by Arthur Aughey
Englishness has re-emerged with a sense of grievance. Is it big enough to threaten Britain?
According to Philip Larkin, sexual intercourse in England began in the annus mirabilis of 1963, between the ending of the ban on Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Beatles' first LP. According to many, something similar happened to English national identity in 1996, the year the European football championship was held in England.
1963 helped to dispel the myth that the English prefer the comfort of a hot water bottle to the delights of sex. 1996 helped to dispel the myth that the English were reluctant to engage in national celebration. Back then, the flying of the St George's cross in such large numbers was a startlingly new form of behaviour. Ten years on, the flag is part of the cultural and commercial mainstream.
Official acknowledgement of English self-expression has also been changing. In January 2000, Jack Straw, the home secretary, was still warning of dark forces lurking within the English nation, its "propensity to violence," its history of subjugating other nations. In 2006, the prime minister ordered the England flag to be flown in Downing Street on the days of England World Cup games, and the secretary of state for culture, media and sport flew the flag on her car.
One way of describing what has happened in England is the assertion of the autonomy of populism. For much of recent history Conservative politics helped to contain English populism within a culture of social deference which looked down on the vulgarity of national display. Labour politics helped to contain it within a culture of working-class solidarity, the patriotism of which was deep but ideologically moderated. The liberal conscience, common to both left and right and the arbiter of much public discourse, often despised English popular culture, seeing it as xenophobic. The decline of social deference, promoted by the Conservative party itself under Thatcher; the waning of working-class solidarity; and the retreat of intellectual condescension, especially in the media, permitted populism to escape its former restraints.
In the past, it was the exceptionalism of England's character that informed national self-understanding, but the new "celebratory patriotism," as sports sociologists have labelled it, is rather different. It is the desire of imitation, the desire to be like other nations, to express a universal carnival spirit. What has surprised many on the left, as well as the right, is that English populism could have very little to do with "national aggression." From one point of view, there has been a successful rebranding, one which also returned to English people the pride of being "good sports." Moreover, the ubiquity of the St George's cross means that those who use it to symbolise exclusivity—"this is ours"—shared it with those who used it to symbolise "we also belong." Is this populism merely the English version of what has been called "90-minute patriotism"—intense national emotion confined to football and other sporting events? Or does it have larger political implications?
There are those who think it does, and that England is taking the first steps on a journey of homecoming after centuries of obfuscation in Britain and empire. Much of the recent literature implies that the English suffer from a double lack—a lack of distinct national identity and a lack of distinct institutions of self-governance. The autonomy of populism is here attached to a political demand for greater English self-governance, in the wake of devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. For England it is a return and a beginning—the stuff of romantic nationalism, where recovery and renewal make it possible to become "a nation once again." And if that seems a rather fanciful interpretation for the prosaic English, it is also the conclusion of Krishnan Kumar's The Making of English National Identity (2003) which invites the English "to begin again from scratch." But if patriotism in sport is celebratory, there is in its political version a tone of grievance. One can detect an unmistakable English mood—it is not yet a movement—and it is based on a number of anxieties.
First is the anxiety of absence. Having given itself to the world, England has lost its soul. Rudyard Kipling thought that their civilising mission had made the English feel "akin to all in the universe," but this was lost in the retreat from empire. The nation of shopkeepers has become a nation of shoppers, its identity defined by patterns of consumption rather than patterns of belonging. In Roger Scruton's elegy, the English have experienced globalisation so thoroughly that they have lost their sense of place.
Second is the anxiety of silence, which involves the suspicion of conspiracy. The conspiracy is to confine the English question to issues of administrative efficiency—like the recent failed policy of regional devolution—to avoid raising the issue of national identity. (A hint of this can be found in Robert Jackson's comments that follow.) England, it is said, is the country that dare not speak its name. Such commentary is often prefaced by the couplet from GK Chesterton's The Secret People, "Smile at us, pay us, pass us; but do not quite forget/For we are the people of England, that never has spoken yet." This is a nationalist threat as much as a populist invitation.
Third is the anxiety of anticipation, a premonition of abandonment. In this case, not the end of empire but the end of Britain. The anxiety assumes that devolution is the first stage of a process in which the other nations throw off what Billy Bragg called the "safety blanket" of Britishness, while the English are smothered under its decaying folds.
