CEP: Brown and Straw express concern over the Campaign for an English Parliament
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Friday, 26, Sep 2008 12:00
The demand for an English Parliament unnerves Brown and Straw.
‘Our campaigning for an English Parliament’, stated Mrs Scilla Cullen, chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament in her email message to the CEP membership on the occasion of the close of the Labour Party conference, ‘has forced both Gordon Brown and Jack Straw, speaking separately at meetings in Manchester, to register their concern at the way in which the case for an English Parliament is not only being taken up nationwide but is also penetrating the Parliamentary Labour Party itself. Brown has declared he will himself now speak out against it. There can hardly be stronger evidence that we are making huge inroads into the opposition we have experienced over the past ten years than Downing Street itself in the person of the Prime Minister himself coming out against us.
‘Brown’s statement at his Manchester meeting was: “There is also an English lobby for a separate English parliament. The case for the UK and the integration of it has got to be put and that’s what I intend to do over the next few months.” And in the same week at a separate meeting the Justice Secretary Jack Straw warned against what he called ‘the rising threat of an “English parliament” campaign.
‘Both Brown and Straw in their speeches argued that an English Parliament would threaten the existence of the United Kingdom. They have obviously agreed upon a joint formula of attack upon us. Their argument is nonsense of course. Nothing will better serve the unity of the UK than all three nations of this island, England, Scotland and Wales, standing in the same relationship to the Union government and to each other; and nothing has so strongly threatened the Union that the degree of home rule and the immense benefits Brown himself got for his own country of Scotland in the 1998 Devolution legislation which he was very careful to deny to England and Wales.
‘It is the best endorsement of the power of our campaigning that now Downing Street itself has in the person of the Prime Minister has decided to take us on.’
Contacts:
Mrs Scilla Cullen Chairman CEP Tel: 01438 833155
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