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Brexit and the COVID-19 crisis have weakened the ties between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, said former Labor Prime Minister Gordon Brown.
Unless the UK is fundamentally reformed, it could quickly become a failed state amid growing fears that the country will be ruled by a London-centric elite acting in its own interests, former Prime Minister Gordon said Brown.
“I believe the choice is now between a reformed state and a failed state,” Brown wrote in the Daily Telegraph on Sunday. “This is indeed Scotland where the discontent is so deep that it threatens the end of the UK.”
“Who in London thought about that?” is a running refrain, reflecting the frustration of people in outlying communities who feel the forgotten men and women, practically invisible to Whitehall, ”wrote Brown, who served as Labor prime minister from 2007 to 2010.
Brown said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson should reform the way the UK is governed, warning the country must “urgently rediscover what holds it together” or risk fracturing.
He called on Johnson, leader of the ruling right-wing Conservative Party, to create a commission and review how the country works.
Johnson should call “citizens’ assemblies in every region and nation so he can listen to what the public is saying,” Brown said.
He also proposed replacing the unelected upper house of the British Parliament, the House of Lords, with a “Senate of the Regions”.
“Beaten by COVID-19, threatened by nationalism and unsure of what the promise of a post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ represents, the UK urgently needs to rediscover what holds it together and sort out what that separates us, ”he wrote.
Brown’s comments come against a backdrop of growing political tensions in the UK, stirred by the challenges presented by Brexit as well as the fight to contain COVID-19, issues that have weakened the ties between the United Kingdom. England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland in $ 3. trillion savings.
A poll published in The Sunday Times suggested that 50% of Scottish voters want a second independence referendum within the next five years.
The survey found that 49% of those polled would vote in favor of separation from the UK, while 44% would reject it – the latest in a series of recent polls suggesting that a small majority now support the independence of the UK. Scotland.
In a 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, 55% of voters voted against independence in a poll billed as a once in a generation event.
Johnson has ruled out giving Scotland another public vote on the issue, but Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has said she intends to hold a “legal referendum” on UK independence if she won the Scottish elections, scheduled for May.
Sturgeon argues that Brexit transformed the situation by dragging Scotland out of the European Union against its will.
While England voted to leave the EU in a 2016 referendum, a large majority in Scotland voted to stay in the bloc.
Tension is also mounting elsewhere in the UK, particularly in Northern Ireland, where a majority of voters now want a referendum on whether to form a united Ireland in the next five years, according to another Sunday Times poll.
The political turmoil comes as the UK quickly approaches 100,000 coronavirus deaths, marking the worst toll in Europe and the fifth in the world.
Johnson’s government has been criticized several times for its handling of the pandemic. Critics accused officials of not acting quickly enough to reduce infection rates at various stages of the crisis.
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