Constitutional reform: time for new wineskins

“Nobody puts new wine in old wineskins; otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins and run to waste, and the skins will be ruined. No; new wine must be put in fresh skins. And nobody who has been drinking old wine wants new. ‘The old is good’, he says”. The Gospel According To St. Luke, 5: 37-39.

They just don’t get it, do they, the establishment types? They talk the language of reform, but they basically think the old system works and knows best. It certainly works for them.

So, in the interests of ‘reform’, they elect a ‘maverick’ speaker in what turns out to be essentially a put-up job, with Labour and the Lib Dems ganging up to choose a Tory that the Conservatives despise, in the hope that he will provide a useful counterweight to a Tory-dominated Commons when the Conservatives ‘inevitably’ achieve a landslide victory at the next election (why? because they won’t in fact have reformed the First Past the Post voting system by then, despite their fine words?) – up to their old party-politicking tricks again in filling a position that is supposed to be above all that. This reformist speaker then makes an acceptance speech affirming that the vast majority of MPs are in fact honest and motivated by zeal for public service. So the expenses scandal doesn’t in fact bespeak a systemic problem of corruption and venality on the part of a parliament that is largely unaccountable (comprising mainly ’safe seats’) – despite the fact that you, Mr Speaker, are one of the biggest flippers of them all.

One of the proposed reforms the new speaker will have to oversee, announced on Tuesday, will involve the creation of a new government-appointed body, provisionally entitled the Parliamentary Standards Authority, that will not only supervise and advise on MPs’ pay and expenses but will administer them, including via a statutory power to take possession of Parliament’s assets and property rights. So instead of greater accountability of MPs to the people, what we are in danger of getting is MPs becoming effectively employees of the government whose new body has draconian powers to expel or even imprison them if it deems they have violated the rules to a serious extent. No less than the principle of parliamentary sovereignty is at stake.

We may feel that Parliament has demonstrated its unworthiness to exercise sovereignty over its own affairs in this particular area; but shouldn’t the reforms involve proposals that put the power to hold MPs to account in the hands of their own constituents (for instance, through the power for the people to call by-elections if, say, 10% of constituents demand it), not in those of an unelected, unaccountable quango? And of course, it’s Parliament itself, not the people, that will get to vote through this legislation with potentially devastating consequences for the UK’s constitution and parliamentary democracy.

The same goes for House of Lords ‘reform’, with MPs keen to rush through legislation for a new mainly or wholly elected House, an issue of principle on which they already voted last year. In addition to party-politicising a House that has acted as one of the few scrupulous sources of revision and scrutiny of an authoritarian and unaccountable government, these changes could result in expelling the Church of England bishops from the Lords, adding momentum to the drive to disestablish the Church altogether. All very well, on one level, if you don’t think the Church should have a privileged position at the heart of the establishment and the right to be involved in revising legislation proposed by democratically elected politicians. But this involves changes to centuries-old constitutional arrangements that pre-date the creation of the British state and which, as I’ve argued elsewhere, represent possibly the only way in which England continues to have any official, constitutional status as a nation. But are the people of Britain, let alone the people of England, going to be consulted in a referendum on these fundamental constitutional changes? If they are, I haven’t heard anything about it.

And then there are all the shabby, venal goings-on around the parliamentary enquiry into the Iraq War, with Gordon Brown showing last week that he’d learned absolutely nothing from the furore over expenses, insisting that the enquiry should be conducted in private despite all his mealy-mouthed advocacy of greater transparency in the way parliament conducts its business. Of course, he’s had to back-track; but even last night, the Labour party whips managed to corral enough of their troops into the voting lobby to defeat a Tory amendment demanding that the scope of the enquiry should be broader than that proposed and should be down to parliament to determine: the old parliamentary systems clicking into gear to prevent rather than insist on adequate scrutiny of the executive.

It’s all very depressing: it really is as if the whole thing is in a terminal state of decline, disrepair and disrepute. The politicians seem to believe they can carry on in the same discredited way, playing their self-serving, party-political games, with little reference to the people’s wishes and rights. Even the reforms suggested are top-down (proposed, driven and voted for by Parliament) rather than resulting from a genuine process of consultation with the people through measures such as citizens’ conventions and deliberative referendums. And the reforms themselves, far from putting greater power in the hands of ordinary people to whom Parliament should be accountable, seem designed to increase the power of the executive and the party apparatuses over MPs and the legislative process.

Originally, I was thinking of writing a post suggesting that the best, most straightforward and most radical way to reform the House of Commons would be simply to replace it with a new English Parliament, with new structures and procedures, and elected using PR. You’d then also need a new federal UK parliament, which similarly would be drawn up on completely new lines. Not so much reform from within the existing Parliament itself but starting from a blank canvass. A slightly less radical alternative would be to turn the existing House of Commons, including some of its arcane, historic traditions and its present home in the Palace of Westminster, into an English Parliament; while the House of Lords could be transformed into the new federal UK parliament with powers to scrutinise and suggest amendments to legislation arising from all four devolved national parliaments. Both of these options would still preserve a United Kingdom that did not break from the past in its fundamentals: same monarchy; same symbolism and ‘identity’ of the historic UK state; and probably the same emphasis on the ultimate sovereignty of the British parliament, or shared British-parliamentary sovereignty distributed across the national and federal parliaments in their respective areas of competence.

But somehow, I just can’t see this happening. I think the events of the past couple of weeks, described above, demonstrate that the old Parliament is incapable of driving through radical democratic reform from within. It is too profoundly wedded to the idea that its sovereignty and power – intimately allied with that of the executive – is somehow timeless and unchallengeable, and gives it the right to dictate the shape of reforms that consolidate the unaccountable dominance of the main parties and the executive, rather than restoring and renewing Parliament’s authority and sovereignty from its true source: the will of the people.

In reality, maybe the situation needs to be framed the other way round: instead of thinking of the dynamic towards the creation of an English parliament and a federal UK as resulting from a process whereby the present system reforms itself from within, maybe the present crisis is the symptom of a much deeper rift and sense of division between the people and the government (parliament and executive), and between the different nations whose union in the United Kingdom Parliament is supposed to symbolise and embody. On this view, the authority of Parliament has ebbed away because it is no longer a ‘national parliament’ worthy of the name: a parliament for, and of, the people as a united national community. Parliament cannot exercise sovereignty on behalf of, and in the name of, the people until there is agreement on who the people are: England or Britain; a single British nation-kingdom, or a federation of multiple nations.

But the politicians want to carry on much as before. In the words of the evangelist, they think the old parliament and the old Britain is good, and that they can pour the new wine of reform into the old wineskin of the present system. But maybe, in doing so, they risk destroying both the wineskin of the old establishment and the possibility for genuine democratic renewal.

Instead, isn’t what is needed a whole new start, with the citizens of the respective UK nations deciding for themselves on a new politics and constitutional settlement that match their aspirations, priorities and identities as national communities in their own right? Reform should start from new foundations; from the bottom up. Yes, new wine must be put in fresh skins.

Calman Report: Constitutional reform on a plate

The eagerness of the main unionist parties to seize on the Calman Commission’s report on Scottish devolution, published on Monday, suggests how little they are interested in factoring the English Question into their constitutional-renewal programmes. The report offers nothing for England: it deliberately avoids addressing the West Lothian Question; it urges that the Barnett Formula should be retained until a more equitable system for distributing the UK’s tax revenues based on real need can be determined; and it does not discuss the broader English Question – the issue of how England as a nation should be governed now that most of the Westminster government’s responsibilities relate to England alone.

The report does, however, acknowledge that this is an issue that needs to be resolved:

“Devolution to Scotland (and Wales and Northern Ireland) created political institutions that exercise many of the powers of central Government for a significant proportion of the UK. That inevitably has meant that the governance of the rest of the UK [England to you and me] cannot continue unchanged.

“It is not sufficient for Scots (or indeed Welsh or Northern Ireland citizens) to dismiss this as simply a problem for the English: the internal arrangements of the Union are a matter for all of us. The UK now has a territorial constitution, and it needs, in our view, to be more fully and clearly set out.”

