Tensions continue in UK

If English resentment is bad under Blair it will be worse with Brown as Prime Minister.

http://www.sundayherald.com/56428

So while Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell says he’s supporting any team not wearing three lions on their shirts, England’s MPs, past and present, are returning to the undercurrent of the Resentment in all its forms. Lord Barnett, Jim Callaghan’s Treasury minister, says the simplistic “Barnett Formula” wasn’t a long-term formula and that the over-subsidy of the Scots should stop to the tune of billions each year. London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone, says he too is fed up with the rich capital exporting its wealth north of the border.

But who is going to challenge this belief? Even though Brown is said to be privately sympathetic to the notion that it is London, not Scotland, which is over-subsidised, he will not risk a debate where he could be forced to take sides.

Having asked the first West Lothian Question, Tam Dalyell recently told the Sunday Herald, that even if Brown made it to Number 10, he would be the last Scot to do so. That would mean a decisive victory for this generation of English MPs, and an effective “cleansing” (however emotive that word is) of the Scots from power at Westminster.