AS a regular reader of The Guardian and the New European, as well as The National, I’ve been struck by a smattering of articles over the last few weeks about restructuring the UK’s political system, particularly Gordon Brown in the Guardian on October 18 and Andrew Adonis on the creation of a federal UK in issue 220 of The New European.
I grew up in the north-west of England and from my earliest political awakening in my late teens I shared Adonis’s vision of a fair and federal UK, with the important proviso that it must use proportional representation.
Needless to say, the London-centric political establishment had no interest in such a model then, and I haven’t seen any evidence of interest from any UK party in the 30-odd years of my adult life, most of which I’ve spent in Scotland.
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I suspect the Damascene conversion of the “big beasts” has come too late for Scotland to regard the concept with anything other than the deepest suspicion: another commitment that would be shrugged off, in the same way as “The Vow”, the moment independence was off the agenda.
Ironically, I believe that a Yes vote for independence will be the catalyst for a London-based political class to take seriously the need for a complete overhaul of the political landscape for the countries remaining in the UK, hopefully ushering in the kind of federal democracy I had dreamed of in my youth. A win-win situation indeed!
Wendy Graham
Aberfeldy
HAVING watched (endured more like) a TV interview with Douglas Ross, and read some of the mince he spouts in the press, I formed the opinion he is a lying, oleaginous wee toady.
I then read Boris Johnson’s statement that Ross is the “very personification of Unionism” (Tory attempts to block indyref2 are ‘doomed to fail’, November 21).
Spot on, I’d say.
Malcolm Cordell
Dundee
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