Tam Dalyell: Why don't we stop trying to annoy the English and just say goodbye to Holyrood instead I INCURRED much displeasure from some (not all) of my Scottish colleagues in the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1989 for being the only Labour MP to decline to sign the Claim of Right. In the case of Donald Dewar, it wasn't displeasure but naked, incandescent wrath (then leader of the Labour Party, Neil Kinnock, was far from displeased). I still think what I thought then, though some might think it, in J S Mill's phrase, "the deep slumber of a decided opinion." I contended, and still contend, that sovereign right was little more than a misleading slogan and that it was hard to define in a technological age where people change their country of abode ever more frequently. Who exactly should be defined as the Scottish people? Surely there is a difference between the Scottish people, and people in Scotland in AD 2012. Increasingly vocally, the Scottish diaspora are asserting that they ought to have a say. It seems to me that the present hoo-ha is not about constitutional niceties but really about something else: whether people in Scotland on a certain date in 2014 should have the right, alone, to set in motion the disentanglement of the United Kingdom. The truth is that, not only with independence but with devo max - the actual meaning of which is totally unclear - Britain would be fundamentally altered. In which case, people in England (separately defined from the English) are emphatically entitled to have their say. No government at Westminster could deny them a vote in a referendum in which this nebulous term devo max was on the ballot paper. After all, they would be greatly affected. Besides, whatever one may think about 1707, dismantling a treaty of Union is a matter for two parties. I now think it is not only possible but probable that the majority of people in England would vote to "be rid of the Scots." They are fed up with what they see as "gurning"; they are resentful on issues such as the funding of tuition fees and free care for the elderly, and the straw which breaks the camel's back of people in England may be when they hear or read about "claims of bleeding right" - to borrow the phrase of a former Labour chief whip who privately expressed to me the view that, on this issue, I was the only Socialist to be found amongst his Scottish Labour MPs. I suspect that the raison d"être for the motion is that it chimes perfectly with Alex Salmond's strategy of nurturing fed-upness among people in England. What would I do? Terminate the Scottish Parliament and return to Strathclyde, Lothian, Grampian, Tayside and the other regions, which provided the best form of government in Scotland in modern times. Few politicians in public (more in private) and no Scotland-placed media person would agree - but if such a proposition was put to the electorate, it might be surprising how many would like to call a halt to Holyrood. Tam Dalyell was Labour MP for Linlithgow (formerly the constituency of West Lothian) from 1962 to 2005.