Delusion of Sturgeon

Sir: Nicola Sturgeon’s resignation speech was the longest and most delusional in living memory (‘After Sturgeon’, 18 February). There were reportedly more than 150 ‘me’, ‘my’ and ‘I’s spoken, as she congratulated herself at length, despite the government’s deplorable record since the SNP came to power. She referred to Scotland just 11 times. That tells the electorate where her government’s priorities have been all this time. Their focus was never us Scots; it was how to separate from the rest of the UK. If she wasn’t going to persuade the majority to vote ‘yes’ then, like her predecessor, she would be so irritating and divisive that she hoped Westminster would want to see the back of us and grant Scotland another referendum.

Thank goodness that ploy did not work. The support for the Union is stronger than ever thanks to her failures.

Lyndsey Ward
Beauly

Ofcom compliance

Sir: You’re entitled to your opinion, as they used to say, even in Britain. And Toby Young is entitled to his, regarding my recent departure from GB News (No sacred cows, 18 February). However, I was struck by his summation of my show: ‘Great television, but not always Ofcom-compliant television.’ How does he know this? Ofcom has been ‘investigating’ me for a year and has reached no such determination. They have launched three ‘investigations’ into the show. The first they abandoned. The second has been running since April and the third since October. Toby’s breezy assertion of my guilt is clearly prejudicial.

Given Toby’s confidence in my non-compliance, perhaps he’d like to give Ofcom a heads-up on which rules I’ve broken, because they seem to be having trouble getting the goods on me. This risks giving the impression that these ‘investigations’ are a racket: producers and presenters of daily TV shows are expected to ensure that they’re in ‘compliance’ in the mere hours before airtime, but the fellows who wrote the rules need ten months to figure out whether I broke them?

How odd to find Britain’s supposed free-speech champ cheering GB News’s decision to play Queen of Hearts – sentence first, verdict whenever. As Toby has semi-conceded elsewhere, the clause I was being asked to sign is illegal under English law, which tells you something about whether or not this was a good-faith contract negotiation. But, more importantly on the broader free-speech question, GB News is self-censoring and conceding to Ofcom far more authority than the law demands.

Some years back, I ran into a similar situation with Canada’s censorship law –Section 13, which had a conviction rate of 100 per cent. The difference then was that, unlike GB News, the suits at the corporation and our estimable QC, Julian Porter, were all in agreement on the end-game: getting the law repealed and the Canadian state out of the censorship business. It was a tough fight, but we won: on 26 June 2013 the repeal of Section 13 received Royal Assent, and that was that. That’s what should happen to Ofcom’s powers over editorial content.

Mark Steyn
Woodsville, New Hampshire

Fast show

Sir: Jane Stannus (‘Fast and furious’, 18 February) should consider the benefits of being an Anglican when it comes to the Lenten penance advice of the Catholic Church. ‘You can go above and beyond, of course, if you want to’ may well be the Catholic approach to Lenten penance, but such flamboyant virtue signalling is expressly forbidden in the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion. Good Queen Bess and her bishops decreed in 1562 (Article XIV) that ‘Works of Supererogation’ – voluntary works besides, over, and above God’s Commandments – ‘cannot be taught without arrogancy and impiety’. So good Anglicans can remain great eaters of beef during most of Lent without any undue qualms, and will banish all thoughts of anything so foolish as going ‘above and beyond’, regardless of how much harm their wits might suffer.

Nicholas Head
Weymouth, Dorset

Coronation chaos

Sir: I wonder if Charles Moore has taken his understandable anxieties about the coronation (Notes, 18 February) to the government’s coronation minister? Not many people know that we have one (Stuart Andrew MP), possibly because he is also the Minister for Sport, Tourism, Heritage, and Civil Society, and has to answer for the Arts in the House of Commons. On top of all that, the Prime Minister recently made him Equalities Minister in the revamped Department of Business and Trade. Poor Mr Andrew was clearly too overworked to save the vital Court of Claims. Is it too late for Charles to take over the coronation ministry in the Upper House?

Richard Heller 
London SE1

Northern knocking up

Sir: Those of us brought up in grimy northern industrial towns and cities will know that the ‘knocker up’ was a man who went round the houses in the early morning wielding a long pole which he tapped on people’s windows to rouse them from their slumbers so as not to be late for work at t’mill (Mind your language, 11 February). So ‘wut [wouldst thou, in Stoke] knock me up in the morning’ might be a request from someone whose alarm clock had broken.

Bob Adams
Oxford

Taking stock

Sir: Impressed by the William Palmer poem ‘What Was a Library?’ (11 February), I cut it out to place in a secondhand book called The Case For Books, considering that to be an appropriate home. Opening the book at the flyleaf, I found that it had been rubber-stamped ‘Kent Libraries Withdrawn Stock’.

Brian Emsley
Kennett, Cambs