Friday, September 19, 2014

Devo Max and the Scottish vote

The referendum is over, and the Scots decided they want to stay with the UK.

I'm glad – I think that Scotland and England (and Wales and Northern Ireland) really are "better together" as the much-maligned campaign slogan says.  The loss of that many smart people and that much land would have crippled the UK. (You can read a million analyses of the loss to NATO for example.)

The good that came out of the campaign is that the Scots have been promised Devo Max. As I've mentioned before, that's great, particularly if the rest of the provinces (read: England outside the Home Counties) are given the same powers. I know Yorkshire and Lancashire would benefit from devolution that allowed them to set income tax rates on a regional basis (among other things) and although I don't know how say, Tyne and Wear or Cornwall think, I'm betting many there feel the same.

The fact is that Westminster  is a sphere unto itself. It governs based on what the City of London (a very small part of Greater London) wants and doesn't  deign to notice what the other 60 million people of the UK want. And the voters in the UK have the choice of the Conservatives, who promise something but I'm not sure what  they speak like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoon) and Labour, who are Conservatives pretending to care about working people in order to get votes.

Yeah, I was a card-carrying Labour supporter in the eighties. Not so much now.


Looking forward to Devo Max for Yorkshire.

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