Any excuse to post an old pic of a lib dem photoshopped as a weasel flying away on a bird…
More UK government presence up here. Something about Scotland having two governments. Challenging the Scottish government – the one people voted for. Putting Union Jack stickers on things. A positive case for the Union.
A fresh faced, 2011, Danny Alexander was probably full of hope that these strategies would win some waverers back over to the Unionist side.
Ten years later and, though Danny Alexander works for a bank in China, having long since lost his Westminster seat to the SNP, ‘Minister for The Union’ Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are still at it, coming up with almost identical plans. It’s lazy plagiarism of something that hasn’t even worked.
From the BBC website… in 2011, it could easily be from today.
The chief secretary to the treasury has told the BBC that the UK government is not “active enough” in Scotland.
Danny Alexander said the coalition needed to “step up” its engagement and make a “positive argument” for Scotland to stay inside the UK.
The Liberal Democrat said that the UK government needed to behave like a government of Scotland.
He said it should listen more to Scottish concerns and better explain UK-wide issues.
But Mr Alexander also believed the coalition should be more willing to challenge the Scottish government on some of its decisions.
The Inverness MP said successive UK governments had been “passive recipients of complaint” from the SNP administration instead of active participants in the debate about how Scotland was run now and in the future.
He said: “I think we need to do a great deal more.
“It’s something that we have been discussing within government over the past few months – how do we step up the way in which the UK government engages with Scotland?
“I think it’s kind of accepted across the political spectrum that since devolution, when Labour was in power at Westminster and subsequently, the UK government has not engaged enough with Scotland.”
Mr Alexander added: “Scotland has two governments, and we have to behave like a government of Scotland and get out there and argue and explain what we’re doing.
“That’s what Michael Moore [the Scottish Secretary] and I have started to do over the past few weeks, and you will start to see other ministers coming and making those cases in Scotland, to Scottish people, listening to Scottish arguments and to Scottish responses to those things.”
The minister said senior ministers would spend more time in Scotland in the years before an independence referendum and were preparing to counter the nationalist case with “vigour”.
From the BBC website ten years later…
The government is setting up a new cabinet committee to focus on the union, sources have told the BBC.
The Cabinet Union Strategy Committee will be chaired by Boris Johnson and “set the government’s strategic agenda” for keeping the UK together.
The government’s strategy is focused on telling Scottish voters more about its role in Scottish life.
It wants to persuade people of the “broad shoulders of the union.”
How moribund is Unionism.