Fourth is the anxiety of reticence, the curse of English national decency. Since devolution the system for allocating resources within Britain has become more transparent, which has led to a call for an end to English reticence. The other countries are thought to be taking advantage of England's lack of national identity and the English must advance their own identity politics if they are to protect their interests. The measure of historic English reticence and the measure of the injustice of that decency is one and the same: the Barnett formula, the calculation of public spending that is said to deliver to the Scots at least £1,000 a year more per head than to the English.
These four anxieties reinforce a mood of grievance that contains the two vital elements that sustain nationalist politics: self-righteousness and self-pity. What is being voiced here is a sense of irritation about living in a system that fails to acknowledge English primacy and perhaps the fear of becoming superfluous. This worldview echoes Orwell's sentimental image of the English—a gentle people with a deep sense of justice and fairness, difficult to rouse and slow to criticise but, when the time comes, a people stubbornly determined to do what is right.
This self-image underlies the prolonged discontent with EU membership and it now underlies the discontent about England's relationship with other parts of Britain. It was illustrated by Jeremy Paxman's recent outburst against the Scottish "Raj," in which he exaggerated the "imperialism" of Scottish influence over England in the mode of self-pity and understated the grievance in the mode of self-righteousness. "Do we complain about it? No we don't."
Outside Northern Ireland, "British" refers almost exclusively to the legalities of citizenship, while English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish refer to national belonging. This convention can be traced in part to Linda Colley's work Britons (1992) in which she argued that Britain was an invention temporarily superimposed on much older loyalties. For Colley, these natural loyalties of Welsh, Irish, Scottish and English were bound to wax once the artifice of imperial Britishness began to wane. In sum, Britishness has become understood as exterior and formal compared with the interior and sentimental nature of national identity. This has given rise to two competing tendencies. In the first, Britishness becomes dispensable if popular identity is there to be authentically expressed in national institutions. In the second, the national becomes dispensable since Britishness signifies all—the idea advanced in the Parekh report of 2000, a high-water mark of multiculturalism.
The politics of Englishness used to be conducted in an idiom that preferred, as Disraeli once said, government by parliament rather than by logic, an idiom that could see no point in removing an anomaly just because it was an anomaly (see Robert Jackson below). The consequence was an unthinking unionism in which England, as Bernard Crick has put it, was a relationship as much as a thing in itself. The insight here is not that Englishness is a relationship defined by some "other" (and so lacking an identity), or that Englishness has a fixed meaning, but that the Englishness of Britain and the Britishness of England have been bound up together. Devolution has clearly modified things: unionism can no longer be unthinking, because devolution has modified the institutional relationship between England and the other parts of Britain. Bargaining between the territories is more visible than the multinational solidarity that makes such bargaining possible in the first place. As a consequence, the English question has become England's British question, and the question is to what extent devolution has undermined English patriotic identification with the UK. In short, does it inevitably mean disintegration?
From a cultural perspective, there is a strangely exotic aspect to these English anxieties, since Weltschmerz, as Ernest Barker observed in his celebrated collection The Character of England (1947), is very un-English. Barker thought that what defined the English political character was not angst-ridden longing for wholeness but a capacity to make do. It also seems bizarre, as well as self-diminishing, for a large nation like England to define itself in grievance against small nations like Scotland and Wales and to transform the constitutional anomalies of devolution into evidence of a systematic victimisation that warrants breakup of the union. This new idiom of victimisation has encouraged a jingoistic style, albeit in a very English sense. Originally, jingoism professed a reluctance to fight, but warned that if the English had to, then they had the ships, had the men and had the money too. The jingoism of English nationalism has been equally reluctant, but if Britain should break up, then England would be secure: it will have 85 per cent of the population and it can keep its own money.
