People and policies
Sir: I hope you will permit me to comment on three points arising in your excellent Christmas issue.
1. I am sure you merit the gratitude of every right-minded citizen for your. leading article, but may I add an outstanding example. All the talk nowadays is about rights: no one talks about duties. This false balance has now, for example, been given Government blessing in the Employment Protection Bill which specifies and extends the rights of an employee against his employer without a single word about the duties of an employee to his employer. It is worth noting that no good employee needs this sort of legal protection. 2. One hesitates of course to dispute with Mr Enoch Powell on points of logic, but it seems to me, though I usually agree with him, that he has gone off the" rails in his review of Mr Rees-Mogg's book. To say that the golden calf is useless because if we returned to it we would not stick to it, is a non sequitur. I would be more interested to hear Mr Powell's views on whether the golden calf would mitigate our difficulties on the assumption that if we adhered to it we gave it a proper trial. Surely at least it would provide some definite check that the Government was, for a change, living up to its stated policies or promises and not as now surreptitiously playing the fool with the money supply. 3. I wish Mr Russell Lewis would talk for himself and not generalise that the democratic public is responsible for the manifest follies which he demonstrates. We are responsible for putting politicians in power but not for what they then do, particularly so with the increasing disregard of Public Opinion by Parliament in recent years. I find it surprising that the Director of the Conservative Political Centre, should now seek to absolve his office, at the expense of the public, from responsibility for government policies which from 1970 it must be assumed to have influenced, Did he just pigeon-hole many critical papers from constituency level during the recent period of a Conservative government, the activities of which in many respects were not so dissimilar from those of a bull in a china shop as might at first be supposed. A. M. Burdon-Coo per Garscadden, Middle Cave Road, Malton, Yorkshire.
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