EVEL – THE BRITISH ESTABLISHMENT TAKES ITS FIRST FALTERING AND HESITANT STEP TOWARDS THE RECOGNITION OF ENGLAND
Last week, William Hague, on behalf of the leadership of the Conservative Party, took the first formal step that any part of the British Political Establishment towards recognising the legitimate grievances of England and the English Nation over their exclusion from the whole devolution process.
EVEL, or English Votes for English Laws, is rather a puffing, faltering little step but as Scottish National Devolution has shown once national recognition has been offered, a process has begun which must inevitably lead in the direction that English Nationalists will approve of.
As was recently pointed out to me by a Welsh Professor of Politics, Plaid Cymru’s traditional position before any party had started to talk about national devolution for Wales was as follows:-
“You’ll recall that the traditional view in Plaid Cymru was that they should say yes to anything that recognised Wales as a unit as that would lead – inevitably – to more. They weren’t wrong!”
In the circumstances English nationalists can unequivocally approve of there being a first step taken by the British Political Establishment.
We should however be under no illusion that it is done for any reasons of love for England!
Let us not forget that the person charged with the production of this little concession is the same William Hague who, when he was the Leader of the Conservative Party in 2002 said:- “English nationalism is the most dangerous of all forms of nationalism that can arise within the United Kingdom, because England is five-sixths of the population of the UK." Leopards famously do not change their spots, nor, I suggest, do Brit/Scots like William Hague - even if they masquerade as Yorkshiremen!
DID HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN, BEHAVE UNCONSTITUTIONALLY IN THE SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM?
The highly respected journalist, Severin Carrell, who writes for the Guardian has published this detailed account of the Scottish referendum campaign. I have put the parts of his narrative that relate to the Queen in bold at the beginning of the article and then reproduced the whole of the article. The reason for doing this is that he states, as a fact, matters which do raise constitutional concerns.
If what he says is correct, then it is at least arguable that the Queen stepped outside of the proper role of a constitutional monarch in intervening in the Independence referendum.
See what you think, but bear in mind that while it is proper for a constitutional monarch to discuss policy with individual politicians and perhaps even to some extent lobby them in the way of trying to persuade them of the monarch’s view, it would never be proper for the monarch to push their view too firmly towards elected representatives, nor should the Queen be seeking to intervene in a democratic decision. It is only by not doing so that the role and position of the monarchy can be maintained in any State which has a claim to be a functioning democracy. It is therefore at the very least of concern that it seems from Severin Carrell’s narrative that the Queen may have over-stepped that very important demarcation line.
First here are the relevant passages relating to the Queen:-
“In a quaint ritual of Britain’s political calendar, the prime minister repairs to the Queen’s Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend break at the end of every summer. The atmosphere is meant to be relaxed: the prime minister is treated to an annual barbecue served up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who do the washing up afterwards. Tony and Cherie Blair entered into the spirit during their Balmoral stay in 1999 by conceiving their youngest son, Leo.
But there was a distinct sense of unease this year when David Cameron arrived for his stay on Saturday 6 September. The Queen was taking a close interest in the referendum, and was said to have noted a poll published in the Times earlier that week, which found the no side’s lead had shrunk to only six points.
The news was even worse that Sunday morning as the prime minister came down to breakfast with the Queen – on the day that the banner headline in the Sunday Times declared “Yes vote leads in Scots poll”, reporting the shock YouGov survey putting independence in the lead for the first time.
You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.
One Whitehall source insisted that the atmosphere was friendly, as the Queen resorted to her famous – and at times pointed – humour. “I think there were one or two bits of humour,” the source said. “Obviously it is not the ideal thing to come down to breakfast and there’s the Queen with a little pot of marmalade or whatever and porridge and kippers and you see the headline. I think the Queen, as far as I understand – I mean I don’t know, obviously, none of us know – likes having the prime minister there because he does all the stuff that well brought up young men know how to do. So I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”
It turned out that it was not just the prime minister who had his work cut out that week, as No 10 went into “meltdown” – in the words of one senior Downing Street source – as the full (peaceful) force of the British state was mustered to save the union. Senior figures in Whitehall were so worried by the prospect of a collapse of the union that it was suggested to the palace that it would be immensely helpful if the Queen could say something publicly.
Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, embarked on discussions to work out how the Queen might register her concerns at the prospect of a yes vote while upholding her constitutional duty to remain wholly impartial. The Whitehall machinery was fully apprised of the prime minister’s concerns that the yes side was developing an ominous momentum.
The talks between the most senior civil servant in the land and the palace’s most senior official, the two key figures at the heart of what the Whitehall source described as the “deep state”, focused in the first place on the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who has been scrupulously impartial during her 62 years on the throne. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion some words that would ensure that the she remained within the bounds expected of a constitutional monarch.
I don’t think it was frosty. There might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge.
Jim Lawson, a veteran freelance reporter who has dutifully covered royal visits to the Scottish Highlands for decades – he remembers covering Prince Charles at Gordonstoun boarding school in the 1960s – got the answer a week later on Sunday 14 September, outside Crathie Kirk, the small church where the Queen attends Sunday services while at Balmoral. As he has done at these events for years, Lawson wandered over to the crowd behind the barriers after the Queen had departed, to harvest quotes from her greetings to wellwishers. To his surprise, one woman disclosed that the monarch had offered a coded warning about the impending referendum, telling her: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”
“The Queen looked almost uneasy,” Lawson recalled. “It was strange. [She] didn’t look supremely confident.” When he asked the woman who had spoken to the Queen for her name, a friend standing with her urged her not to reveal it. When Lawson asked her why not, she replied “It’s my job.” For Lawson, this was a first. “It has never happened in my life before,” he recalled. “Normally if the Queen has talked to someone, they’re delighted to give you everything. I was baffled, to be honest.”
Buckingham Palace declined at the time to comment publicly on the Queen’s remarks, but in private, officials were keen for reporters to broadcast every syllable uttered by the monarch. The Whitehall source said that the Queen’s statement was no accident: “She knew exactly what she was doing. There are two possible responses on the referendum: one, you buy into this as a fantastic festival of democracy; or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully, you imply the second. If they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum Ma’am’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”
The Queen’s remarks were crafted with great care by the two men at the heart of the “deep state” to ensure that she did not cross a line – as some had alleged she did decades earlier, when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks that were seen as an attempt by the Labour government to warn of the dangers posed by the SNP after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”
It was felt, 37 years later, that it would have been wholly inappropriate for the Queen to make such pointed remarks in the heat of an independence referendum. It was decided that she would make remarks which were wholly neutral but which would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union – as she made clear she had no intention of reverting, as Alex Salmond had suggested, to the ancient title of Queen of Scots.
The delicate negotiations explain why the prime minister was so relieved by the result of the referendum, a point illustrated when he told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an unguarded moment a few days later, that she had “purred down the line” when he informed the monarch that her kingdom remained intact.
The Queen’s intervention showed the stakes could not have been higher for the pro-UK side, which had started the final countdown to the referendum amid rancour, divisions and bust-ups.
........................................
In the end the union was saved, allowing the prime minister to telephone a mightily relieved monarch.”
Here is the full article:-
The real story of the Scottish referendum: the final days of the fight for independence
As the vote neared, Britain’s breakup seemed a real possibility. In the second part of their series, based on extensive interviews with key players, Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour track the final days of an epic campaign
In a quaint ritual of Britain’s political calendar, the prime minister repairs to the Queen’s Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend break at the end of every summer. The atmosphere is meant to be relaxed: the prime minister is treated to an annual barbecue served up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who do the washing up afterwards. Tony and Cherie Blair entered into the spirit during their Balmoral stay in 1999 by conceiving their youngest son, Leo.
But there was a distinct sense of unease this year when David Cameron arrived for his stay on Saturday 6 September. The Queen was taking a close interest in the referendum, and was said to have noted a poll published in the Times earlier that week, which found the no side’s lead had shrunk to only six points.
The news was even worse that Sunday morning as the prime minister came down to breakfast with the Queen – on the day that the banner headline in the Sunday Times declared “Yes vote leads in Scots poll”, reporting the shock YouGov survey putting independence in the lead for the first time.
You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.
One Whitehall source insisted that the atmosphere was friendly, as the Queen resorted to her famous – and at times pointed – humour. “I think there were one or two bits of humour,” the source said. “Obviously it is not the ideal thing to come down to breakfast and there’s the Queen with a little pot of marmalade or whatever and porridge and kippers and you see the headline. I think the Queen, as far as I understand – I mean I don’t know, obviously, none of us know – likes having the prime minister there because he does all the stuff that well brought up young men know how to do. So I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”
It turned out that it was not just the prime minister who had his work cut out that week, as No 10 went into “meltdown” – in the words of one senior Downing Street source – as the full (peaceful) force of the British state was mustered to save the union. Senior figures in Whitehall were so worried by the prospect of a collapse of the union that it was suggested to the palace that it would be immensely helpful if the Queen could say something publicly.
Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, embarked on discussions to work out how the Queen might register her concerns at the prospect of a yes vote while upholding her constitutional duty to remain wholly impartial. The Whitehall machinery was fully apprised of the prime minister’s concerns that the yes side was developing an ominous momentum.
