The Liberal-Democrat Accession and the English Parliament

You should always be careful what you wish for and be wary of the law of unintended consequences. Although I will probably be voting Lib Dem this time round – unless my Tory MP astounds me by previously unsuspected support for an English parliament – a Lib-Dem break-through could have far-reaching ramifications for the prospects and nature of any future English parliament.

For a start, as they made clear yesterday, the Lib Dems will make their support for a minority Labour- or Conservative-led government conditional on introducing proportional representation. One imagines this would involve a referendum on changing to the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system for UK-parliamentary elections.

Many supporters of PR see it as a way to mitigate (i.e. ignore) the West Lothian Question. The logic behind this position is simple, though flawed in my view. For example, under STV, if the actual vote on 6 May exactly followed yesterday’s ICM opinion-poll ratings (Con 33%, Lib Dem 30% and Lab 28%), then the Conservatives would be the largest party both in England and the UK as a whole; and in any coalition of the parties to form a government, the UK majority thus constituted would also be consistent with the parties’ shares of seats in England. Therefore, on one level, it would no longer matter if non-English MPs voted on English laws, as the same laws would be passed if only English MPs voted.

On the other hand, the reverse logic could also apply: if the votes of non-English MPs were no longer needed to pass English bills, why let them vote at all? The only real justification for non-English MPs voting on English legislation presently is when there is a link to spending in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland via the Barnett Formula. But presumably, the days of that formula itself might well be numbered under a Con-LibDem coalition, as the Lib Dems favour scrapping it and even the Tories talk in their manifesto of greater fiscal autonomy for Scotland.

Indeed, in a proportionally elected House of Commons, the situation of non-English MPs voting on English laws would come to appear blatantly, if not scandalously, anomalous. Under First Past the Post, by contrast, the fact that Labour’s Scottish MPs have occasionally been required to pass the government’s England-only legislation against the will of a majority of English MPs did not on one level seem that outrageous in that the government majority procured in this way was no more disproportionate than the normal majority of English MPs only it would expect to command, as both majorities were merely the product of the absurd FPTP electoral system rather than of the way English people actually voted at the 2005 general election.

In other words, in a situation in which voting majorities in the Commons bear little relation to the way the public actually voted at the election, the misuse of non-English MPs to inflate those majorities even further does not stand out too obviously. By contrast, in a proportionally elected House where the parties’ shares of the seats are meant to reflect the way people voted, and where MPs are meant to be more accountable to their electorates, distorting those shares by allowing MPs not accountable to the people affected by bills to vote on them would be completely inconsistent and unacceptable.

Accordingly, I tend to think that, rather than mitigating the WLQ, PR would render it inoperable. But then if you do not allow non-English MPs to make England’s laws, what arrangements would be made for that little matter of how to govern England? Do you go down the route of an English Grand Committee: English laws debated and voted on by separate sessions of English MPs only? Do you draw the logical conclusion and say that Parliament needs to evolve into an English parliament to deal with English matters, with a separate set of representatives elected from across the UK to deal with reserved matters? Or do you just try to ignore the problem by pretending that England does not exist and that the West Lothian Question simply does not arise, let alone require a solution – the Labour government’s approach?

In this way, by insisting on introducing PR before dealing with the English Question, the Lib Dems might find that question comes and bites them in the bum: they could create a constitutional mess in which the very legitimacy and function of the parliament for which they had finally secured PR was called into question – a British parliament without a valid democratic role and status in most of what it did, i.e. in English matters.

To be fair to the Lib Dems, their manifesto does state that they want to hold a citizens’ convention to help draw up a written constitution, and the English Question would be dealt with as part of this process. But the Lib Dems are not going to be in a position to carry out this commitment in full as part of a coalition government. All they’ve actually said is that they’d make electoral reform a minimal precondition of any deal to support a minority government, not the whole constitutional-reform programme; and neither Labour nor the Tories have any appetite to address the English Question. But as I say, the English Question may impose itself as unavoidable if the Lib Dems do succeed in introducing STV.

There are two possible scenarios that follow on logically from this. Firstly, if the Lib Dems do secure STV (and if, as I argue, this would lead to an urgent need to address the English Question because of the crisis of governance it would bring about), then any English parliament would also be based on STV. Having gone to the trouble and expense of introducing STV, which would require the re-drawing of constituency boundaries and the amalgamation of constituencies into multi-member seats, there is no way the English parliament could then revert to the pre-STV single member-constituency system. Having finally achieved their goal of a proper proportional system, the Lib Dems would never accept an inferior system for England; nor – I think – would the English people.

However – scenario two – what if the British public did not endorse STV in the initial referendum required to adopt it as the system for UK elections? For instance, Gordon Brown favours the Alternative Vote (AV) single-member system, and if the Lib Dems’ referendum were held under a putative Lab-LibDem coalition, it could be a multi-option referendum with AV as one of the systems on offer. Labour could be expected to argue strongly for AV, which is in reality merely a mitigated form of FPTP and would preserve the unfair advantage the present system gives to the party. Who knows, voters might prefer to retain single-member constituencies and the winner-takes-all aspect of the present system, albeit in a slightly fairer form. Under this second scenario, the West Lothian Question could remain in place for much longer, as AV would perpetuate the disproportionality of the present system from which the very ability of Labour to form any kind of government depends and which also disguises the outrageously unfair extra advantage Labour obtains from the WLQ.

In this context, the Lib Dems could find themselves in the unenviable position of propping up an unfairly elected Labour government that exploits its stronger base of support in Scotland and Wales to secure its power in England. Would it not then be both more effective tactically, and give greater moral credibility to their demands for constitutional reform, if the Lib Dems declared now – ahead of 6 May – that they would not exploit the West Lothian Question in the new parliament, even if to do so were the only way in which a coalition of which they were a part could actually form a working majority?

After all, how can the English people believe in the Lib Dems’ advocacy of greater democratic fairness and proportional representation if they are in theory willing to exploit one of the most egregiously unfair and disproportional aspects of the present system simply to have a share in government? If they want England to back them on 6 May and support STV in a referendum, then surely they should back ‘building a fairer Britain’ in the forthcoming parliament, too – including fairness for England.

The SNP would break its self-denying ordinance and support a minority Labour government

I’ve just been listening to an interview with SNP leader Alex Salmond on BBC Radio 4’s PM programme. Towards the end of the interview, Eddie Mayer asked Salmond if the SNP would be prepared to break the self-denying ordinance it has hitherto observed in parliamentary votes on what Mayer called ‘devolved’ matters and what Salmond rightly insisted on calling ‘English-only matters’.

The context of the question was the SNP’s election-campaign claims that they would use their influence in a hung parliament to defend Scotland’s interests, in particular to shield Scotland from the severity of the budget cuts that those of us living south of the border are going to have to endure. How could they exercise that influence if they refused to support the party of government in England-only votes?

Salmond stated that he wanted to keep the option of voting on English matters ‘up his sleeve’ as one of the trump cards he might need to play to secure the SNP’s objectives. In other words, the SNP would be prepared to vote on English matters in some circumstances.

Mayer then set the example of a minority Conservative government needing the SNP’s support in a vote on an (English) education bill. Salmond suggested that the example was unrealistic, as the SNP would be more likely to support a more ‘progressive’ policy agenda than one of Tory cuts to public services. This is a round-about way of saying that the SNP would prop up only a Labour minority government or Lab-LibDem coalition, not a Tory government or, one assumes, a possible Con-LibDem partnership.

In other words, if Gordon Brown wants to cling on to power after the election – whether Labour wins the largest or second-largest number of seats – his best bet might be to forge a deal with his SNP compatriots and, of course, Labour’s Plaid Cymru Welsh-Assembly coalition partners.

