It is a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed (Sir Alan Beith)—somebody from my region, so this is obviously the north-east part of the debate.
I welcome the opportunity to talk about this subject. I spent quite a lot of time in the weeks leading up to the referendum in Scotland, as many members of my family live in Scotland, as is very common among people in the north-east, so the Union was very important to me, and it was very important to my family.
My experience in those weeks had some positives. People were more engaged in the political process than I ever remember before, and explaining to people how to vote almost every time I knocked on a door was a pleasure. That is something we must grasp and work out how to translate across the country. However, being called a posh southerner, when I do not think I am either, was an interesting experience.
Nothing is ever quite the same again after a referendum. The right hon. Member for Berwick-upon-Tweed mentioned the north-east assembly referendum, as have many other Members. I was the agent for the yes campaign in that referendum. It was not one of my most successful campaigns. Only 20% of the people of my region voted for it. However, on the day after the election the problems were still there—the problems of inequalities and of not having enough money to deal with our economic issues. We would go to meetings and people would say, “What do we do about this?” We did not get the assembly, which meant we had no mechanism to deal with it. Those issues are still there, although I think time has moved on and at the moment there is no appetite for a vote on a regional assembly.