While the Government has yet to table final proposals, one idea is that every person entering Great Britain would have to give one week's notice and complete a questionnaire which contained some 96 questions, before arrival.
A few years ago, however, a ranking member of the British royal family, whose members aren't supposed to get involved with politics, committed an indiscretion by telling me that he thought devolved parliaments were a terrible idea because they could break up the United Kingdom. The Welsh would stay with England, and maybe the Northern Irish, he said, but the Scots probably would not.
“I am looking at all sorts of ways which we could encourage business and it is just not sustainable to have an economy which depends on over two thirds of its GDP effectively depending on public
Douglas arrived at HQ very agitated about it. ‘I can’t believe Ed Miliband,’ he complained. ‘You’d imagine that after ten years of waiting for this, and ten years complaining about Tony, we would have some idea of what we are going to do but we don’t seem to have any policies. For God’s sake, Harriet’s helping write the manifesto!’It was the first serious indication of a recurrent theme of Gordon’s premiership – everyone around him thought there was some big plan sitting in a bottom drawer somewhere, just ready to be pulled out when the moment came. In fact, there was nothing.