Scotland and Wales already receive over £1,600 and £1,000 per head per year more than in England and the gap is widening.  The money they get is based on population, not on need and any extra capital expenditure in England results in even more money being spent on Scotland and Wales, whether they have a need for it or not.

Exactly what, in the method of funding, is unfair to Scotland and Wales?  There is a virtually inexhaustible list of reasons why it is unfair to England which grows almost daily yet the British parties are going to be held to ransom by the Scottish and Welsh nationalists with England paying the price, as usual.

If government was devolved in England as it is in Scotland and Wales, this alliance of celtic nationalists wouldn’t be able to demand more English money in return for political co-operation.  There are no politicians fighting England’s corner, demanding fair funding for England, making demands on the British government for England’s fair share, only a cabal of British nationalist MPs who wouldn’t give a second thought to caving into the demands of the SNP and Plaid no matter what the cost to the English to ensure their party gets control of England.

We will be demanding guarantees from Labour and the Conservatives tomorrow that they will not allow the Scottish and Welsh nationalists to extract further concessions or money at England’s expense.

No Scottish stations will receive funding as it is a devolved matter and they have benefited from decades of generous funding courtesy of the English taxpayer-funded Barnett Bribe.

The list of stations makes interesting reading when you correlate it with the political make-up of the local authority involved:

Manchester Victoria – Manchester City Council – Labour controlled
Clapham Junction – Lambeth Council – Labour controlled
Crewe – Cheshire East – Conservative controlled
Barking – London Borough of Barking & Dagenham – Labour controlled
Stockport – Stockport MBC – Lib Dem controlled
Warrington – Warrington – Lib Dem controlled
Preston – Preston City Council – Conservative/Lib Dem coalition (Labour majority)
Wigan – Wigan MBC – Labour controlled
Luton – Luton North – Labour controlled
Liverpool – Liverpool City Council – Lib Dem controlled

Only one of the stations is in a Conservative controlled local authority area, 5 are in Labour controlled local authority areas and 4 in Lib Dem controlled areas.  Seven of the stations are in the north of England which is a traditional Labour voting part of the country.  Given the extreme likelihood of a hung parliament after the 2010 general election, the Lib Dems are very probably going to end up as coalition partners to either Labour or the Conservatives.  Of the two, Labour is ideologically closer to the Lib Dems than the Conservatives and are likely to be their coalition partner of choice.  It is therefore in the interests of the current rump Scottish Labour government to divert funding to high profile projects in Labour and Lib Dem controlled areas than Conservative controlled areas.

The British Labour government’s motives in this are quite clear – to try and buy favour with the Lib Dems in the hope that the Lib Dems will provide the additional MPs they will need to cling to power once they have been all but eradicated from Conservative voting England.  The Lib Dems will be too flattered to object to this blatant electioneering and David Cameron is too busy chasing Scottish votes in the vain hope the Conservatives might have at least one MP north of the border by this time next year to be concerned with what’s happening in England.

So yet again the Brit-Scot Labour government will get away with frittering away millions of pounds of English money to buy a few votes and the fact that this could have been stopped if there was a devolved English government will be completely lost on the Conservative & Unionist Party who refuse to accept that virtually nobody outside of Westminster thinks of Britain any more.  And come the next election they might just regret that.

And on this day in 2009 two articles on politics.co.uk manage to celebrate the Magna Carta without any mention of England.

• Groundswell of support for civil liberties on the anniversary of the Magna Carta
• Thank God Britain hates its government

Some parts of Britain hate our government more than others. In the Euro elections Labour secured 20.3% of the vote in Wales and 20.8% of the vote in Scotland, to make them the second most popular party in both Wales and Scotland. But in England Labour won just 15.0% of the vote and finished third behind UKIP. And even though Labour failed to win the largest number of English votes in the last general election, England is still the only part of Britain governed by Labour (except locally where we have had the opportunity to vote them out – Labour have now lost control of every county in England).

My apologies for the above graphic.

UPDATE:

YouGov data reveals that 38% of Scots believe that Gordon Brown is doing well as prime minister. This compares with 19-23% in England and Wales.