The talks between the most senior civil servant in the land and the palace’s most senior official, the two key figures at the heart of what the Whitehall source described as the “deep state”, focused in the first place on the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who has been scrupulously impartial during her 62 years on the throne. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion some words that would ensure that the she remained within the bounds expected of a constitutional monarch.
Jim Lawson, a veteran freelance reporter who has dutifully covered royal visits to the Scottish Highlands for decades – he remembers covering Prince Charles at Gordonstoun boarding school in the 1960s – got the answer a week later on Sunday 14 September, outside Crathie Kirk, the small church where the Queen attends Sunday services while at Balmoral. As he has done at these events for years, Lawson wandered over to the crowd behind the barriers after the Queen had departed, to harvest quotes from her greetings to wellwishers. To his surprise, one woman disclosed that the monarch had offered a coded warning about the impending referendum, telling her: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”
“The Queen looked almost uneasy,” Lawson recalled. “It was strange. [She] didn’t look supremely confident.” When he asked the woman who had spoken to the Queen for her name, a friend standing with her urged her not to reveal it. When Lawson asked her why not, she replied “It’s my job.” For Lawson, this was a first. “It has never happened in my life before,” he recalled. “Normally if the Queen has talked to someone, they’re delighted to give you everything. I was baffled, to be honest.”
Buckingham Palace declined at the time to comment publicly on the Queen’s remarks, but in private, officials were keen for reporters to broadcast every syllable uttered by the monarch. The Whitehall source said that the Queen’s statement was no accident: “She knew exactly what she was doing. There are two possible responses on the referendum: one, you buy into this as a fantastic festival of democracy; or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully, you imply the second. If they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum Ma’am’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”
The Queen’s remarks were crafted with great care by the two men at the heart of the “deep state” to ensure that she did not cross a line – as some had alleged she did decades earlier, when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks that were seen as an attempt by the Labour government to warn of the dangers posed by the SNP after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”
It was felt, 37 years later, that it would have been wholly inappropriate for the Queen to make such pointed remarks in the heat of an independence referendum. It was decided that she would make remarks which were wholly neutral but which would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union – as she made clear she had no intention of reverting, as Alex Salmond had suggested, to the ancient title of Queen of Scots.
The delicate negotiations explain why the prime minister was so relieved by the result of the referendum, a point illustrated when he told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an unguarded moment a few days later, that she had “purred down the line” when he informed the monarch that her kingdom remained intact.
The Queen’s intervention showed the stakes could not have been higher for the pro-UK side, which had started the final countdown to the referendum amid rancour, divisions and bust-ups.
March 2014: Bitching sessions
When the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, sat down for a discreet lunch at a Holyrood restaurant with a few close advisers on 27 March, the no campaign still enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls. But George Osborne’s rejection of a currency union appeared to be backfiring, as the yes side gained momentum in opinion surveys – while Better Together was about to be plunged into “a week from hell”.
Davidson had been lunching with Professor Adam Tomkins, a constitution expert from Glasgow University, Eddie Barnes, her trusted head of communications, and Chris Deerin, a Daily Mail columnist. Craig Harrow, a leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and a Better Together board member, was at a neighbouring table – and when Davidson left her guests to return to her office, he joined the others. It was already a “bitching session”, Harrow said, so he unburdened himself.
He described a major dispute within the pro-UK campaign over the tone of its advertising, its failure to energise middle-class no voters, and its perceived negativity – which pitted Harrow and Phil Anderton, a marketing expert and executive known as Fireworks Phil after he introduced pyrotechnics to Scottish Rugby Union matches at Murrayfield stadium, against senior executives at Better Together, particularly Labour’s chief strategist Douglas Alexander and its Labour chief executive, Blair McDougall. The three Tories were very sympathetic: there had been debates for months about whether Better Together needed to be more positive. “Labour ran [the pro-UK campaign] as a national by-election and we wanted it to have a bit more to it. We wanted a concert, something that took it beyond politics [such as] some of the things you saw develop, some of the celebrity stuff from down south, Let’s Stay Together and all that sort of stuff,” Davidson recalled.
The next morning that story was splashed across the front of the Scottish Daily Mail under the headline “Campaign to save the UK in crisis”, reporting Harrow’s case that “hard-hitting messages about the disastrous consequences of a yes vote appear to be backfiring.” The no campaign had another setback later that night, when the Guardian published a story revealing that a member of the UK government had said that a currency union would be formed after a yes vote.
Alistair Darling and the Better Together campaign are wounded by the yes side’s claim that the NHS would be under threat if the Conservative-backed no side won the referendum. Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck
The Guardian story was seized upon by a jubilant Alex Salmond: it was proof, the first minister said, of the UK government’s “bluff, bullying and bluster” over currency. The opinion polls were starting to shift towards yes – some putting the yes vote as high as 46%, and the yes campaign had widened dramatically to involve groups beyond the SNP. such as the National Collective group of artists, musicians and cultural figures, the Common Weal left-green think tank and a new radical left umbrella group called the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC).
Yet behind that upbeat front, Yes Scotland was suffering its own turmoil at its headquarters on Hope Street in Glasgow, leading to increasing involvement from SNP executives and Sturgeon, then deputy first minister and referendum minister.
After a purge of senior staff in 2013, yes campaign chief Blair Jenkins and the SNP, which dominated the pro-independence campaign’s strategy and messaging, sacked the last two executives hired in 2012 as part of Jenkins’s “vastly experienced” team. Sources involved say Jenkins was deeply unpopular among senior staff, who were unhappy about his taking several long holidays; on at least one occasion, staff staged walkouts. There were significant tensions over the campaign’s lack of a clear strategic plan and the factional disputes within.
As the two sides jostled for position over the summer, the yes campaign sought to establish its credentials as a mass movement; in contrasting style, Better Together strived to be seen as sober. The no camp got an unexpected lift at the start of June from US president Barack Obama, who said he hoped the UK would remain “strong, robust and united”. Better Together strategists believed the White House and Obama had been considering for months whether he should intervene: Darling was approached during a visit to Washington for an IMF event in April by what one source described as “very nervous” British diplomats, who were worried an Obama intervention would backfire. The message from Darling was clear: it would be extremely helpful because Americans have more latitude in Scotland than England does. A few days later, JK Rowling donated £1m to Better Together, describing independence as an “historically bad mistake”. It was a crucial gift, largely enabling Better Together to pay for the final 100 days of campaigning – though Rowling was less generous than the SNP’s most lavish funders, the Euromillions winners Chris and Colin Weir, whose donations to yes and the SNP topped £5.5m by early September.
The SNP had hoped that the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, at the end of July, would give the independence campaign a lift by boosting national pride. But non-partisan audiences at the Games treated it as a festival of sport, often applauding English and Welsh athletes as heavily as their own. Salmond broke his own pledge to keep the Games non-political by referring to Glasgow as “freedom city” – an ill-concealed reference to the prediction that Scotland’s largest city was already on the brink of voting yes. In private, discussions of the referendum were unavoidable: on an official bus to the opening ceremony, Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg pressed Ed Miliband to be more ambitious on agreeing to a joint strategy on more powers. But Miliband was reluctant to allow his name to appear alongside the prime minister’s – for Labour, there was a danger of being associated too closely with the Tories.
5 August: Salmond and Darling face off
Two days after the Games ended, and after much wrangling with broadcaster STV, Alex Salmond confronted Alistair Darling in the first televised debate of the referendum – a duel that set the tone for the last six weeks before polling day. In the weeks before their setpiece confrontation at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, Scotland’s premier music and drama academy, Darling’s team had been coaching the former chancellor at Better Together’s wood-panelled offices on Blythswood Square.
The two men had never debated each other, and their styles were quite different. A former advocate – the Scottish version of a barrister - Darling was an experienced Commons debater after nearly 30 years as an MP, and had withstood torrid encounters at the dispatch box as chancellor. But he was dry, managerial. Salmond, in contrast, was famous for this rapier wit and putdowns.
Darling was put through training bouts with Scottish Labour’s master of first minister’s questions, the party spin doctor Paul Sinclair, pretending to be Salmond. He also received detailed briefing on how to behave in a TV debate by Scott Chisholm, the broadcasting adviser who had prepped Nick Clegg for his definitive general election debates in 2010.
Distracted by the Commonwealth Games, Salmond was snatching training sessions as he travelled the country, even dragging his team up to Inverness. His colleagues implied that he was under-prepared, but he was also more nervous about the encounter than expected.
Salmond was clearly tired; Darling more aggressive and intense than expected. Despite delivering well-aimed punches on Darling’s lack of detail about future tax powers and Scotland’s viability outside the UK, the first minister flailed on his “plan B” proposals for a currency now that the UK parties had vetoed a deal on the pound, relying on poorly judged quips about no campaigners worrying about aliens invading Scotland.
Darling’s camp had decided to focus their fire on Salmond’s weakness on an independent Scotland’s currency options, now that the UK parties had vetoed a currency union. Darling deployed a line he had written the previous weekend: “Any eight-year-old can tell you the flag of a country, the capital of a country and its currency … you can’t tell us what currency we will have. What is an eight-year-old going to make of that?” The first debate was notable for its unexpected outcome: a Darling victory. A snap ICM poll for the Guardian put Darling head by 56% to 44% for Salmond.
