The Health of the Union
Reading Drinking From Home (Scottish Raj) & The CEP (Campaign for an English Parliament) this morning, on the subjects of Scots at Westminster and devolution made me think what a botched job Labour has made of the constitutional affairs it has deigned to touch and how we solve the West Lothain Question.
DFH in the Scottish Raj article identifies 28 Scots who hold major Cabinet, Government & parliamentary positions from Tony Blair to PPSs to the Speaker. The imbalance is obvious and frankly embarrassing. As far as I can see there are two options for Britain if we accept the current arrangement in Westminster, Holyrood and Cardiff is a total, unworkable fudge:
- We either retain the current unitary system, whilst overhauling the Lords, returning all powers to Westminster and provide more emphasis on the regions or the more impoverished areas outside London and the Midlands such as the North West/East, Scotland & Wales that will always need help.
- We adopt a Federal system which breaks the UK into Scotland, NI, Wales, the North, Midlands and South of England each with their own mini-bicameral systems with a streamlined Commons and a Senate style Lords of much fewer Peers/Senators (approx. 100.)
David Stenhouse's 'On the Make: How the Scots Took Over London' is definitely worth a read to understand more about the outflow of talent from Scotland to England over the ages.
4 comments:
I believe that there are problems such as the Barnett Formula & the West Lothain Question that need to be addressed but what would you get from yet another parliament that you don't get from Westminster?
Please don't think life in Scotland is a bed of roses; it ain't - high unemloyment, poor infrastructure & a major brain drain.
It is easy to blame the other members of the union in times of trouble for the state of the economy, NHS and other public services but that is really down to the 9 years of mismanagement by the current Labour government.
Sorry to be a pain, but unemployment is not very high in Scotland - not much more than in England anyway. Infrastructure - I'd wager that in some of the urban areas of Scotland it is probably better than their equivalents in Northern Ireland, England and Wales, and as for a brain-drain London has always been a draw for quite a large proportion of Scots; there's estimated to be around 1m Scots in England. Certainly the problem with the "brain-drain" has lessened in recent years, but it is still nevertheless a significant problem - and not just for Scotland either
Unemployment in Scotland has been (aside form the North-East and bizarely London) 1-3 percentage points higher than most English regions.
Whilst the consistent averages are maybe only a percentage point or two apart, which doesn't seem alot granted, this can represent hundreds of thousands of people. Which is quite a big difference in my book, however I take the point.
There are areas in England much worse affected than Scotland.
The urban economies of Aberdeen and Edinburgh (per capita) are the second and third richest areas of the UK (after London). They probably have a far greater quality of life to boot - far in excess of much of the rest of Scotland and the remainder of the UK, and generate more in proportional tax revenue than much of the rest of Britain, due to the proportion of high earners that live in these places.
The point is that in Scotland, just as England there is gross inequality between the richest and poorest parts of the country. The richest parts of Scotland hold their own, the poorest parts continue to decline and SOME areas have a life expectancy lower than that of the Gaza Strip. It really irks my goat when I here commentators (present company excluded, of course) - nominally the printed media characterise the whole of Scotland on its most unfortunate parts. I don't characterise the whole of England based on the economies of Hackney, Sefton, Brixton or Grimethorpe so why should others base their perceptions of Scotland on Easterhouse, Airdrie, Greenock or Pilton?
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