It is not yet clear whether the issue of English national identity will become politicised. All the ingredients of a nationalist platform are there: a sense of injustice, a feeling of powerlessness, the mood of exploitation and the occasion for righteous anger. For the moment, overtly nationalist groups remain on the fringe, but the sentiments of such groups are more openly displayed in the press. And the Conservative temptation since 1997 has been to drift towards a politics of Englishness. This is an old temptation, despite the party's traditional unionism. It was Disraeli who complained that the Whigs were only maintained in power by the votes of Scottish MPs, and Robert Blake wondered in his history of the Conservative party why, even at a time when Tory support was still well established in Scotland, its leadership had not been more English-oriented. The temptation has rarely been indulged because the party leadership has been aware that breaking up the UK would weaken British (and English) power. But if in the course of the last 30 years the Scots and the Welsh have come to think of the Conservatives as the English party, a long period in opposition has increased the Tory temptation to paint Labour as a vehicle for imposing a Celtic mafia on England. With an intimation that England has begun to stir—a recent ICM poll found that 55 per cent of English respondents did not think that it was right for a Scot to become prime minister—some in the Conservative party are beginning to fly the English flag in the sense that Gladstone once flew his kite at Hawarden.
There is, however, good reason for Conservatives to be cautious about the supposed prejudices of middle England. The 2003 British social attitudes survey showed that the English appear to be comfortable with devolution without wanting their own regional or national institutions. Moreover, as a YouGov survey found in 2005, the old British staples of fair play, tolerance and civility still ranked highly among public values. For those who feared patriotism would allow no "black" in either the Union Jack or the St George's cross, the same survey showed that the athlete Kelly Holmes tied with the queen as the person in whom people had most pride. The "icons of Englishness" suggested by the public to the government-sponsored Icons Online project were a mix of the tourist board familiar—Big Ben, York Minster; the regionally evocative—the Lindisfarne gospels, Hadrian's wall; the culturally diverse—morris dancing, the Notting Hill carnival; and the inevitable St George's cross. There was little evidence here of an alienated and anxious people.
Devolution has increased the attraction of clear-cut identities and it is possible to put the logic of simplicity into political practice. It would mean adopting the policy Tom Nairn has long advocated and Michael Portillo has now adopted—that the English should turn their attention from the management of British decline into the management of disintegration, a sort of "Four Nations and a British Funeral" strategy. It would be, in my view, a tragic case of national separatism based on the narcissism of small differences. On the other hand, the multinationalism of Britain can be understood as an appropriate location for popular Englishness. Billy Bragg captured the interconnected parts of this relationship when he sang: "Cos my neighbours are half English and I'm half English too." He is "half English" because of the Britishness which has made England what it is today and his British neighbours are half English too, because whether they like it or not—many don't but most do—what touches England touches everyone.
Arthur Aughey is professor of politics at the University of Ulster. His "Politics of Englishness" is published by Manchester University Press in May 2007
The Cameron temptation
by Robert Jackson
The Tories could stir up a constitutional crisis over Englishness. Let's hope they don't
It is beginning to look as if David Cameron intends to play the English card in some form at the next general election. One of his senior associates, Alan Duncan, has already argued that after devolution, a Scotsman should no longer be prime minister of Britain. Cameron's instincts are probably telling him that this directness may not go down well in middle England—it plays the man rather than the ball. Much cleverer, surely, to make the same point with high-minded constitutionalist talk of the need to put right the anomalies created by Scottish devolution—summed up in the question posed by the anti-devolution Scottish Labour MP Tam Dalyell in the 1970s: the West Lothian question.
It is a question that deserves a serious answer. But how one answers a question notoriously depends on the terms in which it is put. Talk about constitutions is usually framed in terms of one of two metaphors. According to the first, constitutions express an idea—the idea of monarchy, or aristocracy, or democracy. This is the metaphor that hovers behind current proposals to elect the House of Lords—"we live in a democracy don't we?" A key feature of an idea is that it must be "rational," it must be consistent with the "laws of thought," notably the principle of non-contradiction, which holds that P cannot be both A and not-A. Anything which does not fit with the idea constitutes an "anomaly" (from the Greek, "un-even").
A variant of this metaphor holds that a constitution is a machine. Each of its parts has its function, and all fit together in a rational design. The thinking behind the defunct European constitution derives from this discourse, which has been entrenched in France since the 17th century. The idea of a "democratic deficit" originates in this context. The deduction goes like this: the European idea is democratic, majority voting in the council of ministers abrogates national democratic accountability, so there is a democratic deficit, so there must be a European democracy. (The problem then arises of how there can be a democracy without a living demos.)
