the english question

Peter Robinson, DUP leader and hubby of the infamous Iris "Gay Basher" Robinson, the man who helped Brown get his 42-days detention, has some words of advice for David Cameron's progressive Conservative Party:

"I can well understand that where we are at the present time is far from satisfactory for people from England, perhaps less from a Northern Ireland point of view and more from Scotland point of view. If Scottish members can stop things happening in England that they enjoy in Scotland then that is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs.

"The answer is not in English-only votes and I think that a lot more thought has to go into it or else we will damage the Union and I don't think that is either what the Conservative Party or the Democratic Unionists want to see.

"At least it is clear that David Cameron is thinking about the issue and I think some others need to start thinking about it. The debate is on and he's made an opening contribution to it and it is out there to be discussed. I don't think we have arrived at a conclusion to that debate but the issue does need to be addressed let's work on it until we find a resolution."

Leaving aside the small matter of why anyone in England would want the advise of these bigoted illiberal shits, what exactly is Peter Robinson's preferred solution to the West Lothian Question?

What's that Peter. You don't have one? Oh! Neither does David Cameron.

Peter Robinson has left open the prospect of "leaning" towards the Conservatives in the event of a hung parliament, an offer of support that is presumably conditional upon the Conservatives not adopting an English solution to the West Lothian Question.

Heated debate over at the Herald (not covered by English papers).

In 1973 the Kilbrandon Commission concluded that "there is no public demand for English regional assemblies with legislative powers, whether under a federal system or otherwise". To their cost, and our financial cost, Labour discovered this to still be the case in 2004 when they held a referendum to discover that 78% of the population were opposed to their crackpot ideas. So they pressed ahead with 'indirectly elected' assemblies - which nobody wanted either - until this year when they finally abolished the assemblies altogether in favour of 'regional ministers', which nobody wanted or asked for either.

And all this undemocratic repositioning to provide democratic accountability for the work of Regional Development Agencies, which the Taxpayers' Alliance has now revealed to be yet another complete waste of our money, £15 BILLION to be precise:

Daily Mail: The report said 39 RDA executives earn more than £100,000 a year and they have sent staff to pointless conferences, including a film festival in Dubai.

One agency boss spent nearly £54,000 in a year on taxis and cars.

The TaxPayers' Alliance called for the nine RDAs to be abolished and their funding to be used to encourage new businesses and jobs through a 4p cut in the small business rate of corporation tax.

RDAs were set up by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott in 1999 as part of his drive to create regional assemblies in England.

While Mr Prescott's hopes of elected regional governments foundered because of public hostility, the nine agencies have remained.

Do read the Taxpayers' Alliance report: Regional Development Agencies: £15 billion thrown away.

Congratulations to Iain Thom from Edinburgh for his superb protest in support of Tibetan nationalists:

"I'll probably get detained by the police and then ejected out of the country but I believe it's not anywhere near the risk or the fear that Tibetans are living under the occupation of the Chinese government."

In a recent Telegraph article Charles Moore was rather scathing about nationalism:

Nationalism is also obsessed with possession. "It's Scotland's oil," says the SNP, as if the benefits of a global industry could all be hoarded north of Hadrian's wall. "The Malvinas are ours!" say the Argentinians about the Falkland Islands, even though hardly any of them have ever lived there. Robert Mugabe says that land ownership must fit his definition of what is Zimbabwean.

Or "Tibet is ours". Nationalism is about sovereignty, which implies ownership. British oil, "The Falklands are ours", and ownership of the political process and Westminster are all about British sovereignty. A contract of trust between citizens and politicians on a defined national community – we can elect you, we can remove you – is fundamental to a democracy. When that trust breaks down, as in the case of Scotland - or never existed, as in the case of Tibet - nationalism is a perfectly legitimate and understandable cause.

Harry Reid replied beautifully to Charles Moore in the Herald:

The essence of modern mature Scottish nationalism is simple. Scotland already is a nation, with a distinguished and proud history. We have our own legal system, our own church, our own educational traditions and so on.

What we do not have is our state. We are a nation waiting to become a state. No Scottish nationalist is trying to create a nation out of another nation: our nation already exists. All we are trying to do is to create - or, technically, recreate - a state to go with a currently stateless nation. This is not the work of rogues. What Scottish nationalists wish to end is nothing to do with England or Englishness. What they wish to end is the British state.

You can't argue with that. Well, you could but it would make you a British nationalist.