But the no camp’s jubilation was short-lived. The yes team had already begun unfolding a far more damaging campaign for the final weeks: attacking the UK government and Better Together over the future of the NHS.
Better Together officials insist that the decision to focus on the NHS was a panic measure after Salmond’s debate defeat. They were wrong: Yes Scotland and the SNP had put the NHS on their campaign grid months before, after watching the powerful reaction on Facebook and YouTube from yes voters to a speech by Dr Philipa Whitford, a Glasgow-based breast surgeon, claiming that privatisation could kill the NHS within a decade. Within the yes movement, Whitford’s speech had gone viral.
Nicola Sturgeon said the NHS was always in mind. As Scottish health secretary, she had rehearsed the key arguments at an SNP conference speech in spring 2012.
“It was always an argument we intended to make and I am absolutely convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that the reason the Better Together parties reacted so ferociously to that was that they knew how important it was,” Sturgeon recalled. “It was one of the arguments that I think started to shift opinion towards yes.”
It was immensely effective and played very well indeed in Labour-voting neighbourhoods, largely because it triggered a gut anti-Tory reaction and played to Yes Scotland’s conceit that Scots were more socially liberal than England. Yes and no campaigners began hearing the Yes Scotland arguments played back by voters on the doorstep: proof that it was hitting the target. The SNP’s private and unpublished polling had already found that warnings around NHS privatisation and spending in England could flip no voters into yes: one showed that the number backing independence jumped from 45% to 55% when the NHS was raised to voters. “It was very effective,” said Kevin Pringle, the SNP’s director of communications. “It was a very powerful dramatization of what the yes vote was for.
After two weeks of floundering in response, Better Together eventually ended the crisis by asserting that Scottish ministers had complete autonomy over NHS policy and spending in Scotland. But Blair McDougall, the chief executive of Better Together, admitted that the NHS issue cost the no campaign up to three points on referendum day, losing it some 110,000 votes. A senior Scottish Tory source, and other no campaign executives, put the damage higher, estimating that without the impact of the NHS campaign and Darling’s hammering in the second TV debate, the no vote could have hit 60%.
Welfare issues and the Tories’ toxic reputation in Scotland were serious problems for the no campaign: remarkably, Darling had managed to block Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory secretary of state for work and pensions, from coming to Scotland in April 2014 to launch the Scotland Analysis paper on welfare and pensions.
The NHS campaign fuelled an upsurge in mass events by yes activists and supporters, who swelled a series of demonstrations in Glasgow’s George Square, and Buchanan Street, where they gathered under the statue of Labour’s first first minister, and the father of devolution, Donald Dewar.
By the second debate, staged by the BBC in the Edwardian grandeur of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and screened live across the UK and overseas, Salmond was in sharper form and better briefed, largely thanks to Sturgeon.
Pringle argues that Salmond is more self-critical than his enemies realise: “Alex is most often at his best when he is in a situation of adversity. When things are going very well he sometimes gets a bit impatient as to why they are not going better, but he was actually very calm after the first debate,” he recalled.
Faced by a more combative, vocal audience, Darling was comprehensively outboxed, appearing wooden and incoherent. Salmond hit him with well-aimed jabs over the alliance with the Tories, increasing poverty, and the vague offer of extra powers. Afterwards, Better Together were furious, blaming the BBC for shambolic security which allowed yes campaigners to confront Darling as he arrived at the Kelvingrove, and poor screening that seemed to result in two-thirds of the audience being ill-disciplined yes voters. It went very badly for Darling. An ICM snap poll for the Guardian gave Salmond a convincing 71% to 29% victory.
2 September: Poll dancing
The Westminster elite, who had assumed that the referendum would be easily won by the no side, started to stir when the shadow cabinet minister Jim Murphy suspended his 100 town Irn-Bru crate speaking tour at the end of August in the face of intimidation from yes supporters. But the first major jolt that woke London from its slumber came on 2 September, when a YouGov/Times poll found that the no side’s apparently impregnable lead had shrunk from 14 points to six in under a month. Alistair Carmichael, a Liberal Democrat bruiser who had been drafted in as Scotland secretary a year earlier to confront Salmond, told the cabinet on the morning of the poll that the union was in grave danger. “This was a time to hold your nerve and to take the prospect seriously but we had to stick to the strategy,” Carmichael said of his intervention. Later that week, a meeting of the “quad” – the coalition’s senior members – was called to hone the message on the risks posed by independence. The government’s aim was to counter the threat from the yes campaign by fleshing out new powers for the Scottish parliament. On the following Sunday, 7 September – while Cameron was visiting the Queen at Balmoral – the referendum finally became a story of global proportions when a YouGov/Sunday Times poll put the yes side in the lead for the first time – by 51% to 49%. “God, it was nerve-racking, I don’t ever want to go through that again,” Danny Alexander said.
But UK ministers and senior civil servants had already had private warnings about the sharp surge in yes support. Because of the unprecedented threat posed by independence to the future of the UK and the state, the Cabinet Office commissioned more than £537,000 worth of extremely detailed but unpublished polling from Ipsos Mori between May 2013 and the end of the campaign – at one stage paying up to £100,000 a month for these surveys, in what is believed to be a record sum spent by Whitehall tracking one political event.
Those Ipsos Mori surveys, which included conventional opinion polling, focus groups, and qualitative attitudinal research into how voters behaved, had tracked the rising support for yes since chancellor George Osborne’s currency zone veto in early 2014. They also echoed the sudden sharp rise in yes support in the closing weeks of the campaign, and confirmed what YouGov and TNS BMRB had discovered: that the referendum vote was too close to call. The Cabinet Office refused to publish the poll findings, insisting they were wholly confidential, and it is now vigorously resisting freedom of information act requests for disclosure.
Ipsos Mori executives had also briefed Whitehall that the last Quebec independence referendum suggested that polling figures could exaggerate support for yes – Ipsos Mori staff in Canada had advised their UK colleagues to assume that on polling day, undecided voters would break two to one for no; that had been the experience in Quebec, where the polls had over-estimated the pro-independence vote. In hindsight, the Better Together chief executive Blair McDougall described the YouGov polls as a “godsend”: “Those two YouGov polls were the best thing that happened to the campaign in terms of making the economic risk real, in terms of energising activists and getting the parties to work through the painful process of sorting out this stuff,” he said.
8 September: Gordon takes a Vow
The new urgency of the pro-UK campaign saw the return to the frontline of the man who had suffered Labour’s second-worst election defeat since the introduction of suffrage. Gordon Brown had delivered many speeches on the referendum, but they had barely received any attention outside Scotland – until he roared into action in a speech on the evening of Monday 8 September in the small Midlothian town of Loanhead. Addressing a packed meeting of Labour supporters at a miner’s club, Brown said, “What people are looking for is a timetable, a plan, a mechanism for delivery and a clear idea of what would happen after a no vote.” His crucial intervention was to provide wavering voters a guarantee that further devolution would be delivered on a clear timetable, with a broad plan finalised by the end of November and a final agreement reached in January 2015. The former prime minister had managed to fire up natural Labour voters, after a month in which it seemed the key theme of the no camp – the danger posed by independence – had been seized by the yes side, as Salmond hammered on the risks to the NHS if Scotland remained in the UK. There was also the small matter of Labour’s neglected base in Scotland. “We realised that the Labour party in Scotland was a bit like the Russian army in the first world war,” a Downing Street source recalled. “Superficially it was impressive but the reality was it wasn’t there in numbers or in fighting energy.”
The “silent nos” – Better Together’s description of the voters who eventually swung the referendum – were mobilised in what will be remembered as one of the most gripping weeks in modern British political history. The shock YouGov poll on 7 September prompted a fall in sterling and knocked billions off the value of companies with exposure to Scotland. One government source spoke of “an air of disbelief” among senior officials in Whitehall. The source added: “So [there was] disbelief, helplessness, a sense among the senior civil servants that, Christ, if this goes the wrong way, we have got our work cut out.”
Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, the Scottish shadow foreign secretary, were so alarmed that the Labour leadership suggested to David Cameron that they should abandon prime minister’s questions at Westminster and travel instead to Scotland. It was a difficult judgment call: the pro-UK leaders’ trip north of the border risked looking “heavy-handed”, according to one government source. In the end, the three main party leaders travelled separately to Scotland in a move that eventually won widespread praise from the no side. “On balance I still think it was the right judgment in that it robbed our opponents of the argument that somehow the choice was for us as Scots but the consequences wouldn’t fall elsewhere and it rendered transparent the fact that the whole of the UK was engaged,” Douglas Alexander said.
Alex Salmond mocked the “total disintegration” of the no campaign, but day by day, Better Together was moving into gear as business leaders at last began to voice their private concerns about the dangers of independence. As shares in Scottish companies tumbled, Danny Alexander and Paul Sinclair, a senior aide to the Labour leader in Scotland, cooked up a headline that made the front page of the Daily Record – the key paper to reach out to core Labour voters: “Salmond’s Black Wednesday”.
