Yet Nehru's fear that the reorganisation would harden regionalist sentiments has also been partly justified.

ECONOMIST: Banyan

The report argued that, with a referendum on Scottish independence looming, Labour was caught "between the Scylla of the failure of its English regionalist project and the Charybdis of its dependency on its block of Scottish and Welsh MPs".

BBC: British or English �C a false choice?

That has been even truer since April 5th, when Umberto Bossi resigned as head of the Northern League, the regionalist-cum-separatist movement he founded in 1991, which held the balance of power until the fall of Silvio Berlusconi's government last year.

ECONOMIST: Italian politics