Former Tory, Robin Tilbrook, leader of the English Democrats, has a guest article in support of an English parliament on Iain Dale's Tory blog today. Robin has clearly tailored the article for a certain audience and the reception it gets will, I predict, be more interesting than the article itself. Already the first few Tory commenters are delighting us with their obvious ignorance (this annoys some English nationalists but for me it's just fuel to the fire).

Anyone who thought that Ken Clarke's Democracy Task Force report would prove decisive in the debate over the English Question was drinking a bottle of scotch and counting the profits from his sale of BAT shares as he tapped his oxford brogues to Dizzy Gillespie.

Chairman of the Welsh Conservatives’ economic development commission, Prof Jones-Evans, yesterday called for a reduction in the number of Welsh MPs and an English parliament:

Prof Jones-Evans said that while Welsh MPs would never become obsolete, power could soon be shared among four separate Parliaments, one each for England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland...

“I do not foresee a time when Welsh MPs would no longer exist. There will be key issues where Britain is stronger for having a united voice, while there will also be more domestic issues [for individual Parliaments]. There are clearly issues important to the UK. What I foresee is a strong union of Parliaments.”

I expect that many of the unionist Tory and UKIP contributors to Iain's blog will be unwittingly disagreeing with Prof Jones' strong union of national parliaments. I wonder why. What is it they want? Do these "unionists" even have a vision of how they want the union to be; or are they just hankering after the union they've lost irretrievably (though it hasn't dawned on them yet)?

Simon Lee on Gordon Brown in the Yorkshire Post:

The champion of the British Way and New Unionism, who feared an English nationalist backlash against Labour's failure to redress both the fiscal iniquities of the Barnett Formula and the democratic deficit of the West Lothian Question, has been undone instead by the fruits of devolution to Scotland, for which he campaigned so ardently. The principal reasons for the defeat go to the very heart of the New Labour project developed by Blair, Brown, Peter Mandelson, Philip Gould and Alastair Campbell in the mid-1990s.

It is, of course, impossible to say what part English nationalism played in Brown's downfall because no credible English nationalist party stood in Crewe and Nantwich, Henley or the London mayoral election. So we'll chalk this one up as a victory for the Scottish Nationalism and a success for English nationalists, given that both groups are opposed to Brown's "New Unionism".

It will be interesting to see whether Brown's New Unionism dies with him, or whether the anglophobic baton is passed seemlessly to Miliband, Straw or Harman. My guess is that the removal of the Scottish Raj will focus Labour's attentions on England and perhaps pave the way for a cross-party unionist damage-limitation exercise.

Old school Establishment thinkers like Geoffery Wheatcroft, who today claimed that "No one wants an English parliament", are woefully out of touch with public opinion. They need to get with it, and fast, if they are to save the crumbling edifice of Britain.

Last week the London Standard carried a story claiming that there would be a British football team, composed entirely of English players, at the 2012 London Olympics. The band plays on as the Titanic goes down. Sport imitates politics. If the most watched event of the London Olympics is a load of overpaid arrogant Englishmen running around as a British team because the rest of the Isles refuses to join them, well...It sounds to me very much like the next Conservative Government.

On Thursday the Telegraph brought us details of David Cameron's deal with the Ulster Unionists; to bring their MPs under the Tory whip and make the Conservative Party truly a party of the Union. The article left us hanging with what seemed like a throwaway line: "Mr Cameron is hoping to employ a similar tactic to win votes in Scotland." We wondered, what could that mean, and I jokingly mentioned the Tartan Tories.

Imagine my surprise to read this in today's Daily Mail:

I can reveal, allies of Cameron have entered into informal talks with the SNP over recent months.

Their objective is to save the union by working out a new kind of constitutional settlement for Scotland.

Details are sketchy, but it is possible to indicate the main outlines.

An incoming Tory administration would need to meet Alex Salmond's demands that the Scottish Parliament should have massive new powers over taxation and public spending.

In domestic terms, a Scottish administration would be entirely self-governing and have complete command over economic policy.

And yet the union could be maintained through the retention of shared armed forces, and foreign policy, and the monarchy.

These talks are complex. Alex Salmond is demanding control over business taxation, for example.

Yet such a concession would be desperately unpopular south of the border, because it would allow Scotland to attract British firms by offering lower taxation.

Salmond also wants to get rid of the Trident independent nuclear deterrent, which is based in Scotland - unthinkable for the Tories, who pride themselves as the party of defence.

