A letter to the Times which was published on Friday, June 8th 2012.

Lord Owen’s assertion that the British people should be given a direct say in our future relationship with the European Union by way of a referendum is dead right, but the choices posed by the question must be options which are in the British Government’s power to enact (report, June 7). His question 1 – “Do you want the UK to be part of the single market in a wider European community?” – is both too vague and not something that this country can give effect to, involving as it does an unknown number of other countries which may or may not wish to be in Lord Owen’s outer circle.

The countries with which the UK would be associated under the Owen plan are all, with the exception of the Czech Republic, present and former members of the European Free Trade Area (Efta). Why invent another grouping? Britain cannot force the present four members of Efta to accept us back but informal soundings suggest that we would be welcome to rejoin. If the other former members also chose to rejoin Efta that would be fine by us but it would be their decision not ours.

The only choice, therefore, that can intelligibly be put before the British people is: “In or out of the EU?” There is no middle way, disagreable as this may be to the British political class with its addiction to fudge.

A letter to the Times which was published on 19th January 2012.

It is not “cultural relativism” as Professor Vernon Bogdanor puts it (Wednesday 18th January) to uphold the principle that British laws are there primarily for the benefit of British citizens.

As it is, in the teeth of the British people’s opposition, unelected judges have systematically extended British law and our system of welfare benefits to foreign nationals to such an extent that British citizens now have no unique right or benefit as citizens, except the carrying of a British passport.  Soft British legal practices on asylum and welfare benefits are known all over Eastern Europe, Africa and the Middle East, making Britain a target for anybody who fancies an improvement in their standard of living (see benefits report, January 18th) or who has fallen out with their own government.

Despite Vernon Bogdanor’s assertion to the contrary (and it is only his assertion), British judges are not paid to transfer, in effect, the privileges of being a British citizen to all and sundry under the guise of human rights.  Nor has the European Court of Human Rights the power to stop the deportation of Abu Qatada back to Jordan. The ECHR has given what is simply an opinion on the case.  The British government is free, as it always has been, to ignore the opinions of any foreign court and the disapproval of the human rights industry here at home.  Only British courts have jurisdiction over the British government and they are not bound by the ECHR either, though too often they give the impression that they are.

A letter to the Editor of the Times which was published on 30th December 2011.

With economic forecasting having rather less predictive power than tips for the 3.30 at Newmarket, one must admire the confidence with which the Centre for Economics and Business Research makes its selections for the league table of major economies in 2020, eight years away (report, Dec. 26th).  Russia and India are advanced to 4th and 5th places in the world, which would require an average annual rate of growth of almost 12 per cent, a figure not achieved even by China during a period – now ending – when the West has displayed an almost inexhaustible appetite for its goods.

Brazil is shown as overtaking Britain for 2011 although the GDP figures for Britain are not in, and official figures for Brazil are usually two to three years in arrears, even if one could rely on their being collected on the same basis to three significant figures as displayed in the Centre’s league table.

Perhaps the CEBR should try horse racing.

A letter to the Times which was published on 12th April 2011.

Professor G S Solt (letter, April 9th) draws a parallel between the Nazis’ treatment of Jews in Austria, which he experienced in the 1930s, and British government policy in Kenya towards the Africans in the 1940s and 1950s.

When Allied troops entered Austria as liberators in May 1945 there were estimated to be barely 10,000 Jews left of the 200,000 at the time of the Anschluss with Germany in 1938.

British policy towards Kenya was set out in the White Paper of 1923.  This stated that “where the interests of the African conflict with those of the European settlers” those of the Africans were “paramount”.  This and similar declarations caused consternation among the settlers, resulting in several protest marches on Government House in Nairobi.

As custodians of the African interests as well as the Asian and European settlers, it was also Britain’s responsibility to maintain law and order.  The Mau Mau insurrection, overwhelmingly recruited from the Kikuyu tribe, was a serious disruption to life and limb causing Europeans to go in fear of their lives over several years and costing the lives of many thousands of those other tribes as well as Kikuyu themselves.

Successive Kenyan governments have shown little disposition to rake over the coals of the Mau Mau emergency, but to move on to build a viable future for all their nearly 40 million people.  Britain and its courts should do the same.

A letter to the Times which was published on 7th January 2010.

There is a huge difference between the expression of what the majority of a nation finds merely “objectionable”, and that which virtually the entire British nation finds a grievous insult to the sacred memory of its soldiers (“Walk of shame”, leading article, Jan. 6th).

