Published on Liberal Democrat Voice By Huw Jones | Mon 17th November 2014 – 5:40 pm

For 45% of Scots and for many in the NW, the SW and in Wales (which I refer to as the devolving regions), the UK doesn’t work, and this should matter to a Unionist Party. As a Welshman who was forced, as were my parents, to spend decades working in England the reasons are only too clear.

In England we are quite often subject to xenophobia. And while our local colleagues go for exotic weekend breaks, we have to struggle back home to tend to ailing relatives via a crazy London-centred transport network that means that the quickest route from Penzance or Aberystwyth to Dover or Great Yarmouth is via the M25 or Paddington. The quickest route from Liverpool to Southampton is via the M25. And to get to Paris on the HS2 the whole country will have to stop off in London.

As well paying for the extra miles we are forced to travel, we also have to pay for projects in London to relieve the inevitable congestion.

In West Somerset or Carmarthenshire we are told that we must rely on tourism, but 2/3 of our skies are covered with vapour trails from London Airports, and we get no say about their expansion. Few tourists arriving at London Airports get to the devolving regions (Scotland, Wales and SW or NW England).

The chaotic planning that so distorts the transport network can be seen in almost every government department, and while London manages to get improvements, the rest of us have to put up with infrastructure that was condemned in the 1920s. Is it any wonder that industry does not want to move out of London?

But things are getting worse still. Broadband is used as an excuse to close local branches of national businesses, and yet while London boasts internet speeds of up to 100MB/s, there seem to be no plans to improve on the unreliable 3MB/s that we hope for in the devolving regions. This not helped by poor mobile phone signal; but while we wait for the wonders advertised elsewhere, we have lost all our phone boxes. Our landline phones are installed by a company that doesn’t talk to us, but instead all communications go through competing sales organisations, which reduce costs by economising on customer service. Many pay surcharges for courier services, while expecting to lose postal deliveries.

The devolving regions differ from the rest of the UK in having very low population densities, and this, alone, is often taken as an excuse to treat us as second class citizens; but the reform of constituency boundaries has also made it harder for these areas to have political influence. Parliamentary constituencies now have almost equal numbers of voters, but the geographical area they cover is hugely different.  In the conurbations it is often possible to walk to a constituency office in an afternoon, but voters in the more rural constituencies may have to drive for hours to meet their MP. Whereas urban MPs may be able to visit several of their colleagues’ offices in a day, a rural MP may be lucky to be able to visit one of his colleagues’ offices.

And then there is the fabled “West Lothian Question”, which actually works massively in favour of London, because all MPs spend much of their time living and working in London. When London wants improvements, MPs from the devolving regions will have sympathy for Londoners. But how many London MPs have first-hand experience of the overloaded St Clears’ sewage system, or the closure of the Withybush maternity ward?

But this is not just about the relative rights of different regions; this is about good management of the resources that the UK has. How can we expect to compete internationally if we don’t use all the resources that are available to us, with 10% of the population treated as second class citizens, and the rest crammed into London?

* Huw Jones has been a Liberal since the 1960s, have stuffed envelopes, canvassed and stood as paper candidate for council posts in England and Wales. A trained farm manager, he has spent 25 years in Agricultural Research, and has now retired to a small farm in Carmarthenshire.