Come to think of it, it’s rather obvious that Salmond could not get away with suggesting he might do a deal with the Conservatives at Westminster, as the SNP has tried to position the Tories as an anti-progressive force intent on savaging Scottish public services. Salmond is therefore indirectly encouraging Scottish voters to vote Labour in seats where the SNP can’t win in order to ensure a sufficiently large ‘Scottish block’ of ‘progressive’ votes in the new parliament that can override the Tory-LibDem majority in England.

The West Lothian Question could be more alive and embittered than ever in the new parliament – which of course also suits Mr Salmond’s agenda just fine.

Make Gordon Brown say ‘England’

I’ve ranted on enough about the way England-specific topics are unlikely to be explicitly dealt with as such in the much heralded prime-ministerial debates, including in this blog. But now Power 2010 is giving people a chance – however slim – to persuade ITV to ask the leaders where they stand on English votes on English laws (EVoEL) during the first debate tomorrow, on ‘domestic’ (i.e. mostly English) issues.

They’ve set up a web page that allows you to send an email requesting that ITV ask the West Lothian Question that the Labour and Tory manifestoes, published this week, have already shown the parties to be unwilling to even address, let alone resolve in any meaningful way.

Give it a go and, you never know, the leaders might actually be forced to utter the ‘E’ word: it’ll be worth it for the sheer entertainment value of watching Gordon Brown squirm as he pushes that hated word out of his mouth!

Vote hung parliament!

The English tend to resent people telling them what to do. But at the risk of provoking such resentment, I want to set out here why I think the best result for England from the British general election would be a hung parliament, and then discuss how best to bring about that result.

In a hung parliament, the party that was able to form a government – whether Tory or Labour – would be especially reliant on their MPs elected in Scotland and Wales (and, in the case of the Conservatives, their UUP MPs, if any) to pass legislation affecting England but not the countries those MPs are supposed to represent. If the government relied on some sort of pact with the Lib Dems (whether an actual coalition or an agreement to support the government on principle, if not in every single matter), it might be the case that the support of both the government’s non-English MPs and non-English Lib Dem MPs would be required to vote through English bills.

This situation would make the unrepresentative and unjust character of the West Lothian Question even more obvious than it has been under New Labour’s 13-year-long disproportional rule. So much so, in fact, that the WLQ could come to the attention of many more people in England who have hitherto been blissfully ignorant of it. Who knows, this could even provoke as much outrage as the expenses scandal, and English voters would be rightly furious that the government was exploiting this gerrymandering principle to impose its will on England. Even more so if the SNP and Plaid Cymru, in return for government concessions making the injustices of the Barnett Principle even more onerous to English people, decided to relinquish their self-denying ordinance by voting on non-Scottish and non-Welsh bills respectively in support of the government.

In short, a hung parliament could help bring about a constitutional crisis by waking English people up to the way they’re being ripped off by Westminster.

A second way in which a hung parliament could help along the process of constitutional reform is if the Lib Dems extract an agreement for constitutional and electoral reform in exchange for their support for the government. At the very least, this might involve proportional representation (PR); although I wouldn’t be too surprised if the lily-livered Lib Dems were content to let Gordon Brown (if Labour remained in government) have his insulting referendum on the Alternative Vote (which, as I’ve said elsewhere, is not a real alternative to First Past the Post), rather than pushing for a properly proportional system, which England deserves.

At best, the reforms that might follow could involve a constitutional convention, which the Lib Dems favour, in which potentially all options would be on the table, including an English parliament. It is, however, extremely unlikely that the party of government would agree to such a wholesale process of constitutional reform, even if the Lib Dems made it a condition of their support. However, smaller-scale reforms would be a step in the right direction; and under PR, there would at least be a reasonable chance of electing some English-Democrat and UKIP MPs, depending on which system was adopted.

How to vote for a hung parliament

Under the First Past the Post voting system, the sad truth is that, in most constituencies, it really doesn’t matter how you vote: the incumbent party will almost inevitably win. This is, for instance, the case in my constituency, which is a safe Tory seat.

However, if you are ‘lucky’ enough to live in a marginal constituency, then your vote might actually influence the eventual outcome of the overall contest, and could serve the cause of a hung parliament. This is what I’d recommend:

• In seats where the Lib Dem candidate has a realistic chance of winning: vote Lib Dem, as this will increase the chance of a hung parliament
• In seats where it is a fight between Labour and the Tories: either vote Conservative or any other party than Labour. Don’t vote Tory if a) the prospect of doing so makes you feel sick, including because they aren’t remotely interested in governing in the interests of England or English voters; or b) because the opinion polls nationally are suggesting the Conservatives are in danger of winning an overall majority – in which case, they don’t need your vote, and at least you’ll have voted in accordance with your conscience.

In my case, I’m pretty convinced I’ll end up voting UKIP because the only alternatives to the big three, in my seat, are UKIP and the Greens. As I said, it’s a Tory safe seat, so it essentially doesn’t matter how I vote, and none of the main parties are remotely interested in how I do so or in fighting for my vote. So I’ll vote UKIP because I’m furious with the way they all reneged on their commitments to a referendum on the EU.

If, over the course of the campaign, it started to look as though the Lib Dem candidate had a chance of winning, I’d switch to voting for him – simply in order to try and get a hung parliament.

So my recommendation is: vote hung parliament – if you can!

The Alternative Vote: An Opinion

Yesterday, Parliament voted to include a referendum on replacing the existing First-Past-the-Post (FPTP) system for UK-parliamentary elections with the Alternative Vote (AV) system in the Constitutional Reform Bill presently being debated in Parliament. For those who still don’t know what AV is: instead of marking a cross beside the name of their preferred candidate, voters rank candidates in order of preference. Then, if no candidate obtains more than 50% of first-choice votes, the bottom-ranked candidate is eliminated and the second preferences of those who voted for that candidate are added to the totals of the remaining candidates, and the process is repeated if necessary until one candidate has more than 50% of first, second and, in some instances, third, fourth, fifth, etc. preferences.

I support the view that Gordon Brown’s insistence that the referendum proposal be included in the Constitutional Reform Bill is an entirely cynical ploy to position the Labour Party as a supporter of constitutional and electoral reform ahead of the general election. This is because the bill has no chance of being passed before the election, as it still has to go through the House of Lords, where it will face opposition, and time is running out. Brown is trying to hoodwink voters into believing that Labour supports electoral reform while the Tories manifestly do not (as they’re committed to retaining FPTP) simply in order to attract the votes of Lib Dem voters in seats where Labour needs their support to avoid being beaten by the Conservatives under the present voting system. In short, it’s a tactic to win tactical votes.

There’s absolutely no guarantee that Labour, should they be re-elected, would revive the legislation that includes the referendum on AV: the Bill would have to be revived, or a new one drawn up, as the existing one would be dead. And even if they did follow through, the AV system is designed to engineer a permanent Labour / Lib Dem majority in the House of Commons, and thereby to disadvantage the Conservatives. See for example the excellent analysis of what the election results from 1983 to 2005 might have looked like under AV on the BBC News website. This reveals that, in scenarios where more Lib Dems vote Labour as their second choice than Conservative (i.e. in the last three elections and probably the next), the number of seats won by both Labour and the Lib Dems would be greater, to the detriment of the Conservatives. According to the analysis, the Tories would have been practically wiped out in 1997, with only a few more seats than the Lib Dems presently hold, despite being the second-largest party in terms of first-choice votes.