The second metaphor describes constitutions as living organisms. Here the terms in which constitutional questions are framed are not so much logical as empirical. A natural organism is not a rational construction. It is the product of a specific historical development, and at each stage it retains traces of earlier phases in its evolution. Although the organism may exhibit pathologies, it is a category mistake to apply to it the notion of anomaly. There is no design, and no single designer. The principle of non-contradiction does not apply: in a living constitution P is frequently both A and not-A.
The British constitution has been considered a prime specimen of this kind of organic growth ever since it was described by the Marquess of Halifax at the end of the 17th century as a "mixed monarchy"—a combination of absolute monarchy and commonwealth. This thinking also inspired America's founding fathers. The US constitution is not the rationalist charter it is sometimes taken to be—it is an organicist document, seeking to combine the distinct ideas of monarchy (the executive), democracy (the legislature), and of law binding on both. "Tory philosophy" used to be based on this metaphor. Adopting the Whig thinker Edmund Burke as their patron, the Tories held themselves to be the original "organic" party, and they despised the Liberals as exponents of a mechanical and rationalistic view of the world.
What are we to make of the West Lothian question in the light of these two different metaphors for the framing of constitutional questions in general? The question asks whether it is right for a member of the UK parliament elected by a Scottish constituency to vote on a law that applies only in England. The thinking behind this question implies that the situation described in the question is anomalous; and that, like all anomalies, this must be put right.
The West Lothian question thus arises out of, and derives its force from, the mechanical metaphor. This is visible in the way the argument is put: before devolution, the parts of the British constitution fitted neatly together; devolution has caused a dislocation; therefore the machinery must be redesigned.
In terms of this framing of the question, there is an irresistible logic behind the Conservative proposal that only MPs from English constituencies should be permitted to vote on laws applying only in England. This apparent logic perhaps explains why so little thought was given to it before it featured in the Tory 2001 and 2005 manifestos. It also explains why, according to opinion polls, almost half the population in both England and Wales support "English votes for English laws." On the other hand, they also show that the issue has very low salience.
But with the likely arrival of a Scottish prime minister at 10 Downing Street, the time has surely come for the Conservative party—and the country—to think seriously about the whole idea. Of course, the answer to the West Lothian question that the Conservatives are proposing is not the only possible one. There are at least two others. One is the creation of a UK federal state, with distinct parliaments and governments in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, and a distinct UK federal parliament and government, the whole subject to a written constitution on the US model, with a supreme court to determine its application. The other is devolution all round, with devolution to the English regions of powers roughly analogous to those devolved to the Scottish and Welsh nations.
The Conservatives are entitled to argue that the upheaval involved in the first approach would be excessive, and that the second approach has been tried and failed. After all, the Labour government got a resounding "no" in a 2004 referendum on its proposal for an elected regional government in the northeast, the English region thought most likely to vote "yes."
But the Conservatives cannot so easily brush aside the device for dealing with the West Lothian question that has actually been put in place by the government—the reduction in the number of Westminster constituencies in Scotland (from 72 to 59). This device was invented by a Conservative-Liberal coalition in 1920 in the context of devolution in Northern Ireland, and nobody complained that it was anomalous in the half-century before the suspension of the Stormont government in 1972. This is a good "organic" answer to the West Lothian question, and if the Tories really believe that they cannot win seats in Scotland, they could argue for a further reduction.
In any case, the West Lothian situation is not the only, or even the most serious, of the anomalies which could be said to be riddle our constitution. Britain is in many respects a presidential democracy in which government is a plébiscite de tous les jours, and public opinion largely represented and formed by the media. Yet the head of government is not chosen directly by the people: his appointment depends on commanding a majority in parliament—and, to be pedantic, upon receiving Her Majesty's commission. If a constitution should be an anomaly-free mechanism, what is the point of the crown—or of parliament?
Moreover, Britain is largely secular and multi-faith, yet in the established church retains a principle of unity of state and church that goes back to the Emperor Constantine. Then there is the House of Lords, still with hereditary members. If the idea of the British constitution is "democratic," how can this anomaly be tolerated? (To be fair to modern Tories, many press this question in precisely such terms.)