Indeed. But as the constitutional-reform agendas of none of the three main parties, as set out last week, contain any reference to remedying the post-devolution anomalies in the way England is governed (i.e. the said WLQ and the absence of proper democratic accountability to the English people), or indeed make any reference to England at all even when talking about it, what hope is there that they will pay attention to this recommendation in their haste to be seen to be doing something – anything – to deliver constitutional reform?

Clearly, Calman is a safe reform, handed to them on a plate by a Commission that’s been at work on it for a year or so. It’s safe because it doesn’t put into question the fundamental assumptions of UK governance and the structure of the UK itself: UK-parliamentary sovereignty and the supposed right of the UK parliament – including members elected outside of England – to make laws and decisions affecting England alone.

In short, Calman perpetuates asymmetric devolution, indeed entrenches it still further, with greater powers for the Scottish Parliament to set the level of taxation and public expenditure in Scotland, while the power of Scottish Westminster MPs to vote through relatively lower per-capita spending for England remains unchallenged.

The commitment of the parties and of Parliament to deliver meaningful constitutional reform for England, and not just perpetuate a discriminatory, asymmetric Union, will be measured by the extent to which they are prepared to engage with these questions of democratic accountability and be honest about the English downside to Scottish devolution.

Regrettably, I’m voting UKIP

Never thought I’d say that! I don’t consider myself to be politically right-wing and I’m certainly not a Unionist; so UKIP is far from being a natural political home for me. I don’t like UKIP’s simplistic, black-and-white presentation of the case against the EU and open immigration policies, even though I myself am in favour of the UK’s – or at least England’s – withdrawal from the EU, and of more restricted immigration. And I certainly don’t like UKIP’s defence of the integrity of the UK as a quasi-nation state, governed in a more unitary manner than now from the Westminster centre. I’m an English nationalist not a British Unionist.

So why vote UKIP in the elections for the European Parliament on Thursday of this week? Well, the main reason is to register an anti-EU vote. I don’t think the EU is all bad, and I don’t accept UKIP’s analysis that membership simply costs the UK £40 million per day, for which we do not see any benefit. Being part of the EU has created huge opportunities for trade and business, and has enabled thousands of British people to live, work and prosper in other EU countries, just as it has allowed thousands of people from throughout the EU to come to our country and help create our wealth as well as enrich our culture. But unfortunately, I do believe that the EU is an inherently federal project: that it has an in-built dynamic towards ever greater political as well as economic union. Unsurprisingly, this is not compatible with an English-nationalist position: I want greater political autonomy for England, let alone for Britain; and membership of a sovereign, federal, European super-state that might well see England split up into a number of faceless British ‘regions’ is hardly consistent with that goal.

So why not vote English Democrat? They support both withdrawal from the EU and tougher immigration controls, with the extra positive that they’re (supposedly) a civic English-nationalist party that supports the establishment of an English parliament. I would have liked to be in a position to vote EDP this time. However, I’ve been put off by their links with the racist English First Party (for which they still haven’t come up with a justification), and by the unseemly and childish spat between EDP lead candidate for the South-East Euro-region Steve Uncles and the blogger John Demetriou. These are not, methinks, the mark of a credible political party with a coherent, inclusive vision for a self-governing, multi-ethnic English nation inside or outside of the EU, and inside or outside of the UK.

I also had a short email correspondence with EDP chairman Robin Tilbrook, in which I asked him what the EDP intended to do in the European Parliament if any of its candidates were elected. But they had not thought about this, merely using the European elections as a chance to mount a (much-needed) campaign for fair treatment for England within the UK. But I don’t think that’s good enough: you’re putting forward candidates for a parliament; and, however illegitimate you may think that body’s powers are, you should at least have some idea how having people from your party serving as members of that parliament could be leveraged as an opportunity to provide a distinct voice for England within an influential international forum, and to press the cause of democratic justice for England.

What about the mainstream political parties? The biggest problem I have with them in the context of the Euro elections is that they are all strongly committed to the UK’s continuing membership. On the one hand, the Lib Dems are closest to my position, in that they at least support a referendum on that membership; although, on the other hand, they are far too pro-EU for me to consider voting for them. And they seriously let themselves and the UK down by not sticking to their general-election commitment and voting in favour of a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty when Parliament decided on the matter last year.

The Tories did vote in favour of such a referendum, and all credit to them for that. But the Tories are interested in only limited political and constitutional reform, at both EU and national-UK level. They’ll use a vote for them in the Euros as backing for their call to hold a UK general election now, under the existing defective electoral system (they’ve explicitly asked people to vote for them for that reason). And despite Cameron’s claims last week that a Conservative government would introduce radical constitutional reforms, these would not include two of the most vitally needed components: proportional representation and an English layer of governance – English matters to be decided on by English-elected representatives only, whether those of a UK parliament or of a separate English parliament. And the reason why Cameron’s proposals did not include these measures is that they would prevent the Conservatives from ever again being able to gain an absolute UK-wide majority based almost entirely on the way the First-Past-the-Post electoral system transforms a large minority of the vote in England into a large majority of seats in the UK parliament.

Think about it: the Tories’ proposals for ‘resolving’ the West Lothian Question, dubbed ‘English pauses for English clauses’ (English-elected MPs only to be involved at the committee stage of England-only bills), are predicated on the assumption that power will continue to be bestowed to the governing party in a disproportionate way. For example, there could be, as now, a larger Labour majority across the UK as a whole than in England only, taking into account Labour’s comparatively stronger electoral performance in Scotland and Wales. English pauses for English clauses is therefore conceived of as a ‘corrective’ for this imbalance, in that the Tories will be in a smaller minority or hold the balance of power in England, and will be in a better position to influence bills at this crucial stage of their passage through parliament. Under the other, now more likely, scenario, the Tories gain an absolute majority that is greater in England only than in the UK as a whole. In this case, English pauses for English clauses is a concession to the idea of greater responsiveness to the wishes of the English people, as expressed in the ballot box, that costs the Conservatives absolutely nothing. But in either of these instances, the shares of parliamentary seats involved are unrepresentative of the will of English voters and are to a great extent merely a product of the distorting electoral system. So this is ‘reform’ that is designed to maximise the undue, unrepresentative power over English affairs that the system gives to the main parties, and particularly in this instance the Conservatives.

Under a proportional electoral system, on the other hand, assuming that English matters continued to be run by the UK parliament as a whole, the Tories and Labour would simply not be able to carve up English governance for themselves in this undemocratic way. English pauses for English clauses would never get off the ground because the way things would probably resolve themselves is that a new politics of changing cross-party alliances and deals on different issues would emerge; and it’s quite likely in this scenario that a consensus would develop that it was simply inappropriate for Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs to be involved in working out these deals on English-only matters.

Such a way of doing things would also nullify the morally bankrupt whipping system, which is also predicated on parties maximising their unrepresentative seat counts in an adversarial contest that bears little relationship to the way MPs’ constituents might actually think about the merits of individual issues. Little wonder, then, that Cameron’s supposedly radical constitutional reform programme (in reality, merely a bit of tinkering to parliamentary procedure) advocates restricting the role of the whips at the committee stage only: that single part of the parliamentary process where English MPs, supposedly free from the power of the whips, will now be intended to act as a discrete body, but in a way that is in reality calculated to maximise Tory influence); but not at the introductory and final stages of a bill’s passage, where the full weight of the UK-government’s disproportionate allocation of seats across the UK will be wielded to force through legislation that may command little popular support in the country that it actually affects: England. Under PR, the whole rationale for whips dissolves, because there are no disproportionate party-block votes to be wielded and there is much more cross-party collaboration.

But I digress. As for Labour in the European elections, they’re completely beyond the pale in my view: the architects of asymmetric devolution, and the government that has presided over the unprecedented meltdown of the financial system and the general economy that we have experienced in the past year, while also being vehemently pro-EU. Say no more: they’ve got to go.

