It is imperative we kill the idea of an English parliament, before it kills us. “
Many of us English consider there is enough “racism” being directed against the English in the present devolved UK to warrant England being independent.

The UK is already killing the English. The deadliest enemies of the English are the British. There are no English politicians in the Palace of Westminster. There are Anglo-British Anglophobes who have betrayed their English constituents most disgracefully.

40% of Tory candidates say they are “relaxed” about Scotland going independent. Presumably this means 40% of Tory MPs are also as relaxed about it.

So where the hell have these Tory MPs been over the last 12 years which has seen their constituents onerously disadvantaged compared to the Scots, Welsh and N. Irish?

Gordon Brown (unelected First Minister of England) has just revealed a pile of policies that only affect England. He lauded about early cancer diagnosis in England. What’s the point? There are 15 cancer medicines presently denied to English cancer patients that are freely available to Brown’s countryfolk in Scotland. Brown has brought in free prescriptions for English cancer patients. What’s the use of free prescriptions when no medicines can be prescribed?

You say an English Parliament will kill us. Well a British Parliament within the present devolution framework is certainly killing the English.

The Scots are OK though.

Andrew, if you think the devolved entities are “equally sized and essentially similar constituent nations then you are missing the point”. Scotland is twice the size of Wales and four times the size of N. Ireland. The reason these unequal sized entities were chosen as the base unit for devolution was because the people there identified themselves as distinct nations. The Nation was sacrosanct, even when it made no sense to treat them as an homogenous unit.

The devolutionary precedent is set and we continue with it, or unravel devolution to date. If it is a mistake, or if England is too big, then it should consider further devolution to the counties. This should be a matter for England alone to decide as is the sovereign right of any people. Unequal treatment is not an option.

“You can’t grant a national parliament to one nation and then deny it to another.”

And then you went off on an entreaty against an English Parliament on the basis that it would be too powerful and a northern parliament would be more ‘proportionate’ (though you didn’t not say to what).

I take it from this that you do indeed want to deny the English the option of an English Parliament. This is the problem with so many people in politics today, they’re more concerned about governing in their own interests or pushing their own agenda than doing what the people actually want them to do.

No, it would have the same power over a larger area. If an English Parliament had leglislative competence for the same devolved matters that the Scottish Parliament is responsible for, then the legislation that the UK Parliament passed for the United Kingdom as a whole would be no different to that which it now passes for the UK as a whole.

“On many issues, whatever it decided, the Scots would be essentially unable to do anything else but follow.”

I’m afraid that you don’t know what you’re talking about, David, because it is the reverse that is true The present system hamstrings the Scots and prevents a proper flowering of devolution because the Barnett Formula ties Scotland to ‘English’ spending plans. The present system also means that the UK Parties down in Westminster exert considerable influence over their Scottish counterparts (the Lib Dems at least have an English Party and believe in the autonomy of the Scottish Lib Dems, but the Tories less so, and Scottish Labour is run by Gordon Brown). Once parties produce English and Scottish manifestos alongside a UK manifesto, all costed separately, we will see proper devolution, proper divergence of policy along national lines.

“A North England “Parliament” or Assembly could have a measure of power to match that of the Scottish Parliament. That would be proportionate.”

A North English Parliament could have the same power as the Scottish Parliament, but who’s asking for one?

Proportionate to what? Are you seriously suggesting that the English need to govern themselves in units of government proportionate to Scotland, and if so why? What does the size of Scotland have to do with how the English should organise their national governance?

The Liberal Democrats produced a policy document two years ago entitled “For the People, By the People”. If you invoke the people then you should not be scared to ask them how they wish to be governed. No one has yet asked the English. Ask them whether they want an English Parliament or a Northern English Parliament and see what answer you get back. Simples.

An English Parliament would have far, far more power than the Scottish Parliament has, because of the sheer size of its jurisdiction. On many issues, whatever it decided, the Scots would be essentially unable to do anything else but follow. That would be hugely disproportionate.

A North England “Parliament” or Assembly could have a measure of power to match that of the Scottish Parliament. That would be proportionate.