But the defining moment of the final phase of the campaign came six days later when Gordon Brown persuaded the Daily Record to emblazon across its front page a declaration by the leaders of the three main UK parties that they would start the process of delivering “extensive new powers” to the Scottish parliament. The Vow, which appeared on mock parchment paper on Tuesday 16 September, was so named by imaginative editors. But it was almost wholly the work of Brown, who is credited with doing the most in the final two weeks of the campaign to stabilise the no vote and save the union – in the words of the veteran Whitehall watcher Peter Riddell, it was “Gordon’s second premiership”.
Douglas Alexander, who had been drafted in by Darling to take day-to-day command of Better Together in its final months, was in regular contact with the prime minister’s Scotland adviser Andrew Dunlop in the negotiations over the Vow. But Downing Street was also kept informed by another route – Brown sent regular emails, in his trademark capital letters, to senior civil servants including Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary. Cameron also spoke to Brown in the final stages of the negotiations over the wording of the Vow, though their conversation focused on the prime minister’s final speech of the campaign, in Aberdeen on Monday 15 September. The prime minister had sent the man he dislodged from Downing Street a copy of his speech, asking for suggestions. These were then incorporated into the speech, in which Cameron warned that independence would lead to a “painful divorce”.
A Downing Street source says the prime minister took an “indulgent” view of his predecessor. Recalling their telephone call ahead of the Aberdeen speech, the source said: “Gordon Brown couldn’t resist saying I’m the saviour of the world and you take my advice. I think the prime minister’s view was indulgent – that is Gordon, Gordon has a role to play, there you are. It wasn’t the case that he felt, why is this man so central to this situation? It was just, we’ve got to win, he has a part to play, if I have to cope for half an hour as he tells me why the campaign should have been run in an entirely different way, then that’s fine, OK I’ll do that.”
Douglas Alexander, a former protege who fell out with Brown over the abortive plans to call a UK general election in 2007, experienced something of a reconciliation with his mentor, whose role he likened to that played by the Quebecois former Canadian prime ministers Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chrétien in the closing stages of the 1980 and 1995 Quebec referendums. “I was clear that we needed a Scottish voice closing the campaign, the most powerful and eloquent voice that we had in our side of the argument was Gordon, and that was why we scored him for the closing days of the campaign.” A self-confessed political anorak, Alexander’s study of the Quebec referendums also provided an answer to one of the dilemmas of the pro-UK campaign: how to dress up No as a positive message. Pierre Trudeau, Alexander discovered, had made his final speech in front of a banner saying “Non Merci”. Alexander says: “As soon as I found ‘Non Merci’ we put that into qualitative research and it tested out the park. I mean, one of the ways you can tell in a campaign that your messaging is working is when your merchandise flies out the door, and just as soon as we produced ‘No thanks’ badges, buttons, leaflets, they flooded out.”Following a series of successful public appearances, Brown gave a barnstorming speech in a community hall in the Maryhill area of Glasgow on the eve of the poll in which he warned that independence would be irreversible: “Once it’s done, it’s done.” Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats who watched the speech from the stage, was blown away. “I thought he was going to chew the heads off everybody in the front row, he was that dynamic.”
Brown had, in fact, first raised his concerns with Cameron and Osborne more than two years earlier, in March 2012, complaining that the SNP had been allowed to set the terms of debate by framing the referendum as a clash between Scotland and London. Brown warned the pair who had ended his premiership that the majority of Scots now felt more Scottish than British, and suggested English politicians wrongly believed these identities to be equivalent north of the border.
Leading figures in the no camp found it hard work to pin down Brown on his plans during the campaign. “As ever with him, you dance through intermediaries,” one source said. But in the end they were immensely thankful for Brown’s interventions, though his impact was not clear until the last hours.
The final polls – and the visible jitters among the British elite – gave the yes side confidence that they were on course for victory. But Pringle acknowledged that amid the excitement, the yes campaign failed to appreciate the late surge for no.
Sturgeon said voters were subject to an “onslaught of fear-mongering” after a second YouGov poll gave the yes side a lead. “The Vow and [the poll] came together for enough people who in their hearts probably wanted to vote yes, but for reasons that I totally understand, were scared of what they were being told might be the consequences. Suddenly they had something that sounded as if it were the safer option to give them a lot of what they wanted, but without the risks,” Sturgeon recalled. “If that poll had been the following Sunday we’d have won. It was too soon. We had private discussions in our campaign meeting about not wanting to go ahead too early.”
The mood in the Better Together camp in the final days was supremely nervous. Ed Miliband was forced to abandon a walkabout in an Edinburgh shopping centre as pro-independence supporters drowned him out with cries of “serial murderer”. In the final days of the campaign the Labour leader struggled to move much beyond his hotel.
“[The SNP] presumed that the closing 10 days of the campaign would be a cavalcade towards independence,” said Douglas Alexander. “They wanted to suggest Better Together was in a perpetual state of crisis and that ever more support was coming to ‘yes’. So when we set out the strategy – ‘faster, safer, better change’ on the Monday evening, they had very little in their locker to push back with.”
18 September: Up all night
A period of almost unbroken sunshine ended on the eve of referendum day, forcing voters to trudge through the rain when the polls opened at 7am on Thursday 18 September. Undeterred by the return to normal autumnal weather, voters came out in their millions to record the sort of turnout (84.59%) unseen in a UK general election since 1950 when 83.9% of voters turned out.
The yes side thought their chances were strong as vast numbers of supporters turned out. “It felt to me on polling day as if we were winning,” one SNP source says.
But the Better Together camp knew they were in a strong position after the final polls gave them a lead and the postal vote returns showed they were comfortably ahead in areas where they could have faced trouble. By midnight, after a YouGov poll suggested a 54%-46% no win, the momentum was clearly with the no camp. Muted celebrations became a little more joyous around 1.30am when tiny Clackmannanshire, which had been in the sights of the yes camp, voted for the union by 53.8% to 46.2%.
Salmond was pictured looking dejected as he was driven from his north east home in the early hours for the flight down to Edinburgh (aides later said he was simply monitoring results on his iPad). Hundreds of miles south in London the atmosphere was looking up in Downing Street where George Osborne had hosted a takeaway curry dinner for the prime minister and their close aides in No 11 in the final hours of polling. The Tory leadership were so nervous about the results that camp beds were brought in for staff to ensure that everyone was on hand if the prime minister had to go out into Downing Street to admit that he had outdone Lord North, the prime minister who lost the North American Colonies, by losing the United Kingdom.
In the end the union was saved, allowing the prime minister to telephone a mightily relieved monarch.
Amid the rejoicing, the unlikely allies who had secured victory for the no campaign would soon be back at each other’s throats, after Cameron seized the moment of triumph to play the English card – providing the SNP a quick route back from defeat. But one prominent Scottish unionist urged that the outcome not be forgotten. “The dream that Salmond had campaigned for all his life had come to a halt,” said Lord Strathclyde, the former Tory leader of the House of Lords. “He had done everything in his power to make sure that the vote went his way. He decided the date of the referendum, he decided the length of the campaign, he decided the question, he changed the franchise so that schoolchildren had got a vote, he was wholly in control of the Scottish government and the civil service. There was nothing more he could do. So he lost. The people have spoken. The sovereign will of the Scottish people has been heard. A once in a generation – once in a lifetime – opportunity occurred in September, and the decision is final.”
Here is the link to the original article:- The real story of the Scottish referendum: the final days of the fight for independence | Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and P
ENGLISH NATIONALISTS CAN CELEBRATE A MERRY CHRISTMAS EXPECTING A BETTER NEW YEAR!
I would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. I am glad to be able to do so after a year that has seen several developments which give some cause for optimism that events and the mood of the country are beginning to visibly move towards the need for a whole England/English National reform of our politics!
The General Election next year gives a focus to our efforts in the coming year but it will be after the election that the most interesting developments are likely to work themselves out, especially in the light of current opinion polls.
Before then we have the interesting prospect of much more England focussed debates following on from William Hague’s EVEL White Paper! All treats for us!
Wishing you and England too a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Political Correctness over Christmas cards on Russia Today
On the 9th December I was telephoned mid-afternoon by someone saying she was ringing from Moscow asking if I was happy to be interviewed by Russia Today that night on questions of political correctness about the way in which Councils are treating Christmas.
Naturally I said I was happy to do so. Initially I was told that I would have to go up to London to be interviewed at Russia Today’s studio at Millbank Towers. They then said that they would pay for the taxi, but not long afterwards she rang back to say it was going to be too expensive, as that day there had been a major crash on the M25 which had blocked roads in all directions for most of the day. I was therefore asked if I could deal with the interview on Skype. I said I was happy to give it a try and the results of the interview you can watch on the link below.
One comment I have already had is my office is obviously rather messy! However some people think I at least got over a good point about the importance of tackling political correctness head on.
What do you think?
Here is the link >>> http://youtu.be/L89xfCGQoXw
Is the British Education Establishment conspiring to indoctrinate pro-immigration, multi-culturalist values into English children?