And this illustrates the deficiency of the AV system. Gordon Brown has stated that it would restore the public’s confidence in politics and Parliament, because it would mean that all MPs would enjoy the backing of a majority of their constituents. But this is a fallacy. This supposed ‘majority’ is in fact merely an artifice of the AV system. For example, you could in theory carry on eliminating the lower-ranked candidates until only the winner was left standing, who could then be said to enjoy the support of 100% of voters. And it all depends on how you reallocate the second preferences. For example, there could be some instances where the candidate that is first to cross the threshold of 50% based on the second preferences of people voting for smaller parties would actually lose if you counted the second preferences of the stronger-performing, eliminated candidates. This might be the case in a narrow finish between Labour and the Conseratives, where a Conservative could narrowly win based on the second preferences of those who selected UKIP or the BNP as their first choice, but where the Labour candidate might win if you went on to count the second preferences of the losing Lib Dem candidate.

No, when Gordon Brown says AV would restore the public’s faith in Parliament, what this actually means is that AV is a ploy to deceive the public into thinking they’re getting a more representative and accountable parliament while basically preserving the present parliamentary and electoral systems fundamentally unchanged. Indeed, it’s worse than before, in that the results can be more disproportionate than under FPTP; they fail to fully reflect the strength of voters’ positive choice of parties (as opposed to what they regard as the ‘least bad’ candidate); AV continues to marginalise the smaller parties; and it’s intended by Labour to disadvantage the Conservatives and favour Labour itself. 

In short, it’s just another case of cynical Labour gerrymandering and electoral posturing.

A nice constitutional crisis: Labour win on a smaller share of the vote than the Tories

Imagine this election scenario: the Tories win the largest share of the vote across the UK, but Labour are returned to office with a small majority. It could happen: the Conservatives actually have to win by a margin of around 9% to secure an overall majority, owing to the absurdities of the First Past the Post voting system and Labour’s gerrymandering of constituency boundaries. Admittedly, the ComRes opinion poll last week gave the Tories a 17% lead over Labour; but the most recent ICM poll, also last week, gave them only a 9% lead. (See the BBC’s excellent poll tracker charting the trends shown by different opinion polls over the past few years.)

Obviously, a hung parliament with the Tories having the largest share of seats is a more likely result than a Labour majority despite the Tories gaining the largest share of the votes. Or we could of course have a situation where Labour wins more seats overall, but not enough to form a majority, even though the Tories poll more votes. In all of these cases, the West Lothian Question would really come to the fore, in that it would be Labour’s disproportionate return of Scottish and Welsh MPs that would prevent the Tories from winning a majority or allow Labour to secure one. In all of these scenarios, the Tories would probably win a majority of English MPs.

How aware or concerned would people in England be about the national dimension to this situation of political stalemate or worse (a deeply unpopular Labour government) caused by an election result that failed to reflect the popular will to an even greater extent than normal, in that not even the largest party, in electoral terms, was in a position to form a government? Doubtless the media would conspire with the establishment parties to suppress the uncomfortable fact that the UK result was the consequence of Labour’s relative strength in Scotland and Wales (coupled with the voting system) overriding the will of the English people – although the Tories themselves are highly unlikely to command the support of the majority of voters even in England. But it could become embarrassingly obvious, even to the politically indifferent, that a minority or majority Labour government was totally reliant for its survival on its Scottish and Welsh phalanxes, and that Labour was happy to disregard the way the English had voted so long as the West Lothian Question allowed it to cling on to power.

What would happen in the case of a Labour majority or plurality based on a smaller share of the vote than the Conservatives? Precedent from the last hung parliament, in 1974, would indicate that the Queen would ask the leader of the largest party in parliamentary terms, i.e. Labour, to form a government. Under such circumstances, a man with the genuine leadership qualities that Brown sadly lacks might try to form a unity government: a coalition with the Tories and perhaps the Lib Dems, too, although not with the Lib Dems alone, as that would be correctly interpreted as simply a tactic to shut the Conservatives out of power and to retain a supposedly centre-left government. The more likely outcome would be that a Brown minority or majority government would attempt to soldier on despite its lack of a mandate – at least in England – and would try to morally blackmail the other parties into allowing it to function, on the basis that the economic crisis made political stability imperative. A minority Conservative administration would, I’m sure, behave in like manner: the Conservatives want to hold the reins of power on their own, regardless of the actual will of the electorate. So they’d probably set their stall out with an emergency budget and painful cuts in English public services (bearing in mind their direct spending in most areas relates to English (and occasionally Welsh) services only) and would then go to the polls for a second time to try to win a ‘mandate’ – defined as a parliamentary majority, not a majority of votes across England, let alone the UK.

Whichever party forms the next government is in a strong position to work this two-election poll vault into power, as Labour in fact did in 1974: carry out some emergency measures, and then seek a mandate and win a majority in a second election. The real political-credit crunch would come if a Labour government with an unrepresentative small majority tried to carry on for a full term, or if a second election produced an equally unsatisfactory result. Then, and probably only then, a constitutional crisis might occur that could lead to some fundamental reforms being made.

For example, a Labour government (after the first election) would probably try to force through legislation on electoral reform, including the proposed referendum on the Alternative Vote (AV) system. Any second election might well be conducted using AV, if a majority of voters backed it. This change would probably be decried by the Tories as an attempt by Labour to keep them permanently out of power, as AV – which is not a proportional system – would be likely to favour the centre-left majority in England and would bolster the leading unionist party (i.e. Labour) in Scotland and Wales. (You wouldn’t expect the Gerrymander Party to support a voting system that was not biased in its favour, would you?) In fact, based on the very same national electoral logic outlined above, AV might well return another majority Labour government based on a smaller share of first-choice votes than the Tories. However – and here’s the clever part – Labour would try to make out that this was a more genuine mandate as AV allegedly ensures that each MP enjoys the support of the ‘majority’ of their constituents. In fact, it does no such thing, as the 50%+ support each elected MP has to obtain through AV is merely an artifice of the voting system itself: in theory, you could carry on eliminating all of the last-placed candidates in an AV-based vote until only the last man, or woman, was left standing, and they could then be said to command the support of 100% of voters. But that figure is no more real than the 50%+ share proponents of AV say it engenders.

Imagine the Tories’ fury if they were frustrated in their lust for power by a change in electoral system for a second election in 2010 producing a majority Labour government from a smaller share of first-choice votes than the Conservatives! Not only would they be furious but so, this time, would many people in England, as, once again, the Labour majority would be dependent on the West Lothian Question.

The alternative scenario – a minority Conservative government seeking but failing to obtain a majority in a second election – would also be likely to add momentum to calls for fundamental reform. Under such circumstances, the Conservatives would have to rely on support from the Lib Dems in order to govern, perhaps in a coalition. The Lib Dems might then find themselves in a position to demand some meaningful reform measures, such as a move to a genuinely proportional voting system and a constitutional convention. Knowing the Conservatives, they would probably insist on ‘postponing’ such measures till later in the parliamentary term, or to a subsequent term, in the hope – no doubt – that they could put them off indefinitely.

For those, like me, that support the goal of an English parliament, what would the most favourable scenario be? The ‘best’ options would be the small-majority Labour government based on the West Lothian anomaly or a strong Conservative majority with very little representation in Scotland, as these are likely to get up the hackles of the English- and Scottish-nationalist constituencies respectively. On the other hand, a minority Labour or Conservative government, having to rely on the support of the other parties in order to govern, would be the least desirable outcome, as they would be able to appeal to the need to preserve ‘national unity’ and political stability to steer the UK out of its economic and fiscal crisis.

So as a supporter of an English parliament and of fundamental constitutional reform, one is in the invidious position of wishing for the election to bring about a constitutional crisis. But such a crisis would arise only because the established parties are determined to continue exploiting the unrepresentative character of the present system for their own advantage rather than realigning politics so that government is genuinely accountable to the people it affects. The refusal to remedy the West Lothian Question and address the more fundamental question of the governance of England are just part of a general unwillingness to reform a system that gives the main parties such unaccountable power: Labour needs its disproportionate representation from Scotland and Wales to govern England, and the Tories need their disproportionate representation from England to govern the UK. It may perhaps require a situation in which the UK becomes ungovernable – i.e. unworkable minority governments, a Labour government hated in England, or a Tory government hated in Scotland and Wales – to force the hand of the political elite and to bring about a situation in which all the nations of the UK can genuinely elect the government of their choice.