Essentially the old Conservative argument against the Scottish Parliament. You can’t grant a national parliament to one nation and then deny it to another. When will we learn? It’s simple, if the English want an English parliament, then that’s what they should have. Preventing England from taking that decision on any grounds (apart from the prevention of bloodshed) is an anti-democratic nonsense.

If you look at population, economy, public spending, tax revenues, number of MPs or any other measure you care to choose you realise that England is nearly the same as Britain – however much Scots or Welsh or Northern Irish might not like to accept.

Having a separate England-level of government would create nothing but conflict with Westminster and unending and pointless power disputes. The benefits in terms of bringing power closer to the people would be negligible.

Stephen and Matilda was male vs female (the Barons didn’t want a woman to rule them): the wars of the Roses was between Yorks and lancs (both northern) and the Glorious Revolution was between Protestantism and Catholicism (each having strongholds in the north and the south).

The north and the south divide come from industrial/commercialisation. You can see similar divides in Scotland and Wales, but the notion of England as a single nation are ancient; the Northumbrian monk Bede was writing about the history of the English people more than 1200 years ago.

That was then and this is now. Labour decided to devolve power to nations…the nations of Wales and Scotland. This means that the nation of England should be offered the same choice if all citizens of the UK are to be treated equally because anything else would be an unacceptable fudge. If England should devolve power to the local level, then that is a matter for England to decide and England alone. But we need a Parliament first, in order to make such further decisions.

Not at all. The legal and education system were separate ro a point, but UK laws applied to Scotland as they did England. The NHS was the NHS.

I’ve challenged Scots to name me one law that disadvantaged Scots compared to the English many a time, without success (before you say “poll tax”, phone Malcom Rifkind as to why it was started in Scotland first). Now we have a raft of prejudicial disadvantages amouting to an apartheid system against the English.

You say It’s academic in any case, as England has never voted for parties who support higher levels of public spending – in Scotland you effectively have only one minority right of centre party –
It may have escaped your attention, but Labour is in power in Westminster.

Your arguments for England apply just as easily to Scotland. Firstly, England has always been a culturally diverse country based upon its ancient counties. However, we stand together as the English.
This applies to the Scots too, to a lesser degree. The western Islanders are not the same as Glaswegians who are not the same as Edinburgh folk. Public spending is not the same across Scotland, no more than is the wealth generation.

Not all of Scotland is rural. The poorest area of the UK is Cumbria where I live and has similar difficulties to Scotland’s rural parts. The North West Region is making matters worse for Cumbria not better. Services are being moved out of Cumbria, so that emergency services are administered in Manchester and other places, for example.

No English person identifies with the spurious regions foisted upon them, whereas everyone identifies with their home county or city. This is exactly why England is being bust up into regions to dissociate the English from their heritage and culture. If devolution had been done properly then Scotland would have been bust up into regions too. However, the plan has always been to fragment and destroy England, leaving Scotland as the largest geo-political part of the UK. We all know how being first and biggest is necessary to feed Scottish mental masterbation.

You miss the point entirely about the English being rendered stateless, so I’ll repeat it. If England is bust up into regions, it will be no more. There will be 9 or 10 EU-regions with awe inspiring names like “The North West” fighting one another for a slice of the UK budgetary cake. Then if Scotland (and Wales) go for independence, the English won’t have a country, and will be rendered stateless – the UK will have gone too.

Fragmenting England will not guarantee that the UK will remain intact. I care more about England than the UK, especially when the future of the “Union” depends on what a surly partner called Scotland wants.

To use your argument back at you, you demonstrate precisely the reason why England should have its own parliament and better still, independence. Scottish arrogance would be breathtaking if it were not so predictable on this matter. The Scottish premise is that everybody else must wait around while Scots decide on independence or not. What’s so damned special about Scots?

The reason Duncan Smith had his “Damascene” moment is because he is a Scot viewing depravation in Scotland. He has his consituency in England and like every other blasted MP in England does not give one jot for his consituents, especially those who are English.