To come closer to the West Lothian question, we have already noted that under the arrangements for Northern Irish devolution, Westminster MPs from the province were in exactly the same position as Scottish and Welsh MPs have been since 1998. But most of them voted, for most of the time, with the Conservative and Unionist party—which explains why this was not then held to be anomalous.
Of course, when these points are put to a committed political rationalist he has a ready answer: "One wrong doesn't make a right—one anomaly cannot justify another." But then we are entitled to respond, "Why pick out this anomaly rather than that?" The right question to ask of any constitutional arrangement is not "can it be rationally justified?" or "how do we get rid of the anomalies?"—but rather "is it on balance helpful or harmful?"
This is above all a practical question, and it implies three tests. Does a particular arrangement on balance help to secure the legitimacy of government? Does it on balance contribute to the accountability of government? And does it on balance help or harm the efficacy of the state—what the American Federalist Papers call its "energy"? So let us look at the Conservative plan of "English votes for English laws" in the light of these three criteria—legitimacy, accountability and energy.
One of the strengths of the British constitution has been its success, relative to others, in resolving the potentially conflicting goals of accountability and energy. The constitutional conflicts of the 17th century were settled by agreement on the concept of "crown in parliament"—the glorious muddle of monarchy and ultimately democracy by which we are still governed. This resulted in a form of state which has combined exceptional levels of consent with exceptional forcefulness in government. It was this formula that won the great 18th and 19th-century wars against France—then a much bigger power than Britain—and also against Germany in the 20th century. In the 1980s it arguably also enabled Thatcher to implement the kind of reform programme that seems to be unattainable under the more rational constitutional arrangements of the big European mainland countries.
The strength of this formula derives from its simplicity and transparency. Accountability and energy are secured by the first past the post electoral system, and the unity of parliament and executive.
The British electoral system has the disadvantage, that votes cast under it are of unequal value, too many votes don't really count at all and governments can be formed by parties with as little as one third of votes cast. But balancing this are great advantages. It concentrates the number of parties, and pushes them to make the widest appeal. Each of the big two presents a broad-based programme for government. The voters choose between these parties, with a clear sense of what each is offering.
Energy in the executive is secured by the way in which this system normally enables one party to win a majority capable of lasting a five-year term. The executive is usually able to control parliament and thus deliver the programme for which the largest single section of the electorate has voted. On each of these counts, proportional representation systems are less effective—they generate a multiplicity of parties, each plays to its own supporters, and the electorate does not choose the government, which is instead formed by the parties after an election.
"English votes for English laws" would put all this at risk by breaking the unity of parliament and executive. One of two cases will arise under this proposal: either the same party would have a parliamentary majority across the UK and England, or the party which has a UK majority will not have a majority in England. In the second case it will be impossible for the UK government to implement in England the programme preferred by the UK electorate as a whole. Before every election the voters may have to consider this possibility. English voters would always have to consider whether their preferences in a matter reserved for English MPs could be put into effect by their choice of UK party. The effect of all this must be to reduce the simplicity and transparency of the system of accountability to the electorate, and with this the energy and efficiency of the executive.
In reply, it might be said that under the second case, the party that forms the UK government would simply have to negotiate with the other parties to secure the passage of its legislation by English votes only. But if large parts of the domestic legislation governing some 85 per cent of the British people are to be decided after elections by negotiation between the parties, most of the advantages of the first past the post system will have been lost, and only its disadvantages will remain. This is why "English votes for English laws" would probably open the way to a new electoral system, one which is both less accountable and less effective than the one that the British people have used to good effect for centuries.
Those who favour proportional representation may not object to this (see Chris Huhne's comments below)—but do the Tories want PR? Meanwhile, they ought to consider the further point: that if only MPs from English seats can vote on laws applying to England, the effect would be to create an English parliament within the UK parliament. The Conservatives say that they do not want to turn Britain into a federal state. But how long could the anomaly of a parliament within a parliament survive? What they try to present as a mere procedural change will release a logic that is bound to lead to federalism—and an extraordinary federation in which one of the units has 85 per cent of the population. (The only precedent for this is an unhappy one: between 1871 and 1948 Prussia had 65 per cent of the population of the second German reich.)