I thought about voting for the Greens. I think that the EU has played, and could continue to play, a vital role in co-ordinating measures to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and reduce other harmful environmental impacts. Therefore, it’s important that there is a strong Green contingent in the European Parliament; and there certainly should be much greater emphasis on investing in renewable power generation and energy efficiency as part of the efforts to stimulate economic recovery in the UK. But, much as I would like to support the environmental agenda, the Greens go and spoil it all by not only being 100% behind the whole EU project, but also advocating a range of policies that I can only call ‘progressive-British-republican’, including regional devolution within England (absolutely no interest in national-English governance as such), a classic socialist-type commitment to fostering social equality, and abolition of the monarchy. Now, we can argue about the intrinsic merits of equality and how to promote it, and the pros and cons of monarchies versus republics; but I just can’t put my cross next to a vision of a British republic complete with Euro regions (but no England), be that vision e’er so green. An English Republic maybe, in time; but let’s have English self-governance within the United Kingdom first or, failing that, within a restored Kingdom of England!

So I’m left with UKIP as the fall-back position: in favour of EU withdrawal; and punishing the main parties for their pro-EU stance, their failure to deliver a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, the expenses fiasco, and their woefully inadequate and self-serving advocacy of parliamentary and constitutional reform minus an English Parliament. At least UKIP does support some form of English parliament: a system not hugely dissimilar to my previous ‘blueprint for a federal UK‘, whereby there would be a single proportionally elected UK parliament that would split for part of the time into separate bodies for each UK nation (including England but minus Cornwall) – although UKIP’s vision is both more unitary than mine, and involves less change to the structure and procedures of the established Westminster Parliament. But in any case, if the party-political establishment does ever concede the need for an English parliament, I doubt very much that it’s the UKIP model (or mine, for that matter) that they’ll be turning to. It’ll be whatever version allows them to preserve as much of their privileges and unrepresentative power that they can hold on to – unless we stop them.

But on Thursday, it’s about Europe. And I reckon that UKIP is the best of a bad lot. At least, a vote for them signals an unambiguous demand for a referendum on Britain’s, and England’s, membership of the EU. The mainstream parties won’t listen to that call if you vote for them, that’s for sure.

The governance of England must not be left out of the process of constitutional reform

Over the past week or so, I’ve been attempting to write a rather long post on the implications of the ongoing MPs’ expenses scandal. I started to write it last week, when I was concerned that the initial reaction was tending to ignore the fact that public outrage about MPs’ behaviour was symptomatic of a much deeper disaffection with the whole UK political system. However, over the course of the following week, more and more of the themes I felt needed to be aired did start to be debated in the media: the need for fundamental reform of parliament, the voting system and, indeed, the whole UK constitution. So the piece I was intending to write has now been superseded by events and will probably not see the light of day.

However, the one major constitutional issue that has not been widely discussed is that of the relationship of the different nations of the UK to any redesigned UK parliament. Indeed, there is a real danger that the English Question could be completely sidelined as the political and media establishments click into gear and debate how the UK Parliament should be reformed and what form a new UK constitution should take, without any challenge to the implicit assumption that the UK Parliament and government would continue to run England in every respect.

All the discussion so far has been focused on Westminster, and the advocates of change are not factoring in that their proposals would leave in place an intolerable democratic deficit and asymmetry of governance for England: laws and policies that apply to England (or England and Wales) only formulated and decided upon by the MPs for the whole of the UK, whilst the corresponding laws and policies for the other UK nations are made by separate, properly representative, devolved bodies.

It is possible that unionist defenders of the imbalanced status quo may attempt to use the introduction of proportional representation as a means to circumvent the problem of the English democratic deficit. For example, the party-political composition of an English Parliament elected under a perfectly proportional electoral system, based on the 2005 general election results, would not have been very much different from that of a UK parliament: 36% of voters chose Labour in the UK as a whole, versus 35% in England; 32% voted Tory, compared with 35.5% in England; etc. In either case, there would have been a need to form a coalition or minority government, which would probably have been of the same political hue in the UK or in England alone. Therefore, it could be argued that – owing to the fact that the overwhelming majority of the UK population live in England – a coalition UK government elected under PR will almost always reflect the voting preferences of the majority of the English people. As a consequence, the West Lothian Question loses its relevance, as the composition of parliament will be a much more accurate reflection of the will of the English electorate.

But this of course misses the whole point: such a parliament, however much it represents an improvement on the present travesty of democratic fairness, would still not be an English parliament elected by the people of England to look after their needs and interests, and to speak and act on their behalf. England would continue to be governed as the UK by the UK parliament for the (debatable) benefit of the whole of the UK, rather than for that of its own people – in contrast to every other nation of the UK (with the possible additional exception of Cornwall) that would presumably continue to benefit from devolved government under any new UK constitution.

Changes in the relationship between Parliament and the people, and between Parliament and the Executive, are indeed desperately needed, and PR is a vital component in bringing about the greater accountability of Parliament and government. But what must not be omitted from the process is changes in the relationship of the UK nations to Westminster and to each other. Unless and until this nettle is grasped, any constitutional reform will be flawed and will not address the problem of Parliament’s democratic illegitimacy that is the underlying reason why the expenses scandal has caused so much outrage.

Another siren call that must be resisted is the demand that a general election be held right away. David Cameron upped the ante on this issue on Monday of this week, at the launch of the Tories’ European Election campaign, by initiating a petition for an election to be called in June. Clearly, it would be in the Conservatives’ interests to hold an election sooner rather than later given the fact that they would be likely to win an outright majority, as they are the only viable alternative to a government that people were already desperate to get rid of even before the expenses scandal. The fact that the Lib Dems have joined in with these calls is clearly also self-serving: the Lib Dems are hoping to capitalise on Labour’s unpopularity and the fact that they’ve come off relatively lightly in the expenses scandal to assert themselves as the centre-left alternative to Labour.

But this is party politicking of the kind we need to do away with: parties putting their own interests and opportunism ahead of the UK’s and England’s needs. A new Tory government would lack legitimacy for the same reason as the present government: it would be elected under a monumentally flawed and distorting electoral system. In addition, if an election were held now, it’s likely that there would be an even higher rate of abstentions than in the 2005 general election: around 39%. A lot of people, such as the former Conservative minister Norman Tebbit last week, have already been calling for voters to abstain in the forthcoming European Parliament elections as a protest against the parties’ failure to put their Westminster House in order. As a result of the low turn-out in the 2005 UK general election, the present Labour government was elected by only 22% of eligible voters. With a high rate of abstentions in 2009, a new Tory regime might well command the support of an even smaller – or at least, not significantly larger – share of the population. Hardly a recipe for re-engaging the people in politics and for driving fundamental reform!

And Prime Minister Cameron would be highly unlikely to do anything significant to address the English Question. In all probability, the Tories will continue to govern England as if it is the UK and will have no qualms about enlisting the votes of the precious few MPs the Tories have in Scotland and Wales, along with those of his allies the UUP in Northern Ireland, to push through legislation that affects England only – especially if the Tories’ overall parliamentary majority is slim. Having said that, the Campaign for an English Parliament has today issued an open letter to David Cameron calling on him to work towards the establishment of what would be a de facto federal system of government in the UK: parliaments for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, with a much smaller UK parliament dealing only with reserved matters such as taxation, defence, overseas aid, immigration and macro-economic policy. It remains to be seen how, or indeed whether, David Cameron will respond to the CEP’s challenge. If he does recognise that we are facing a ‘constitutional moment’ – indeed, an Oliver Cromwell moment – then he will really be showing true leadership and vision. He would be a worthy Prime Minister for a re-shaped UK, who could be accepted by the people of England – as opposed to a Prime Minister for the UK who does not want to be a Prime Minister for England, even though that would be what he effectively was under the present system.

