I love England

I am a Scot. I do not hate the English, I love and admire them despite when I worked for HMG I had to put up with numerous snide remarks and bad jokes from the Oxbridge mandarins which if I had been black would have merited referral to the race relations board/tribunal or whatever.

I worked for 20 years in Liverpool, a melting pot of English, Welsh, Irish and Scots. On the bar wall of Waterloo football club which of course plays rugby there is a photgraph from just before the First World War of the first XV which included the capatains of all 4 home countries that year. It could not have happened in any other place.  Liverpool has two cathedrals built in the last 100 years and connected by Hope Street!

Liverpool has had a very bad deal from HMG littered even in the 1970s by WWII bomb damage. More memorable were the former merchant seaman who had crewed the ships that kept Britain supplied. I knew several who had been torpedoed and sunk not once but three times on the North Atlantic and a couple who had been on the Arctic convoys to Murmansk. The were incredible men who received no recognition from HMG. It might have been different if they had gone to Eton. Bomber command suffered the same fate. The memorial to their 50000+ dead is on Plymouth Hoe well out of London. They were just politically inconvenient fror Churchill after the war. At the end of the day he was just one more sordid politician who changed parties twice  - ask the Welsh miners.

The Mancs, Geordies, Yorkies and Brummies all have similar strong regional identies and have also had a poor deal from HMG post war. They deserve better and should be given a structure and powers the same as Scotland. they will run themselves far better than the Oxbridge elite we currently have. Money will stay in the region rather than being syphoned off to London.

London is currrently booming but so was Tesco five tears back. It has problems developing. The EU is clearly out to pinch a big chunk of its finanacial business and with the UK political eleite wedded to the EU they will meet little opposition to this money grab from Brussels. London also has a mega housing and immigration problem which will lead inevitably to civil unrest and destruction of property.

London is now like the American cities with fewer rich whites  in the centre as those who can, flee to the largely white suburbs.  This is not a problem in Scotland where I was impressed how well the Sikhs, Indians and Pakistanis had integrated and mixed into the community  It certainly is not a problem in Liverpool but is a problem in the English Midlands particularly in Leicester, Birmingham.the Souh Yorks Rotherham area and Rochdale in Lancashire.  I watched the clip of Sadeq Khan's Labour conference speech where he referred to the Rotheram abuse scandal but carefully avoided pointing out that most of these abusers were of Pakistani origin. This guy is the shadow justice secretary surely bad news if Labour win.

When in Scotland I was very struck by how well Pakistanis and Sikhs were integrated into the body politic. It is not the same in England where of course the problem is much bigger.

Giving more power to English regions is essential to help this integration. I hope it comes soon.