Letter to Daily Telegraph published on 10th August 2019 under the title “Recent history shows that royal powers could stop an anti-Brexit bill”.

Beside advising the Queen to withhold assent to a bill which has passed all stages in the Houses of Commons and Lords, as mentioned by Andrew Roberts (Comment, August 8), the Prime Minister can advise the Queen to withhold her consent to a bill proceeding beyond second reading where it touches on any of the 14 royal prerogative powers, which include the making of international treaties and declarations of war.

Such consent has been withheld three times in the United Kingdom during the present Queen’s reign, the most recent being in 1999, on the advice of Tony Blair.

This was in respect of a bill introduced by the late Sir Tam Dalyell, intended to make military action against Iraq contingent on approval by a majority vote in the House of Commons. Second reading was postponed and the bill fell because the Queen’s consent for it to be debated was withheld.

There are, therefore, recent precedents for stopping an anti-Brexit bill in its tracks between September 3 and October 31, so long as the Prime Minister tenders the relevant advice to the Queen.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 24th June 1999.

Tony Blair, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, made it clear in his Belfast speech last week that the concerns of Irish republicans, dedicated to wrenching the United Kingdom apart, are as valid as those of Unionists, dedicated to upholding it (report, June 15th).  The Unionists are portrayed as the obstacle to setting up devolved government because they decline to do what no other democracy has ever done, namely admit into government a party linked to a terrorist organisation.

As one act of appeasement of the IRA follows another, the Sinn Fein proportion of the nationalist/republican vote rises in step.  In the 1992 general election, which ushered in the “peace process”, the proportion was 28 per cent; in the recent Euro-elections (with a Northern Ireland turnout of almost 60 per cent) the proportion has risen to nearly 40 per cent.

The unambiguous plan for the handing over of arms by the Kosovo Liberation Army announced by Nato contrasts with the endless prevarication over the same issue by Sinn Fein/IRA.  Imposing moral principles on Serbia by virtually risk-free bombing is one thing.  Upholding democratic principles in the face of an opponent such as Sinn Fein/IRA, able and willing to inflict real damage – well, that for Mr Blair is evidently a different matter altogether.

A letter to the Editor of the Daily Telegraph which was published on 7th September 1998.

The imminent closure of the Fujitsu semi-conductor factory in Durham, following the closure of the Siemens semi-conductor plant in the same area (report, Sept. 5th) should underline to the Government the folly of relying on foreign companies for such a large proportion of new manufacturing investment.

The chief benefit of foreign investment has, in fact, been to bring much needed expertise and modern quality standards to parts of British industry.  Yet at the same time it has exposed once again the near total failure of the British financial system to invest in British industry in anything like the amounts needed to sustain it as a viable entity.

The passing into foreign ownership of Rover and Rolls-Royce cars, Courtaulds and a wide range of well-respected smaller engineering companies (Crabtree, on Tyneside, is under bid now) will in due course expose more British workers to the brutal fact that when the chips are down and markets are shrinking, foreign owners will close British plants before they close their own.

Mr Blair may well be “saddened” by the Fujitsu factory’s closure, but such characteristic emotion is no substitute for the hard intellectual and managerial task of putting right, in the fact of enormous entrenched interests, our defective corporate financial system.  Fiddling with interest rates is no substitute either.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 22nd June 1998.

If, as James Kennedy avows (letter, June 20th), there are “stable loving homosexual relationships” of many years’ standing, why should such homosexuals be concerned with reducing the age of consent to 16 years?  No responsible adult would ever try to form such a relationship with a young person of 16.

Not only is there no moral equivalence between heterosexual and homosexual acts, as your leading article (June 19th) avers, there is no emotional equivalence either.  Anyone who has had anything to do with teenagers know that, generally speaking, boys mature emotionally two or more years later than girls.  While most girls are fundamentally young women at 16, boys are, well, still boys.

The freedom which the amendment to the Crime and Disorder Bill, if passed today, will give is not the freedom of natural justice, as Shaun Woodward maintains (article, June 19th) but the freedom for adult male homosexuals to inveigle teenage boys into a world of unnatural vice.

Far from it having little practical effect, the amendment will greatly expand teenage prostitution in central city areas, increase still further the anxieties of parents, already beset by worries about drugs, and handicap the prosecution of activities in schools and children’s homes which have been the subject of recent horrifying publicity.

While Tony Blair’s Labour Party may have learnt something about the facts of economic life, it is still bent on extending what its mentor Roy Jenkins once fatuously referred to as the “civilised” society, but many of us thought then – and still think – is the “decadent” society.  Today’s amendment is just that – decadent.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 15th April 1998.

David Trimble’s article (April 13th) shows how, sadly, he has mistaken fair words for concrete actions.  What he has agreed to is the most complex job-creation scheme for politicians imaginable without dealing with the central issue, the handover of IRA weaponry.

The only things that will actually be done are all things detrimental to the British position: an effective veto by the Irish on the functioning of the proposed Northern Ireland Assembly (strand 2, article 13); admission of Sinn Fein to executive power (strand 1, article 16); extension of the Irish government’s involvement in UK affairs (strand 3, article 5).

Under what should properly be called “security for terrorists”,  Army surveillance installations will be dismantled (section 2 (ii)), Army numbers reduced (2 (i)) and emergency powers removed (2 (iii)).

For 30 years the security forces have been handicapped by insistence on treating terrorists as non-political civil offenders.  Tony Blair and Mr Trimble, both lawyers by profession, now agree to the premature release on political grounds of people found guilty of the most wicked of crimes.  The next time Mr Blair chatters about the rule of law, we will at least know what he is not talking about.

Mr Trimble could have bargained for a tariff – say 10 man-years of remission for every ton of weapons given up.  Unless this connection is made, the Northern Ireland people – of both communities – would be well advised to vote No.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 30th September 1997.

Your report (Sept. 27th) that the Government has more or less decided not to refurbish or commission a replacement for Britannia brings up the point as to why this cannot be an initiative entirely paid for by private individuals.

If the issue is the £12 million a year running costs, can we not find 120,000 individuals willing to covenant, say £100 a year each?  I certainly would be prepared to do so.  Are there not enough patriotic individuals in the City, say, to support financially the refurbishment/replacement cost of around £60 million from their own pockets?

The Government is now in the hands of those whose main preoccupation is demolishing the Britain that most of us love and respect, and reconstructing it more to the taste of Islington café society.  Offering a new Britannia to the Queen as an entirely private initiative would be a signal to Mr Blair and ministers that they are only part of the state.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 28th July 1994.

Nothing more greatly exposes the contentless verbiage of Tony Blair for what it is than Labour’s new policy statement on education (report, July 27th).  Declaring that “mediocrity and decline can no longer be tolerated”, it goes on to announce measures which will remove the last vestiges of international standards from our schools.

Few British people seem to realise how pathetic an examination the GCSE is in the key subjects.  As Ray Sherlock showed (In My View, July 20th), GCSE mathematics has been gutted of virtually everything recognisable as mathematics.

Labour’s proposal for abolishing A-levels and replacing them by a so-called General Certificate of Further Education, directly related to GCSE, will complete the destruction of school mathematics, physics and chemistry, long sought by the ignorant egalitarians who advise Labour politicians.

If Mr Blair took the trouble to see what actually passes for further education in this country, he would see that the constant prattle about vocational education merely deflects attention frm the school’s abject failure properly to teach the bulk of our children the foundation elements of any education – the three Rs.

For an industrial country, no subjects are more vocational than mathematics, physics and chemistry, but only a minority of young people can do them – which is why Labour wants to destroy them.