England: The Fundamental Difficulty

Ok, so the balkanisation of England is the only way (post devolution) that the Union (Federation) can survive. All well and good (?) but this option and the alternative of full independence must be put to the people of England.
Of course a positive referendum in Scotland would save a lot of time and trouble.

It would have made sense to devolve power to the easily identifiable, and proportionately similar, regions of Britain.

But they didn't!.

This Government decided to devolve power on national lines… the nation of Wales and the nation of Scotland.

The precedent is set and England would like to be treated the same. They can't pursue a nationalist agenda and suddenly switch to regionist one.

I actually don't mind which one we go for, so long as we're treated equally. As we're three quarters of the way through this process, I guess we're stuck with the nationalist one.

Don't blame campaigners for an English Parliament Bob, they didn't decide on this course of action, they just want to see it completed.

So, Hazell compares England to a defeated, post-war Germany. Not a comaprison I am happy with, even if it were a truly analogous one.
Germany was not in a Union with other countries, larger or smaller, unless one considers the Third Reich to be a Union. Even if it were, the conquering nations, such as England, did not force Germany to remain in a union, be itself bust up, yet have intact fellow union nations like Austria decide the bust up Germany's domestic policies while Germany had no say in Austria's.
Hazell merely confirms that an intact England and the UK are mutually exclusive. I value England more than the UK, just as the Scots value Scotland more.
Hazell is the problem and, being the problem, offers no solution.

And yet, in the same breath, they say we don't need an English parliament or independence because England is the 'dominant partner' in the Union and her needs are 'fully represented' in the Westminster parliament - verbatim. Let's face it, chaps; with these people, the problem with England is that England is the problem! Hence the need to break it up.

Prof Hazell is still peddling the idea that ‘England is too big’ which he inherited from Kilbrandon (and for all I know from Gladstone). He has never replied to Tom Waterhouse’s answers to this claim (see P20-21 of Tom’s ‘Answering the EQ’ published by the Campaign for an English Parliament). It will be interesting to see if he tries to do so in this latest book (which looks from its contents to be a bit of re-hash of existing material). If not, he should be invited to do so.
He also needs to answer the criticism put forward by Gareth of the methodology used in the BSA and similar surveys which ignore the fact that the English tend to regard Westminister as ‘their’ Parliament. Obviously he ‘knows’ this perfectly well despite his query about the Newsnight survey.
His comparison with Germany is rubbish really. The German states were not united till 1870 when in effect their conquest by Prussia, a militaristic state from its birth, was completed. One of the reasons that Prussia was broken up was to prevent to rise of militarism once again. Even so the German states today do appear to have quite a lot of autonomy - how do their powers and political representation compare with those offered to the English ‘regions’? And of course while the German state is relatively ‘new, the German states themselves are ‘historic’, having been around since the late Middle Ages, unlike the English regions invented c 1945.
He and others also seem totally to ignore the basic flaw of regional ‘devolution’ in England, that it is unworkable and unwanted. The English regions would never be given devolved powers equivalent even to those devolved to Wales, as Prescott discovered. Instead they are agents of the central government and will remain so with the appointment of regional committees and regional ministers.
Other researchers have found that there is no ‘identity’ in the English regions that ‘requires representation’.
What is lacking is an English national voice and clearly what Prof Hazell & Co should be doing at the CU is looking at ways in which this can be accommodated within the Union or in a new kind of Union or Federation - but then of course he would have to go against HMG. The Govt is, for reasons of its own, determined to prevent any English political expression, as Michael Wills recently made only too clear to Derek Wyatt in the House of Commons. This attempt to stifle England cannot be maintained indefinitely and the idea that allowing an English national voice is a threat to the Union has been rejected by most Scots, most recently by Henry McLeish.

As Ian Campbell shows, using Germany as illustration, it is history that dictates how things will work out in the end.

Terry complains that the government started off in a nationalistic way and now want to revert to a regionalist settlement, but the government's actions were dictated by the logic of 1707.

Westminster was already acting as a quasi-federal parliament, in that duplicate legislation was required in most areas of domestic policy, because of the existence of separate Scots law and institutions.

It was this that became indefensible, against SNP attacks, when the ruling party at Westminster had virtually no representatives in Scotland. Wales was given devolution mainly to prevent it looking too much like an SNP triumph.

History is on the side of an all England solution to the English question.