United State of Europe
Sir: Your musings (‘England Rides Again’, 19 April) upon the complexity of being English, Scottish or British have, I fear, the relevance of the archangels upon the proverbial pinhead. This is because we are all being ineluctibly subsumed into the coming United State of Europe.
This process will accelerate impressively after the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty, aka the EU Constitution. That is the whole point of the exercise; if you do not believe me, read the text.
The rise and rise of the European State must be matched by the decline and decline of its natural and deadly foe, the Nation State; whether that be called Britain, England or Scotland. Before the good folk of Scotland vote for secession (please let us call it by its real name), the emblems of Britain, England and Scotland will have all the sovereignty of the insignia of Aragon and Bavaria.
If you are assailed by two wolves, one ten yards away and the other half a mile, it is wise to shoot the nearer first. For if you do not, by the time the second closes in it will find no more than a pile of bones.
This is the intended fate of the British nation/state and it is hard to see how it can possibly be stopped unless the British people are allowed to speak. That is why all three major parties are determined that they must not.
Frederick Forsyth
Hertford
An English characteristic
Sir: You may not have realised it, but asking Mohamed Al Fayed to contribute to your survey (‘So what is England?’, 19 April) showed an important English trait — kindliness. Such generosity of spirit is but one of the characteristics of the four Wind in the Willows protagonists who together typify the varied English character.
Ian Olson
Aberdeen
Missing steeple
Sir: Alex James writes (Slow Life, 19 April) of the joys of orbiting the spire of Canterbury Cathedral, ‘the static needle of the steeple pointing quietly up’. In my years as chaplain of the King’s School Canterbury, I took many pupils to the top of the tower of the Cathedral. They would have looked in vain for a spire or steeple. Has Alex James perhaps mistaken Rochester for Canterbury?
Father John Thackray
Senior Chaplain, King’s School,
Rochester, Kent
The wrong George
Sir: It was a delight to receive the St George’s Day special issue and to read what were, for the most part, well-balanced and interesting articles about England and the English. That delight was only marred by reading Beryl Bainbridge’s classic error (Diary, 19 April) in confusing our patron saint with another George, George of Cappadocia, who was an early bishop of Alexandria. Gibbon’s reference to that bishop is a well-recorded error and has been made use of on many occasions as a put-down to the English, most recently by Ken Livingstone.
John Clemence QPM
Vice President of the Royal Society of St George,
Battle, East Sussex
Our origins
Sir: In his Spectator’s Notes of 19 April, Charles Moore writes that John Buchan’s idea of ‘Old English’ is ‘historical rubbish (who were these Old English who were here even before the Angles arrived to bring the word “England” to our shores?)’. But it is not historical rubbish; DNA research in the past decade or so has revealed how little is the input from successive waves of Vikings, Celts, Angles, Jutes, Saxons and Normans. The earliest ‘English’ came from the western coast of Spain and France to establish our race. Why should they not be called Old English? Charles Moore should read Stephen Oppenheimer’s masterly The Origins of the British and stop sneering at Buchan.
David Hancock
Witney, Oxfordshire
Consequences of separation
Sir: While Fraser Nelson’s column (Politics, 19 April) provided an excellent political analysis regarding England and Scotland, it made no reference to the potential consequences of separation to the other two countries of the United Kingdom. The lobby for full independence has traditionally been weak in Wales, a country whose constituent parts of North and South are more connected with major English cities than they are with each other. But would a fear of becoming a mere adjunct to the ‘state of England’ drive the Welsh to a premature secession?
Gavin Bostock
St Albans, Herts
Ideological fanaticism
Sir: Igor Toronyi-Lalic (Arts, 19 April) correctly raises the question of fanaticism of some ideological movements. According to him, in the 1920s the USSR was advocating struggle against capitalists even in space. When the Red army in 1919 invaded Estonia, Lenin instructed them to execute all Estonian capitalists on the spot. On the question of who should be regarded as capitalists, he said: pharmacists, shopkeepers, lawyers, civil servants, librarians, policemen, teachers and similar.
Oleg Gordievsky
London WC1
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