ANY QUOTES USED MUST BE ATTRIBUTED TO MURNAGHAN, SKY NEWS

DERMOT MURNAGHAN: It’s not just politicians and the people of Scotland for whom life could be utterly different after September. If Scotland votes for independence nationalists in other parts of the United Kingdom could be likely to see an opportunity for change. The leader of the Welsh Nationalists, Plaid Cymru, Leanne Wood, joins me from Cardiff, Mike Nesbitt who heads up the Ulster Unionists is in Belfast and Eddie Bone, who campaigns for a parliament for England, is in Portsmouth. I want to start with you, Leanne Wood, and a very good morning to you all, I spoke to Alex Salmond earlier and he said he suspected that you in Wales would be cheering Scotland along as it seeks independence, are you?

LEANNE WOOD: Well I think there is a great opportunity for Wales. Things will change, there’s no doubt, beyond September and it is incumbent upon us in Wales to make sure that we get a slice of the action too. There are fantastic opportunities for us to garner more powers, there is already legislation going through Westminster looking at additional financial powers for Wales and we need these financial powers as tools to do a particular job. It’s not about constitutional change for the sake of it, it’s about constitutional change to make life better for people here in Wales and I think that the debate that’s happening in Scotland offers fantastic opportunities for Wales to take a slice of that action.

DM: Okay, let me bring in Eddie Bone. Eddie, you’re campaigning for an English parliament, do you think that Scotland could blaze a bit of a trail for you?

EDDIE BONE: Well one of the things that we’ve got to accept is that if Scotland does become independent, that the United Kingdom of Great Britain will be legally dissolved, that will be the end of it so Leanne would be sitting in a situation where we might have negotiations going through where the Welsh would be very vulnerable so she should be more concerned and a bit more proactive in putting that Welsh voice across because the people of England also need to have a political voice, they need to have their own First Minister, they need to have their own parliament, they need their own government, we’ve got our own concerns. So it would be a very different situation if Scotland does become independent.

DM: So Mike Nesbitt, how do you view it in Belfast, in the Ulster Unionist party? Could it be the case, as we’ve been hearing there, that there may be no United Kingdom to be a part of?

MIKE NESBITT: Well I suppose the uncertainty is that we don’t know what the result is going to be or what the consequences will be but I do believe whether it’s a yes or no vote in September, we will see some form of recalibration politically in terms of the definition of the United Kingdom and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Obviously as a Unionist my default position is to support the union and parity would be what we would normally tend towards but then as somebody who supports devolution for the parliament at Stormont, I understand that there are times when you want to break parity. For example, economically we are probably as dependent on air transport as the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, so we like the power to set our own air passenger duty. The big one for us economically is corporation tax and we would like to devolve the power for us to set our own tax because we are the only part of the UK with a land border with a eurozone country, the Republic of Ireland. So there are issues in terms of policy levers that we think could be looked at post September whatever the result is in Scotland.

DM: The question about loosening the union, what you were talking about there Mike Nesbitt, could we end up with some kind of looser federation of islands, small nations and regions all pursuing slightly different, particularly economically different, policies?

MIKE NESBITT: Well we could push economically different policies and that will be no bad thing. Even welfare reform, Dermot, if you look at the so-called bedroom tax, it might suit some parts of the United Kingdom, it certainly doesn’t suit Northern Ireland because we don’t have the housing stock whereby we can offer people single bedroom dwellings. In my own constituency of Strangford, we build about 100 social units a year but over 1000 in people would be impacted by welfare reform if we simply cut and paste legislation from Westminster. In terms of identity, I think it is much more complex and in Northern Ireland we do kind of feature identity quite heavily in our political discourse but we have to move away I believe from the old binary concept that you are either orange or green, Unionist or Nationalist. I am more in tune with the great Ulster poet, John Hewitt, who described himself as an Ulsterman but also as Irish, British and European and that’s how I would see myself. Last night here at home the Nesbitt’s were cooking haggis in celebration of Burns Night, next Saturday I’ll be in Dublin supporting Ireland in a rugby match against Scotland at the start of the Six Nations Championship. Everything is mixed up and we don’t have to look at it as a yes/no black/white binary solution anymore.

DM: I’m sure there is a lot of agreement with those joining you in this debate at the moment. Leanne Wood, I wanted to ask you though, how far Plaid Cymru want to go looking at the Scottish experience. It started with devolution and now the Nationalists are going for full independence, that’s a bit further than you want to go at the moment?