So we should perhaps wish for the Tories to win the election (on votes) but for Labour to return to power (on seats). Such a nice constitutional crisis may bring about political and economic turmoil in the short term; but in the long term, it may be the route to restoring English democracy.

Could a vote for the BNP be a good thing?

For the avoidance of doubt, I am not a BNP supporter. I despise their racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia. However, I agree with some of their key policies: restrictions to immigration, withdrawal of the UK from the EU, withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan, and more accountable local and regional democracy. Yes, those last two items are official policies.

For the former reasons, I would not vote BNP. For the latter, I would not be unhappy to see them doing reasonably well at the general election. What would constitute ‘doing reasonably well’, for the BNP? An article on the BNP website discusses the opinion polls conducted since last week’s appearance of BNP leader Nick Griffin on the BBC1 Question Time political discussion show. It cites the YouGov poll in the Daily Telegraph, which “found that 22 percent of voters would ‘seriously consider’ voting for the BNP in a future local, general or European election. This included four percent who said they would ‘definitely’ consider voting for the party, three percent who would ‘probably’ consider it, and 15 percent who said they were ‘possible’ BNP voters”. In reality, if the party managed to convert the equivalent of all of the ‘definites’ and ‘probables’ into actual votes – making 7% of the vote in the UK general election – they would probably regard that as a considerable achievement, given that they obtained ‘only’ 6.2% of the vote at this year’s European Parliament elections, which tend to produce more support for minor parties than general elections. Nonetheless, according to the same BNP article, an ICM poll last weekend indicated that “54 percent of voters say there are too many immigrants” and that “43 percent . . . said that, while they shared some of [the BNP’s] concerns, they had ‘no sympathy for the party itself'” – which goes for me, I guess.

What would be achieved by a 7% BNP vote at the general election? Well, this would scare the liberal establishment so much that the incoming government – probably led by David Cameron – would have to do far more than is presently being done to stem the flow of net immigration (let alone, overall population growth), currently running at around 237,000 per year. Secondly, the new government would be under no illusion that it needed to address people’s concerns about the ceding of UK sovereignty to the EU; and if this is a Tory government, it would be more difficult for them to avoid giving us a referendum of some sort on the Lisbon Treaty, even if it has already been ratified, which will probably be the case.

I say if this is a Tory government, because a 7% vote for the BNP might help to bring about a hung parliament – but only if the BNP derives enough of its support from people who would otherwise have voted Conservative, thereby reducing the Tories’ margin of victory and making it less likely for them to win an outright majority. However, at the moment, the BNP appears to be gaining most of its support from disaffected white working-class Labour voters who, quite understandably, feel the Labour government has failed to look after their interests. If a substantial BNP vote serves to reduce still further Labour’s share of the vote at the election, this could turn the tables in favour of a Tory victory.

Personally, a hung parliament would be my preferred election result; so I’m hoping that increasing support for the BNP will somehow help bring this about. Given the absurdities of our electoral system, anything’s possible. Why do I want a hung parliament? This is because it offers the best prospect for constitutional and parliamentary reform. The mere fact of a hung parliament could create something of a constitutional crisis, as there are no hard and fast constitutional rules for dealing with such a situation in the UK; although the precedent is that the queen should ask the leader of the largest party to form a government. Imagine a situation in which the Tories were the largest party but did not have a majority, and in which Gordon Brown refused to resign (as Edward Heath did in 1974) until he’d attempted to build a coalition government. Given how he’s desperately clung to power for so long, you would almost expect him to behave in this way.

Regardless of whether the end result were a Tory- or Labour-led coalition or minority government, the Liberal Democrats would end up holding the balance of power. And unlike either the Tories or Labour, the Lib Dems are genuinely committed to constitutional reform – if not specific proposals for English self-government – including the idea of holding a constitutional convention to come up with the blueprint for a written constitution. It’s debatable how much of this agenda they’d be able to push through in the circumstances of a hung parliament; but at least, there’d be more possibility of movement than under majority Conservative or Labour governments.

However, even if the election results in a majority Conservative government, a large vote for the BNP would probably advance the constitutional-reform agenda. This is again because it would scare the main parties and would be seen as a reflection of people’s disenchantment with mainstream politics and with Parliament. Ironically, then, a strong showing by the racist BNP could become one of the most powerful voices for democratic reform, and the need to make government more accountable to and representative of the concerns and wishes of the people. This is a huge paradox and is to the great shame of the self-serving political elite.

So I won’t be voting BNP at the general election; but, though I find their racial politics abhorrent, I hope they do quite well. The establishment needs the kind of kick in the teeth that perhaps only the thuggish BNP are in a position to deliver. And if, in the eventual shake-up, we get an English parliament, that will be an outcome that I personally will be delighted by – even if neither the establishment nor the BNP will be.

The Labour Party will never fulfil its calling with Gordon Brown at the helm

This article is cross-posted from Labour Home. Accordingly, it is orientated towards Labour Party members and sympathisers. I am not myself a member of the Labour Party. But I would like to see the Labour Party evolving into a movement focused on the needs of English society and people, which it has clearly failed to be during the New Labour period:

When New Labour came into power in 1997, it had huge ambitions to reform and invest in public services and the social-security system. In the event, much of that investment was indeed put in. Many improvements have been made to public services; the benefits system is now more tailored to the needs of the most disadvantaged sections of British society, while also offering more incentives and assistance for people to get back into employment; and the minimum wage was a long overdue reform that has helped end much of the wage exploitation of the Tory years.

And yet, in the present fin de régime atmosphere, it is hard to escape the feeling that Labour could and should have done much more given the broad centre-left consensus that swept it into power with such huge majorities in 1997 and 2001. Similarly, if Labour were re-elected next year – which hardly anybody in the real world regards as likely – would the Party have the ideas and vision to bring genuine progressive change and renewal to the country? Indeed, the apparent absence of any coherent and credible vision going forward is the main reason why the default option of a Cameron-led Tory government is the one the British (or rather, English) electorate is likely to choose.

One of the main reasons why Labour has failed to deliver an agenda of radical, popular socio-economic reform for Britain as a whole is that it spent half of its first term in office dismantling the governmental apparatus necessary to achieve it. Having, for once, secured a comfortable parliamentary majority across the whole of Great Britain – England as well as Scotland and Wales – Labour set about devolving responsibility in all social-policy areas apart from social security to separate administrations in Scotland and Wales. Doubtless, the Party expected to be able to continue to rule Scotland and Wales as its fiefdoms: exercising control over policy from London and being elected into power in perpetuity, having ‘seen off’ the nationalist threat through devolution. But it has not worked out that way, as we know, making it increasingly problematic to formulate and implement genuinely Britain-wide social policy.

The Labour government did, however, retain responsibility in England for areas such as education, health, local government, justice, transport, housing and planning: all key planks in any potential social-democratic programme of national social and economic development. But Labour has shown itself to be unable and unwilling to transform itself into a progressive movement and government for England. The Party is unionist in its traditions and outlook, and is rooted in ideas of UK-wide, or at least Britain-wide, social solidarity and the exercise of centralised power in pursuit of a common, ‘national-British’ social agenda. But post-devolution – or, at least, after asymmetric devolution as introduced by New Labour – it is no longer possible to deliver a consistent set of social policies for the whole of Britain directed from the Westminster centre. And Labour has failed either to adjust its vision of ‘the country’ for which it is in a position to pursue a progressive agenda, or to adapt its methods to the new realities of life at Westminster, which are that only some of the levers of power are now effective across the UK, while most social policy relates to England only.

