Letter: Government under fire: calls for coalitions, resignations and public demonstrations

Sir: Within 30 years party politics will be dead. Let us, for once, jump the gun of history. Let there be a non-party government. We face our greatest national crisis since 1940. Let us have a national government, now.

Nobody wants another election. Everybody wants another government. Let Paddy Ashdown forget his silly fooleries over the minutiae of the electoral system; let John Smith offer leadership and (as difficult) conciliation; let those Tories who respect their noble tradition of, in crisis, preferring country to party, now stand up.

This Government can be voted out, and might even be, if MPs of courage and conviction could believe that they would have a part in sustaining and shaping a new and better regime. Let us not make the particular cases of the past - the coalitions of 1916 and 1931 - a burden on the future. Those who recall history superficially and by rote are condemned forever to relive it.

Principles, yes. The West European way, not the American (or Japanese) one. Individual freedom, yes, but the community of us all, first. One nation, not two. Unrestrained market economics to join Marxism in the dustbin of history. Let the mother of parliaments act and be at last the mistress of our destiny.

Yours faithfully,

ARTHUR MARWICK

London, NW3

17 October