QUOTE OF THE MONTH [bonus]

‘The Conservatives are the major party. And the Conservatives and the Liberals together have a majority in parliament. Labour and the Liberals don’t. They would therefore have to cobble together an alliance with an assortment of Scottish nationalists and people from Northern Ireland, all of whom would demand that the price of their support was that they would not get the same cuts imposed upon them as the English would. Now that would enrage the English, rightfully, even more than they would be enraged if the two losing parties decide to try and form a government.

So I think that however well meaning it is, it hasn’t been thought through and I think that from the point of view of the Labour Party, if we appear not to be accepting the decision of the electorate - we lost nearly a hundred seats, the biggest loss in our history apart from 1931 - and I think if we now decide that we’re just going to cock a snook at the electorate, or look that way, that the electorate will reap vengeance on us and we will suffer most grievously in the future.’

John Reid, being interviewed by ITN, speaking at the time about the attempt by Labour to cling onto office by forming a coalition of the losers.

The new Liberal/Tory coalition government has merely committed that they ‘will establish a commission to consider the “West Lothian Question”,’ and have positively committed themselves to the continuance of the Barnett Formula [which gives preferential subsidies to Scotland] in the short term at least.

It is not only the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland nationalists who demand that extra subsidies be paid by the English to their countries. The Liberal Democrats have always been dependent upon the Celtic fringes and are equally committed to the plundering of England. While the Tories are too decadent and gormless to stand up for the more conservative English, who are actually voting for them.

We need an English party to defend English interests.