National crisis
Sir: Your leader Mr Heath's national crisis' (July 29) proposes remedies which Mr Heath is as likely to take as he is to give his yacht to Oxfam. You rightly say that the public "is angry and fed up, and lacking confidence in itself, in its future, and in its leadership." You suggest that Mr Heath must transform himself into a national leader. But the whole point of Mr Heath is that he is not a national leader. At his press conference of July 12 last year he said: "I have a vision of a Europe once united — nearly 1200 years ago . . . and that together that Europe will once again come." At the Conservative Women's Conference the previous May he announced that he hoped that the Common Market would achieve "what Napoleon and Hitler failed to achieve." He told the House on May 9, 1967 that: "solutions which are put forward purely from a national point of view . . . will not be accepted by the Community as a final solution."
Mr Heath is not, and can never be, a national leader. To use his own metaphor, he is like one of Charlemagne's counts, or Napoleon's prefects, or Hitler's gauleiters, and his concern is Europe first, last and all the time. Thus, Mr Cosgrave may be disturbed to read that we no longer have a navy which can defend these Islands (August 5). But if we reflect that Chancellor Brandt announced this February that he foresaw a Euro-army within ten years, we can see that a Britain able to defend itself against invasion would be a grave hindrance to European unity: hence Mr Heath's breaking his election pledge on building up the navy. Again, the man in the street may be disturbed to read that the Government propose to admit all the coloured UK passport holders, who were said by Mr Callaghan, when Home Secretary, to number at least 1,200,000. But from Mr Heath's point of view, a largely coloured Britain will be one oblivious of the glorious history of its former inhabitants, and so every coloured gentleman who presents himself at Heathrow is eventually admitted. A nation of immigrants will scarcely question unlimited immigration in the Common Market, or alien rule from Brussels.
You cannot expect a people which has been told that it is to disappear, through immigration, population policies, and intermarriage aided by compulsory integration to have confidence in itself. Likewise, a few meaningless speeches by Mr Heath will not set the matter right: what is needed is a British government determined to maintain national independence.
G. J. A. Stern
6 Eton Court, Shepherds Hill, London N6
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