So if the Labour government has not succeeded in carrying through a joined-up programme of progressive social reform for the country, this is because the ‘country’, in the social-policy area, has changed from Great Britain to England; and because Labour did not want to be a government for England only. The Labour-led coalitions in Scotland and Wales (up to 2007) were able to pursue traditional social-democratic agendas not only because they had a genuine electoral mandate to do so, but because the very rationale of the Scottish Executive and Welsh Assembly Government is to develop and execute social policy for those countries (and also, it has to be said, because they enjoyed very generous funding arrangements, arguably at England’s expense). By contrast, the Labour UK government and the Whitehall establishment have held on to the view that it is their job to be a government for ‘Britain’, and not to develop and implement a distinct social agenda for England, for which they do not in any case have any electoral mandate. Consequently, Labour’s agenda has been driven by the areas of government for which its responsibilities have remained genuinely Britain-wide: the economy; benefits and social security; defence; and foreign affairs.

In particular, under New Labour, social policy (in England, that is) has been subordinate to economics; or, put another way, in the Whitehall corridors of power, departments whose responsibilities are now limited largely or exclusively to social-policy areas relating to England only have been subordinate to the big, cross-UK-power-wielding departments such as the Treasury, the DTI (and subsequently, BERR) and the DWP. In part a consequence, and in part a cause, of this governmental prioritising of (UK) economics over (English) social policy, New Labour’s very ideology, as expressed in its management of the economy and its direction of social policy in England, was based on an economic model of society itself, rather than a model of society of which the world of economics and work is seen as an expression and support. In essence, New Labour viewed a progressive society in terms of an efficient market economy: the more efficient and productive the economy, the more integrated and wealthy is society as a whole, as people are enabled to participate to an ever greater extent in society-as-a-market. This means that, in theory, people can fulfil their aspirations to self-improvement and social mobility at the same time as working to improve the efficiency and productivity of the economy – with the circle squared through the idea that a true market should naturally develop products and services that a society needs; so that economic growth, and ever greater social inclusion, opportunity and wealth creation / distribution are co-terminous.

It is this ideology that has underpinned New Labour’s reforms of education and the NHS in England. In essence, these have involved introducing ever more market mechanisms, not only through direct investment by business into the public education and health systems in England (e.g. in the form of academy schools or PPPs to construct and run new hospitals), but also through the setting up of internal education and health-care markets. These have involved individual schools, universities and hospital trusts competing for public and private funding, and for the best staff; and the use of centrally imposed targets to replace the profit motive in driving efficiency savings (often involving privatisation, contracting out or even total elimination of ancillary services) and performance improvements. But performance has tended to be measured largely in quantitative terms, e.g. based on exam results in the educational context, rather than how the schools contribute to building up and maintaining cohesive communities, and developing happy, rounded individuals equipped to go out and help make a better country: a better England, that is.

Indeed, Labour has lost sight of the country for which it is equipped, in government, to shape a better future. This is not Britain any more, but England; although, of course, in the present lop-sided condition of the UK’s constitution, any would-be government for England would also be the UK government and would have to operate within a dual- or even triple-focused framework: developing a socio-economic vision for England while looking towards the strategic and economic interests of the UK as a whole, and also trying to co-ordinate economic policy for the UK with the varying social policies of the devolved administrations. It is arguable whether such a system could ever work, either in the sense of delivering social policy that really addresses the needs of the English people, or in terms of its asymmetry and democratic discrimination towards England: refusing to allow the English people the same democratic input to social and economic policy for their country as is afforded to the Scots, the Welsh and the Northern Irish.

But one thing that is clear is that Labour will not reverse the steady erosion of its support from both the middle class and its core working-class constituency in England unless it can transform itself into a progressive party for England. That means facing up to the fact that the old unitary Britain for which Labour used to be able to implement holistic, nationwide social policies no longer exists – by Labour’s own actions. But there is a whole country out there – England – that is crying out for better education, health care, social care, and more cohesive and less crime-ridden communities, and which needs a strong Labour Party to speak out for it, and offer a more hopeful and egalitarian vision of society than the discredited market-centric ideology of Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and David Cameron.

But this is never going to happen with Gordon Brown as Labour’s leader. Irrespective of whether the Party has now come round to the view that there’s no alternative to Brown as leader until the general election, he has to go if Labour is to assume its moral responsibility as the socially progressive party for England. This is not purely because Brown is Scottish and represents a Scottish constituency, with the consequent problem for democracy that many of the policies implemented by the government he leads do not affect his constituents but do affect people who can’t vote him out. The real problem is that Brown quintessentially represents the denial of the post-devolution truth that most social policy for which UK governments are responsible relate to England only, not Britain. Brown takes flight from this reality into an economics- and world affairs-centric ‘Britain’. Everything is only ‘Britain’ for Brown, even what is in reality England only. Just listen to his keynote speech at the Party conference this afternoon. I guarantee that it will be a litany of ‘Britain, Britain, Britain’, even though over half of it will effectively relate to England alone, including the reported emphasis it will place on anti-social behaviour and crime (well, that relates to Wales as well as England, but not ‘Britain’).

All this talk of ‘Britain, Britain, Britain’ increasingly rings hollow and no longer chimes with voters in England. And that’s because it actually isn’t real: social policies as carried out by UK governments are not British but English. And if they’re not real, how can they also be realistic and joined up: not just isolated reforms introducing even more market-orientated mechanisms into English social services, but part of an integrated vision for England’s future offered honestly and openly as such to the English people, and enlisting their ideas, participation and support? A true popular, progressive movement, in short.

Indeed, ultimately, all this incessant intoning of ‘Britain’ is an insult to the people of England: insulting their intelligence (because increasing numbers of English people realise that the present Labour government can’t and won’t deliver an integrated socio-economic plan for England), and insulting their national pride – shoving ‘Britain’ down their throats in a denial of England’s very nationhood. And this is because Brown’s British obsession expresses more than merely a denial of the contemporary national-political realities, but an actual pathological aversion towards the very idea of ‘England’. The man can hardly bring himself to utter the ‘E’ word, even though he’s effectively the English First Minister. But the English people are not going to vote for an England-hating Scot for PM at the next election. Sorry, but that’s the painful truth.

But over and above the issue of personalities, the Labour Party cannot hope to be, indeed does not deserve to be, a popular, mass-movement, progressive party for England until it is reconciled to England: reconciled to the fact that ‘national’ social policy now means English social policy. And reconciled to the English people as the people it is its duty to love and to serve.

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 up with proposals for a new written constitution.

This is something that is urgently required in my view, and which I’ve supported in numerous posts on this blog, as the British government and parliament have lost much of their legitimacy as democratic institutions, especially as far as the governance of England is concerned. Real Change also correctly places the emphasis on popular sovereignty, or bottom-up reform: citizens coming together to decide on the ‘form of government best suited to their needs’; as opposed to Parliament-led, top-down reform, in which the Westminster Parliament will inevitably seek to retain its privileges, particularly the notion that it – and only it – is the sovereign authority in the land.

The inevitable question I have about Real Change, though, is whether it is, or should be, predominantly a UK-wide or England-focused movement. At the moment, it is effectively both, in a way that replicates the dual nature of the current Westminster model of governance. Real Change presently articulates its aims in relation to Britain / the UK: the British people forming a nationwide (UK-wide) movement culminating in proposals for a new British constitution, a (British) Bill of Rights and / or a radically re-shaped (British) parliament. But at the same time, unless something is done to rectify the situation, the would-be reformed British political system would also remain the vehicle for the governance of England: the English Question is an integral part of the British-Constitutional Question, whether this is openly acknowledged or not.