The whole of the British establishment is insitutionally Anglophobic and an English Parliament focusing on England is the very least we should have.

Stop fabricating.

In The English civil war the centre of resitance to the Crown came from London. Hull and Plymouth, both miles away from London and yet not in the north were rocksolid for parliament throughout and both endured long Royalist sieges.

Regarding your reading of English history, I think you’ll find England has weathered more than its fair share of internal strife. Stephen and Matilda, Richard and Bolingbroke, the Wars of the Roses, let alone the Puritan coup de force and its bastard offspring, the “Glorious” Revolution. There is only one thing which can be said about every single one of these Questions of England: the North, and particularly Northumberland and Yorkshire, were set against the South (and the Crown) in all of them.

England starts to get organised, with anything between 4 and 9 crowns slowly coalescing into one, between Alfred of Wessex and William the Bastard. The only reason this happens is repeated external invasion. Between the Roman legacy of “Britain” and the eventual formalisation of “England” by the coronation of William I at Winchester, the land areas that are now English were invaded, usually at regular intervals, by: the Irish, the Germanic colonists made famous by Bede, the Welsh, the Norwegians, the Danes, the Dublin Vikings, the Scots (alot!), the Irish (again!), more Vikings and ultimately the Normans. Harold Godewinson is crowned at Winchester “King of the English”; his crown is elected by the English earls and dependant from the people who call him King. William, by the contrasting tradition evolving on the continent as a legacy of Charlemagne, is crowned King of England, by right of conquest: no matter who you are, this land belongs to this crown.

It’s not really until his son Henry I is middle-aged that England, as we know it today, is properly organised as a “modern” geographical sovereign state. Scotland and Wales are still unable to get organised, mainly because both lacked a clear invading enemy to unite against and were (as you say!) well possessed of local feuds and enmities to divide them.

And that is the answer to your last question. The reason this is a matter for debate is that England, having won, is now branded guilty and seen as a rogue nation (since one couldn’t do such things today!). Celtic nationalist narratives of history require that we owe the Scots, the Welsh and the Irish a never-ending debt in recompense for … well, putting a Scot on our own throne, among other things. The debate isn’t whether or not England needs or wants self-rule, the debate (from the devolved perspective) is whether England should be permitted it.

My point of view is quite similar to that of the article author, and some commentators, excepting how I see a Westminster in a more devolved UK. While federalism is not quite what you’d see, a Westminster which was concerned with broadly the same responsibilities as James Madison intended for the US Executive would not lack for ambitious servants. In foreign relations, and thus in foreign money and opportunity, lie the future of a very small island which is no longer an industrial power and which never will be again. This is simple economics, not ideology; it costs too much to make things here, as it does in any place where the general populace have been educated to a high enough standard that their expectations are as high as ours.

Such a Westminster would be a good way to make an international career and name for oneself, and an extremely likely path to lucrative directorships thereafter. Look where John Major got to, let alone Tony Blair.

It seemed so incongruous that a Liberal administration should support the slave based economy against their liberators. This was because the principle of “national self determination” was such key-stone to liberal thinking at the time, the South’s demands for nationhood blotted out their less palatable objectives.

Can someone explain to me why English national self determination is even up for discussion by the Lib Dems? Surely to oppose it is neither liberal nor democratic?

Having said that, I believe England is by far the most homogenous nation in the UK, Politically, economically, historically and culturally.

Compare industrial, modern south Wales to touristy north Wales. Edinburgh has more in common with London and Manchester than it does the Western Isles and the Highlands that are Celtic in language and culture.

England is Europe’s oldest nation state whereas Wales has not existed as such, pre 1998. Scotland was always torn between the Catholic Highlands and the Protestant lowlands (Glasgow was the first British city to close its gates on Bonnie Prince Charlie). Apart from the civil war (which was more between Parliament and Crown) England has not seen such turmoil within itself.

At least we all speak the same language!.

Better democracy, less remote government, clearer accountability. Actually, where’s the big downside?

(And the United Kingdom hasn’t exactly made a roaring success of Northern Ireland, has it?)

