A paper written in December 1990 for a Gresham College Conference.

It shows the importance of high standards in teaching and learning and the way to achieve them.

To read the text please click on the link More Matter Less Art which will take you to the paper on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Sunday Telegraph which was published on 3rd December 1989.

I am not sure where Robert Jackson (Letters, Nov. 26th) gets his information about Germany, but as a recent visitor to West Germany I can say the Press and magazines are full of the prospect of reunification.

He seems shaky on the “philosophical basis” of the EEC, which was designed and still operates fundamentally as a system of war reparations by Germany to France.  Its basis is about as incompatible with the Anglo-Saxon way of government as anything could be.

The basis of the majority of the EEC’s pronouncements is the Single European Act (SEA), which is an enabling Act, a form of legislation abhorrent to our tradition, but completely in line with Continental practice.  It was after all the enabling law – Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Reich und Volk – democratically passed by the German Parliament which was the legal foundation of the Hitler regime.

It is the claim that the SEA covers transport, health, education, etc which enables the EEC Commission, in its view, to issue to our government detailed instructions on matters which in our parliamentary tradition would have to be agreed individually and separately.  The problem posed by German reunification is not our crisis but France’s, whose policy of using German economic power as a prop to its own pretensions is now in ruins.  For us, the suggestion by Mr Andriessen, the Dutch EEC commissioner, that we should resume membership of an EFTA linked to the EEC in a wider European Economic System (EES) with all the Single Market freedoms, though derided by the Foreign Office, renders us everything we could possibly want.

While Germany unifies and draws closer to Russia, and France, Italy and Spain enter some form of Latin federation, we will be free to resume our position as a founder member of the Society of English speaking nations and that expanding society of nations outside Europe who have English as their language of business, industry and technology.

We would be excluded from EEC inner councils – but so what?  We shall also be excluded from the Common Agricultural Policy, from an annual levy likely to reach £3 billion in a year or so (removing which reduces our balance of payments deficit at a stroke), from artificially high food prices, affecting particularly the poorest, from the absurd hyprocrisy of Italian commissioners complaining about our water quality, from an Irish commissioner telling us, a great nation, what we can and cannot do with our industry, and so on.

In short we shall be excluded from a nightmare and wonder why we ever endured it for so long.

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 Daily Telegraph which was published on 23rd March 1982.

Your leader on the Thatcher-Schmidt meeting (March 20th) is a disappointment to those who feel The Daily Telegraph generally sees the world as it really is.  The majority of people in this country have always seen the EEC as basically an arrangement whereby West Germany paid her way back to respectability and France received reparations which she felt she was entitled to.

That period is now past, but Britain has been foolishly entangled by soft-centre politicians into an arrangement whereby she pays ad infinitum for the Supreme Quango in Brussels which, as is the way with quangos, has grown mightily in ambition since its setting up.  Insofar as Britain and West Germany succeed in reducing their role of EEC paymasters, so the other countries, especially France, will lose interest in the enterprise.

Twenty-two years ago Britain and six other European countries which have prospered quite as much as the EEC countries since, formed a Free Trade Area (EFTA) in industrial goods.  On Britain joining the EEC, EFTA was linked to it, but without, of course, taking on board the huge task of modernising Continental agriculture and the nonsense of a common external tariff.

I believe the EFTA arrangement is still the right one for Britain to pursue and our withdrawal from the EEC would hasten its evolution towards this sensible form.  It is a dangerous situation that on present form only the Labour party will derive electoral benefit from such a move, the popularity of which will grow with the introduction of maroon passports and other symbols of an unwanted association.