A letter to the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 3rd June 2007.

The amazing suggestion by David Willetts, the Conservative education spokesman, that schools in multiracial areas should select their pupils by race (News & Comment, May 27th), shows just where the current obsession with social engineering among some politicians can lead.

Actually the proposal is not so much to select as to restrict the admission of native English children into the schools desired by their parents in areas like Burnley where there is a heavy concentration of children of Pakistani descent.  If implemented, this would be a rerun of the Dewsbury case of 1987 when the parents of 26 children declined to let them be used by the local authority to reduce the preponderance of Asian children at Headfield school preferring rather that they should go to nearby Overthorpe with their friends and where (it was eventually admitted by the local education authority) there was room for them.

Not only would Mr Willetts’s proposal run into furious opposition and the Human Rights Act, it would bring a nasty whiff of apartheid South Africa and Nazi Germany in some inner city areas where there are significant numbers of mixed race children.  The sort of question that would be bound to arise would be: would three grandparents of one racial group be needed to insist that a child go to a school short of its allocation of that group, or would two be enough?

By their policies of intermittent and incompetent immigration control over the past 50 years, politicians have inflicted race problems on our country, as David Blunkett has been honest enough to confess.  The least we can expect is that they don’t make things worse with schemes like Mr Willetts’s.

A letter to the Editor of the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 7th January 2007.

Your correspondent (Letters, 31 December) asks pertinently why Gordon Brown sold the British-owned Westinghouse electric company to Toshiba (for a paltry £2.9 billion) just as Westinghouse was on the brink of obtaining a £60 billion contract with the Chinese to build 32 nuclear power stations.

The Chancellor sold this irreplaceable asset to help plug the gap in Britain’s finances opened up by the reckless hiring of well over half a million additional public employees to promote Labour’s equality and diversity hobbyhorses.

To compound this folly, Mr Brown has let markets know that he would like to dispose of Britain’s one third share in Urenco, the British-Dutch-German consortium that operates the gas centrifuge process for making enriched uranium fuel for nuclear power stations.

The French would dearly love to acquire Britain’s share to replace their own outdated thermal diffusion process, leaving us of course eventually to pay foreigners for what we currently own.

As with Westinghouse, Urenco is an absolutely vital part of our future energy supplies.  Are there enough Labour MPs willing to prevent the Chancellor visiting another disaster on the British people?

A letter to the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 8th October 2006.

Your comment that Shakespeare’s “vision cannot be identified with any single country” (Leading article, October 1st), in the context of celebrating St George’s Day as Shakespeare’s Day, is only too typical of the views that have increasingly deprived English people, and especially English children, of any sense of their own culture and its achievements.

Just as Isaac Newton’s profound insights and analysis of the physical world have shaped the modern world, more than any other individual’s, so have Shakespeare’s poetry and insights illuminated human nature more than anyone else’s.  But that does not lessen the fact that both these supreme geniuses were English and passed their entire lives in England.  Just occasionally, we English should be allowed to celebrate our inheritance without the usual tut-tutting from the metropolitan punditry.