I have posed the above title for this article as a question, but I think that once the question is asked the article answers the question affirmatively. As the English legal profession would have responded to such a question for centuries with the Latin phrase:- “res ipsa loquitur” – the thing speaks for itself!
What do you think?
Here is the article:-
Pupils to learn about immigration in new history GCSE
The OCR exam board unveils plans for a new history GCSE that will include a module on 2,000 years of immigration, from the Romans up to 21st century arrivals from Syria
Teenagers will be able to learn about the impact of immigration on Britain over the last 2,000 years under plans for a new history GCSE, it was announced today.
For the first time, a history module will be introduced covering new arrivals to the UK from the Romans up to modern day migrants such as those from Syria and eastern Europe.
The proposals – drawn up by one of the country’s leading exam boards – will assess the reasons for immigration, the experience of new entrants and the impact on the indigenous population.
The OCR board insisted pupils would find large numbers of parallels to the modern day, saying they would be “surprised to learn” that the black population of London may have numbered up to 15,000 in the 1750s and that at least 10 languages were used across medieval England.
Under plans, “Migration into Britain” will be included as part of an optional extended study theme, which will make up around 20 per cent of a new GCSE course being introduced in 2016.
OCR’s GCSE in history is currently the most popular version in the country, with more than 93,000 teenagers sitting it last year, the exam board said.
It is hoped the move will “reinvigorate interest in GCSE history” following claims from historical experts that rising numbers of schools were barring pupils from taking the subject beyond the age of 14.
The move is made as immigration continues to dominate the political agenda in the run up to the election. Last week, David Cameron promised the introduction of tough new rules on access to welfare benefits for migrants entering Britain from the EU.
But the government has insisted that the number of pupils sitting GCSEs in history had increased in recent years, with almost four-in-10 teenagers taking an exam in the subject in 2014.
Mike Goddard, the exam board’s head of history, said: “Migration is an ideal history topic for GCSE students to study, allowing them to consider fundamental historical concepts such as continuity, change and significance, rooted in the major events of England’s history.
“Doing this through the lens of the movement of diverse groups of people has the added benefit of contemporary relevance and will make for a rigorous, stimulating and enjoyable course.”
He said it would require pupils to explore and understand “the constant shifts in the British population”. This included the impact of invaders such as the Romans and the Vikings, the effect of the Empire on India and the West Indies and people coming to Britain to flee persecution including the Huguenots, Jews and, more recently, the Syrians.
The Government has already set out proposals to overhaul GCSEs will more rigorous subject content and a greater emphasis on exams as opposed to coursework.
Under the changes, new history exams require pupils to study a wider range of historical periods, a greater emphasis on British history and at least one extended project.
OCR is currently developing two new GCSEs in response to the reforms. One will focus on the “modern world” and the second will put more emphasis on a range of historical periods. As part of the courses, pupils will have the option of taking a dissertation-style project in the monarch, war and society or immigration.
The proposed new GCSEs will be submitted to the government next year and will be taught from 2016, subject to approval from Ofqual, the exams regulator.
Mr Goddard said: “Migration has been a constant and, in many important ways, a defining feature of our history. Tracking it thematically over time makes for a complex and fascinating study, will build on recent academic research, and will reveal many new and enlightening aspects of our past.”
Here is the link to the original>>> Pupils to learn about immigration in new history GCSE - Telegraph
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What is the British Government’s role in "Planning"?
As a practicing solicitor I am sent various legal magazines and periodicals, one of the more interesting of which is the Solicitors Journal and in the most recent edition there is the article the introduction of which appears below.
I thought it worth reproducing it because it demonstrates vividly that it is only in England now that the British Government has unfettered rights to govern the English.
In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, they have their own separate governments with an array of different powers. If we had our own government and parliament we wouldn’t have had to put up with the announcement made recently that the Government is now proposing to give "Planning" Permission to build a huge housing development under the spurious headlines of “Garden City” around the Oxfordshire market town of Bicester, concreting over and spoiling yet another part of England.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-30290505
Our lack of self-governance has real consequences for real people and for the future of our country!
The sooner we get rid of that antiquated and wasteful monstrosity known as the British Government, the better!
Here is the header of the article. What do you think?
Planning in Wales
Julian Boswall and Stephen Humphreys discuss the EIA directive and green belt policy
The launch of the Planning (Wales) Bill puts Wales on an irrevocable course towards an entirely separate planning regime akin to the system in Scotland. As part of this process, some interesting ideas are being rediscovered, varied and newly minted. The community infrastructure levy (CIL) has made the first of what is likely to be many forays into court, and those old stalwarts, green belt policy and environmental impact assessment (EIA), have also been the subjects of important decisions.
Here is the original link>>> http://www.solicitorsjournal.com/property/land/planning-wales
The British Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Honourable George Osborne MP is anti-English – shock?
The article from the Telegraph below is about the admiring reaction of one of Labour’s “thinkers”, Jon Cruddas MP, who is commenting on George Osborne’s adoption, as he sees it, of the latest version of the British Establishment’s efforts to try to break England up into “Regions”, viz “City Regions”.
For any English Nationalist, the fact that a leading “Conservative” politician would want to break England up into Regions, will cause no surprise whatsoever, after all it was the Conservatives who introduced the whole concept of regionalising England and implemented their original scheme under John Major under the EU Maastricht Treaty.
For the general public however the problem with the Conservatives is of course their “skill” in misleading the public and lying about what they are trying to achieve.
They are a party whose electoral appeal depends strongly on people’s patriotism but they are not actually a patriotic party. On the contrary, they are a party of globalisation and international capitalism and are generally the big business party.
Their vote also depends strongly on ordinary peoples’ Euro-scepticism, but in fact the Conservative leadership, whilst willing to make plenty of noises of a Euro-sceptic variety, are arguably the most Europhile of all the parties in what they actually do in office. They are a party that took us into the EU on a deliberately dishonest prospectus by Edward Heath, and thereafter cemented us into the EU both under Mrs Thatcher (one of the leaders of the pro-EU group in our 1976 referendum) and then John Major with the Maastricht Treaty.
All the noises that Cameron and Osborne make about Euro-scepticism now are for blatantly obvious reasons, a combination of increasing problems with their genuinely Euro-sceptic back-benchers and fear of the electorate now given a genuinely Euro-sceptic option, i.e. UKIP, which although seems unlikely to get many MPs, nevertheless seems very likely to cut short David Cameron’s and George Osborne’s time in office at the General Election next year.
So the problem with the Conservatives is the fact that they are much more likely to be successful in deceiving voters into thinking that they are patriotic Euro-sceptics and for those that don’t think very deeply at all they may even think that the Conservatives care something for England.
For those who are that confused the antidote is this clear statement from the then leader of the Conservative Party, William Hague (who David Cameron recently described as the greatest living Yorkshire man!). Here is what he said in 2003:- "English nationalism is the most dangerous of all forms of nationalism that can arise within the United Kingdom, because England is five-sixths of the population of the UK. Once a part of a united country or kingdom that is so predominant in size becomes nationalistic, then really the whole thing is under threat."
So far as Labour is concerned, I think increasingly few people believe that Labour is patriotic, let alone pro-English. Emily Thornberry and the overreaction to her demonstrated, for all those who needed such a demonstration, that Labour’s leadership is not only anti-English but very nervous about being found out as being anti-English and somewhat incompetent about it.
The article also shows another instance of where the “mainstream” parties in the traditional democratic model are supposed to be competing, are in fact not competing, but instead are somewhat conspiring against the interests of the public and, in particular, the English Nation.
Here is the article. What do you think?
Jon Cruddas praises Tory adoption of Labour’s cities agenda
Labour’s head of policy review says the chancellor has made successful land grab of Labour’s agenda on cities and English devolution
The chancellor, George Osborne, has made a significant and successful land grab for Labour’s agenda of re-empowering English cities as the new engine of economic growth, the head of Labour policy review, Jon Cruddas, has admitted.
He has also conceded that Labour had probably not been as agile as its Conservative opponents in projecting its English devolution policy, adding that the party still faced its biggest challenge to build a movement for national renewal and optimism in a cold economic climate.
His remarks to a meeting held by Progress, the New Labour pressure group, in Westminster may reflect a frustration that one of the central themes of his policy review has not been given the prominence he wanted, allowing Osborne to reach a devolution deal with Labour northern cities, notably Manchester.
At one point in the summer it appeared Labour might have monopoly ownership of the English devolution agenda, especially after similar plans put forward by the former Conservative cabinet member, Lord Heseltine, had apparently been spurned by Downing Street.
Cruddas said: “On this I have been very impressed with what Osborne has done. They parked the Heseltine project for a couple of years. Then they realised from late July what was happening and for the last few months they have tried to backfill around this policy agenda, and I think they have done that very effectively. Personally, I think it is good for the country that the Conservative government is going there just as Labour is going there.”
He explained that Labour had spent two years re-engineering a growth strategy and solving the English democracy question through devolution to cities. “Osborne has been agile enough to see that and has made a major land grab about a lot of our policy. The question of England has been central to a lot of our thinking in our policy review and maybe we have not been as agile as our some of our opponents in putting that up in lights in the way that we should.”
