for a complete withdrawal of American forces by about 1974, and which recognises the improbability that American cities will ever be exposed to nuclear attack to save European cities from Russian aggression.

These objectives, one economic, the other military should be the basis for negotiations with the Six.  But the major problem confronting Western States in the years ahead is likely to be social.  Here we have everything to lose by any form of political union with other European states.  We have no wish to add to our own prolems France and Italy’s comunist influenced politics, Germany and Holland’s catholic-protestant struggles, Belgium’s language strife, nor Sweden and Denmark’s obsession with pornography.

Both the Continent and ourselves have something to gain from closer association, but each arrangement should be designed to achieve something definite, like Concorde and the centrifuge project, and not be an airy-fairy wish for closer association for its own sake.  Switzerland, a tenth of our size, though anxious for freer trade, is not panicking about exclusion from the EEC and neither should we.