The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Brexit powers should go to UK’s regions: Brown
The powers of Brussels must be transferred to the UK’s regions to stop the country breaking up after Brexit, former prime minister Gordon Brown said.
The ex-Labour leader told an audience in Westminster how Boris Johnson’s slogan of “getting Brexit done” was having the impact of “leaving Britain undone”.
He said: “When you think of Brexit getting done, it is leaving Britain undone and at the same time you are destabilising the relationships between the different interests of Irishness and Britishness, and putting at risk the whole of the United Kingdom.
“The danger is we have Scotland first, England first, Wales first, and so on in the United Kingdom.”
The former chancellor added: “We have to rediscover, in my view, the value of empathy, not enmity, between nations.
“We have to rediscover the importance of cooperation and not conflict.”
Mr Brown, PM between 2007 and 2010, said one way of reversing the UK’s “overcentralised” system was not only to grant more powers to Scotland to ward off the threat of independence, but also to give greater control to English regional leaders over investment and changes in their areas.
He said he wanted to see regional citizens’ assemblies set up to examine the issues Brexit will present the country with.
“I would give it powers to look at some of the important issues that arise from Brexit,” he told those at the event organised by campaign group, Hope Not Hate.
“When you transfer powers from Brussels to Westminster, you cannot say that’s where powers should be located.
“There has to be devolution of some of these powers, otherwise Westminster and Whitehall will have even more centralisation and power than they have now.”
Mr Brown criticised the Conservative idea of moving the House of Lords out of London in a bid to connect with voters, calling it a “cosmetic” change.
Instead, he said long-term reform of the House of Lords should use his example of the regional citizen assemblies.