My own question about this is in fact twofold: 1) can a unitary, UK-wide process and set of objectives such as Real Change possibly succeed if they do not explicitly, and from their inception, factor in the different debates around and aspirations towards self-government in the various nations of which the UK is composed? 2) are the campaign and movements for reform of the British constitution and parliament not in fact already primarily English movements: made up of English people who think of the present constitution and system of government as essentially theirs and make no fundamental distinction between which bits of the whole edifice are British and which English?

In other words, Real Change is in danger of becoming another Anglo-British movement: believing that it is possible to implement a new unitary-British system of governance that would be the product of ‘British’ popular sovereignty exercised in a consistent and coherent manner across the whole of the UK; and which, indeed, would represent the expression and consolidation of a redefined ‘British nation’. Such concepts are expressions of the traditional English conflation of England and English government with Britain as a whole. It is highly debatable, to say the least, whether a perpetuation of the fuzziness regarding the overlaps between British and English / Scottish / Welsh / Irish [/Cornish] identities (which it has arguably been one of the main purposes of the present constitutional settlement to keep fuzzy) is feasible and acceptable any more, for any of the nations concerned – even for England. Each of the UK’s nations has embarked on an irrevocable process of defining and reaffirming its distinct identity; and this process is inextricably bound up with the search for the appropriate type and degree of national self-rule: the search for the ‘form of government best suited to its needs’.

This search, in England, is still wrapped up for many – including, arguably, for Real Change – in the forms and structures of British government that have evolved out of centuries of English political history, of which they are the continuation today. In other words, the people who conceive of constitutional reform in ‘this country’ in terms of the British constitution and parliament will tend to be English (or at least, Anglo-British) people who have still not dissociated the identities of England and Britain. No such problem for the Scots and Welsh, who view their own conversations regarding the forms of national self-rule they would like to have as quite distinct from – though bound up with – considerations about the British constitution. Surely, at a ‘constitutional moment’ such as this, where we have a unique opportunity to redraw the whole framework defining the relationship between the UK’s nations and its political centre, it is time to separate out those parts of the picture that relate to the government of England from the elements that may still be able to form the basis for a trans-national British system of government of some sort: to set apart the foundations of a new English-national politics and consciousness from those of a completely re-worked ‘United Nations of Britain and Ireland’.

New British Parliament, or separate English and British parliaments?

The pinnacle and centre of the agenda of constitutional and political reform is the demand for fundamental change to the operation, structure and accountability of Parliament. Notice how the word itself, ‘Parliament’, is so often ‘hypostasised’: turned into a sort of Person or legal personality in its own right, rather like the three Persons of the Holy Trinity in Christian doctrine, by means of capitalising the word and treating it grammatically as a personal subject of sentences: ‘Parliament does this’, ‘Parliament intends that’; and, if I’m not mistaken, I’m sure I’ve heard the use of the personal pronoun ‘she’ for Parliament, rather than ‘it’. But the effect of this is also to reinforce the thinking that there is and can be only one Parliament, i.e. the British Parliament which, it is said, is a perfectly adequate vehicle for the government of England, in both senses of the word ‘adequate’: ‘sufficiently good / good enough’ and ‘appropriate / commensurate’ – and this for the fundamental reason that the traditional political identities of Britain and England are merged and are one – like the Holy Trinity, indeed, with ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ being replaced by ‘Britain, England and Parliament’.

Constitutional prescriptions that take the British Parliament as their sole object and prize are therefore bound up in the traditional non-differentiation of Britain and England. But this model and this view of ‘the country’ (a term that is generally deployed to avoid specifying whether one means Britain or England, or to express the ambiguous conflation of the two) have already begun to radically break down, and they cannot be carried forward into a new, remoulded British parliament. Not ‘should not’ be incorporated into a new parliament, but ‘cannot’. It is quite inconceivable, in fact, that a radically new parliament, designed with the express intention of eliminating the democratic deficits and lack of accountability of the present system, should perpetuate the most glaring example of the present system’s injustices: the fact that MPs for non-English constituencies can legislate for England, which they have not been elected to represent; while neither they (nor English MPs) can make legislation or decisions for their own countries in policy areas that have been devolved.

Once a new constitution is written down, it could not possibly embody an asymmetric structure such as this, which is wholly without any justification, either logically or democratically. Indeed, one of the main reasons for not coming up with a written constitution – and some would say one of the benefits of not having one – is that you would have to address anomalies such as this that have arisen as a result of Britain having a constitution that slowly evolves through successive statutes, rather than a single, largely immutable, set of fundamental constitutional principles.

Devolution as introduced by New Labour in 1998 effectively also created a distinct English layer of governance: those areas of responsibility of the UK government that now apply to England only because the devolved administrations deal with the same policy areas for their own countries. A new UK constitution – or, indeed, a constitution for a new kind of UK – would, one would think, have to rationalise and systematise the devolution arrangements: certain areas of government to be carried out by the respective national parliaments and assemblies (including one for England), and the remaining reserved matters to be handled by the new UK parliament. It is unimaginable that a written constitution would seek to set in stone something along the present lines: ‘Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland have their own parliamentary bodies to deal with matters x, y and z; but for England only, the corresponding matters are dealt with in the parliament for the whole of the UK by representatives from Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland alongside English representatives’.

So a new written British constitution and parliamentary framework would have to deal with the English Question and the relationship between the UK’s nations and central government. The most logical and fair solution for England, in this context, would appear to be to create an English parliament to deal with England-only legislation and policy, whatever overall UK framework this was incorporated within: devolution, federation or confederation [and below, I discuss the possibility that a British constitution could devolve power either within or to England but, at the same time, still deny England an identity as a sovereign nation in its own right].

It is still of course possible that the politicians might seek to circumvent the eventuality of an English parliament by promoting a regional model of devolution, as New Labour attempted to do, with regional assemblies in England supposedly serving as an equivalent to the national bodies in the other UK countries: the infamous ‘Britain of nations and regions’ model. But as this very designation implies, this would be just as asymmetric as the present devolution settlement: England only denied nation status and a national representative body. It’s also a highly unpopular idea as the referendum on an assembly for the ‘North East’ region and numerous opinion polls since then have demonstrated beyond all doubt. Therefore, if the constitutional-reform process is genuinely bottom-up and takes account of what English people actually want, the regionalisation of England will be dismissed out of hand.

The kind of radical reform of Parliament that groups like Real Change and others are pressing for cannot therefore avoid thinking about at least the possibility of an English parliament as a means to redress the English democratic deficit; although, given the unionist and Anglo-British habits of thought that still seem to pervade the constitutional-reform movement, attempts will no doubt be made to ‘accommodate’ the England-only tier of governance within a supposedly unitary British parliament; e.g. through some variant of the English Grand Committee model, with English MPs only being permitted to vote on England-only matters. But this is a highly messy compromise solution that certainly would not satisfy very many English voters and would miss the opportunity that a new written constitution presents: that of setting out which parts of government the people of England, Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland [and Cornwall] wish to be handled by separate national parliamentary bodies, and which bits (if any) they wish to pool together in a continuing UK government.