We have to find ways to make sure that the English Question – the issue of how England should be governed – comes and remains to the forefront of the discussions about parliamentary and constitutional reform. How do we do this? Well, at a basic level, we keep on doing what we have been doing: bringing up the topics of asymmetric devolution and the need for an English parliament in conversations with friends, workmates, down the pub, etc. Now that people generally are talking more about the need to change parliament, this is the best chance we’ve ever had to push the case for an English parliament. Then there’s all the blogging and campaigning of one sort or another we’ve been doing to inform people about the unfairness of the present system to England and the British government’s suppression of English-national identity and political rights. So it’s keep up the good work, and more so.

But is this enough? One of the ideas I was going to float in my aborted long post (yes, even longer than this one) was that we could form a new political party to stand at the next general election solely on a platform of wholesale constitutional reform at the three levels I referred to above: the relationship between Parliament and the Executive; between Parliament / the Executive and the people; and between the UK and its nations. If the mainstream parties are not going to answer the constitutional challenge on all of these levels – and the Tories’ and Lib Dems’ eagerness to have an election under the present defective system, without a clear programme of constitutional reform, appears to suggest that they may not do so – then it is up to us, the people, to assert our just demands. In fact, it is the people that is the lynchpin and raison d’être of this whole process: government should be for and of the people in both our distinct national communities, and as a united federation of nations across the British Isles.

I’m still interested in canvassing people’s views about this, although the situation is changing so fast, I wonder whether my ‘Change Party’ idea will soon also be superseded by events, as was my previous draft post: maybe Cameron will surprise us and accept the need to factor the English Question into a constitutional reform process; maybe the Lib Dems, too, will start to acknowledge the English dimension of constitutional reform, rather than referring to ‘Britain’ and ‘the country’ in every second sentence and avoiding the ‘E’ word almost as pathologically as New Labour. Maybe even the ‘national’ (i.e. English) media may also belatedly realise that you cannot – simply cannot – now talk about meaningful reform of ‘Parliament’ without recognising that something has to be done about those Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs that have so little to do – other than meddle in English affairs that do not concern them – that it’s no wonder they just see Westminster as a gravy train and an English golden goose to be exploited for their constituents’ and their own maximum benefit.

To design a new UK constitution setting out shiny new responsibilities, powers and duties for MPs, and a brand-spanking new proportional voting system, without remedying asymmetric devolution, and without allowing only the English people – let alone English MPs – to vote on English matters, would be such a gross absurdity and injustice that it would be bound to fail and lead to many more years of disaffection with politics and parliament on the part of the English people.

Surely our political representatives must see that. And if they don’t, they deserve to be voted out. And that’s our final sanction: if any of the established parties do not include the need to re-examine how England is governed as part of their manifestoes for the next general election, whenever it comes, they do not deserve our support.

MPs’ expenses: a parliament unaccountable to the people

In themselves, some of the dodgy expenses claims by MPs revealed by the Telegraph this week have been relatively trivial. I don’t mean just the odd bar of soap or payment for changing a light bulb [How many MPs does it take to change a light bulb? None (well, at least under the present system)]. Even some of the more supposedly ‘luxurious’ claims don’t seem to me all that unreasonable. Take, for example, Ming Campbell’s thousands of pounds for fitting out his small rented flat near the Commons, reported in the Telegraph today. The former Lib Dem leader’s explanation that, in fact, he had under-used his Additional Costs Allowance over many years, thereby ’saving’ the taxpayer money, doesn’t seem that dishonest assuming it’s true. And some of the items listed (e.g. “a new king-size bed, worth £1,024 and bed linen worth £373 as well as £1,515 decorating bill”) are simply the going rate for such goods and services, let alone luxury items (I paid over £300 for a bargain-basement new single bed and mattress over Easter; so a new king-size bed at £1,024 really doesn’t sound that exorbitant to me).

Clearly, though, there have been all-too many cases of MPs stretching the rules to an excessive degree in order to subsidise considerable expenses that should have been met by their own purses and to profiteer, especially through the practice of ‘flipping’: changing the designation of one’s ’second home’ in order to make improvements to one’s property at the taxpayer’s expense before selling it on at a profit retained by the MP.

Having said that, all these expenses claims were approved by the House of Commons authorities, allowing many of the MPs involved to claim they were acting ‘within the rules’: within the letter of the rules, that is, not the loosely defined ’spirit’, according to which MPs are expected to claim only for expenses directly connected with their work as MPs (e.g. for second homes in London for MPs representing constituencies outside of London), while the items claimed for should also be relatively modest and reasonable, not lavish and luxurious.

In the absence of sufficient ‘transparency’ and public scrutiny, it’s understandable how a culture of ‘you might as well claim for as much as you can get away with, because you can get away with a lot’ crept in: if people are offered something on a plate, they tend to take it. MPs are only human, after all. The same happens in businesses where there is a lax expenses regime. And the amounts involved are peanuts compared to the mammoth, multi-million-pound bonuses that bank directors regularly awarded themselves before the credit crunch and are still trying to get away with, according to reports this week.

So why is it that so many ordinary people appear to be so enraged by their MPs’ petty profiteering? There are lots of reasons, not the least of which is the acute financial worries that people are facing, with job losses or the fear of losing work, high levels of personal debt and the general economic slowdown. While all of that is happening, here are the MPs effectively ripping them off to extract the maximum financial benefit from their privileged positions.

Abuse of privilege is indeed the correct term. To serve as an MP is supposed to be a privilege, in the good sense: an honour, and a special mark of favour and trust conferred on the MP by their constituents. But the way many MPs have been carrying on conveys the impression that they are intent on enjoying all the privileges of an MP, in the bad sense: exemption from the normal rules and financial constraints that apply to their constituents in both work and domestic life, as if MPs were some privileged social class enjoying a superior status, and entitled to greater wealth, than lesser mortals: the political class, indeed.

It is as if the MPs thought and acted as if they were not accountable to the electorate for this particular (ab)use of the people’s money: both that the expenses did not need to be treated in the way that a business might audit such things as part of drawing up its accounts and settling its tax liabilities; and that MPs were not answerable to their constituents for this aspect of their work: that they did not have to make an account to their constituents about whether they were offering ‘value for money’.

In other words, if MPs cannot be ‘up front’ to their constituents about how much money they are extracting from their work for them as an MP, this breaks the relationship of trust between the MP and those (s)he supposedly represents in a fundamental way. Constituents send MPs to Parliament and pay them to do a particular job for their areas. But if MPs are not being open and honest about all the little, or not so little, extras they are earning, this completely compromises the ‘contract’ that exists between them and their constituents: it suggests that the money and the privilege have become more important than the duty to serve the constituents. It’s as simple and as personal as that, really: about MPs being honest with their constituents. ‘You think you’re paying me £X thousand in wages plus reasonable expenses on top to do the work you’ve sent me to do; but I’m also earning £x thousand in dodgy expenses that I’m not going to tell you about’. How can the constituents of such an MP possibly know whether their MP is delivering value for money, if they don’t know how much money they’re effectively shelling out on them? And how can an MP who is not being open to his or her constituents about their secret earnings at their constituents’ expense honestly claim that their constituents’ best interests are foremost in their minds and actions? They can’t.

So it’s a sorry story about dishonest claims: claims to serve the people without personal interest and in a manner that is accountable to them. And it’s a story about expenses: those of the people that MPs did not even tell them they were paying. Ultimately, this all points to a parliament that has grown accustomed to not being adequately accountable to the people: where the majority of MPs at any time appears almost to have the freehold over their constituencies, as the first-past-the-post electoral system makes their seat ’safe’ – virtually unwinnable by any other party. Is it any wonder that such a parliament is prepared to rip off the nation – England, that is – as a whole by all manner of expenses that it hides or does not adequately explain, such as the higher per-capita public spending in Scotland and Wales than in England that it tries to cover up by denying that England even exists as a separate entity? This fat-cat parliament, presided over by a Scottish Prime Minister and Chancellor, has grown accustomed to thinking that it is not accountable to England for how it spends its taxes on its ’second homes’: the governments of Scotland and Wales!

