Yes a certain G Brown is moving house from number 11 to number 10. Surely he could have stayed put and let someone else move into number 10 you'd have thought. Is the view from the bedroom window that much better?
Well I jest, but only slightly. I have mocked, along with manyothers, Mr Brown's committment to "Britishness" by calling him a "jelly bellied flag flapper" because we can see that it is little different to TEBAF Margot's committment to Europhilia (i.e. that is is mostly an attachment to something who pays him and lets him prance around as a leader on a global stage). But this is serious. Mr Brown is inheriting a government that is unpopular with the population (not unusual) and one that has managed to create widespread ethnic tensions between groups of the population where there were none (or very few) before.
The English are, as Magnus Linklater discusses today, unhappy with the present state of affairs and the perceived featherbedding of the Scotch at the expense of the Sassenachs. Now Mr L has a fair point that English nationalists are guilty of exaggerating the offenses but they are ably aided in this by the ZANU labour government and its attacks on the wealth of SE England and the antics of many of the politicians north of the border who seem only too keen to leave the UK. Unfortunately for any hopes of a continued UK, Mr Brown seems to epitomize the Scottish Raj and its ZANU labour carpet-baggers.
The problem is not solely a British one, the richer parts of Belgium, Italy, Spain and possibly other European nations are just as hacked off with the perceived welfare skivers in the poorer parts of their nations too. The difference, it seems to me, is that the Scottish/English divide was limited 10 years ago and it has now become a huge split with plenty of people on both sides willing to cut yet further links. It seems to me that the blame for this can probably be laid at the door of Mr Brown and his fellow Scotch Labour party MPs: Firstly by the disproportionately scottish tint to the UK government and secondly by granting autonomy ot Scotland and Wales without clearly creating the same thing for England. Mr Brown needs to come up with a way to counter this lest he find that at the next election the majority of England votes Tory. Wrapping himself in the flag is not sufficient, we need a public debate about possible choices and then action not empty rhetoric.
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