The
union of the four nations of Britain – England, Scotland, (Northern)
Ireland and Wales – is dead. Officially it is still the United
Kingdom and various brands of Unionism are still the dominant
rhetoric of the three main political parties, but the union
is dead. The fact is that Scotland and Wales now govern themselves,
and Northern Ireland does too – if sporadically. The missing
x in the equation is England with no way to protect herself
from having her MPs being outvoted by non-English MPs on matters
that only affect her. An example of this is the denial of the
right to jury trials, which is being gleefully promoted by Welsh
and Scottish politicians, even though it is a non-issue in these
two countries.
THE
UN-ENGLISH LABOUR PARTY
The
short-term significance of this situation is slight. The Labour
Party has a majority of English MPs, and so there is no short-term
difference with the Scottish MPs. The present constitutional
demands are not so much for an English Parliament, or a way
to quarantine non-English MPs from purely English business,
but for regional assemblies – at best talking shops at worst
another layer of bureaucracy. But this is unlikely to last.
Labour only wins a majority in England when it gets a landslide
everywhere else, this has only been managed three times in their
existence. The chances are very high that at the next election
the English will elect a Conservative majority (or at least
a Conservative plurality) which the Scottish and Welsh together
manage to convert into a Labour majority in Britain, in fact
most Labour governments have come about in similar circumstances.
JOHN
BULL'S SNOOZING
The
English will not only be faced with a government that they did
not elect (as Scotland admittedly had under Conservative rule
for 18 years). The English will also have to face the fact that
their MPs no longer have the power to decide Scottish (and to
a lesser extent Welsh) internal business while Celtic MPs will
have the right to govern them. The Scottish and Welsh MPs are
also grossly over-represented, while it takes 100 000 electors
to vote for an MP in the outer London suburbs, about 30 000
do the same in Scotland. Scotland also has a disproportionate
amount of Government spending through the iniquitous "Barnett
formula" that dictates that one seventh of spending must
be devoted to the less than one tenth of the population that
is Scots. This state of affairs is manifestly unfair to the
English and although it is tolerated now, it may not be tomorrow.
THE
UNIONIST PARTY
The
natural home of English dissatisfaction, the Conservative
Party, is historically burdened. Just as the Conservative
Party was historically the party of Europe, and so found many
of its most eloquent and senior figures were less interested
in national independence than in being in the "heart of
Europe." This problem is more acute in the case of the
union for the simple reason that the pro-European nature of
the Conservative Party was as a result of the comparatively
liberal economic environment of continental Europe in the 1960s
and the perceived need to unite against the Soviet menace. Europe
was for most conservatives a means to an end. The union is an
end in itself to far more Tories. So while the
party has made considerable progress on the issue of Europe,
it has barely started looking at the issue of the Union.
A VERY
VIABLE NATION
The
Scottish do not like the English to say that England could do
just as well on her own as she could with Scotland, but the
truth is that she could. England has 85% of the British population,
and a larger proportion of her GNP. The fact is that Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland are all subsidised, meaning that
only England is left to do the subsidising. England’s tax bill
will be drastically reduced by the very act of leaving the United
Kingdom (and would fall by a similar amount if she left
the EU). The rightward shift in the political spectrum,
with the Labour Party needing to either go further to the right
or to merge with the non-socialist Liberal Democrats, would
also encourage a large degree of investment as the continuation
of a liberal economic climate would be near enough guaranteed.