SIR – How right were Keighley Conservative MP Kris Hopkins’s (pictured) concerns about the deplorable attitude of Labour over the proposed solution to the long-standing ‘West Lothian Question’.
Because with those powers to be substantially extended as a result of the ‘no’ vote for Scottish Independence, this problem needs addressing all the more urgently; as the current situation undermines the most basic democratic principle of all, for example, ‘accountability’, as no Scottish MP of any party has to answer to England’s voters.
One Scottish MP, Gordon Brown, a former Labour Prime Minister, spoke of the undesirability of two classes of MPs at Westminster. But thanks to Labour we have numerous examples of the two-class system, for example, the sick, with only English patients paying NHS prescriptions costs, or university students of which only English ones pay tuition fees, with them and much else free in Scotland but not England. What’s the difference?
I believe it incumbent on every Labour MP in Yorkshire, which has a bigger population than Scotland, to declare in public their personal attitude to only English votes for laws affecting England. The electorate wish to know this before May 2015.
D S Boyes, Upper Rodley Lane, Leeds
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