In Scotland 27% believe that “Gordon Brown’s continued presence as prime minister is damaging the country”. In England and Wales this figure ranges from 50-56%.

The Sunday Times’ headline misleadingly informs us that “Half of voters say Brown is damaging UK“.  The actual question referred to ‘the country’ not the ‘UK’.  Do Scots have a different idea of what constitutes ‘the country’; does the UK seem in better shape to them; or do they simply look more favourably on their man in Westminster?

If a British politician has ever told you that the reason that they don’t want an English parliament is because it would mean ‘an extra layer of politicians’ and ‘extra cost’, then thanks to the Telegraph, which helpfully exposes the way that the British political class has been milking the system, you might now have a better understanding of why they don’t want us to upset their Westminster gravy train.

The Telegraph has so far exposed the following politicians who are growing rich at our expense.

Douglas Alexander: spent more than £30,000 doing up his constituency home – which then suffered damage in a house fire; Margaret Beckett: £600 claim for hanging baskets and pot plants; Hazel Blears: claims for three different properties in a year; Gordon Brown: house swap let PM claim thousands; Andy Burnham: had an eight-month battle with the fees office after making a single expenses claim for more than £16,500; Alistair Darling: stamp duty paid by public; Caroline Flint: claimed £14,000 for fees for new flat; Geoff Hoon: established a property empire worth £1.7 million after claiming taxpayer-funded expenses for at least two properties; Lord Mandelson: questions over timing of his house claim; David Miliband: spending challenged by his gardener; Paul Murphy: had a new plumbing system installed at taxpayers’ expense because the water in the old one was “too hot”; John Prescott: two lavatory seats in two years; Jack Straw: only paid half the amount of council tax that he claimed back on his parliamentary allowances over four years; Shaun Woodward: millionaire minister received £100,000 to help pay mortgage; Phil Hope spent more than £10,000 in one year refurbishing a small London flat; Keith Vaz claimed £75,500 for a second flat near Parliament even though he already lived just 12 miles from Westminster; Michael Martin used taxpayers’ money to pay for chauffeur-driven cars to his local job centre and Celtic’s football ground; Vera Baird tried to claim the cost of Christmas tree decorations; Greg Barker made a £320,000 profit selling a flat the taxpayer had helped pay for; Margaret Moran switched the address of her second home, allowing her to claim £22,500 to fix a dry rot problem; Ben Bradshaw used his allowance to pay the mortgage interest on a flat he owned jointly with his boyfriend; Phil Woolas submitted receipts including comics, nappies and women’s clothing as part of his claims; Barbara Follett used £25,000 of taxpayers’ money to pay for private security patrols at her home; Barry Gardiner made £198,500 profit from a flat funded and refurbished at taxpayers’ expense, and; Alex Salmond claimed £400 per month for food when the Commons was not even sitting.

Commit the names of these cheats and their scams to memory. As you can see, it is mostly Labour MPs who should be hanging their heads in shame. So if you are wondering why the Tories and Liberal Democrats aren’t on your television sets condemning them it is because, to use an old adage, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones; the Tories and Lib Dems come later, it is the entire British political class, with one or two exceptions, that is corrupt and on the take. Not just Labour but the entire House of Commons.

What does this mean for our campaign?

• It means that those that oppose us in favour of the Status Quo are unprincipled money-grubbers who abuse the public trust in order to feather-bed their lifestyles.

• It means that those who preach Britishness have undermined the concept through greed.

• It means that those who talk of fairness and decency and responsibility in reference to Britishness have no understanding of those values.

• It means that the guardians of British democracy have brought public contempt and ridicule upon themselves and undermined that democracy.

• It means that we must question the Establishment’s preference for England to be governed by Westminster, just as we would question the motives of anyone with a vested financial interest in maintaining a particular system.

British MPs have long acted to preserve their own interests like a privileged clique, and I think we now have a better understanding of why.   The gravy train has hit the buffers of public outrage.  I wonder just how much resistance to an English parliament was based upon the fact that they didn’t want to upset that gravy train and their lavish publicly-funded lifestyles?

