BBC's take on Brown and New Statesman

The BBC gave a view on Brown's first statement that take sseveral angles.

Meanwhile David Murquand ran some interesting (if not wholy accurate) lines in the New Statesman (page 34) including :

"Devolution has fostered a remarkable and fundamentally healthy growth in the self confidence and sense of nationhood of the Scots and Welsh. Scotland and Wales are now distinct political communities, with real capital cities and real parliamentary assemblies, in a sense that has not been true for 300 years and has never ben true of Wales.

The revival of England's sense of nationhood is a natural respinse to these transformations. Though the metropolitan liberal intellientsia has never been comfortable with the idea, the English are a people, too. If the people of Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland are entitled to autonomy over a wide rnage of policy areas, how ca it be right to deny it to the English?"

Therein also lies any potential danger to the Barnett review that was a formula based in a single Parliamentary context.