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Home Affairs and Justice

I am happy to fight a general election in England any time. We will win and the Conservatives will lose—[Interruption.] Yes, the problem for the Conservative party is a partisan one. In the mid-1950s, the Conservatives won not just half the seats in Scotland but half the popular vote. How many Scottish MPs are Conservative these days? What the Conservatives need to address is the fact that they have been pushed downwards—down the United Kingdom—into an English-only corral in the midlands and the south. My final point on this question is that when the Conservative party represented the whole of the United Kingdom and concerns were sometimes expressed from the Labour Benches—in my view, inappropriate ones—about the fact, for example, that Northern Irish Members, all bar one Ulster Unionist, voted on matters that did not affect them one jot, it was the Conservative party that stood up for the Union. That is exactly what happened in 1964 over the steel nationalisation Bill—