Six Years Ago Today

Six years ago today, I covered the following stories on the CEP Blog.

From the Daily Star, 11th April 2005:

Patriotic Englishman and women will march on Downing Street to demand an annual public holiday to celebrate St George's Day. More than 600,000 people have already swamped a Daily Star backed website calling for a special hol to honour the patron saint. Now the delighted chief of www.stgeorgesday.com will deliver a petition to Tony Blair to make the Government sit up and take notice.

From the Conservative Party manifesto:

"Conservatives believe that the Union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland brings benefits to all parts of our United Kingdom. We remain strongly committed to making a success of devolution in Scotland, so that it delivers for the Scottish people. In Wales we will work with the Assembly and give the Welsh people a referendum on whether to keep the Assembly in its current form, increase its powers or abolish it. But devolution has brought problems of accountability at Westminster. Now that exclusively Scottish matters are decided by the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, exclusively English matters should be decided in Westminster without the votes of MPs sitting for Scottish constituencies who are not accountable to English voters. We will act to ensure that English laws are decided by English votes."

From the Conservatives 2005 Election Manifesto (pdf file). Hat tip to Englishman's Castle.

And Andrew Neil's Banana Republic article on Business Online:

Strike three against British democracy has been the governmen'ts refusal to deal with the so-called West Lothian question, whereby Scottish MPs (who are predominantly Labour) are allowed to vote on English domestic matters, even though, since a devolved Scottish parliament was created in Edinburgh in 1999, English MPs now have no say on purely Scottish domestic matter.s This anomaly has already led to several undemocratic absurdities, with Mr Blair using his Scottish legions in Westminster to force through unpopular reforms to English public services (such as university tuition fees and foundation hospitals) even though the reforms do not apply to Scotland, where such matters are the preserve of the Edinburgh parliament.

This insult to democracy will become all the more pronounced if on 5 May England votes Tory but Labour still forms the British government because its Scottish and Welsh lobby fodder give it an overall majority. In that case England would be ruled by a government which did not have the consent of the English people. None of this much mattered when Britain voted as a unitary United Kingdom: the constituent parts of the country had to accept the overall result. But devolution has changed that and England will rightly resent Scottish intrusion in its domestic matters when England does not intrude on Scottish domestic matters The simple and democratic answer to the West Lothian question - that Scottish MPs in Westminster do not vote on purely English domestic legislation - has been steadfastly resisted by the Blair government (again, for purely self-serving reasons).

As far as England is concerned, nothing has changed in the intervening six years. But Wales now has more devolved powers, while Scotland is set to vote for more devolved powers and has St Andrew's Day as a designated public holiday.