To tolerate the former may be one mark of a fair society as you imply.  To tolerate the latter in the form of an Islamist march through Wootton Bassett would be simply decadent, confirming in the minds of those abroad who hear of it, an irredeemable loss of national self-respect.

A letter to the Times which was published on 1st December 2009.

I doubt if the Swiss people will be disturbed by your remonstrating that their vote to ban minarets in their beautifully cared-for country “completely misunderstands the nature of a secular, constitutional democracy” and is “an attack on religious liberty” (“Intolerance of Islam”, leading article, Nov. 30th).

Buildings, like the countryside, like people themselves, make up our personal landscapes, what we call our homeland.  All long-established peoples have a perfect right to keep or change their homeland as they choose.  The Swiss people using a democratic means, which many in this country would love to have access to here, have chosen not to have something that they judge is not in keeping with their landscapes.  That is all.

A letter to the Times which was published on 21st June 2009.

If we abandon Trident (leading article, June 20th), we shall leave France as the only strategic nuclear power in Europe, and we shall come under irresistible pressure to give up our permanent seat on the UN Security Council while France will continue to retain hers.  A nuclear submarine armed with ballistic missiles is the only weapons system that allows pressure to be brought on an enemy state anywhere in the world.

Coupled with the two planned carriers, an updated Trident system will give the UK the most potent force projection that can be bought for the money – about £20 billion spent over 10 years, or an average of about £5 billion per annum for the capital cost of the equipment.  This should be compared with the £10 billion net per annum we shall soon be spending in direct contributions to the EU, or £3 billion plus per annum on local authority “cultural services”.

Can anyone seriously suggest that we will derive better value as a nation from these other expenditures?

A letter to the Editor of the Times which was published on 7th March 2009.

The Bank of England is using £75 billion to buy commercial banks’ bond liabilities in the hope that they will deploy the liquidity thereby created to increase lending.

At best this scatter gun approach is a very indirect way of restarting the economy.  Why not instead feed some of this money directly into business through the medium of an industrial bank, which would specialise in lending to industrial businesses, particularly for investment in new equipment?

If this equipment were built in Britain from primarily British components this would increase jobs and put more money directly into the hands of wage earners and thus increase demand.

In Northern Rock the Government has a ready-made vehicle for this role with an established network of branches that, with careful recruitment of business expertise, can gradually shift out of the oversupplied mortgage sector and give the Rock a distinctive future supplying this country with something it urgently needs.

Such a change of focus would also give the hard-hit North East something to cheer about.

A letter to the Times which was published on 11th April 2008.

Daniel Emlyn-Jones’s absurdly unbalanced description of our colonial rule as a “history of humiliation, exploitation and degradation of native peoples” as in some way explaining the chaos in Zimbabwe (letters, April 8th) can be refuted by literally millions of documented actions to the contrary.

The 1922 White Paper on the colonies, for instance, set the tone for all the remaining colonial territories by roundly declaring in respect of Kenya, where there was substantial European immigration, that the interests of the native population were “paramount”.

To describe Robert Mugabe (born 1923) as “our monster” is likewise absurd.  Mugabe was educated in a Catholic mission school in what was then Southern Rhodesia, which enjoyed complete internal self-government over which the Colonial Office had no control whatsoever.

If anything created the monster in Mugabe it was his proclaimed belief in Marxism, which really is responsible for untold misery, death and degradation all over the world.

A letter to the Editor of the Times which was published on 24th September 2007.

The constant use of the terms “director” and “manager” in reports about alleged inequalities in women and men’s pay is highly misleading (report, Sept. 21st).

Many so-called directors are not directors at all in the legal Companies Act definition, a definition which has specific legal rights and duties attached to it.  Even within a particular company, the pay range of real executive directors may cover a factor of three or more.

The title “manager” is used in an even wider range of circumstances and so salaries cover a huge range.  The practice is to pay salaries and benefits according to factors of which time in the job, experience in the company and range of responsibilities are usually the main ones.  As a result many employees have gripes about their pay but unlike women, men do not have a statutory body ready to enforce their claims on the ground of discrimination against them as a gender.

The truth is that the number of people designated “director” rather than “manager” and “manager” rather than, say, “officer”, has expanded enormously recently, especially in the public sector.  It isn’t only in the exam system that grade inflation exists.  It is absurb to build a case for the underpayment of women on the basis of such vague and variable job titles.