Is now the confederal moment?

In my previous post, I commented on the finding in this week’s ComRes opinion poll of 864 English adults that 36% of them felt that: “Irrespective of the outcome of the Scottish referendum . . . England should become a fully independent country with its own government, separate from the rest of the United Kingdom”. [...]

DPEV: absolutely the best single-member voting system for the UK and England – honest

OK, I admit it: I’m a voting-system geek, if not obsessive. I really dislike AV, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it leaves England short-changed: nothing done to address the West Lothian Question or the broader English Question, to say nothing about the unaccountable nature of executive power in [...]

The People’s Pledge: a demand for popular sovereignty

Imagine if May’s referendum on the Alternative Vote were a referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU. The media would be completely filled with the story, and we’d see the claims and counter-claims of the two sides in the argument being fired off in quick succession like a never-ending tennis rally. Compare that to [...]

17% of British voters want a referendum on an English parliament

[Update: The exact total is 17%, it now emerges, as Toque has obtained access to the full data sheet. So for '15%' below, read 17%.] Yes, you didn’t read incorrectly: I meant ‘British’, not ‘English’. At the end of August / beginning of September, YouGov carried out an opinion poll on behalf of the Constitution [...]

The national dimension to constitutional reform

I’m a supporter of the Power 2010 initiative that is attempting to keep radical constitutional and parliamentary reform on the political agenda. However, I have serious qualms about the organisation’s ‘British’ dimensions and the way in which it conceives of constitutional reform, ironically, in rather conservative terms: within the framework of the present United Kingdom [...]

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 [...]

How to bring about constitutional reform: vote out all MPs!

There’s an interesting thread on the Our Kingdom site at the moment about the best tactics for bringing about radical constitutional reform in the UK. Anthony Barnett’s piece detailing seven possible strategies, which kicked off the thread, is especially worth checking out. I have previously suggested in this blog that one possible tactic would be [...]

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 [...]