Barbarous Reactionary

In a couple of posts on Our Kingdom (here & here) David Marquand has accused the campaign for an English parliament of being 'entirely reactive: negative, sour, mean-minded' and of displaying ‘me-too’ responses to the 'wonderful growth of national feeling in Scotland and Wales':

as I know, no one has yet put forward a positive case for devolution to England, based on a moral vision of what England and the English stand for or might come to stand for. Sadly, this is not surprising. There is no English national Myth comparable to the Scottish Myth of popular sovereignty or the Welsh Myth of Celtic socialism.

First off, devolution to Wales was on a me-too basis, which is why they held the Welsh referendum a week after the more certain Scottish one, to elicit a response. And I might add that the Northern Irish were bribed. But I digress.

Marquand argues that campaigners for an English parliament are 'barbarous reactionaries' and England will 'not be fit for self government' until they show that they belong to the tradition of 'the Levellers, of Milton, of Tom Paine, of the Chartists, of John Bright, of the pre-1914 syndicalists, of George Orwell and R.H. Tawney'.

Note the imperialist caveat on democracy: Not fit for self-government, unless....

Rather patronisingly Marquand questions whether any of the contemporary English nationalist 'reactionaries' have read the Claim of Right for Scotland. I can assure him that for most it is their Bible. The Scottish claim of right is, for me, a claim of popular sovereignty for the nation of Scotland, and it's a claim that I make on behalf of England:

"I do hereby acknowledge the sovereign right of the English people to determine the form of Government best suited to their needs."

The spirit of the Scottish claim is undoubtedly one of popular sovereignty; it is the people of Scotland who are constitutionally sovereign. The 'moral vision' behind this claim comes not from Marquand's Labour Party, who have consistently argued that 'devolution is power retained' (ie absolute sovereignty lies with Westminster), but from Scottish nationalists. At worst the Claim was an immoral reaction to the threat of Scottish separatism. Various people within the Labour movement drew upon the Scottish myth of popular sovereignty (people like George Foulkes) but for most of them it was a reactionary response, or simply a cynical exercise in Gerrymandering, there was no 'moral vision'.

In a speech to the Scottish Socialist Society in 1983 Robin Cook declared:

"I have not been an extravagant supporter of the Scottish dimension but I have changed my mind. I don't give a bugger if Margaret Thatcher has a mandate or not - I will simply do all I can to stop her."

By the time Thatcher won the 1987 election this had become the common view of the Scottish Labour Party. Devolution was party-political: Socialist Scotland against Tory England. The Scottish Claim of Right did not explicitly mention the poll tax but there was a nod in its general direction:

"the Treaty of Union has been eroded almost to the point of extinction;...in which the wishes of the massive majority of the Scottish electorate are being disregarded...In such a situation one would expect to see breakdown of respect for law. They are beginning to appear."

In 1975 Gordon Brown, who went on to sign the Claim of Right, wrote:

We suggest that the rise of modern Scottish nationalism is less an assertion of Scotland’s permanence as a nation than a response to Scotland’s uneven development … the discontent is a measure of the failure of both Scottish and British socialists to advance far and fast enough in shifting the balance of wealth and power to working people.

He got his wish because the SNP are advancing socialism farther and faster than his own UK Government is willing to do in England. He was wrong though, Scottish nationalism is about Scotland's permanence as a nation, and according to Canon Kenyon Wright he didn't even understand what he was signing:

"Most of the MPs didn’t know what they were signing! Because they were signing something which was a direct contradiction of the claim of Westminster to absolute sovereignty, within our unwritten constitutional system. Because if the people are sovereign then Parliament still has an important role but it’s not an absolutist role."

Canon Kenyon Wright went on to say that 'it’s quite irrational for those who signed that Claim in Scotland...to deny that same sovereign right to the people of England'.

And it's there that the CEP come in: Why should Scotland enjoy a ’sovereignty of the people’ whilst England makes do with ‘Westminster sovereignty’ and a government that didn't win the popular vote in England; a government they didn't vote for headed up by a man elected in Scotland?

It's not 'entirely reactionary', or indeed 'barbarous', to make this point whether or not you buy into Marquand's democratic socialism. For all their polemic about devolution making the UK stronger, Labour know that their immoral asymmetric Gerrymandering has endangered the Union. Brown's nightmare lies in knowing that having an English parliament would lead to Britain becoming an empty and meaningless shell; it's the dawning realisation that Britain is becoming little more than an administrative concept that's the main reason for Gordon Brown’s flirtation with the idea of a written constitution or a new Bill of Rights. Yet the only vision that he has for Britain draws entirely on an English narrative:

The most intruing element of and greatest flaw in Brown's British Way is the extent to which it can only be sustained by drawing on examples of English history or writings specifically about England and the English and reinventing them as if it were about Britain and the British. - Simon Lee

Or, as Bernard Crick would have it:

the examples he [Brown] gives of our long British tradition of civic values are all English. The myth of Magna Carta’s importance is once again disinterred and nary a word on the Declaration of Arbroath. He invokes Milton, Wordsworth, Burke and Orwell as British rather than, it seems to me, typically English voices. Walter Scott and Robert Burns are ignored, though both were Unionists, powerful voices for a dual not a single identity.

The Campaign for an English Parliament were publicly making these very points before Crick or Lee so I find Marquand's attack - for want of a better word - rather petty. As fate would have it Tom Griffin submitted a fabulous essay to What England Means to Me a couple of days post Marquand that beautifully summons up his 'true glory of English history'.

That tradition is still alive in England today, the legacy of the Levellers, Tom Paine, the Chartists and their successors. Their demand for the sovereignty of the English people is more relevant than ever. That idea, and the people who have fought for it down the ages, are what England means to me.

For me the Campaign for an English Parliament belongs to this struggle for English emancipation. It would be fantastic if we could produce material to tap into, and reconnect the English people with, that radical tradition, but sadly we do not have the man power, resources or the need to do so. Ours is a struggle for democratic equity, popular sovereignty and a constitutional recognition of nationhood; our case will succeed or fail on that basis. It would be nice if left wing intellectuals like Marquand could use their time productively in wrenching England's glorious history from the grubby mitts of the statist Gordon Brown, but I fear he'd rather throw poisonous barbs into campaigners for an English parliament - the advance guard of the movement for a sovereignty of the people.

More on the Left's intellectual disdain for England later.