Well, quite probably. It might very well go swimmingly. Most likely it would just be a matter of general mild regret, as I suspect is the case with Czechoslovakia, where it has of course caused a fair amount of disruption to the lives of individuals. The odds, “Ireland aside”, would be fairly strongly against genocide.

So on balance, is it worth the gamble? Where’s the big upside?

I think the problem is that any system of regional assemblies is going to feel about as relevant to most people as a County Council – indeed, less so – simply because no one describes themselves as “a northeasterner” or an “east midlander”. In terms of finding a form of state organisation that corresponds with people’s perception of their own identity, you could perhaps just about get away with a simple division into North and South England; but I think (and I speak as another Scottish resident in England, as most of you don’t know) that the very clear identity that most people in this part of the UK feel is “English”.

Anyway, it’s not just a matter of soggy feelings. As KL pointed out above, there was extensive legal and administrative devolution to Scotland throughout the twentieth century – indeed, most of it was never subsumed into the London government in the first place. The only question was whether control of those devolved systems should belong with representatives elected only by the people affected or by the UK as a whole. Likewise, England has a clearly defined legally distinct identity, and the question is, should the inhabitants of England be able to control the laws and administration of that distinct territory without interference from representatives of separate territories with their own laws and governments? It’s a less pressing issue for England than it was for Scotland, just because England’s size means that it is not possible for Scotland and Wales to impose its will as unilaterally as England could in reverse – but it can tip the balance when the parties in England are finely balanced, and that seems wrong to me in principle.

Would an English parliament reduce the UK government to irrelevance? I doubt it; though life would be interesting and difficult if England and the UK had PMs from different parties. In the end it might not be sustainable, but I no longer believe that matters very much. I used to be very concerned about the UK breaking up – largely because I felt it would leave me as a foreigner in the country that is my home. But provided it was done sensibly, with the least possible rancour, I doubt now that it would be so bad. In fact, I struggle to see what is so essential about the UK layer of government in Scotland now – except to give Alex Salmond somewhere to pass the blame when it suits. Democracy trumps all arguments for me. England’s laws should be decided by England.

Of course, there’s another answer: abolish the Scottish parliament and the Scottish Office, and with them Scots law and education system. One parliament for the UK, with one system of law for all its people. No? Then I can’t see better, fairer, more rational answer than a parliament for England, with whatever consequences that brings.

If the people of England want an English parliament, then that certain something most certainly should be an English parliament.

That something should certainly NOT be an English parliament, unless you believe that the break-up of the UK into four separate bits would be a good thing. As Stephen Gash puts it, if we had an English parliament, Westminster would become “a vastly reduced UK Parliament …………to manage foreign affairs, defence and not much else”. In other words, it would become an irrelevance and would probably wither away and die.

All our ambitious politicians would first become M Eng Ps, MSPs or Welsh AMs, rather than Westminster MPs. Then, they would demand that Westminster should just do whatever had already been agreed between the English, Scottish and Welsh authorities. Then, they would close Westminster down or turn it into a kind of two-chamber House of Lords. Then the nations would sooner or later fall out with each other, find no authority powerful enough to resolve their disputes and bring them back together, and march off to mutual independence.

For those who think that national fragmentation would be a good thing, and have enough subconscious racism in their make-up to dismiss the thought that what happened to Yugoslavia might conceivably happen to us, just consider the prospects for the newly independent “Ulster” that this process would create. What price peace?

It is imperative we kill the idea of an English parliament, before it kills us.

The answer might be KL’s federal UK structure, it might be revisions to the Barnett formula, it might be a lot of things. It might for example mean going back to what was said at the time of devolution and making sure that when next the Scots vote themselves better provisions than the English, there is actually a visible cost for them to pay in terms of higher taxes. That would assuage English wrath – and that is what we must do.

You can’t define any national identity, and why should you want to other than to exclude people from it? Group identities are fluid because they are drawn from personal and individual feelings of self-identification. It is enough to say that there is a nation that is England and its inhabitants feel English. This works for Scotland, Wales….Any country, and is the basis for self-government the world over.