What about the question of legitimacy? The West Lothian question arises because of Scottish devolution. Devolution to Scotland became a controversial question in that part of Britain in the 1970s because of the decay of the Conservative party in Scotland. By the 1990s, when laws were being made for Scotland by a UK parliament controlled by the Tories, who had dwindled to a small minority in that country, it was evident that a serious question of legitimacy was posed.
The obvious solution was to seek to restore that legitimacy by devolution to a Scottish parliament and executive within the UK. This solution has now been accepted by the Conservative party, in some part because it came to see the force of the argument for devolution from legitimacy.
The West Lothian question thus arises out of the resolution of the earlier question of the legitimacy of government in Scotland. But does it now pose a question of similar weight and force for the legitimacy of government in England? Clearly at present it does not. For 25 years I was the MP for Wantage, one of the best-educated constituencies in middle England. Having an interest in constitutional questions, I tried to stimulate debate on them. There was never the slightest interest, except sometimes a mild grumble about too much tax money going "up north"—to the north of England as much as to Scotland.
Nevertheless, I would guess that the potential exists for the Conservative party to generate in England the same kind of xenophobic hostilities that the SNP succeeded in stirring up in Scotland. But I doubt whether it will be able to assemble behind its campaign for "English votes for English laws" the same national consensus of the great and the good that emerged for devolution in Scotland in the 1980s.
Does the West Lothian question pose problems for the legitimacy of government in England? It entirely depends on the Conservative party. If the party wishes to generate a crisis of legitimacy in the British state, it probably has the means to do so. But it should not underestimate the risks to itself—the leader-writers of the Daily Mail have already fired a hostile warning shot.
After 1997 the Tories made a similar effort to play up popular resentments about Europe, and this contributed to the widespread feeling that they were unfit for government. Even an implicitly anti-Scottish campaign would probably have the same effect.
It does not require much insight to imagine the effects on the loyalty to Britain of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish if they were excluded from high office in the UK government. To say that the MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath cannot vote in Westminster on health and education is to say that he cannot be education or health secretary—or, logically, chancellor or prime minister.
Devolution has had the desired effect of neutralising Scots and Welsh separatism. One effect of "English votes for English laws" would be to reignite these issues, not only in England, but in Scotland and Wales too. But perhaps this may not bother today's Conservative party. Scotland and Wales have given up on the Tories, so why shouldn't the Tories give up on them? In this calculation it might be considered merely sentimental to point out that the British union has been one of the world's most successful states. Nor will a party which is turning its back on Europe care to be reminded that the British union has been one of the pioneers in combining different nationalities and ethnicities under a unifying system of governance.
A campaign for "English votes for English laws" has obvious attractions for the new Conservative leadership—in which the self-confidence of the traditional ruling class has morphed into a sloganising insouciance. Cameron is desperate to win, and he may think that stirring up English hostility to a disproportionate number of Scots around the cabinet table could be an effective tactic against a Scottish prime minister. In doing so he would be throwing over the last vestiges of what made the Conservative party a serious governing party for the British nation.
Robert Jackson was a Conservative MP until January 2005, when he left the party and joined Labour
The East Lothian answer
by Malcolm Rifkind
What about a grand committee of English-only MPs to determine English-only policy?
Robert Jackson is right that constitutions can be seen either as mechanistic or organic. What he fails to see is that reforming the way the House of Commons deals with English business after devolution would be an organic response in the traditions of our parliamentary system.
Jackson says that an organic parliament "is the product of a specific historical development." But he surely cannot deny that the creation of local parliaments or assemblies in three of the four nations of the UK is a historic development, which requires change in the way parliament deals with business specific to the fourth nation, England.
The reason the handling of English business has to be changed is not just because we now have an anomaly. As Jackson says, we have learnt to live with many anomalies. But the history of parliament shows that anomalies are addressed to avoid political crises. To have England-only measures imposed against the wishes of English MPs because of the votes of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish would always have been controversial. But to see it happen when it is impossible for the same to apply to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is unsustainable.
The challenge is to identify an organic reform of parliament that would deal with the West Lothian question without creating first and second-class MPs. The solution I offer is different to that being discussed in the Conservative party—and as I own a house outside Edinburgh, I choose to call it the East Lothian answer to the West Lothian question.