As an English MP, if you want preferment, promotion and security of ‘tenure’, you must tow the party line and support policies that you have to sell to your constituents as being in the best interests of Britain. But are they really in the best interests of their English constituents? And how can those constituents be sure their MP is acting in their best interests if he or she is dishonest about the deals and compromises done to ensure his or her ascent up the greasy pole of power, so he or she can continue to enjoy the privileges and dodgy expenses he or she does not tell the constituents about?

So, in fact, this issue does go to the heart of the validity or not of the claims that are made about British parliamentary democracy: are MPs really willing to be accountable and answerable to the people – and English MPs to the English people – about where their money is going and whether they are getting value for money? And are MPs more interested in ‘working the system’ for their own advancement and gain, rather than being representatives of the people to whom they are accountable? It would appear that many English MPs really aren’t primarily concerned about being good servants of the English nation.

Therefore, it’s time perhaps for the English people to send those MPs a reminder that they do not have a life-long lease on their Westminster seats: they are mere House tenants who can be expelled by the landlords – the people, to whom parliament belongs – if they do not pay their rent and abide by the rules that the people expect them to comply with. Westminster is not a ’second home’ for MPs, to be sumptuously furnished for them at the taxpayer’s expense.

And maybe it’s time not just to expel those self-serving and party-serving MPs but the whole British parliament, and to reclaim the Palace of Westminster as an English parliament: one whose members are proud to serve their English constituents, not a corrupt and outmoded British system of power, patronage and privilege.

Devolution as it should (have) be(en)

One of the objections that is often raised to an English Parliament is that it would add a whole new large body of MEPs, as I suppose we’d have to call them (unfortunate clash with the European Parliament), on top of the existing 530-odd (or however many) Westminster MPs representing English constituencies. To say nothing of all the extra civil servants, running costs, new English-government departments and duplication of functions with the UK parliament.

This objection is in reality made up of straw (Jack Straw even). As those of us who support an English Parliament know, an EP would replace the Westminster parliament with respect to its England-only responsibilities, which presently constitute around 70% of its business at a rough guess. So an English parliament might well comprise a large body of MEPs (although it could arguably make do with fewer than the number of English-constituency MPs in the present Westminster parliament); and it would be the vestigial UK parliament (dealing only with genuinely UK-wide, reserved matters) that would be greatly reduced. The net effect could be a total number of English MEPs and UK MPs (representing the whole of the UK) that was more or less equivalent to the number of MPs now.

Apart from the fact that the two main parties do not want their power base stripped away from them, and that Westminster MPs fear that their jobs would be on the line, I think it is this vision of the Westminster parliament being superseded by an English parliament and perhaps even being scrapped altogether that must haunt the nightmares of the opponents to an EP. But this is precisely what it is: a nightmare vision, not the reality.

As proponents of an EP, we could offer to the political establishment a much less alarming, and alarmist, vision of an EP that they are more likely to embrace. This could be an English Parliament as the continuation of the present Westminster parliament. If the Westminster parliament is already 70% an English Parliament – in its activities if not its composition – why not just make it fully an English Parliament by removing the participation of Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs, who already can’t represent their own constituents in devolved matters and strictly have no business poking their noses into matters affecting only English constituencies?

There’d still be a requirement for a UK parliament to deal with reserved matters. But then it would be this much smaller UK parliament that would be the ‘new’ body that would need to be created under English devolution, not an English Parliament as such, as it would be the contracted Westminster Parliament (minus Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish MPs) that would fulfil this function.

Clearly, there would be a huge amount of detail to work out if this idea were implemented, relating to issues such as the division of responsibilities between the UK and devolved parliaments and governments; the question of (UK) parliamentary versus national-popular sovereignty as embodied by the four national parliaments; and whether the new UK parliament were separately elected or would be made up of a representative sample of MPs from the national parliaments. In addition, there would have to be a uniform electoral system for the national parliaments, as it would be grossly unfair for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments to be elected under their present PR system while the English Parliament continued to be elected under First-Past-the-Post, which is designed to guarantee permanent unrepresentative parliamentary majorities for either of the two main parties. We might need a new system for all the national parliaments, preferably multi-member STV (Single Transferable Vote), which provides the most proportional results while preserving the link between the MP and his or her constituency.

Such a system might not even need to be a fully federal one, as previously outlined in my ‘Blueprint for a federal UK’: the state could continue to call itself ‘the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ if the politicians and the people felt more comfortable with that. And it could still be conceived of as a unitary system of governance if, for instance, the parliaments / assemblies in each of the nations were defined as embodying the sovereign power of the state within their own areas of responsibility, while the UK parliament was sovereign in its own competencies.

But that’s not the main point I want to make here, which is that such a system is really how devolution should have been implemented from day one: the West Lothian and English Questions would simply not have arisen had the decision been taken that, as a result of devolution, it was now the Scottish MSPs and the Welsh AMs that would henceforth fulfil the role previously fulfilled by Scottish and Welsh MPs in devolved policy areas, leaving the Westminster Parliament as a body of English MPs dealing with exclusively English matters – while, obviously, separate arrangements would then need to have been made for the governance of UK-wide affairs.

And this is something that we could still achieve and indeed must achieve if we want both devolution, on the one hand, and a United Kingdom whose citizens enjoy democratic equality and the same right to a national parliament, on the other hand – meaning there has to be an English Parliament if there are going to be parliaments / assemblies for Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland. But the English variant could just be an evolution of the present Westminster Parliament rather than a devolution creating a whole new parliamentary body along the lines of those in the other nations of the UK.

Let the Westminster Parliament become what it already is in all but name in so many areas (an English Parliament), and then work out what separate arrangements we want for the remaining tier of UK-wide governance: not a new EP but a separating out of the English and UK-wide functions of the present UK Parliament, leading to the creation of a smaller new UK parliament – perhaps located away from Westminster altogether to enforce the principle that its functions are also separate.

Maybe this is a vision of English parliamentary (d)evolution that even the Westminster politicians could buy into: because their beloved Westminster parliament – but with fewer privileges and better representation of the popular vote – would remain intact.

Must Our Modern Liberty Be English Liberty?

I’ve been thinking and reading quite a bit recently on the subject of liberty and the national question. This was the topic of a debate at the Convention On Modern Liberty event in London at the weekend. I wasn’t there but I’ve read the interestingly divergent accounts by Gareth Young (who was speaking on behalf of the Campaign For an English Parliament) and Ros Taylor of The Guardian.

The essential question, it seems to me, is as follows: is it necessary for the present-day campaigns in defence of fundamental freedoms in England to define their struggle as a fight for English freedoms? In which case, is the effort to secure ‘modern liberty’ indissociably bound up with the struggle for English self-government?

These questions could seem quite abstract. But it’s important to ask them and seek to answer them if we want to get to the heart of what we’re actually trying to achieve; and who is the ‘we’ that is trying to achieve it. First of all, many of the supporters of the Convention On Modern Liberty would not see themselves as fighting for freedoms in England as such but for British freedoms and their protection from a British state that seems intent on eroding them piece by piece. Whether or not the freedoms in question (things like habeas corpus, trial by jury, innocence till proven guilty, etc. etc.) are seen as English or British (historically, many of them were originally English) is a matter for discussion elsewhere. The Convention is forward-looking (’modern liberty’) and is engaged in a political struggle in the context of ‘national-UK’ governance in the present. For that reason, it would be tempting to agree that the Convention is a British cause and should not be of particular interest to English nationalists, and should certainly not concern itself with English-national issues.

But such a view presupposes that there is a unified national, political community called Britain, or the UK, whose liberty it is a question of defending; doing so in the name of its people: the British ‘nation’ or ‘people’. While liberty itself is a universal concept, its practical interpretation and implementation take the form of the fundamental laws and constitution of particular nations or states. You could say that the liberty of a free nation is expressed and protected through the particular freedoms and rights that are constitutive of that nation’s state: free nation and state perfectly mirrored in each other; the values and consent of the former articulated in the legal and constitutional principles, and the political institutions, of the latter.