He said the model of devolution to Greater Manchester was very attractive. He added: “I congratulate the government on what they have done, and, most important, I congratulate them on learning about the innovations of great Labour leaders – we should be speaking very confidently to that agenda because it is our agenda. It resets what we are about.”
He said Labour-led English local government in the past four years had saved lots of money and yet innovated the delivery of public services, claiming this represents a new model for social democracy. “Labour nationally should be incubating the best practices in English local government and distilling it into a new story of where the future of the country lies.
“Osborne was very successful in the past three months in grabbing hold of this agenda and our response should be we welcome this change in direction and working alongside this Labour innovation across our cities.”
Cruddas has also become an enthusiast for the way in which technology can empower citizens and innovate public services. He also praised another Conservative figure, singling out cabinet office minister Francis Maude, saying: “I must admit Maude has done a great job for the first couple of years in his department re-engineering government digital services.” He said the issue was how to take Maude’s reforms to the next stage using open data to codify new forms of citizenship as “the foundation stone of a new wave of radical public service reform”.
Discussing the politics of despair represented by Ukip, Cruddas said: “You have to confront it by a totally different story about national renewal of a country, especially in England. That is the only option available to us. It has to be based around a story about what this country could be rather than what it was in danger of becoming if these forces are incentivised by people running from them.”
Cruddas also aligned himself with those who favoured a bold manifesto offering a big picture of a new country, rejecting those who say “keep our mouths shut, turn up the dial on immigration and welfare and then we are in”.
Any cursory reading of Labour history is that it wins when it is bold, he added, claiming “we are in an epic era of change”.
He added: “My view is that you cannot waste opposition. It’s disrespectful to the electorate.”
Here is the link to the original Guardian article>>> Jon Cruddas praises Tory adoption of Labour’s cities agenda | Politics | The Guardian
Cabinet Office – A paradigm of the current British Government
I recently went to an election planning meeting at the Cabinet Office, No. 70 Whitehall, which, as you see from the picture, has a grand classical frontage onto what is after all one of the grandest streets anywhere in the world. Once you get to the doorway you are quickly struck by what a sham the façade is. You are greeted by security people who, with their high vis jackets and scruffy dark uniforms, look no smarter than municipal car park attendants.
Once into the building you discover that the original interior has been largely gutted and replaced, clearly at vast expense, with modern office accommodation, but laid out like a maze with even bridges going over the roof of old buildings, with courtyards enclosed and roofed over with bomb proof glass. So just like our whole government system we have a glorious façade and inside we have a highly expensive muddle of meeting rooms, committees, offices, corridor and lifts, none of which are coherently planned or even efficient. Both with the Cabinet Office building and with Government generally we have neither the grandeur of the original interior of the building, nor the efficiency of a wholly new structure.
During the course of our meeting to discuss election planning for the coming General Election, one party’s delegate pointed out that many returning officers were breaking the law in the way they compile the electoral roll. which is part of the muddle of an electoral system that we have got, where there is no-one overall in charge and the returning officers are often able to get away with their own illegal practices, which particularly matters when the returning officers are partisan like in many of the Labour one party state areas of the country.
In response to this I suggested that the Cabinet Office might wish to “fire a shot across their bows”. The remark was met with hushed shock that government would show any such firmness of action. The senior civil servant present said “No they would only be politely reminded of their legal duty”!
The façade of the building which is a remnant of the days of Empire is wholly at variance with the thinking of those that work in the building!
The senior civil servant concerned also certainly did not match the public’s outdated view of what a senior civil servant looks like. Not at all Sir Humphrey, but indeed a somewhat unkempt beard and hair, scruffy un-ironed shirt with shirt neck button undone, sleeves casually half rolled up and tie askew. But there we all were in a room overlooking our greatest imperial era parade ground at Horse Guards!
What do you think?
Proof of media collusion at the heart of the British political Establishment
When Peter Oborne came up with the concept of Britain not so much having a competitive political and media Establishment but rather a collusive political and media Class, who work together, have similar interests, go to the same schools or universities, marry each other’s relatives, and generally represent a group whose interests are often starkly against the interests of the majority of people in the country, he could hardly have expected a clearer proof than the gloating article written by the Telegraph’s, Alan Cochrane, which I reproduce below.
If only Alan Cochrane and the British Political and Media Establishment could be charged in a criminal court with conspiracy against the People, then it is no exaggeration to say that Alan Cochrane’s article (if it came with the required 'Statement of Truth' and his signature) would amount to confession evidence!
What it shows, all too clearly, is that far from having an independent media with genuine professional standards of reporting the facts without fear or favour, instead what we have is a media that actively seeks to be propagandist for the British Establishment. Looked at this way, Alan Cochrane’s article is a searing indictment of the gross lack of professionalism at the heart of the British media, whose principal interest is in manipulating the electorate into voting for whatever the Establishment wants, rather than what is good for the People.
For all those of us that read newspapers or look any other mass media productions, whether it be radio or television, from the established media, it is a salutary lesson that we are probably giving undeserved attention to people whose object is too often to manipulate and deceive us into voting for whatever their agenda is, rather than making any serious attempt to tell the unvarnished truth so that we can make up our own minds!
There can be no clearer evidence of the corruption at the heart of the British Establishment except that is a contemplation of the evidence which was given in the Leveson enquiry. The most important aspect of which was many further examples of just how incestuous the relationship is between senior British politicians and the British media.
Here is the article:-
Alan Cochrane: my part in Alex Salmond's downfall
The two-year battle to prevent the United Kingdom’s break-up was at times bitterly fought, and – as these extracts from his candid Scottish referendum campaign diary reveal – The Telegraph’s Alan Cochrane was right in the thick of it
February 4 2012: The search for a leader of the ‘No’ campaign begins
I eventually got through to John Reid, the former Labour home secretary. It took umpteen phone conversations with his secretary and with the noble lord himself before he agreed to meet me. JR – they really are appropriate initials for the great man – took me to the Pugin Room in the Lords, where we had tea. He doesn’t drink now. He’s very funny about his drinking days.
When asked whether he had a drink problem, he always says: “Aye, my problem was I couldn’t get enough of the f------ stuff!”
I tried to interest him in taking over the anti-Nationalist campaign, but right from the start he said he wasn’t interested, wasn’t the right man and wouldn’t do it, no matter who asked him. He suggested all sorts of people who would be better than him, former chancellor Alistair Darling and Jim Murphy, Labour MP for East Renfrewshire, being the two most often mentioned.
His initial reluctance, he says, is because he’s still chairman of Celtic, which he’s due to be for another six months or so. And he doesn’t have to explain why that would stop him being a unifying figure in a campaign to save Britain.
Half of West Central Scotland, the Rangers half, would say: “We’re no’ listening to a bloody Tim like John Reid.”
David Cameron knows he has to keep Ed Miliband on side in the fight for the Union because it will be Scottish Labour’s foot soldiers who will have to do most of the work.
So if Cameron recruits Reid, he risks losing – or at least annoying – Miliband. Jesus, talk about wheels within wheels. I think it’s worth the risk as Reid would be great at tackling Eck’s bombast Alex Salmond’s nickname is “Wee Eck”]. But I think I’m going to lose this one.
February 14 2012
After months of b-----ing about over whether I should be working for DC as a special adviser and then nothing happening, I told them at Christmas that I’d rather forget it, if they don’t mind, as I want to get on with the rest of my life.
I don’t like people describing me as a Tory, as I’ve hardly ever voted for them, but I like Cameron, and I’d have worked for him on fighting independence. Still, I’m probably better where I am.
So it was a bit of a surprise when, out of the blue, I got an email from Julian Glover, the new speechwriter at No 10, telling me that the PM had said I should be shown a copy of his speech due to be delivered in Edinburgh on Wednesday. I made a couple of minor suggestions: one was not to compare Scotland to Latvia, as this would annoy the natives; and that his offer to think about more powers if the Scots voted against independence would be the story. And so it proved.
Bigger surprise later, when I was asked whether I could have dinner with the PM at the Peat Inn in Fife. Oh, very well, I said. As if!
DC came in an open-necked shirt, with a sweater around his shoulders. The rest of us were in suits. Very relaxed. Moderately priced burgundy. “We can’t spend too much taxpayers’ money,” he said.
Kept asking things like: “If I say X, what will Salmond say to that?” And made clear that while he might be able to do a deal on timing or on teenagers voting, there was no way – absolutely no way – that he would agree to a second question.
If it came to it, DC said he had his final option of Westminster holding the referendum. “Let him boycott it,” he said.
He also asked what Salmond’s final position would be, and was told by Andrew Dunlop [Cameron’s special adviser] that it would be to hold an illegal referendum and tell the PM: “I’ll see you in court.”
DC loved my line about my son and daughters, and how I don’t want them to be foreigners to each other just because some live in Scotland and some in England. Everyone likes it – German newspapers, French TV. The Nats hate it, so it must be good.
When we meet at breakfast the next morning, DC says he might use it in his speech. He had been for a run with the cops. Looks fit, not tired at all. I gave him a spare Caledonian Club tie, which looks very like the SNP one, and he says he’ll wear it next time he’s up.
