By: Alasdair Macdonald

Alasdair Macdonald — Wed, 25 May 2016 20:09:29 +0000

The first point to note about this constitutional recommendation is that it comes from the unelected House of Lords and that the Chair of the committee was rejected by the electorate, as were so many of the placement and women in the Lords.
There has to be constitutional change and it would be better if it were done in a thorough-going way with good will on all sides. The recent Scotland Act was an example of how not to proceed. A party who have a single MP in Scotland (as has been the case since 1992) overturned every amendment for party gain to produce the risible claim of the “most powerful devolved parliament in the world.” So much of it was designed to transfer responsibility, but not power. It was an exercise in scapegoating.
The Lords’ proposal is simply a ruse to transfer responsibility to the nations and the regions of England, while real power is retained at Westminster to further the aims of the financial interests of the City. This was clear from everything Mr Laing said in his interview on Radio Scotland. We have seen n in the waffle about ‘The Northern Powerhouse’. Manchester, indeed, has the potential to be a powerhouse as it was when it was the cradle of the industrial revolution, but there is not a chance that Westminster, the current government and its Blairite cronies will let that potential be fulfilled.

By: John Woods

John Woods — Wed, 25 May 2016 18:45:10 +0000

If they, the government, could achieve the simple remedy recommended above “the UK Government should be engaging with the devolved administrations across the whole breadth of government policy” they could also, perhaps do the same for the Regions of England, which are even more neglected than the devolved regions. It is a mystery to me that with a country of such potential, we allow whole regions to spend decades in decline and the government does nothing constructive about it. I do not consider George Osborne’s speech on the “Northern Powerhouse” as doing something about it.

Comments on: Report slams lack of ‘strategic thinking’ on devolution

By: Alasdair Macdonald

By: John Woods