Such a balance between nation and state no longer exists in Britain, if it ever truly did. The asymmetric devolution carried out by New Labour in 1999 introduced, or perhaps rather gave political expression to, a divergence between the nations of Scotland and Wales, on the one hand, and the British state; and between the national identities of Scottish and Welsh people, and their state identity as British citizens. More fundamentally still, it introduced a split at the very heart of the British identity itself between the English nation and the British state: entities which had by and large previously been viewed by most English people as indissolubly fused; the one mirroring the other in the manner of a free nation-state, as described in the previous paragraph.

What this means is that conversations about ‘British liberty’ inevitably become fractured, both as to their object (the way fundamental freedoms are or are not protected by the laws and governance of the British state) and to the ’subject’ of liberty: the ‘British’ people whose liberty is at stake. Nowadays, when people in England engage in a discussion on liberty in Britain, they’re almost always really referring to the situation in England (or England and Wales), rather than Britain as a whole, in two ways: 1) the legal situation in Scotland is already quite different from that in England and Wales on some issues, such as CCTV surveillance, the keeping of the DNA records of innocent adults and children, and the maintenance of a national database of children, as Gareth Young points out in the article linked to above; 2) more pervasively, when English people (particularly, the liberal middle class) talk about ‘Britain’, they tend to mean ‘England’; but they may continue to say ‘Britain’ rather than ‘England’ even if they’re semi- or fully conscious that the situation and the remedies they’re discussing relate to England only – because ‘Britain’ is the way one refers to England in relation to official matters, the UK state and national governance.

This phenomenon is partly the reflection of the adage that old habits die hard (England may be the nation but Britain is and always has been the state and the ‘country’). But partly, this is also a symptom of the splitting of the old unified English-British identity, one effect of which is that – depending on which side of the debate you align yourself with – either ‘Britain’ or ‘England’ are construed as negative, irrelevant, antiquated and even unreal, while ‘England’ or ‘Britain’ respectively are seen as more positive, inclusive, authentic and modern. Witness Ros Taylor in the Guardian article linked to above attempting to deride appeals to a distinct English identity and tradition as backward-looking, petty (”‘You just have to Google “England” and look at the rubbish out there’”), racist (”Was the presence of another audience member anxious to assert that . . . 100 white women were raped by black men in the United States every day, a clue?”) and irrelevant to a serious, inclusive discussion on modern liberty: “But these [national questions] are a distraction from the convention’s main purpose: to thrash out how much power the state should have over the individual”.

Such views, while being intensely anglophobic and embodying considerable class prejudice, are also predicated on the assumption that discussions centred on the relationship between the [British] state and the [English] individual, by very virtue of their universal and UK-wide purport, do well to bypass the “red herring” of Englishness, as Taylor calls it. But it’s only in England that a debate on national governance and liberty could actually draw a virtual square bracket around the name of the nation whose people is most seriously affected by the encroachments of the state and which is being denied democratic equality with the other nations of the UK. And it’s only in England that one could pretend to have a conversation on civil liberties that could appear to have no ‘national’ character at all, even though – or rather because – it centred on Britain and the British state. The fact that Britain is a state and not really a nation allows the Britologists, as I call them, to have their cake and eat it: to build a new nation of Britain while denying that it really is a nation (because Britain isn’t a nation) but is in fact something ‘above’ mere nationhood: supra-national, multi-cultural, inclusive and universal, like liberty itself.

But this is an illusion and a lie: you can’t have liberty in practice without a political and legal (national-state) context that embodies it in laws, rights and institutions. And that context, for the Britologist (whether campaigner for modern liberty or member of the political establishment), is the UK-Britain. Listen to the way the government describes its own ambitions to conduct a ‘national conversation’ on Britishness, which was its British-sledgehammer-to-crack-an-English-nut response to a petition to set up St. George’s Day as a national holiday in England:

“The ‘Governance of Britain’ Green Paper set out the Government’s commitment to lead an inclusive debate to develop a Statement of Values to help identify what binds us together as a nation.  We will begin an inclusive process of discussion and deliberation across the country, involving roundtable events and online engagement. Central to this will be a Citizens’ Summit – a broadly representative group of around 500 people from across the UK – who will be asked to deliberate and decide the framework for the Statement of Values and make recommendations on its uses” [my emphases].

The government’s approach explicitly links the setting out of a formal and modern statement of British values (including that of liberty, no doubt) with the idea of Britain ‘as a nation’. Now I’m not saying that this approach is in all respects similar to that of the Convention On Modern Liberty, which is setting out a serious critique of the government’s actual performance against those very British values it lays claim to. But these two would-be focuses of a national conversation on civic values do rest on common ground in one very fundamental respect: they centre their objectives around an idea of a ‘modern Britain’, which is somehow more inclusive, more progressive, and a more adequate interpretation of contemporary aspirations to freedom and universal human rights than an approach centred on one particular nation and people: the ‘English’ people. But, of course, the one people whose aspirations to give expression to its own values, identity and commitment to the ideals of liberty that is excluded by all this supra-national inclusiveness is England. And this is carried out in the name of a renewal of fundamental British ideals whose full realisation would effectively involve a re-founding of Britain as a nation. The government’s statement here makes this explicit; but it’s also implicit in the approach of the Britologist campaigners for modern liberty: a new inclusive, liberal Britishness and [virtual] nation-state of Britain is preferred to an antiquated, narrow Englishness. As Ros Taylor writes: “many first- and second-generation immigrants to Britain, like Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, find Britishness a more comfortable concept than Englishness. . . . It is the right to opt out and reject a given identity that many of the campaigners at the convention today prize most. Could English citizenship really bestow that? On current evidence, I doubt it.”

Well, clearly, in Taylor’s view, British citizenship does or should bestow the right and ability to ‘reject a given identity’: rejecting one national identity (Englishness), that is, in favour of another (non-)national identity (Britishness). But the real existential reason why Britishness both is and is not a national identity is precisely that it is the state identity – the citizenship – of English people; a citizenship whose national core (Englishness) has been sucked out of it but which aspires to the cachet and effective status of a nation, even as it despises the idea of nationhood and the very name (England) of that nation itself. You can’t get away from the idea of nationhood and national identity even when – precisely when – discussing universal freedoms and human rights; because those rights are enshrined in national laws and statutes, whether English or British. And it is those national laws and statutes that provide the whole context for the conversation and for the fight for freedom.

Whether those freedoms to which both the liberal intelligentsia and, I would argue, the broader mass of the English population aspire will end up being English or British freedoms (regardless of whether they’re acknowledged as in fact English-only or not) may well be decided by the national conversations on liberty and governance taking place elsewhere in Britain (or, more accurately perhaps, somewhere else than England-Britain): in Scotland and Wales. To return to my theme of a fractured national debate on these matters as they relate to the subject of liberty (the nation or people whose liberty is at issue), there is no reticence or repugnance in Scotland about acknowledging and foregrounding the national dimensions of the tensions between the liberty of the Scottish citizen versus the power of the British state. Look at the programme for the Convention On Modern Liberty event in Glasgow, where all the discussions actually taking place in Glasgow (as opposed to the video feeds from London) were on “aspects of surveillance that are distinctive to Scotland”. Precisely: there are many aspects that are distinctive to Scotland, in contrast to the Britain-centric view from England, which delusionally imagines that everything it describes as British (but is in fact English-only) applies to the whole of Britain. And look at the logo for the Scottish Convention (below), which clearly builds the Saltire into its design – in contrast to the non-nation-specific logo for the English events, with anonymous yellow and purple slashes replacing the Scottish blue shown here:

Of course, the Scottish Convention took / takes place in the context of a more general ‘National Conversation’ on the future of Scotland as a nation: the one organised by the SNP government alongside a broader discussion the people of Scotland themselves are having about their future as a nation, whether inside or outside the Union. In Scotland, it makes absolutely no sense to have a discussion about individual freedom versus state power that leaves out the national dimension. It is, after all, the free, sovereign nation that legitimises the power of the state as the formal expression of the nation’s freedoms (and lawful limits to those freedoms), values and identity. If the British state is perceived as infringing on those freedoms and that national identity – including their expression in the formal institutions of the Scottish government – then this will doubtless increase support in Scotland for a complete break-away from the UK. So these civil-liberties issues are inherently also national questions: the nation – the people – freely confers power to the state, and inherently has the freedom (formalised as a right in foundational statements such as the Scottish Claim of Right) to govern itself as it chooses and not as the state dictates.

