Disunited Kingdom

Harriett Baldwin questions the Deputy Prime Minister on his position regarding the West Lothian question and English-only legislation with English-only votes.

A 48-home development at Greenway Lane was approved by district planners last week under delegated powers.

I’m disappointed to have come to the conclusion that the union is holding back England, which is a genuinely impressive economic powerhouse, from reaching its full economic potential. Crucially, I am not convinced the Union offers the majority of the population value for tax. On the other hand, I believe the Union provides important and valuable benefits to the people of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and culturally to England, which currently outweigh the economic drag on the nucleus of the Union. It must be more than simply having become accustomed to one another’s faces which keeps us around the table. A genuine analysis and restatement of the utility of the union to the peoples of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland needs must be made now in order to show this value – or we risk losing the empathy and support of the English.

The British State has set aside £50m of taxpayers money to celebrate the centenary of the commencement of the Great War in August 2014. This seems deliberately designed to compete with or obscure the anniversary of Bannockburn. Why would anyone celebrate the start of such a bloody war?

"We recognise the current arrangements for paying for social care are outdated and need reform. While Andrew Dilnot's report relates to England, this is an issue of vital importance for people in Wales and the rest of the UK.

Reading what has been stated as ‘legal and constitutional exactitude’ in the UK Government’s statement on the legality of Scottish independence I was quickly attracted to two key fallacies Annex A paragraph 95 makes about the legal and constitutional status of the people of Scotland and its supposition Scotland ceased to exist at the time of Union..

There followed a number of audience contributions that addressed an English parliament, a lack of a specifically English politics, the relationship between national identity, ethnicity and class, whether London is different from England, and if Conservatives are better at speaking to suburbia and Englishness.

Basically, despite daily evidence of corruption, lies and greed at the heart of the machine, English voters still believe in a winner-takes-all world financed by economies of scale in which wealth trickles down to the dispossessed (albeit with a bit more regulation) and are willing to waste time breathing life into un-resourced localism as a sop for London-favouring policies that are wrecking the wider English economy.

On Tuesday 5 February, at around 4.20 pm (two and a half hours before MPs were actually due to vote on the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill), I received a reply to my email to the McKay Commission (aka the West Lothian Commission) asking them to make a recommendation that MPs from Scottish and Northern Irish seats should not vote on the Bill, which relates to England and Wales only

Scotland should remain part of the UK because having two governments looking after its affairs offers "the best of both worlds", David Cameron has said.

Our plans for the transfer of financial and constitutional power could trigger changes across the UK. It is up to the rest of the UK how they choose to govern themselves but I hope our plans may encourage them to accelerate that process.

UNABLE to continue blaming the English for their misfortunes, an independent Scotland will instead hate cats.

Peter Davies, the mayor of Doncaster, has resigned from the English Democrats claiming there has been a big influx of new members joining from the British National Party.

"If English local government were financially independent, and local councils could make decisions for themselves, then local democracy would be rejuvenated at a stroke"

Injustice to England: Since the Blair devolution settlement, MPs who sit for Scottish, Wales and Northern Ireland have been able to vote on English business, but MPs from English constituencies have not always been able to vote on theirs.  This is a special problem for the relationship between England and Scotland because of the combination of the extent of devolution in Scotland and the number of Scottish constituencies.

"Lack of sub-regional power should follow four key steps to codifying the central and local government relationship"