It may not be possible to produce a ‘one size fits all’ solution, with all of the nations having the same degree of autonomy from the centre, and the same set of devolved responsibilities. And the constitutional framework that was devised would need to be flexible enough to accommodate further change, such as popular demand for independence in Scotland or progression towards a united Ireland. Ultimately, in my own mind, I think we are witnessing the slow break-up of the UK into its constituent national parts, one manifestation of which is this very constitutional crisis. But it’s equally possible that this may not be a one-way process that will inevitably destroy any common ‘UK’-wide system of government or pooled sovereignty between the UK’s nations. The most effective way to ensure that this does become a process that shatters the UK beyond repair would be to try to deny it and attempt to perpetuate a unitary framework of government, one of whose pillars then becomes the denial of any distinct English layer of government and even the denial of England’s distinct nationhood. Similarly, and more fundamentally, if constitutional reform is truly to be driven from the grassroots, then the new structure that is put together will need to be the expression of the different nations’ visions for their future and blueprints for their governance. We should not necessarily presuppose that enough common ground can be created to continue with the UK, certainly in its present form. On the other hand, if the ‘nationwide’ process of debating and attempting to reach consensus on constitutional reform in England does not see itself as being part of a process leading to the establishment of a new national-English politics and government, but rather as a ‘British’ process in the old Anglo-British mould, then it will lose the legitimacy it might otherwise have had as an expression of English popular sovereignty.

British sovereignty is parliamentary; English sovereignty is popular

Real Change and the broader movement of which it is a part are bound to consider the English Question not only on the grounds of logic, fairness and democratic accountability, but also out of what might be termed basic structural considerations. By this, I mean, to what notion of sovereignty does the whole constitutional-reform exercise appeal, and on what national foundations is this sovereignty built upon? As I stated at the beginning of this post, the Real Change project appears to presuppose some notion of ‘British popular sovereignty’: the people of the whole of the UK coming together to redefine the terms under which they are governed. But it is far from obvious that the ‘British people’ as such exist as a sovereign nation of this sort. By this, I don’t just mean that British sovereignty has always been defined in terms of the sovereignty of the UK Parliament rather than the sovereignty of the people; but rather that popular sovereignty itself has tended to be conceived of as being the property, if at all, of the various UK nations rather than the British people as some sort of unified collectivity.

This certainly is the case for Scotland, where the principle of popular sovereignty was (in)famously re-stated in the Scottish Constitutional Convention of 1988. This body issued the Scottish Claim of Right, to which I have already alluded in one or two places above, that asserted “the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs”. It is on the basis of this constitutional principle that devolution was enacted, and to which any further extension of devolution or right of Scottish independence effectively appeals.

Insofar as it has historically been constitutionally and politically assimilated to the UK, England has not maintained such a strong tradition of popular sovereignty but has tended to accept the legitimacy of UK-parliamentary sovereignty. But it is nonetheless arguable that the legitimacy of UK-parliamentary sovereignty relies on the more fundamental and historically more enduring principle of English popular sovereignty. Without going into all that history, I would argue that English people – at least, since the English Civil War and the English Bill of Rights – have tended to believe in the proposition that the sovereignty of first the English Parliament and subsequently the British / UK Parliament derived from the democratically expressed sovereign will of the people: the English people, that is. Freedom and democracy, on this view, reside in the free will: that of the people who elect the representatives of their choice; and that of those representatives, the MPs, themselves who, if they are truly to re-present a free nation in parliament (if they are the parliamentary ‘instantiation’ of the people), must also be free to vote as their conscience and free intellects dictate – making them representatives of the people, not mere delegates or party-political pawns. This is the English model of parliamentary democracy that the British Parliament – after the Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707 – took on in its essentials, with the consequence that the English people have always regarded Parliament as still an English parliament in all but name, even though its geographic remit was extended to Scotland and Ireland. That is, UK-parliamentary sovereignty, in the popular imagination of the English, was sovereign by virtue of continuing to express and represent the sovereignty of the free English people.

Devolution introduced a radical break with this, at that time, nearly tercentennial, unwritten set of assumptions; and much of the popular, English sentiment that Parliament has lost its legitimacy and that politicians have lost touch with the people derives, in my view, from this schism whose effects in the national Anglo-British psyche are far-reaching and traumatic, and will ultimately tear apart the unified Anglo-British consciousness itself. Putting this in logical form: if UK-parliamentary sovereignty derived its legitimacy from the popular will, and if the people whose will is in question were the English people, then once Parliament no longer feels it has to reflect the will of the English people, it has lost its legitimacy.

One clear example of this is the West Lothian Question, discussed above: the fact that Parliament believes it can still legislate for England alone despite not being a representative body for England, elected by and accountable to the English people in its decisions on England’s behalf. But in addition to this particularly blatant example of disregard for England as a nation, many of the other examples of Parliament’s assaults on our traditional English liberties can be seen as an expression of the fact that, post-devolution, Parliament has effectively abrogated sovereignty to itself alone, i.e. sovereignty has become divorced from the very wellspring of its legitimacy: the will of the English people. How many of the infringements of our liberty that Parliament has enacted since 1998 would have been accepted by the English people if they had been given the chance to have an informed public debate and vote on them in a referendum: detention without charge; weakening of the principle of innocence until proven guilty; restrictions on jury trials; etc., etc? Probably very few, if any; and the fact that these measures, undermining historic English freedoms, would not have been ratified by the English people is almost the very form and frame through which their illegitimacy is to be viewed and understood.

The point I am making is that the UK parliament has lost its legitimacy because it is no longer a valid English parliament; and the reason why this is so is that parliamentary sovereignty has become divorced from the English popular sovereignty that once informed and supported it. How has this happened, and what is the link with devolution? This is an extremely complex and, as I said, far-reaching and traumatic question. But in essence, what I am saying is that Parliament severed its organic link with popular sovereignty because – as a result or precondition of devolution – it lost its profound identity as the English parliament; and as Parliament ceased to identify with the English nation, so the English nation increasingly no longer sees Parliament as an institution that represents it. Under the unitary system before devolution, Parliament could safely be at once the English parliament and the British parliament: English in its traditions and ground of popular legitimacy; British in its administrative and legislative remit.

After devolution, the ultimate ground of sovereignty throughout the UK could no longer be said or thought to be the will of the English people. Redirecting English popular sovereignty into a separate English parliament similar to the new bodies in Scotland and Wales would have explicitly broken up the long-standing organic identification of the English with Britain and British parliamentary democracy. The fear was that once that Anglo-British national identity had dissolved, so would the Anglo-British parliament and state that depended on it. So, in order to maintain the pretence of a supposedly still unitary British state, run from the Westminster centre, that state had to recast itself as a monolithic Britain / UK whose sovereignty, authority and national identity was conceived as having no fundamental reference to, or dependence on, their traditional foundations: this became British-parliamentary sovereignty as a self-validating thing, not popular English sovereignty as validating Parliament; Britain and Britishness superseding England and Englishness.

More than any other factor, it is this fundamental occulting and suppression of England from the heart of the British state, which the English people previously regarded as their own, that has led to the huge disenchantment with politics felt by the English; whereas polls reveal that Scottish, Welsh and N. Irish people generally feel that devolution has brought more accountable and more effective government to their own nations. This ‘de-anglicisation’ has also been the basis for New Labour’s and Gordon Brown’s efforts to assimilate (English) national identity to (British) citizenship, involving the mobilisation of a huge political and cultural machinery in attempting to reinvent and re-describe everything that has historically been English as ‘British’, and in referring to every governmental and political action that relates to England only as if it affected the whole of the UK – if only by omitting the key fact that it concerns England alone.

Why is English nationality replaced by British citizenship in this way? Because the sovereign will of the English people has been suborned by the British state-in-Parliament, which then becomes the sole founding, sovereign, national entity: the embodiment of the ‘national identity’ of its citizens, indeed. And, as I have just described above, this has manifested itself through a massive project to create a new ‘British Nation’ replacing England. Producing a brand-new written constitution also partakes of this sort of nation building: constitutions make claims concerning the identity and values of the people whose forms of government they are setting out. Constitutions define and create new nations as much as they reflect pre-existing nations. Real Change and its fellows must resist playing into the drive to establish a new, England-denying British Nation – if only because the English people do not want it. But one suspects that many of the advocates of the Real Change movement, initially at least, supported New Labour’s drive to create a New Britain.

