Well, they think it’s all over; but it has just began. All party leaders have been damaged by this. Cameron is accused by the usual suspects of selling out England. Miliband of being as of much use as a cat flap in a submarine. And Salmond of conducting one of the most bad tempered and dishonest political campaigns in living memory. Only one politician crawls out of this cess pit with an enhanced reputation and that is Gordon Brown. I wish he could have been as magnificent, passionate and compelling when he was Prime Minister. The saving of the Union will be his footnote in history. And he deserves it.
But now we have to pick up the pieces. For Cameron it will be easier than Miliband whose ratings in Scotland are even lower than they are down south. There will be anger and despair that the working class vote are now deserting to the SNP. There is nothing new in this since Socialism was killed off by new Labour. But yesterday’s vote merely rubbed salt into the wound. And a new enemy was born. Not the Tories. Not the English. But that evil and mythical beast called Westminster. Westminster has caused the poverty. Westminster has wrecked the health service. Westminster is a poison that is causing the great democratic deficit that the public feel so bitter about. Listening to Salmond you could be forgiven for forgetting that he has been running Scotland for the last seven years. He has successfully created a new windmill to tilt at. But now he is at risk. The SNP adopted an iron discipline during the campaign because they thought that they were going to win. Their conference is in November. There will be one question. Is he a lame duck First Minister or a dead one?
So what is meant by the democratic deficit? I suspect that it means that some parts of the UK are better able to screw more money out of the Treasury than others. The total hypocrisy of the Lederhosen Wing of the Tory Party has amazed even me. Are they really telling us that they have just heard of the Barnett formula of redistribution of taxpayers’s money on the basis of population? The little dears have been voting in favour of it since the 1970s. The formula was no more than a clever bribe to the nationalist parties to prop up Calaghan’s minority government fiasco. It didn’t work as they predictably stabbed him in the back. Even Joel Barenett thinks that his formula Is outdated.
And Devo Max than Cameron is accused of writing on the back of a fag packet has been knocking around for years.
The sad truth is that there are a myriad of pockets of disgruntlement spread across the UK. Just about every community one hundred miles from Westminster feels that it is not getting their fare share of the cake. How on earth do we satisfy them all? The sad truth is that we can’t. The old chestnut of an English Parliament is a wonderfully warm and fuzzy idea, but that is as far as it goes. A family in Cornwall doesn’t stand shoulder to shoulder with a family in Sunderland in terms of sharing the same problems.
And it is just another talking shop, another expensive tier of bureaucracy. If politicians are the problem why create more of them? And don’t we have an English Parliament already? Out of 650 MPs only 118 aren’t English.
My only criticism of Gordon Brown is that he promised a Command Paper and legislation to deal with Devo Max by January (and there is still no agreement as what this really means). Rushed legislation is usually bad legislation. The most sensible solution is a Royal Commission. This will take time but it must address the collective whines of the UK as a whole. Self control is always more satisfying than premature ejockulation.