In Scotland David McLetchie MSP resigned after spending £11,500 on taxis, and this after he hounded Scotland’s First Minister Henry McLeish out of office. They do things rather differently in Scotland so don’t expect Westminster’s Michael Martin, who spent four years and £100,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to keep his expenses a secret, to do the honourable thing and step down as Speaker.

You will hear little by way of apology from these people and contrition will be a rare commodity.  They were only “acting within the rules” you see. Isn’t it strange though that when Sir Fred Goodwin was ‘only acting within the rules’, by claiming the pension that he was legal entitled to, up popped Harriett Harman to announce that “It might be enforceable in a court of law this contract, but it’s not enforceable in the court of public opinion and that’s where the Government steps in.”

You can be sure that the Government won’t be stepping in to ensure that the public is reimbursed by its MPs.  It is the Government (and the opposition parties) who must now face the court of public opinion. My advice is to hang them by the neck by refusing to vote for any of the three main parties at the upcoming local and EU elections. Kick them where it hurts them most: In the ballot box.

I looked for a ‘moral compass’ on the John Lewis list.  Surprise, surprise, they don’t sell them.

Not only is it another attempt to deny England its national right, as noted by the CEP, it is also an attempt at gerrymandering, as noted by Simon Hughes in the preceding debate:

This is an important debate, which is why it is a disgrace that we have only an hour and a half for it. Many Members will not have the say that they want to have, and should have. I ask the House to accept amendments (b) and (c) to motion 4, and amendment (c) to motion 7, tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends.

The Government are in their present difficulties because they have never properly grasped the need to address devolution in England. They honourably and rightly—if eventually and under pressure—realised that devolution was necessary for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. I note that devolution to those places gave them proportional representation for their Parliaments and Assemblies, so that they are representative of the people whom they represent. London also has a degree of devolution, introduced by this Government, that is representative of the people of London and provides an element of accountability. But this Government have never understood the need for devolution in England. Until they understand that, they will not command the necessary support in this House for their proposals.

There are different views about how to achieve that devolution for England. Some of my colleagues would prefer a form of regional government, but that was tried—and clearly did not succeed—in the north-east. Some of us believe in an English Parliament, but that suggestion requires constitutional deliberation on how to complete devolution across the United Kingdom. In the absence of such structures, it is right to have a way of holding regional bodies to account, including the quangos and strategic bodies that are not held to account at present. The Government have further failed to grasp the central obligation that follows from that—that those bodies should be held to account by representatives from each region who are chosen by the people of that region.

My party would argue that those representatives should reflect the votes in those regions, but in three regions the Government came second or third in share of the vote at the last general election. Even if we do not win that argument, the Government should at least propose Select Committees that reflect the balance of political representation in each region, which differ hugely from each other. The Committees should also reflect the differences between the regions, but the Leader of the House—as she confirmed earlier in an answer to my hon. Friend Mr. Heath—has failed to accept that.

We propose that the same principle should apply that—it could be argued—currently applies to the Scottish and Welsh Committees. Scotland and Wales have a majority of Labour Members, and so do the Committees. Northern Ireland has never had the benefit of a fair system: there are nine MPs from the Democratic Unionist party and nine others, but that balance is not reflected on the Northern Ireland Affairs Committee.

It is now proposed that the Government should have a majority on the regional Committee for every one of the eight regions of England. At the last general election, the Government did not win the largest share of the vote in the east, south-east or south-west of England. Indeed, they came third in the south-east and the south-west—regions with millions of people. The Government are trying to impose their majority in all of England, when they do not have a majority in every region. Worse, they are trying to fiddle the system so that they can bus in colleagues from other regions to make up their majority. They are insisting that the Grand Committees, made up of all the Members from every party, should have up to five other nominated members. Not content with corrupting the balance on the Select Committees, the Government also want to pervert the balance of the Grand Committees. The Leader of the House must understand that that is causing the greatest offence and suggests great disrespect to the people in many of the regions, some of whom already think that their region is an artificial creation or difficult to accept. They are being told that not only do they have to accept those artificially created regions, but that they will have imposed on them a Government majority, no matter how they have voted in the past.

We will have to see whether these regional committees were imposed upon England by the actions of MPs elected outside England. Any volunteers?

