Oh do go away!

 

Hi All,

If there’s always one politician who gets my goat and that is Gordon Brown. Quite why he cannot simply enjoy retirement, rather than making stupid interventions into politics is beyond me. But anyway, his latest ‘devolution’ proposals.

1.       The devolution of powers to English regions. Brown and Blair tried this in their many years in office and the proposals were rejected when it came to local votes. Why? Because British politicians simply don’t grasp that people in England do not identify with regions such as ‘the South West’ or ‘North East’. The Cornish are very different to Devonshire people: Newcastle is different to Durham. In fact what English people seem to identify with is a matter of urban/rural and geography. If you are in a city or next to one you might well identify with it: Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham etc. If you are small town or rural, you will identify with the old shire counties and not some whitehall made blob, with a line drawn on a map like the old colonial office used to and call it ‘East Anglica region’. People will identify with Norwich, Norfolk, Suffolk etc, before a fake region.  Plus these visionaries never ever grasp the nettle of devolution to the whole of England, with an English Parliament and a Federal Parliament for the whole UK.  This works in Germany and USA, so why not here?

 2.    The Scottish devolution idea of allowing Scotland or Wales  to create its own foreign or trade policies is worse than Scottish independence. Forget that this idea goes against any tenant of a functioning nation-state or  of federalism – that is foreign policy, trade, defence and national security are always, always in the hands of a central or federal government- it would allow  a Drakeford or any of the SNP Peacocks to strut around the world, without the Scottish actually having to shoulder any burden as this would continue to be paid by the English. In other words it gives the SNP exactly what they want, lots of prestige and money without having to find it themselves.