LEANNE WOOD: Well we are at different places on our journey in terms of devolution in Scotland and in Wales. Our settlements to begin with were different and so we’re in a different position on that path now but that doesn’t mean that our ambitions for Wales are any less than in Scotland, we want the very best for people here and we want to maximise the powers that we have and we think that it’s fairly accepted now, widely accepted that the decisions that are made closer to the people that are affected, you tend to get the better outcome and so applying that principle to Wales, in terms of the next stage in our development is fiscal autonomy and we’re starting down that road now in terms of looking at taking responsibility for some taxes and hopefully over the longer term income tax powers as well.

DM: Eddie Bone, what powers would an English parliament look for and what would it’s relationship be with Westminster? So many questions and indeed, what would be its distinct identity, picking up on the point Mike Nesbitt made, where would its distinct identity come from?

EDDIE BONE: First of all, we need to establish that the people of England have rejected overwhelmingly regionalisation of England and I would say to both Plaid Cymru and the SNP, I would politely say to them to keep their nose out of internal English affairs because actually they keep talking about regionalising England and the people of England have overwhelmingly rejected that. We know that the people of England want an English parliament, in every poll that we have there is overwhelming support for that, so actually England is also a nation, the same as Wales and Scotland, and we have a right for self-determination and our own parliament, our own First Minister. So actually the Welsh and the Scots do need to start working with England as a nation. Again I have to say, Leanne has to stop talking about regionalisation in England and so does actually Alex Salmond, he has to stop saying that the Scots have more in common with the North of England. Please keep your nose out of our affairs, thank you.

DM: Well hold on a minute, I’ll bring Leanne Wood back in on that in a moment and of course Alex Salmond made the point as well, Eddie Bone, but it is this issue of identity. What does the stockbroker in Surrey have in common with somebody who perhaps is not working in the north-east?

EDDIE BONE: Well actually England has a thousand years of history as a unified nation, there is such a thing as an English nation. We have a common, right across the whole of England, a common bond. Under the present system we have the people of England are being discriminated against. I’m in Portsmouth today because jobs in Portsmouth were sacrificed as a bribe to the Scots. We are trying to highlight the fact that in these areas and right across, the people of England are really being discriminated against. Only the people of England pay prescription charge, those are serious issues. It’s not equal anymore.

LEANNE WOOD: I don’t want to get into an argument with representatives of the English Democrats. What happens in England is a matter for the people in England, there are a range of options and a range of avenues that they could go down and I wish them all the very best of luck but what’s quite clear is that after September, the United Kingdom, if there’s a yes vote in Scotland, will be no more and we must make sure that as Wales we have an opportunity to have our voice right in the centre of things, to negotiate a new partnership on the basis of equality because we certainly don’t have equality now.

DM: Come back on that, Eddie Bone, and then I’ll bring in Mike Nesbitt.

EDDIE BONE: I’m not an English Democrat, the Campaign for an English Parliament actually is a political campaigning group and we have members from the Labour party, Lib Dems, Conservatives, right across the political spectrum, so we speak for all the people of England and in the last census, 32 million people identified themselves as being English only, that’s right across the whole of the country. Actually this is one of the problems that we have with Leanne, Leanne becomes very defensive very quickly, we know that Alex Salmond and the SNP very quickly start pushing their ideas onto the people of England.

DM: All right, I’ve got to bring Mike Nesbitt back in on that because Mike Nesbitt, in Belfast there, as he says is a supporter of the Union but what you’re seeing is exactly what might happen if Scotland goes independent, the beginning of the break up of the United Kingdom.

MIKE NESBITT: Well it could be a recalibration of the United Kingdom and can I say very clearly, here in Northern Ireland in 1998 with the Belfast Good Friday Agreement, we enshrined the right of the people of Northern Ireland, and those people only, to decide the constitutional future of this part of the United Kingdom so it is to my mind entirely up to the people of Scotland to decide whether they stay in the Union or not come September but on the broader issue of identity, recently we celebrated the life of Christopher Chataway, a great athlete, an Oxbridge man, a kind of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant whereas today in modern United Kingdom, the equivalent is Mohammed Farah, a Somali Muslim, and that to me is the strength of the diversity of the United Kingdom which might be in danger if we go down this binary road of rejecting the totality of who we are. As I say, I am Northern Irish, Irish, British, European and indeed a citizen of the world.

DM: A nice note to leave it on there. Mike Nesbitt thank you very much indeed, our thanks to Leanne Wood and Eddie Bone.