The night before, as we ate venison, DC moaned about the fact that he couldn’t go deer stalking any more. I suppose he doesn’t want to hark back to the grouse-moor-image days of Harold Macmillan, or to be seen out with a rifle. But apparently he’s a very good shot: the journalist Bruce Anderson was with him once when he got a left and a right.
DC says that recently he fancied a bit of shooting, so took his 12-bore out into a wood near his home and bagged a couple of pigeons. It must have been quite a sight – the wood had to be surrounded by coppers with guns. Whether that was to protect the ramblers from the PM or the PM from the ramblers wasn’t clear. Anyway, he misses shooting/killing things. It’s changed days if a council hoose lad like me can go deer-stalking but the Old Etonian PM can’t!
May 25 2012: The ‘Yes’ launch
What a load of tartan cobblers that Yes launch was – 500 people talking and singing to themselves. Nothing coherent, just this nonsense about freedom! And, Jesus, Brian Cox [the Scottish actor] ain’t going to convert anyone. He was positively scary. Hannibal Lecter has nothing on him.
June 6 2012
Had lunch with Alistair Darling in Centotre [an Italian restaurant in Edinburgh]. First class, but very fiery spicy sausages. Now confirmed as the Better Together leader, he is in good heart and confident of seeing off Eck.
Got the impression that the Union launch won’t now be until the end of June. But he agrees that the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee has done us a whole lot of good. He cannot see much light ahead and bad economic news must mean – surely – that voters will stick with the UK.
June 25 2012
The Save the Union campaign – “Better Together” – launched at Edinburgh Napier University, where Eck used to stage his spectaculars. But this time there were no free bacon rolls.
It was quite a good launch; they had ordinary people instead of phoney celebs. But Charlie Kennedy, the former Liberal Democrat leader, didn’t show – said his parents are ill. Charlie is a brilliant performer and campaigner but he is totally unreliable. They’ll have to ditch him.
January 17 2013
Astonishing lunch invitation from Rory Bremner, the impressionist/comedian. He’s planning a show about Scottish politics. Boy, that is going to be difficult. Tapas lunch to talk Scottish politics.
The problem Rory has is that there’s only one personality: Eck. He didn’t appear to “have” him yet, as he didn’t “do” him during lunch, although he kept doing Blair, which is really brilliant. He said that before he’d done Blair for the first time, Blair had joked that he could have a knighthood if he didn’t do him, and then after he did do him for the first time, he was offered an OBE, which he turned down.
March 14 2013
Did another session with Rory Bremner, who’s still having a go at Scottish politics. He talked in a funny voice for several minutes and I hadn’t a clue who it was. Apparently, it was Alex Salmond; I’d never have guessed.
October 21 2013
Had a long chat with Darling, who is a bit less than confident. “I’ve always thought it would be a close result,” he says. “Maybe 60/40.” How do we galvanise our bloody support? I’m sure people would visibly support the cause if we gave them the opportunity. What about car and window stickers?
March 24 2014
Polls all over the place. ICM says Nats catching up, TNS says “no, they’re not”, and then YouGov says “well, yes, they might be”. However, the latter is still suggesting it’s 60/40 against independence. Big “Don’t knows”, but I think I can guess what’s happening. People don’t want to appear to be anti-Scottish, so may be saying either they’re voting Yes or that they don’t know. I reckon they’ll mostly vote No in big numbers. Christ, I hope I’m right!
April 15 2014
Incredible day. That complete idiot Philip Hammond gave an interview in which he said that everything was negotiable after independence, which means – as the Nats seized on – that sterling and Trident could be on the table. Stupid, stupid man.
Darling manages to have a laugh and says if the Tories behave like this during next year’s election, Labour will walk it. I think he’s right and I also think he may well fancy his chances a bit more of a new career with Labour.
May 5 2014
Amazing email from some young lad who says he works for Gordon Brown, who, apparently, has read Yes or No? [Cochrane and George Kerevan’s book on Scottish independence], likes it and wants to meet. Of course, I say I will, but then I wake up in the middle of the night thinking that maybe this is a hoax.
May 13 2014
Got another email from the Great Broon’s laddie, and I’m meeting Broon at the Sheraton. What’s this all about? He must want something.
May 14 2014
Astonishing meeting with Gordon Brown. He was sitting alone, except for his two protection officers, in that vast Sheraton lounge. They moved to the next table when I turned up, leaving Gordon to talk to me alone. He’s actually read my bit of the book and cross-questioned me carefully about my background, slagged off poor old Kerevan for being a Trot, and interrogated me about my family, especially the girls.
He said he’d been offered a place at Oxford but chose to go to Edinburgh. “I wish now that I had gone. I think I missed something by not going.” I said he hadn’t done badly, PM and all.
His main theme was essentially that the Better Together team, and especially the Tories, were pitching the campaign as Scotland versus Britain, which he, rightly, says is wrong. It should be that Scotland will be better if it remains within the UK. Osborne and Cameron etc were wrong – totally wrong – in their approach. Basically, he thinks everyone is wrong except him.
May 15 2014
Through to Glasgow for drinks with DC. He was in sparkling form, although he looked a bit knackered. He came into the room and immediately took off his tie. He looked slim and fit and held court with the Scottish editors brilliantly. Lots of jokes about the Cup Final, which somebody had told him was between Dundee United and St Johnstone.
He thinks the referendum campaign is going OK, but that Eck is more interested in process than in debating the issues. He said he wanted the debate only because it would be against an English Tory; I said he could forget about the Tory bit, as it was only the English bit that Alex wanted to highlight.
He was very preoccupied with giving Holyrood more powers. I said he was pre-empting Tom Strathclyde’s commission, which he denied, and went on to say – incredibly, to my mind – that there was nothing wrong with different tax rates in the different parts of the UK.
Eh? Did I hear right?
He made a very good joke about Salmond and Nigel Farage. Someone asked him whom he disliked most – Salmond or Farage. And he got on to thinking about both of them standing on the cliff edge at Beachy Head. Who would he push off first?
“Oh, Salmond,” he said with a grin. “Business before pleasure.”
May 21 2014
Dinner with the Darlings, and what a feast. Maggie is a great cook – fish lasagne preceded by the kind of duck/pancake dish that you normally only get in Chinese restaurants. Great craic, too.
I told Alistair all about the Brown encounter. His most prominent reaction was to shake his head in bemusement and wonder at the rubbish Brown talked.
He was also very funny about his conversations with Gordon. Broon would castigate him about something that had been said in his book, to which Alistair would say: “But Gordon, you always say you haven’t read my book!”
And Gordon always says he never reads the newspapers and yet he can quote whole pages back to you.
Both were very sad about Gordon. Not just the Darlings, but many of Brown’s friends and former friends are worried about him, stuck in that house in North Queensferry all week with the boys, while his wife is in London.
June 6 2014
Lunch with John Reid in Glasgow. He insisted on curry at the Koh-i-Noor. Delicious, but I can’t eat curry at this time of day. Great craic, much of it slagging off Broon.
John Reid told me that he once pushed Brown up against the wall in the Members’ Lobby, when they were both in the Cabinet, and threatened to punch him unless he stopped seeing conspiracies everywhere. Wish I’d been there to see it.
What I didn’t know is that, according to John, Brown begged him to stay in his Cabinet when he took over from Blair. No way, said Reid. But he does admit that Brown can be a brilliantly successful player in this campaign.
August 6 2014
the first television debate
Who would really have thought it? Darling smashed Eck in the first debate last night.
Everyone on the Nats’ side, including that eejit Blair Jenkins, supposed boss of the Yes campaign, had been crowing about how much of a hammering Darling was going to get. I wasn’t especially worried as these debates never add much to the sum of human knowledge or affect the result much. But I texted a “break a leg” message to Alistair all the same.
However, it wasn’t needed. Salmond was hopeless. It looked like he hadn’t done any preparation at all and got absolutely skewered on the pound, which Darling returned to again and again.
Darling’s best moment – and the one that had the overconfident Salmond stuck for an answer – came when he asked his opponent to “contemplate for one moment that you might be wrong”. Of course, Alex Salmond never believes he’s wrong – so he was stumped.
The Nats are shell-shocked this morning. Their hero has been hammered. Is this their worst moment? I bloody well hope so. BT have got to get cracking now and keep up the pressure.
August 25 2014: the second television debate
Disaster! Darling hammered. The whole thing was terrible. It was pretty clear that the Better Together side were playing for a draw and, as Alex Ferguson would have told them, if you play for a draw, you get a hiding.
I texted Darling beforehand but my “break a leg” message didn’t seem to encourage him. The BBC b-----ed up the thing in spades.
For starters, Glasgow’s Kelvingrove gallery was much too grand a venue, and instead of having Glenn Campbell, the moderator, between the two contestants, they made him stand to one side. Stupid. The upshot was that he couldn’t hear – or at least didn’t seem to be able to hear – what Salmond and Darling were shouting at each other. Worst of all, it will put new heart into the Nats.
Afterwards, I tried to gee him up, but Alistair simply replied to my text with the understatement: “Audience two-thirds Nat.”