By creating a Scottish parliament and a Welsh assembly, combined with proposals for a revived Northern Ireland assembly, the government is creating a new kind of Britain. Health, education, housing and many other local issues are or will be decided in Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast rather than London. English MPs will have no power over them and nor will Scottish, Welsh and Ulster MPs at Westminster.
In such a situation it is absurd for the government to claim that there are no implications in these changes for the government of England. Although it is true that if English MPs are united, their dominance ensures they will always get their way, we have already seen examples—on tuition fees and foundation hospitals—of Scots votes determining English business when the English are deeply divided.
The question, raised by Jackson and others, of whether "English votes for English laws" would still allow a Scot to be health secretary or prime minister is a political, not a constitutional matter. It may be foolish to appoint as health secretary an MP who will decide health issues for people other than his own constituents. But there is nothing unconstitutional about it. There have been Labour and Conservative Northern Ireland ministers making decisions that do not affect their own constituents for years. And the last Conservative government had a series of Welsh secretaries of state who represented English constituencies. Nor would it be tolerable to suggest that neither Scotland nor Wales could ever again provide a British prime minister. In any case, most of the main powers of government—taxation, defence, foreign policy and social security—are exercised by the prime minister and the British government uniformly throughout the UK.
But voting in the House of Commons is another matter. It is not just about constitutional propriety. It is also about fairness. It is unfair and untenable for the English to become the only people in the country who do not have the final say on legislation that affects only their own part of the kingdom.
This is not a quarrel between England and Scotland. Every survey of Scottish opinion shows that a very big majority of Scots agree that English MPs should have the last word on legislation in parliament that affects only England. The problem is not England versus Scotland. It is the Labour party versus everyone else, as it tries ensure a majority in England regardless of how England votes. It is also only a Labour problem; it is impossible to imagine the Conservatives having a majority in Britain without a comfortable majority in England as well.
Most Conservatives have assumed that the answer to this problem is to forbid Scottish (and Welsh and Irish) MPs from voting on purely English business. I agree with the objective but I disagree with the method. The Conservatives are a unionist party and it is unwise to advocate a solution that appears to create two classes of MP: those who vote on all issues and those who vote only on some. That would be a nationalist solution to a unionist problem. It would weaken rather than strengthen Britain.
I offer two possible reforms that would meet the problem while minimising the risks. The first would be to create an English grand committee consisting of all MPs representing English constituencies. As with a committee of the whole house, it would meet in the chamber of the House of Commons. All legislation certified by the speaker to apply only to England would come before it, and be voted on.
There are many conventions in the House of Commons. Although not laws, they determine how MPs and governments behave. My proposal would require a new convention: that if the English grand committee has rejected a bill put before it, the Commons as a whole would not seek to overturn it. Just as the House of Lords, in certain circumstances, agrees not to overturn decisions of the Commons, so the Commons should decide in relation to the English grand committee.
Such a reform would have striking similarities with the relationship that has developed between Westminster and Holyrood. Because the Scottish parliament is a devolved assembly, Westminster retains the legal right to overrule its decisions and to legislate in areas that have been devolved. But the political reality is that a convention has been created that Westminster will not legislate in those areas that have been devolved to Edinburgh. In exactly the same way, the House of Commons could agree to respect the wishes of the English grand committee.
There is another way the problem could be dealt with without creating two classes of MP: a new convention that prevented purely English legislation going forward unless it had not only a majority of the House of Commons voting for it but also a majority of MPs from English constituencies.
Either solution ensures that all MPs remain equal. All would retain the same legal powers when the House of Commons was meeting. But the consequence would be that England would enjoy a measure of devolution comparable to that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
Labour would not like this approach, as it might prevent the party getting legislation through. Too bad. Those who promote devolution must live with its consequences. In any event, there would be nothing new in having a government that did not have a majority for some of its legislation. It is what happens when we have a hung parliament, as happened twice between 1974 and 1979. During that period, the government often had to negotiate with opposition parties to pass legislation. If the government did not like the final result, it was free to withdraw the bill. (Incidentally, for Labour to prevail in the UK but not in England its overall majority in the UK would have to be low—in the twenties or even lower.)
The relationship between the Commons and Lords was transformed over the last 100 years because it became unacceptable for peers to thwart the wishes of the elected members. I presume Robert Jackson was comfortable with this evolution. In the same way, it is becoming unacceptable that on measures which will only apply to England, the wishes of English MPs can be ignored because of the votes of MPs from other parts of Britain.