New constitution: British or English?

Creating and writing up a constitution involves placing ‘the nation’ on a new foundation, then; if not establishing a new nation altogether. What kind of nation do we want it to be? And, more importantly, do we want the nation to be Britain or England?

This question relates to another fundamental problem that has prevented the UK from formalising its constitution in a single master document: states with written constitutions tend to also consider themselves as nations. The uniqueness of the UK is that it is a state comprising four [or five] national communities: not a nation in its own right but having all the unitary state apparatus and external identity of a nation state. Setting and writing up a ‘British constitution’ potentially establishes the UK as a nation state for the first time. It says: ‘This is what Britain is and who the British are [as a whole]; this is our founding law; this is our system of government; this is what we regard as ‘British rights’ [and responsibilities], etc. In this way, an overarching ‘national-British’ unity would formally and officially subsume the separate national identities, values, legal systems and institutions of the different UK nations, unless the distinct status and sovereignty of those nations were explicitly guaranteed in the constitution. We’d then all be just British. Full stop. Citizenship and nationality united in one kingdom.

No wonder, then, that so many of New Labour’s leading lights and acolytes have supported ideas such as a written constitution and a British Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. In his recent speech in favour of constitutional reform in the wake of the expenses scandal, Gordon Brown tried to make out that the idea of a BBRR was a response to the ‘public’s’ indignation at what MPs had been getting up to; but it’s been a pet project since the inception of the Brown premiership. Brown even started uttering support for the idea of a written constitution. But you can bet your bottom euro that if such a document ever saw the light of day, this would not so much as include the word ‘England’, other than in the sense of ‘the part of the UK traditionally known as England’ or in the names of ‘British regions’, such as the ‘East of England’ (traditionally, in fact, known as East Anglia – but ‘East England’ confers existence on an entity known as ‘England’, whereas ‘East of England’ is just the easternmost part of a territory commonly referred to as England). Brown’s written constitution would be of the British type I’ve just described: creating a new Nation of Britain on the ruins of ‘England’. And, no doubt, it would all be decided on in a top-down manner by the sovereign British Parliament. Or, if we were offered a referendum, this would doubtless be a choice between the new constitution or the present asymmetric devolution settlement; and the results would not be counted separately in each of the UK nations, in case England voted against but Britain as a whole voted in favour.

But what kind of constitution does Real Change want: British or English? Support for a British constitution – and a preference in general for a de-anglicised ‘Britain’ over either the old anglocentric UK or a new, distinct, self-governing England – is often predicated upon an assumption that ‘British’ identity and values are more progressive, inclusive and universal, whilst ‘English’ identity and values are seen as conservative, ethnically exclusive and insular. The reasons for this cultural trope are many and varied, not the least of them being the general repudiation of the English popular consciousness and identity in the wake of devolution: England being associated as the (formerly) dominant and oppressive national power behind the British Empire and the pre-devolution UK; England, and English popular sovereignty, needing to be denied in order for a new ‘inclusive’ (multi-national, multi-cultural) Britain to emerge.

This sort of dualistic thinking is of course profoundly flawed, stereotypical and insulting (if not on occasions downright (inverted) racist); but it continues to inform much of the thinking about ‘Britain’s’ identity and future not only in government circles but on the part of the ‘chattering classes’: the educated liberal middle class (‘Guardian readers’) and the class from which the ‘political class’ is drawn, who see themselves as the ones best qualified and most entitled to set the direction for the ‘nation’. I have the sense that Real Change is headed up predominantly by people of that sort, although I am conscious that I am stereotyping them in my turn. But what gives me that feeling most of all, apart from personal prejudice, is that Real Change does indeed appear to conceptualise the new constitution towards which it is striving as a British constitution. British constitution; British nationality. Bye bye England.

Am I exaggerating the risk? Possibly, yes. The one guarantee that Real Change will not end up producing proposals for a British constitution that confines the nationhood of England to the dustbin of history is that it is (supposed to be) a genuine process of popular consultation and participation, in which there should in theory be sufficient scope for the merits and demerits of establishing a distinct English-national tier of governance to be properly debated; and, if they are, I can’t see what rational and just alternative could emerge, given that Scottish / Welsh / N. Irish devolution are here to stay and the English are also entitled to a parliament that represents them and speaks on their behalf.

But the stakes are very high because it is not just people’s national identity (and the identity of ‘the nation’) that is at play; but also fundamental philosophical values are typically (and by no means always fairly) aligned with either the British or English side of the equation:

• Britain: republicanism; secularism; multi-culturalism; liberalism
• England: monarchy; Christianity; ‘ethnic’-English culture; conservatism.

Of course, this is just another nonsensical example of simplistic oppositional thinking; but the supporters of a republic, of an ‘officially’ non-Christian (disestablished) state, of multi-culturalism and of liberal progressivism do tend in the main to pin their flag to the mast of Britishness rather than Englishness – even though, as a fact, the increasingly secular, anti-monarchical, multi-cultural and liberal society that exemplifies their values is primarily England, rather than, for instance, more socially conservative Wales and less multi-cultural Scotland. Britain is a global consumer brand, and its brand values are ‘secular-liberal-progressive-multicultural’; but the nation that is in danger of being sold out under that brand is England.

Real Change: Time for a new England to come into being

But there doesn’t have to be a stark black-and-white choice between modern, secular Britain and supposedly atavistic, Christian England. However, the choice is between Britain or England. We can debate our values once we know who we are. This is an existential choice as much as it is a constitutional or philosophical choice. Who are we; who and what is our nation; and what do we wish to become?

A choice for Britain is a choice for an Anglo-British past that has gone for ever: the UK is no longer, and can never again become, a unitary state in which British power and institutions rest on the foundation of unerring popular English support. The other nations of the UK have embarked on a journey to discover their own sovereignty and the forms of government best suited to their needs. England alone remains as the rump of the unitary UK, governed not by its own people but by a ‘sovereign’ parliament that no longer needs to command the support of the English people and does not look to it. It is time for England to embark on its own journey, as a sovereign nation, to determine new forms of government for a new era.

Alternatively, another choice for Britain is the choice for a new, homogeneous British nation-state: the stuff of New Labour’s and Gordon Brown’s dreams. This might formalise the present devolution arrangements and institute some form of devolution, regional or local, for ‘England’. But the distinct millennial British nations that so many of us continue to cherish would effectively be a thing of the past: subsumed into a formalised British citizen-nationality. No England, just as in the first type of constitutionalised Britain described in the paragraph above; but also, no Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland or Cornwall. Not in the same sense, that is: as sovereign national communities. Sovereignty would reside in the British state and its self-identification with its people.

The real alternative? England. Real Change in England becomes an exercise of English popular sovereignty, in which English people collaborate in working out the forms of government best suited to their needs. This process can then be dovetailed with similar processes and national conversations that are already much further advanced in the UK’s politically more self-aware, because self-governing, nations, as well as with the Real Change and other associated processes as they are rolled out across Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. From this process, which is clearly an ongoing, evolutionary one, should emerge distinct views on how each nation wishes to rearrange its constitutional and political affairs. There may just be enough consensus on which aspects of national sovereignty and areas of government to pool together in a new sort of UK; or there may not be. But at least, such a process will be a truly bottom-up one, in which the nations of Britain work out for themselves how they wish to be governed.

Sovereignty belongs to the people and to the nations. We the English people can and should deliberate only on the constitutional arrangements we desire for England. Whether those arrangements also include provisions for joint-British governance, in partnership with our island neighbours, is not ours alone to decide. But we can choose to be a nation in our own right and in our own name: England.

Now that’s what I call Real Change.

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.