This is a staggering piece of news. Cameron is attempting to forge a new British constitutional settlement with a deal between the UK and Scotland, presumably - once again - without asking England. We can see what's in it for the Scottish nationalists, but what's in it for Cameron: The promise of SNP support in the event of a hung parliament, or a slender majority; or is it another attempt to "kill nationalism stone dead"; or an attempt to revive Tory fortunes north of the border?

The problems with this plan is that the Scottish nationalists will always want more, and under the slippery slope hypothesis will surely get more if this plan is implemented. And also, the future of the Union is not Cameron and Salmond's to decide bilaterally, there are 50M Englishmen and women, so far denied their say, who might just think that yet more constitutional privilege for the ungrateful nation to the north is just too high a price to pay for Britain.

O'Neill has an interesting five-point bullet list on what Unionists can learn from the Glasgow East by-election, it's worth a read.

Brown is a dead-man walking, at the minute our biggest liability. A complete incompetent as a leader, Salmond and the forces of Scottish separatism cannot be defeated with him at the helm. He’s got to go, although I don’t think we’ll have to wait too long on that one to be honest.

Even the most adent Labourite would find little to disagree with there. However, it's not just the man that's the problem, it's his unionist philosophy. Brown's philosophy of Britishness is England as Britain, with the other nations of the UK as semi-autominous satellites of an absolutely sovereign Greater England. This pisses off the English who resent being ruled as British as opposed to English, but also the Scots and the Welsh (and to a lesser extent the Northern Irish) who resent the financial and political restrictions imposed upon them by a UK Government that is dominated by the English (albeit with despicable Unionist Scots in charge, for now).

For the life of me I can't understand why unionists like O'Neill see this as a sustainable position. Not only is it unfair on the English who have no distinctly English institutions, it's also a handicap to the smaller nations that English politics is not separated from British politics. It's patronising and divisive, and it will inevitably lead to greater resentment. Whatever your opinion of Salmond at least his nationalist philosophy is logical. Brown's Unionist philosophy is anything but. Having diminished Britishness as a polity through devolution he has now set about diminishing it as a cultural identity with his universal values and his attempt to appropriate Englishness to plug the vacuum vacated by Britishness.

O'Neill sure made me chuckle with this bit:

The Conservatives are now a truly UK party with enormous financial, PR and intellectual resources- the Scottish Tories are (or at least should be) an integral part of that organisation- an unceasing, unwavering campaign should now be waged against the nationalists on all fronts- no more passengers and no more collaboration in any form with any party whose ultimate target is the destruction of our nation.

You might be right about the Tories PR, but they are certainly not a truly UK Party with enormous financial and intellectual resources.

The NHS Support Federation's director Paul Evans said:

Gordon Brown must accept the right of local people to influence the direction of their health service and to take a different view. Afterall his own constituents in Scotland live under a health system that rejects many of his own market based solutions for the English health service.

This CEP line of attack is increasingly being taken up by both health and environmental lobby groups. I've yet to hear the teachers or teaching unions attack Brown over his Scottishness, but it's surely only a matter of time.

The Liberal Democrats statement of vision and values, released today, is well worth reading if you are having trouble sleeping. It's called Make it Happen (pdf), and right at the end it has this disclaimer:

This paper has been approved for debate by the Federal Conference by the Federal Policy Committee. It contains Federal Liberal Democrat policy priorities for a government in Westminster. Liberal Democrats have championed the devolution of powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and many decisions made in Westminster now apply to England only. In significant areas such as education and health, the policies in this document therefore only apply to England. In those areas Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland party policy would take precedence.

Good for the Lib Dems for pointing that out because so often the Tories and Labour just don't bother. However, the word Britain is mentioned 15 times and the word England just 5 times, and three occurrences of the word England are accounted for in the above disclaimer and the noun Bank of England).

It just isn't good enough, England deserves better. Compare it with the language used on the Scottish Lib Dem website and you'll see what I mean.

The Lib Dems want to cut the number of Westminster MPs running England by 150, whilst empowering and leaving unchanged the numbers in Scotland and Wales:

There are too many national politicians, and they cost too much, so we’ll shrink Parliament by 150 MPs....And we need a political system that gives every voter real power. Devolution to Scotland and Wales did not go far enough – the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly should get more powers.

They must mean that there are too many federal politicians if they want to empower the national politicians in Scotland and Wales.

I was shocked to see that George Bush's limo was flying the Scottish flag instead of the Union Flag when it turned up at Number 10.