Constitutional Law

Part of Oral Answers to Questions — Health – in the House of Commons at 2:13 pm on 15 January 2013.

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Photo of Rory Stewart Rory Stewart Conservative, Penrith and The Border 2:13, 15 January 2013

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I will accelerate towards my conclusion, which involves returning to a very good point made by the right hon. Member for Edinburgh South West.

All the issues I have raised are extremely complicated. They are issues of history, of culture and of identity. They are issues of the ways in which borders work and parliamentary institutions function. In order for people to be able to vote properly in a referendum and make that simple yes or no choice for which the SNP is pushing, the debate needs to be widened much further. More money needs to be spent, and the media need to get involved. At present the media are far too worried about not being political on one side or the other and are therefore not setting out the arguments and creating the debate powerfully enough. We need to have a proper debate because if an Englishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman together is a joke, an Englishman or a Scotsman on their own is a tragedy.