September 8 2014: 10 days before the vote
I got a call from Bruce Waddell, a former editor who now appears to be Broon’s apostle on Earth. (Who’s paying him, I wonder?) He says that the great man wants to talk to me and that I could expect a phone call within 10 minutes.
Sure enough, almost on the dot of 10 minutes later, Gordon comes on the line, in fairly friendly tones, to give me a précis of the speech he’s due to make. However, that’s not before he gives me a b------ing.
“The last time we talked, you didn’t seem to accept what I said. I hope you will this time, because your views carry a lot of weight with the other political journalists in Scotland.”
Gosh, why is Gordon being so nice? He proceeded to tell me – or, rather, repeat – his view that Cameron and Osborne had been presenting the campaign as something akin to Scotland versus Britain, instead of the two visions of Scotland. “It has been absolutely central to what’s been going on here that we [Labour] have got to have a vision of Scotland’s future,” he said.
“Although the campaign on the pound has worked over the summer, we don’t want to always be relying on the negative. We have to make our country feel proud.”
Brown then told me about the blueprint he was to announce later – a firm timetable for the new powers for Holyrood, with work beginning immediately after the vote, on September 19, then preliminary agreement by St Andrew’s Day on November 30, and draft legislation ready by January 25 2015.
These dates will p--- off Eck mightily but are a great gimmick by GB; only he could have thought of them. But more importantly, only he could have delivered this promise and got people to believe that something was in the offing.
September 14 2014: 4 days before the vote
Brilliant, brilliant story. The Queen, after the weekly service at Crathie Kirk, walked over to some well-wishers and told them that she hoped everyone “would think very carefully about the referendum”.
But that was only half the story. This was a completely deliberate and put-up job by the Palace.
My old pal Jim Lawson was the only reporter outside Crathie Kirk when the royal party came out, and, as usual, he and the photographers were corralled some way away from Her Majesty and the usual crowd of royalists who gather there every Sunday. But on this occasion, the police were told that the press – Jim and the snappers – could go over to where they could hear what was going on, and that’s how the story about the Queen’s remarks got out.
It was a bit of a coup for the Palace and the Queen herself. There is absolutely no doubt that she did it deliberately; and knew exactly what the effect would be – it was the splash everywhere. Fantastic.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she was provoked into it by Salmond saying last week, when there was a bit of a stooshie about whether she should speak her mind on the issue or not, that he thought she would be “proud to be Queen of Scots”. That implied some sort of support for independence.
A very bad move by Our Great Leader, and one that must have convinced Her Majesty to speak out.
After the referendum
By any standards, it was a pretty conclusive result. Astonishingly, however, the weeks following the referendum have been dominated not so much by a “we wuz robbed” feeling among Nationalists – that was always likely – but by a sense almost of guilt among the Unionist community that they’d won.
At the root of this strange phenomenon was the Vow: a piece of brilliant tabloid journalism in which the leaders of the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties promised “extensive” extra powers for the Holyrood Parliament.
It has since been transformed in the public mind into something resembling Magna Carta. Talked of in hushed tones, it is normally now referred to as “the solemn Vow” which must be honoured, and which Nationalists insist pledges so much devolution as to make it indistinguishable from “pure” independence.
If Alistair Darling was the overall star of the marathon campaign, the man who won most of the plaudits for the sprint in the final weeks was undoubtedly Gordon Brown. No team player he, the Great Clunking Fist showed, with remarkable displays of passion and emotion, that he can remain a tremendously influential figure on the British political scene.
I’m delighted that separation was comprehensively defeated and that my family and I are to be allowed to remain British. That, for me, was what this battle has been all about. It wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about journalism. It was about who I am.
Here is the original article >>> Alan Cochrane: my part in Alex Salmond's downfall - Telegraph
Scottish Nationalists to make play for Berwick
The English town of Berwick on Tweed looks set to be a battle between three contending national identities in the General Election. The Scottish Nationalists have indicated that they are considering putting up a candidate for Berwick on Tweed, calling for Berwick on Tweed to “come back” to Scotland. The British Establishment parties will, of course, be putting up candidates to take the seat from the Liberal Democrats on the retirement of their sitting MP, Alan Beith. The English Democrats will also be standing in Berwick on Tweed to campaign to keep Berwick part of England.
Berwick on Tweed was originally an Anglo-Saxon foundation back in the 6th Century as part of the Kingdom of Northumbria, before the Scots even arrived in Scotland from Ireland.
In the late Dark Ages/early Medieval period Berwick on Tweed did change hands several times with the fluctuations of the fortunes of Northumbria, but by English Unity Day on the 12th July 927, Berwick on Tweed was firmly part of England, only to be sold to the Scottish King by Richard I (Coeur de Lion), as part of his fund-raising efforts to raise money to go on crusade. (This is the King who is purported to have said that he would sell London if he could find a buyer).
The next legal change occurred following the Scottish opportunist invasion to loot, rape and burn their way across Northern England when the young Edward III overthrew his mother’s lover, Mortimer, thinking that a teenage king would be unable to respond effectively. How wrong they were was proved at the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1333, in which the Scots suffered a catastrophic defeat. As part of the peace terms they agreed to hand back the legal title to Berwick on Tweed.
Since that time Scottish armies have occupied Berwick from time to time but never with a legal title. The last occasion being in1482, a little before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas!
It will therefore amuse any impartial observer that Scottish Nationalists would talk about getting Berwick back, when the last time they had any proper title to it was 1333 and the last time they even occupied it was before Europeans had even discovered that there was the continent of the Americas and well before most of the current Nation States of Europe were even thought of!
The strategic importance of Berwick however lies in the effect of North Sea oil and fishing. If the UK does break up and Scotland and England become separate Nation States, then control of Berwick will be of great importance. If Berwick is English, to work out the sea boundary between England and Scotland you will follow the average of the national land boundary, which broadly speaking would mean placing a ruler on Carlisle and Berwick and drawing 200 miles out to sea - all south of that line being English. If you do the exercise you will see that that means that a substantial proportion of North Sea oil and fishing is not Scottish at all, but is English. In fact it goes further than that because the usual international legal convention on deciding the sea boundary is also to follow the geological features which probably places more than half of North Sea oil in English waters and also places nearly all the gas in English waters.
Even ignoring such a strategic point about the position of Berwick, as an English nationalist I would not be willing to see Berwick become part of Scotland without the opportunity to campaign hard to persuade the people of Berwick on Tweed and the whole constituency to remain true to England. Let them sing Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore, Boatswain that “in spite of all temptation to belong to other nations, I remain an Englishman!
Below is the article from the Scottish newspaper, The Herald, about the SNPs intentions. What do you think?
We shall be calling for funds so that we can make as bigger splash in campaigning in Berwick as possible! Will you help?
Here is the article:-
SNP could stand for Berwick seat in UK elections
The SNP could stand for Berwick in the UK general elections this May, in a bold but very smart move to gain a spot in the UK-wide television debates.
Christine Grahame, MSP for Midlothian South, Tweeddale and Lauderdale, has offered to stand for the English seat. She says broadcasters have no plans to include the SNP leadership in any UK-wide debates to be screened in the run-up to May due to their presence being confined to Scotland, but a move to stand in an English seat would automatically provide the party with an ‘across the UK-presence’.
Ms Grahame’s proposal would mean that the SNP could claim to be standing right across the UK because it would have candidates in England as well as Scotland. Ms Grahame believes that would justify a place on the national stage for new SNP leader Nicola Sturgeon when it comes to pre-election leader debates.
Berwick has long been a divisive territory for the Kingdoms of Scotland and England in a historical sense, however more recently, the people of Berwick have become increasingly envious of SNP policies just a few minutes drive over the border including free prescriptions, higher education and travel for the elderly.
Any contest from the SNP for the seat would be seen as a direct attack on the UK establishment and could confidently succeed as many residents of the English constituency could use an SNP vote to voice their discontent with the UK government and may well see it as an avenue from which to introduce fairer local policies and raise issues which matter most to them, being just across the border from Scotland.
Ms Grahame said: “I have offered to stand in Berwick as a candidate so we can get equal coverage on the television because we fight throughout the UK.
“I can still keep my seat in the Scottish Parliament but then they would have to say we stand all over the UK, we should have all our leaders in these debates.”
And this isn’t the first time English-born Ms Grahame has set her sights on Berwick, where she took part in the independence referendum debate in September.
Speaking at the BBC’s pre Scottish referendum ‘Scotland and Us’ debate at Berwick’s Maltings Theatre, she told the audience that Scotland breaking away from England would be good for the area and would stimulate the case for devolution of powers to the north of England.
And in the run up to the 2008 general election she lodged a motion in the Scottish Parliament calling for the town to “return to the fold”.
Standing in bordering English constituencies would certainly frighten the Westminster political elite and would give the SNP a greater chance at strengthening their presence in the UK Parliament.
Border constituencies may be more likely to vote for the SNP as an alternative to the mainstream parties in England, especially with the prospect of a strong SNP contingent at Westminster which would wield greater power and sway over issues affecting those constituencies.”
Click here for the original >>>
http://scottishstatesman.com/snp-could-stand-for-berwick-seat-in-uk-elections/