The four Labour rebels were Kelvin Hopkins (Luton North), Gordon Prentice (Pendle), Dennis Skinner (Bolsover) and Graham Stringer (Manchester, Blackley).

When John MacDougal died earlier this year (following a visit by Jonah Brown, incidently) Labour had a majority of over 10,000.  Their majority has now been reduced to 6,737 with a swing to the SNP of 5%.

The Conservatives will be celebrating a glorious victory – they managed to knock the Lib Dems into fourth place which, in Scotland, is no mean feat for them.  UKIP will also be pleased that they didn’t come last.  One day both the Conservatives and UKIP will realise that Scotland votes for eurofederalist, supposedly socialist parties and concentrate on England where they actually achieve some success.

This is a thoroughly disappointing result to any right thinking person – the SNP were widely expected to overturn Labour’s majority like they have done the last couple of times and there was some speculation that El Gordo might even lose his job if Labour lost yet another by-election in their celtic heartlands.  But sadly the people of Glenrothes decided to vote for a representative of the most sleaze-ridden, corrupt and illiberal British government this country has ever known.

Thanks for nothing Glenrothes.

He went on to confirm what the CEP has been saying for years – that the extra funding given to the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish (the “celtgeld”) under Barnett Formula is not calculated according to need but is a bribe to keep them in the union:

It probably derives not from greater need but from the more credible threat to the Union of the United Kingdom that they pose

It is thanks to the £11.3bn Barnett bribe that the Scots can afford free care for the elderly, free national public transport for the elderly, free prescriptions (as of next April), increased spending on flood protection (it has been decreased again in England), free university tuition, a cure for ARMD (the most common cause of blindness in the elderly),  expensive cancer treatments and the many other social benefits that the Scots get and the English are refused.

The Scottish Raj will, of course, be reluctant to curtail the lavish redistribution of England’s wealth to the celts and equally reluctant to allow the Scots fiscal autonomy.  Gordon Brown’s generosity with English money is what has kept Labour nominally electable in Scotland and scrapping the Barnett Formula would put a stop to that.  Allowing Scotland fiscal autonomy would be equally disaterous to the Labour Party’s spin-meisters because they would no longer be able to portray themselves as Scotland’s generous benefactors.

£24m in debt, membership halved in a decade, no longer in control of Scotland and Wales and virtually unelectable in any part of England.  Who’d want to be a Labour MP?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2008/may/24/labour.crewebyelection08?gusrc=rss&feed=politics

The Guardian Saturday May 24th 2008

Andrew Sparrow

Class warrior remains unapologetic

For a man accused of running one of the most disastrous Labour byelection campaigns in recent times, Steve McCabe looked surprisingly resilient at the Crewe count early yesterday.

The former social worker has been criticised for resurrecting the class war and allegedly pandering to racism in his efforts to get Tamsin Dunwoody elected.

But McCabe said that if anyone in the Labour party had reservations about his tactics during the campaign, “they’ve not expressed them to me at all”.

He also insisted that Downing Street knew what he was doing. Though he is married to Fiona Gordon, the PM’s outgoing political secretary, McCabe, 52, is not one of Gordon Brown’s intimates and has never drawn attention to himself in parliament, but is regarded as a loyal, do-the-business whip. Born in Port Glasgow, a few miles from Brown, he made his professional and political career in the Midlands. He took Birmingham Hall Green in the 1997 landslide, the first time Labour won the seat in its 57 year-history.

McCabe said: “It seemed to me that the most obvious asset I had was a very strong candidate. I think Tamsin is the best byelection candidate I have seen for a very long time. My opponent didn’t have that. Our campaign was about saying: ‘Do you think [Timpson] is fit to be your MP?’”

We need to put a stop to this, so please, whenever you read something from the Conservatives that leaves you in any doubt as to the territory they are talking about, do something about it. Challenge them on it. As an example take the following two stories:

One in five miss out on schools

No new funding for ‘new universities’

Believe it or not the Labour Party is actually better at mentioning England than the Conservatives. However, similar opportunities are available.

No need to hassle the Lib Dems, they always state which nation their press release applies to – because unlike the Conservative Party and the Labour Party the Lib Dems have an English party and manifesto.

Applicablity: due to devolution, this item refers only to England.