Campaign for an English Parliament

Bryony Gordon has a few suggestions on how we might celebrate a British Day, one of which is this:

Find the nearest Scottish person and give him or her all of your money.

Alternatively you might like to just give them your job:

Downing Street was today forced to deny claims that Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling pressured Lloyds TSB to save Scottish jobs and limit the damage to Labour.

In a bid to head off allegations that the Prime Minister and Chancellor, both Scots, had failed to protect English jobs, No10 stated that Mr Brown had ” absolutely not” been involved in lobbying.

But suspicions of political involvement rose when Lloyds TSB explicitly mentioned in its takeover document that a priority was to safeguard jobs north of the border.

In an unprecedented move for a bank merger, the company insisted it would retain its Scottish HQ in Edinburgh, continue to print Bank of Scotland banknotes and that its “management focus is to keep jobs in Scotland”.

It would appear that for Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling the priority lies in protecting jobs in Scotland over jobs in England, particularly the West Midlands, London and Halifax.

Conservative bloggers Iain Dale, James Forsyth and Iain Martin take up the case, with Iain Martin daring to suggest that this may have something to do with the upcoming Glenrothes by-election. But will the Conservative Party take up the case and be forced into acting in the interests of England?

They may have to because The Times is onto Brown’s game:

The architects of the £12 billion rescue of HBOS were accused yesterday of playing politics with jobs after a clause was inserted into the deal that appears to protect jobs in Scotland, despite no equivalent reassurance for workers south of the Border.

And so is the Express:

GORDON Brown and Alistair Darling last night faced claims that their intervention in the banking crisis was designed to save jobs in Labour’s Scottish heartlands.

The Scottish Raj have been found out on this one.