In the midst of a period where uncertainty has reigned supreme, with an unforeseeable cloud of volcanic ash and the volatility of the post- leaders’ debate general election polls hogging the headlines, one fixed point in the calendar took place with very little public attention last week: St George’s Day. While the event has always been totemic for Little Englanders, in recent years, the perceived panacea of an English parliament has become a cause to rally around for those who have a sense of injustice at being English.
The other week, under the heat of television lights, I was charged with defending the union in a Kilroy-style setting with Nicky Campbell in the chair. The show was The Big Questions from the BBC religious programmes department. On our side was the director of the Bruges Group, the Eurosceptic think thank – the first person to hand me a business card with Margaret Thatcher on it. (It was irony-free – she’s their honorary president.) The opposition were a man from the English Democrat Party, who’d just launched their manifesto to zero attention amid Cleggmania and the amiable Andy Newman, who blogs as SocialistUnity. The topic generated a lively debate on the programme’s website, supplementing the faux indignation among the panellists.
Hot air aside, I genuinely believe that we are stronger together and that an English parliament would be the beginning of the end for the union. “It’s Scotland’s oil” was the emotive nationalist slogan of the 1970s and ’80s. Under “new” Labour, the City of London produced an unprecedented 40 successive quarters of positive economic growth. In the recent recession, an independent Scotland would have gone under, buried by the credit crunch. Alex Salmond’s fabled arc of prosperity stretching up to Iceland via Ireland would have been an arc of insolvency.
Our constitutional arrangements have proved remarkably durable yet adaptable from the Magna Carta of 1215 to devolution a decade ago. Their future should not be dictated by fringe organisations which frequently have hostility to immigration at their core. Outfits such as the English Defence League, with inflammatory marches through areas with large ethnic populations, have a misguided persecution complex.
Quite often the politics of English nationalism are dog whistle calls to latent racists. There has been devolved power for England in the London Assembly and regional development agencies. Decisions are best taken at the most local level possible. We need a lumbering beast of an English parliament like we need a hole in the head.
Predictably raised on the show was the “West Lothian question” of whether it is fair that Scottish MPs can vote on English issues. Yet this makes very little real material difference to people’s lives. It is a constitutional anomaly agonised over by sixth-form politics students and constitutional geeks. In the real world, people care about their public services, feeling safe on the streets and vote with their pockets – I say this as a candidate in the local elections. No system is perfect, but ours is not broke to the extent that a clunky measure like an English Parliament is needed to fix it. I’m all for more regionalism but I may be out of step on this one: when people in the north-east of England were offered a referendum on the issue, they blew it a big fat raspberry, thus scuppering the chances of other votes around the country.
At a time when the standing of politics and politicians is at an all-time low after the MPs’ expenses scandal and with financial circumstances dictating that parties scrabble around to find “efficiency savings”, it seems madness to advocate another layer of government with attendant bureaucracy and jobs for the boys culture dictated from the centre.
With 83 per cent of the British population, England already dominates. Scottish and Welsh devolution was a bold decentralising move away from London by Labour. However, there is no public appetite, clamour or need for an English Parliament. If there was, it would have been addressed in this election campaign’s manifestos and the leaders’ debates, but no serious party wants to touch this dud of an issue.
While out trudging the streets in recent weeks not a single voter has mentioned the need for an English Parliament as an issue. On St George’s Day itself the Today programme reported that most people in the UK were at best only dimly aware, if at all, of its existence and origins.
For years, Scotland, Wales and major cities such as Manchester and Sheffield had to endure the worst excesses of Thatcherism despite repeatedly voting against the Tories. I can’t see how an English parliament would have helped the industrial north in the 1980s.
We should aim at reforming our existing structures and injecting more subsidiarity – an unfashionable word, but with a lot to be said for it – into the process. Yes, we need to reform our politics and puncture the Westminster bubble in which too many of our decision-makers are trapped, but an English Parliament is not the way to do it.
