Liberal Democrats: Make it Happen
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.
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Yes, what exactly does all
Yes, what exactly does all that talk about federal this and federal that mean? So they believe in federal governance in Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland - and they have a federal party structure - but they still want England to be governed by the 'national' UK parliament; with fewer English MPs to mitigate it from becoming a de facto English parliament, i.e. a 'federal' English parliament?!!
Be encouraged! At least the
Be encouraged! At least the Lib Dems are organised on a federal basis which I take to be a UK federal basis. By implication they are recognising England .
Their suggestion of depriving England of 150 MP's in the British parliament is completely unnacceptable if there is no corresponding reduction in the number of MP's there from S W andNI.
It ignores the existing overrepresentaion of SC and NI in the British parliament
Nevertheless is is progress insofar as they are accepting that the British parliament is too large . This is a key point bearing in mind that if there is to be an EP then much of work of the British parliament will disappear and it must be slimmed.
They just havn't as of yet incorporated an EP into the picture . In the end they will (and some of the building blocks are there)
One of the inducements to Lib Dem change on this matter is when they get down to seriously considering the likely impact on the Libdem vote in an EP . They have done spectacularly badly out of the British parliament basically because they were replaced as one of the two main parties by the Labour party in 1918 a belated feature of Britishness.
They could, possibly , reverse this situation but only with an EP.
Clegg ought to get his head around this and there are signs in other Lib Dem policy areas that he might be doing some out-of-the-rut Liberal thinking.