And what applies to Scotland – if indeed these principles are to be considered in line with the universal requirements of liberty – must also apply to England. And it does apply to England, as England, in the discussion on these matters that is taking place in England. This is because, as the contrast with the Scotland-centred debate in Scotland demonstrates, the would-be Britain-only debate on liberty that is being carried on in England is one that could happen and is happening only in England. Only in England do we try to obscure and obfuscate the national-English character of the debate about the English individual and nation as (mis)governed by the British state. Only in England do we fail to recognise our future liberty as inherently the liberty of our [English] nation; just as no liberty is possible without a national character.

A failure to acknowledge the necessarily and distinctively English character of our conversation about ‘British’ liberties vitiates the objective of liberty we seek to secure in two fundamental respects: it involves a failure to recognise the inherently national character and expression of any statement on the principles of liberty, equality, justice and democracy that serve as the foundation for a state. And it fails to recognise that in England – a nation that exists and is cherished, still, by the vast majority of its people of all races – that national character of liberty (past, present and future) must be English.

Or else it is nothing. Or else it plays right into the hands of the British government that seeks to control, dictate and impose an ‘official’ state version of our values and national identity (as British), just as it seeks to control and monitor our activities in a host of ways that violate our traditional, English freedoms.

But not just English freedoms, but also universal liberty: because ‘English freedoms’ are the distinctively and, of necessity, national English expression of universal liberty for and in England. If you deny the Englishness of liberty in England, you conspire with the British government’s denial of liberty itself. Along with its denial of England.

New poll: What constitutional settlement do you favour for England?

Check out the new poll on the above subject I’ve just added to the Polls section of this site. My preference, by the way: No. 4 – (con)federation with sovereignty – England fully sovereign but delegating responsibility on things like defence and foreign affairs to a new federal British government.

Not that I’m trying to influence the vote (as if I would)!

The National Conversation For England supports the National Conversation for England

I was somewhat surprised this morning to find that Gareth Young had posted a campaign carrying the name of this blog on the Labourspace forum. Surprised in a couple of ways: first, the theft borrowing of the name, for which Gareth has in any case apologised. Besides which, I nicked the name off the SNP, and I don’t own copyright; second, I was surprised at the choice of forum, the Labour Party in government having been so implacably opposed to any discussion or even concept of the English Question.

However, on reflection, I think Young’s tactic is sound. It’s all nice and cosy preaching to the converted, as we English nationalists are apt to do. But if change is going to come – to nick borrow a phrase – then it’s going to have to be espoused by people with the power to do something about it. The Tories have recently made it clear, if there was ever any doubt, that they are simply not interested in engaging with the English Question nor in consulting the people of England as to what they might actually want. If we get a Tory landslide at the next general election, it’s hard to envisage them doing anything – even Ken Clarke’s hopelessly inadequate ‘English Pauses for English Clauses’ solution – to address the issue of the English democratic deficit. Meanwhile, the Lib Dems under Nick Clegg seem at times to be pathologically incapable of acknowledging the very existence of England, failing totally to connect their belief in extending and improving democracy to the fact that England is the only nation in the UK without a government elected under PR.

So if any of the major political parties are going to espouse the cause of English self-government, even if only in the context of devolution, then it may well have to be the Labour Party in opposition. There have been encouraging signs of late that many on the left of English politics are beginning to acknowledge the need to develop a ‘progressive’ English nationalism, or at least to channel the patriotism of their traditional support base in England – the working class – in a more positive, inclusive and progressive direction. I personally don’t buy in to the concept of ‘progressive’ politics: a term that carries the baggage of a whole liberal (with a small ‘l’) and secular social, political and philosophical agenda that I regard as questionable in some of its core assumptions and practical consequences. Nonetheless, if the right of the English nation to choose its own form of government is going to be advanced, we’re going to need all the allies we can get, including some of the powerful army of liberal opinion formers within the Labour Party and ‘progressive’ media. Accordingly, I wish Gareth’s campaign well and urge my readers to support it, if they haven’t already.

One key component of Gareth’s campaign is the principle of popular sovereignty. I’ve discussed this in previous posts and laid it out as one of the constitutional foundations for a prospective federal UK. If this principle were accepted for England, it would involve a radical break with the current fundamental UK constitutional principle of parliamentary sovereignty, which essentially involves the exercise of royal sovereignty by the democratically elected parliament. A re-founding of English democracy on the basis of popular sovereignty would therefore involve dismantling the present UK state, whose unity and governance is symbolised and personified in the person of the monarch: the king or queen’s sovereign rule of the whole of the UK (subject to parliament) is what makes it a united kingdom. This does not mean that a ’sovereign England’ – a newly constituted England in which the people were regarded as sovereign – would necessarily have to be a republic, or part of a ‘Federal Republic of England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland’ – or whatever. But the transition to government on new founding principles would be a historic moment in which the English nation could be confronted with the decision, among other things, about whether to retain its ancient Christian monarchy.

All the more reason for those of either political persuasion (republican or monarchist) to get involved in the national debate – conversation, indeed – that is gathering momentum. Hence, I would urge you to get behind Gareth’s campaign: ‘Knock and it will be opened to you; ask and it will be given to you’. In other words, we have to keep on pushing on the door and levers of power; and eventually, they might just give in.

“England is a nation”: now what?

I was bowled over by the government’s response last Monday to the ‘England nation’ petition that I posted on the Number 10 website, and which so many of my readers signed – for which, many thanks.

To remind you, the petition asked: “We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to state whether he recognises that England is a nation.”

The further details of the petition were as follows:

“The present Prime Minister’s predecessor once characterised Scotland as ‘a proud historic nation’: sentiments which the Prime Minister would doubtless share. Under devolution, the people of Scotland, Wales and even Northern Ireland are reaffirming their historic nationhood and taking pride in their new national governmental institutions. England, too, is a proud historic nation; and a great many people living in England – perhaps the majority – view their national identity as English in the first instance, and British only secondarily. In the light of these trends, we believe the government should state explicitly whether it regards England as a nation in its own right or not. It goes without saying that any acknowledgement of nation status, however qualified, for England should be accompanied by the acknowledgement of nation status for Scotland and Wales, at least – Northern Ireland perhaps being a special case. Equally, if England is not to be regarded as a nation, the same should apply to Scotland and Wales.”

And here is the reply:

“England is a nation within the United Kingdom. The Union comprises England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. The Government believes that the Union benefits all parts of the United Kingdom. Within the framework of the Union, devolution allows different policies to develop in different parts of the UK, meeting the democratically expressed preferences of the people, adapting to specific circumstances and issues, and allowing public services to meet needs more effectively. All parts of the United Kingdom benefit from a strong economy and share critical common interests, in respect of national integrity and security, in facing global challenges which are played out on an international stage. People in the UK share common citizenship rights, which express in political, legal and social terms what it means to be from the UK. The rights and freedoms that are associated with our citizenship, expectations of mutual support and solidarity, and common institutions and cultural ties, bind us together and continue to unite us. The Government believes that we are stronger together, and weaker apart.”

I’m not intending here to carry out a detailed, sentence-by-sentence analysis of this reply but want rather to draw out some of its implications. First and foremost, I thought I’d never read these words from the government: “England is a nation”. This is a very important statement that should not be underestimated. The petition asked the prime minister to either acknowledge or deny that England is a nation; and what we got was an acknowledgement. I really do think we should all draw a huge collective sigh of relief here: the government has gone on record as accepting that England exists as a nation, and is not just a collection of ‘British regions’ or a mere territory within the UK that is indistinguishable from it in political and national terms. They are much less likely now to try and get away with quietly abolishing England as a nation; and if they do try to do this, we can call them much more effectively to account, as there has now been an official UK government statement that England is a nation.

