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English Affairs
Conservative blogger Iain Dale enters enemy territory with a column on the Guardian's Comment is Free pages. Dale's subject? How to solve the ancient West Lothian Question on Scottish devolution.
For the (happily) uninitiated, the WLQ is as follows:
How can it be right that MPs elected to Westminster from Scottish constituencies have no ability to affect the issues of their constituents which have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament?
and, perhaps more pertinently for Dale,
If power over Scottish affairs is devolved to a Scottish Parliament, how can it be right that MPs representing Scottish constituencies in the Parliament of the United Kingdom will have the power to vote on issues affecting England (including those that don't affect Scotland), but English MPs will not have the power to vote on Scottish issues?
The question arose when talk of a Scottish Parliament surfaced in the 1970s. It lay mostly forgotten until the late 1990s, when New Labour granted Scotland and Wales their own parliaments. Northern Ireland, too, will shortly have its parliament of its own again, once Unionists can be persuaded to put aside their reluctance to share power with the leaders of terrorist organisations.
While most Englishmen paid scant attention to the parliaments on their Celtic fringes for close to a decade, a number of events have conspired to bring devolution into mainstream debate. Oddly enough, football has been one of them. Four British football teams take part in international competitions. The English tend to support the "home side" - that is, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even the Republic of Ireland, when England itself is not competing. Somewhat naively, they expect their countrymen (well, not the Irish) to reciprocate. No way, say some Scots - who, in every world cup, delightedly cheer on whoever is likely to beat England.
Again, this attituded is either ignored altogether or dismissed as Celtic chippiness: Frustratingly, the English don't even have the good grace to make the Scots their number one rivals, preferring to bestow their enmity upon the Germans or Argentina.
However, the second event has thrown British nationality into the public arena, and that's the imminent ascension of Dr James Gordon Brown, MP for Kirkaldy and Cowdenbeath, to the office of Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Brown, currently Chancellor of the Exchequer, is a Scot. And a Scot who appears to wallow in, ahem, certain Scottish attributes (parsimonious, dour, brooding) too, a fact not helped by his ill-disguised fury at having to play second fiddle to Tony Blair, another Scot but one who has managed to persuade the public that he isn't really a Scot at heart.
Nobody could mistake Brown's Scottishness. However, one Scottish attribute he doesn't appear to exhibit is a hatred of the English football team. Rather than wish "Our Boys" ill, he claims to cheer England on, and adds that most fellow Scots feel the same way. Not so, says Jack McConnell, First Minister of the Scottish Parliament. He supported Trinidad & Tobago against England, and is likely to support anyone else the English come up against in the finals - even Argentina or -gasp- Germany.
McConnell is likely to be more representative of Scottish opinion than Brown, or even Liberal Democrat leader Menzies Campbell, who also says he is supporting England. And for once, the English are paying attention - not least because Britain's media, which appears to be packed almost with as many Scots as its parliaments, has gleefully seized on Brown's declaration of support as a spot of media spin by the PM-in-waiting.
And it's brought to public attention just how Scottish the Labour Party is. Brown and Home Secretary John Reid are only the most prominent Scots in a party that draws 41 MPs from north of the Border. A recent poll showed that many in England are unhappy at the prospect of a Scottish PM, which perhaps goes some way to explain why Brown has spent the past month or so extolling the virtues of "Britishness."
Indeed, the idea of Britishness is at the heart of the debate. Many Scots see themselves as Scots first and British second. An old Scottish complaint tells of how if a Scot wins a gold medal at the Olympics he is British, but if he comes last he's Scottish, at least according to the BBC.
The discussion started after the 7/7 terror attacks in London last year, when commentators wondered how to square Britishness - recently defined as inclusiveness and multicultural - with the aspirations of citizens who feel the urge to murder their countrymen because of their religion, or lack of it. However, it has had wider implications, tapping into English gripes that they subsidise Scotland for little in return, and Scottish moans that North Sea oil revenues rightfully belong in Scotland. The English complain of constant low-level anti-English racism in Scotland, the Scots haven't forgotten how Margaret Thatcher's government used Scotland as a "guinea pig" for the hated poll tax in the 1980s.
Compared to other national debates in Europe - Spain's troubles with the Basque separatists, the conflict between unionists and republicans in Northern Ireland - Scottish devolution has been relatively painless (though a boy and a disabled man were beaten up yesterday for the crime of wearing England football shirts). However, it's getting expensive. Scots are subsidised to the tune of £1,400 per person per year more than the English, by the English, one report claimed - yet Scotland's economic growth lags at least one percent behind that of the rest of the UK. Scotland uses "English" subsidies to fund free childcare, care for the elderly and tertiary education - luxuries the English have to do without.
To top it all, the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh came in way over estimate - £470 million, as opposed to the £55 million proposed in 1998, and has been plagued by "snags" ever since it opened. Since the death of Scotland's first First Minister Donald Dewar, Holyrood has not been noted for the quality of its debate or ministers.
However, such sniping from the English hardly endears them to their Scottish neighbours. Indeed, much of the complaints above have been countered by critics on Iain Dale's post - one claiming that Scotland, via corporation tax on oil companies in Aberdeen, has actually been subsidising the rest of the UK.
A minority of Scots want independence; a smaller minority of Englishmen want to break the union by booting Scotland out. So what's the solution? Dale goes for an English Parliament, an idea some Tories and Libdems have toyed with for a while. Westminister would remain for UK-wide and international issues, England's parliament for... well, whatever Scotland's parliament and Wales parliament do for those parts of the UK.
But is this enough to kickstart participatory democracy in England? Is the West Lothian Question really keeping English voters away from the polls? Scotland has 129 MPs for its 5 million people. England has ten times as many people - does it really need 1300 MPs to give it the same representation as Scotland enjoys? That's twice what Westminister has, but any fewer and the English could rightly complain that once again they lack Scotland's representation.
And where will all these English Parliamentarians be housed? Do the English - who are, we are told, fed up with forking out for the Scots - want to pay even more to have a new parliament building erected? And then the salaries of hundreds of MPs and their staff?
Where would such an assembly leave Westminister, the Mother of Parliaments? There is already a shortage of good MPs in Westminister: Do supporters of an English Parliament believe that English MPs would be better motivated?
There must be solutions beyond either breaking up the union or closing the Celtic Parliaments. What do EURSOC readers think?
