This is an extract from a speech delivered by Tory MP Conor Burns at a Conservative association dinner in Chris Grayling’s constituency tonight:
It would be extraordinary if I did not mention what is going on in Scotland this evening.
I represent, as self-evidently, does the Lord Chancellor beside me a constituency in England.
I have watched events in Scotland through that prism of course.
But I have also watched as a staunch Unionist. I have always given equal weight to the full title of our great Party: Conservative AND Unionist. I was born and spent the early years of my life in Northern Ireland into a Catholic family with broadly romantic nationalist sentiment. Yet I knew early in my life that I rejected nationalism and embraced Unionism.
Not for the narrow economic reasons that have been depressingly at the heart of the ‘No’ campaign in Scotland but for optimistic and patriotic reasons. The pull of the heart you might call it.
Many of us have exercised a considerable degree of restraint in recent weeks. We have not wanted to be accused of meddling in the affairs of Scotland. Now – this evening – as the votes are counted in Scotland it is time to speak.
My first question is a simple one: how on earth in defending our historic Union, in fighting to keep the United Kingdom together did we manage to find those who wished to keep the status quo as the ones arguing for a ‘No’ vote? Alex Salmond must have been unable to believe his luck at the errant genius that ceded that.
But we are where we are.
If we find that Scotland has left the UK in the event of today’s vote I say this: we must follow through on every word we said during the campaign – it is final, there will be no currency union and Scotland must take its fair share of the UK’s debt – a debt built up not least in the favourable public spending that Scotland has for so long benefited from.
If, as all the polls predicted, the vote it is to say my message is clear: now is the time for the voice of England to be heard.
I have watched with dismay and disbelief in the dying days of the campaign as the announcement came of ever more powers to be dissolved to Scotland from Westminster. A desperate aria of panic ending with a crescendo of appeasement. And with absolutely no attempt to ascertain the will of Parliament. All stitched up in behind the scenes deals. I heard echoes of William Hague’s line about Mr Blair, “We have a Prime Minister who thinks he’s a President. A Chancellor of the Exchequer who thinks he’s Prime Minister.” At least we don’t now have a Lord Chancellor, Chris, who thinks he’s Cardinal Woolsey although we do have a former Prime Minister in Mr Brown who is acting as though he were still Prime Minister.
Ladies and gentlemen I spent time on the door step in Scotland. I canvassed and I delivered leaflets. And I tell you that if I were to deliver the leaflets I was delivering north of the border in my constituency or here there would be insurrection.
The message was clear. We get free University fees. Free prescriptions. Free elderly care. We get more spent on us than in England. And the UK pays.
Now we are told that as a reward for staying that the Barnett formula that enshrines this unfairness is to stay forever when even its creator Lord Barnett says it should go.
And Scotland’s MPs are falling over themselves in the rush to defend their voting rights in the House of Commons. Quick to scold anyone from England from commenting on Scotland’s rights Douglas Alexander and Danny Alexander take to the airwaves to say devolution to the regions and cities of England is what is right for us because ‘we mustn’t have two classes of Westminster MPs’.
Well guys get this – we already do and it cannot go on.
In order for many of us to support further devolution to Scotland in the lobbies we will demand equality of fairness for England.
And the starting point, the middle point and the end point is this: no Member of Parliament from Scotland should have the right to vote on any issue affecting England when that issue is devolved to Scotland.
And that is before we even start to address the over representation of Scotland in the Commons.
If these measures are not addressed the big result of this campaign in Scotland will be the rise of English Nationalism. And the beneficiary of that will not be what the Prime Minister called the ‘effing Tories’ but UKIP. I want no part of that being our legacy.
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