The essence of organisms is that they evolve. As was once famously remarked, if we want things to stay the same things will have to change.
Malcolm Rifkind is a Conservative MP and was secretary of state for Scotland 1986-90
PR to the rescue
by Chris Huhne
Could Tory attempts to press the Englishness question open the gates for electoral reform?
Robert Jackson is right that anomalies are acceptable features of a constitution, but only so long as the principal interests are prepared to tolerate them. Spain has a lop-sided constitution with big powers for the three Basque provinces, which even collect their own taxes before remitting a share to Madrid. It has more modest devolution for Catalonia and relatively little for Castile. This asymmetry is tolerated in part because the most devolved areas—the Basque country and Catalonia—are the richest parts of Spain, and paymasters of the rest.
But if the Tories do decide to campaign to end Scottish votes on English laws, they will be on fertile ground. Scotland receives far more public spending per head than England, and there is a sense of injustice in poorer English regions. Moreover, the Tories have a long history of constitutional opportunism—they were prepared to trade a sustainable constitutional settlement for short-term party advantage when Edward Carson's 1912 Ulster covenant committed its signatories to resist home rule "by all means necessary," and accelerated the end of the union with Ireland just as assuredly as the 1916 Easter rising.
Of course, there are many differences between pre-1921 Ireland and Scotland now. Scotland was never Catholic or conquered. It was an intimate part of the Protestant ascendancy that was at the core of the new British identity from the 18th century. Nor will the Tories necessarily behave with the lack of proportion that Carson exhibited. It is even said that the Tories will draw stumps once they have extracted a modest concession: perhaps a further cut in the number of Scottish MPs at Westminster in line with the reduced numbers of Ulster MPs once Stormont was set up.
This would, though, be a dangerous and temporary bodge: it would have no intellectual or moral justification other than as another accretion in the organic growth of our coral reef constitution. The West Lothian question would remain unanswered. The cut in Scottish representation would send a signal to the Scots that they were second-class citizens in the union. Moreover, such a bodge presumes the Tories know when to stop pressing their tribal advantage. The history of Ireland suggests otherwise.
More likely, the Tories will stoke the fires of English nationalism and hence of Scottish independence, and will thereby press the other mainstream unionist parties—Labour and the Liberal Democrats—into considering alternative solutions. In the process, the Tories may find themselves scoring an own goal against their professed opposition to electoral reform.
After all, the anomaly of Scots votes on English laws would, under Tory proposals, be replaced by the equally glaring anomaly of English laws determined by a party with a minority of English votes. Yet the Conservatives' English majority is often a mere confection of the first past the post system. In the 88 years since all adult men were able to vote, the Tories have held a majority of the seats in England for 63 years. But they have had a majority of English votes in parliaments for only 19 of those years. Most Tory majorities in England have been artificial, suggesting a fundamental weakness that Labour and the Liberal Democrats can probe and test.
A reformed proportional electoral system—whether the German additional member system used in Scotland and Wales or the single transferable vote as in Ireland—would properly reflect the Conservatives' status in England: largest party, but not so big as to rule out alternatives.
The removal of the incentive for Tories to wreck the settlement might be enough to settle the West Lothian question. If not, there would be other consequences: if the emerging federal constitution were to remove its anomalies in line with the existing devolution of power to Holyrood, there would presumably have to be an English first minister with an executive running the major spending departments together with an English home office. They might sit at Westminster two days a week.
The federal parliament—which might comprise the same English MPs for another two days a week plus their Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish colleagues—would deal with tax, social security, defence and foreign affairs. But any such settlement would ensure that there were English votes for English laws and Scots votes for Scots laws. Symmetry of a sort would be restored, and the most blatant anomalies expunged. But the Tories would have lost their dominance of England. If David Cameron presses the case for English votes for English laws, the opposition parties would be right to respond in the only way they can: by removing the Conservatives' traditionally inflated representation in Britain's biggest nation. That may not be quite the consequence that Cameron expected or intended, but then politics is always full of surprises.
Chris Huhne is a Liberal Democrat MP and former member of the Steel commission on the future powers of the Scottish
parliament. He writes in a personal capacity