Having said that, this is a very qualified statement. I use the term ‘qualified’ intentionally, because I put that very word into the details of the petition: “any acknowledgement of nation status, however qualified, for England should be accompanied by the acknowledgement of nation status for Scotland and Wales, at least – Northern Ireland perhaps being a special case”. I included this caveat in order to allow the civil servants drawing up this reply the latitude of conceding that England is a nation without necessarily having to concede everything else that could be implied by that. My aim above all was to get nation status accorded to England, and then we can all argue about what it means. But so long as the government refused to even utter the word England or accept that the concept of ‘national English governance’ actually meant anything (which they didn’t), then there was no way we could even have a debate. But now we can actually say to government representatives, MPs, journalists and the like, ‘look, the government accepts England is a nation; and, if so, we say it’s our democratic right as a nation to decide how we govern ourselves’. Of course, the government won’t accept that there’s any problem with the way England is governed now; but they’ll be obliged to take seriously the proposition that England is a nation, because they’ve said so themselves.

The government’s response is qualified in two important respects. Firstly, it refuses to accept the idea that England is a sovereign nation: “England is a nation within the United Kingdom” is what it says. This picks up on the wording of the petition, when it said, “we believe the government should state explicitly whether it regards England as a nation in its own right or not [my emphasis]“. So, according to the response, England is not a nation in its own right: with the full sovereign rights that are generally attributed to that term; but the rights and freedoms of the people of England are established, defined and protected within the framework of the United Kingdom, which remains the sovereign state of which England is a part. The response to the petition is basically a defence of the present constitutional settlement, in which a sovereign UK devolves power in certain domains to the different “parts” of the UK while retaining those powers (the reserved powers) that are most fundamental to and characteristic of a sovereign state or nation: running the economy, social welfare, citizenship and citizen rights, constitutional affairs and law (at least, in England and Wales), and national security and defence.

But note this crucial phrase: “Within the framework of the Union, devolution allows different policies to develop in different parts of the UK, meeting the democratically expressed preferences of the people”. People have rightly reacted indignantly to this statement because ‘the people’ of England have clearly not had the opportunity to express their democratic preference about whether or not they wish to have the same form of devolved government as the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were able to choose in a referendum. People are angry about this because it’s inconsistent and unfair. Precisely: it is inconsistent, because this very statement appears to affirm that all parts of the UK should be allowed to have devolved government if that is their preference. The very wording, “Within the framework of the Union, devolution allows . . .” must logically apply to England as well, which was described in the opening sentence of the response as “a nation within the United Kingdom“. In other words, this can be read as an admission that England ought to be allowed devolution if it wants it, and this statement can be used to point up the inconsistency, unfairness and violation of the English people’s democratic rights that are involved in denying us devolution. The government has handed us a new argument and has hanged itself with its own words.

The second important way in which the response is qualified is that it does not explicitly accord nation status to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, along with England, which is what the petition asked: “It goes without saying that any acknowledgement of nation status, however qualified, for England should be accompanied by the acknowledgement of nation status for Scotland and Wales, at least – Northern Ireland perhaps being a special case”. Instead, what we get, in the second sentence of the response, is merely the elliptical statement: “The Union comprises England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland”. However, the fact that this sentence comes immediately after the sentence “England is a nation within the United Kingdom” does at least strongly imply that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are to be regarded as nations as well, especially in the context of what was asked in the petition. By not spelling this out explicitly, the government is avoiding the thorny constitutional issue of the different claims to or refutations of nation status for the other ‘parts’ of the UK; e.g. is Northern Ireland actually a nation, or part of a nation (Ireland or Britain?), or even just a province?

But also, more importantly for England, the unwillingness to declare whether the other ‘nations’ of the UK are truly nations in all the senses of the word is a way not to fan the flames of Scottish nationalism – which was actually one of the things I would have liked to achieve if the government had answered the petition by acknowledging Scotland as a nation. The point is that Scotland has a different notion of sovereignty, which is both national and popular (sovereignty of the Scottish people); whereas UK sovereignty is parliamentary (the sovereignty of the monarch as exercised and expressed through the democratically elected UK parliament). If the response had stated that Scotland is a nation, this could have been interpreted as the government conceding the principle of popular national sovereignty to Scotland, especially as several members of the Labour government were signatories to the infamous Scottish Claim of Right, which enshrines this principle – notably, the prime minister himself, who was the recipient of the present petition.

However, if the principle of popular sovereignty is accepted in Scotland’s case, then we could have argued that it should be admitted for England, too. But to make this argument, the response would have had to acknowledge that England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were all nations with equal rights and constitutional status. The government’s response therefore stops short of acknowledging explicitly that Scotland is a nation in order to pre-empt this line of attack, while at the same time strongly implying that Scotland can legitimately be regarded as a nation, in order not to enrage the Scots by explicitly denying nation status to Scotland.

But where does that leave England? Specifically, what does England’s nation status consist of? This is a very complicated question, which I aim to explore in more detail in a subsequent post. But one way of thinking about what the answer could be is to think about how the description of the UK as a union comprising (the nation of) England together with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (as territories with equal political and constitutional status to England) relates to Gordon Brown’s now infamous description of the Britain he wanted to bring about as one of ‘nations [Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland] and regions [the former nation of England]‘. One reading of the nations and regions concept is that it turns the UK / Britain into a sovereign nation in its own right (not just a state); and that devolution was fundamentally about splitting the nation of the UK / Britain into regions. Under this set-up, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are effectively really devolved British regions equivalent to the ‘English regions’ the government has created and in which it wanted to establish devolved government. But this process of regional devolution was combined by New Labour with the process of according nation status and limited rights of ‘national’ self-government to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. So, through the combination of these processes, England was replaced by Britain as the national-level entity (England becoming Britain) while, at the same time, the ‘regions’ of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were able to affirm themselves as nations.

If, now, England is described as a nation – and if, as I have interpreted the government’s response correctly, this does not mean a sovereign nation – does this mean that England’s ‘true’ official status is to be seen as just a very large semi-autonomous region or super-region, of equivalent constitutional status to the ‘regions’ that are Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? In other words, if the four ‘parts’ of the UK are really regions (but the government calls them ‘nations’ to placate the people), then this means that the UK / Britain can continue to ascribe and abrogate nation status to itself, which is the present position, as the petition strongly implies: the UK is the sovereign power with properly national-level, national-type responsibilities, including ensuring, as it says, the “national integrity and security” of . . . what? The national integrity and security of the different “parts of the United Kingdom” (as nations) or of the United Kingdom itself (as a virtual nation, or nation in all but name)?

This is the danger of demanding only devolution for England on a par with that which has been accorded to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Under devolution, real, sovereign power is retained by the UK state; and the power that is exercised by the devolved parliaments remains an expression of the sovereignty of the UK state, which has merely been delegated to the devolved bodies. This means that, if we were eventually to secure a devolved English parliament (on the present basis for devolution), this would mean we were accepting that England was not a sovereign nation in its own right (as the petition asked) but only as a function of the rights and prerogatives defined by the UK state. The UK would remain the sovereign, national-type body; and England would be a nation in name but without full sovereign nation status: a ‘nation-region’ on a par with Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

This is the risk. But what is the opportunity? The opportunity that this response hands to us is that of insisting that England, as an officially recognised nation within the UK, be accorded the same right to decide whether it wants a devolved national parliament and government as has been accorded to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. The response recognises this as a right. Let’s now the press the case, because the government can no longer wriggle out of its responsibilities by denying that England even is a nation.

We’ve established England’s nation status. Let’s now demand a referendum on an English parliament with even greater conviction and authority than before, because the government itself has declared that England is a nation – and what officially recognised democratic nation anywhere in the world is denied a democratically elected parliament of its own? Only England. Once we have a parliament and can take pride in being a self-governing nation, then we can decide among ourselves whether we want to be a sovereign, independent nation; or whether we want the UK to retain sovereignty over us; or whether we want to be sovereign but pool our sovereignty with the other UK nations under a federal solution, as previously discussed in this blog.

The point is: England is a nation – it’s official. Next step: a parliament.