Parliamentary sovereignty won’t protect us from the EU, because it’s already dead

So I didn’t call it right: I thought David Cameron would at the very least call a referendum to give a Conservative government the mandate to re-negotiate some of the terms of the UK’s membership of the EU. In the event, today, he merely committed to a pledge that there would be a referendum over [...]

Real Change: Britain or England?

Introduction: Deliberations on British-constitutional reform must factor in the national questions

I recently signed up to ‘Real Change‘. This is a grassroots movement that aims to set in motion a nationwide debate, at local level, about fundamental constitutional reform, culminating ultimately in a citizens’ convention to collate and deliberate on all the options, and to come [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

“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 [...]

No more Great Britain: A blueprint for a federal UK

The trouble with the UK is ‘Great Britain’. The future of the UK, if it has one, will be settled by coming to a more stable, mature and equitable relationship between the different nations that currently make up that state. Great Britain, and its even more ill-defined cognate ‘Britain’, is the great interloper that stands [...]

Reply to government consultation on citizen engagement

Just submitted my response to the government’s ‘national framework for greater citizen engagement’ discussion document – one day ahead of the deadline for sending in comments. Here’s what the delectably named Laura Beaumont will find from me in her inbox tomorrow morning:
Dear Ms Beaumont,
While this government initiative to build a greater level of engagement, participation [...]

English nationalism as a blend of ‘Whig imperialism’ and ‘democratic republicanism’

I reproduce here a comment I made on a post in the OurKingdom blog that was reviewing a presentation by the political historian David Marquand of his new book Britain after 1918: The Strange Career of British Democracy. In this book, Marquand analyses British history over the last 90 years as a product of the interplay [...]

Nation of England: Self-rule will come with self-pride

‘Nation of England’! Now there’s a phrase to stir the blood or – for some – to make it boil. ‘Nation of England’: sounds rather un-English, doesn’t it? We English are not given to aggressive displays of ‘national pride’ and self-assertion. It sounds like the demand of some rebellious ethnic minority to be respected and [...]