Campaign for an English Parliament

FEBRUARY 19TH 2008

INTRODUCTION

(1)
On Tuesday February 19th representing the Campaign for an English Parliament I appeared as a witness before the Justice Committee of MPs for the purpose of giving oral evidence ‘in connection with its inquiry into the current proposals for Devolution a Decade on’ and specifically on ‘the English Question’. The concern of the Committee was the situation within the Union created by the devolution legislation of 1998. That legislation and its outcomes in both England and Scotland in the decade since have been found to have placed the Union under severe strain. I had earlier made a written submission to the Committee on the issue. It can be viewed on http://www.thecep.org.uk/wordpress/submission. For the Campaign the hearing was of very considerable significance, namely that a Select Committee of Union MPs had invited the Campaign to put its case to them at a formal parliamentary session. It possibly was the first time since the Act of Union 1707 for the matter of an English Parliament to be formally considered by a Union parliamentary body?

(2)
Not that the outcomes the Committee were looking at had not been foreseen much earlier, though naturally not as clearly as they are now. In 2000 a Constitution Unit had been set up with a membership of academics from major university political departments supported by a council consisting of highly regarded retired members of governments, members of parliament and well known people in the law, the media and the like. The Unit’s brief was in effect to provide the government with academic justification for not letting England have any form of devolution as a distinct nation within the Union as had been given to Scotland and Wales in the 1998 legislation; and instead to find reasons why the division of England into ‘regions’ with ‘regional assemblies’ might be the way to resolve threatening outcomes.

(3)
The concern of the UK Establishment is that England should not get political and constitutional recognition as a distinct nation, even within the Union, such as had been given to Scotland and Wales. While devolution in the form of a parliament for Scotland and an assembly for Wales was acceptable, the mind of British parliamentarians was, and with the great majority still is, that the principles of the 1998 devolution legislation are not to be applied equally to England. What that actually means is that the present Union government and all three major political parties have rejected the pre-devolution principle, by which the Union operated, namely that each of the three nations of this island should stand in the same relationship both to the Union and to each other. The fundamental principle of the 1707 Act of Union has been abandoned, that the United Kingdom is to be governed as one nation. The Union Parliament no longer legislates for the internal affairs of the United Kingdom. It legislates in their totality for the internal affairs of England only, only partially for those of Wales, and not at all for those of Scotland. In the decade since that historic decision was taken, its impact upon England and its potentialities for even more power being given to Scotland, possibly even leading to independence, have started to become clear. The responsibility the Committee has is to address these issues. As the very constitution, shape and future of the Union is the issue at stake, I cannot conceive of a greater responsibility resting on the shoulders of any Select Committee.

(4)
Parliament and government had been warned about the West Lothian Question (WLQ); they were aware of the disadvantage to England of the Barnet Formula; and by December 2000, the Scottish Parliament, even under its docile Labour Party leadership, was beginning to treat Scotland more generously than the Union Parliament was treating England. The first signs of discontent in England were beginning to show, the Establishment academics themselves were well aware of the political and constitutional anomaly of the WLQ and were anticipating the problems it might cause; and many English MPs were becoming more and more uncomfortable at the benefits the Scots were getting which their constituents were not getting.. For that reason the Constitution Unit was set up. Its brief, as I have faithfully described it, can be found in the ‘Statement of the Union’ lecture delivered by its Director on the 11th December 2000 at the first general assembly of its academic membership, its council and its advisory council. The title of the lecture was: ‘An Unstable Union. Devolution and the English Question’. Though an inauspicious title, it was a far-sighted one

(5)
Four years later, on November 4th 2004, the people of England’s North East counties and cities decisively rejected the government proposal of a regional assembly in a referendum vote by 78% to 22%.The government’s effort to somehow evade the consequences of its unequal treatment of England by trying to pass off regional assemblies as devolution when they were nothing more than yet another form of English local government reorganisation had ignominiously failed.

(6)
Then three years later, on November 14th 2007, the Director of the Constitution Unit gave oral evidence to the Justice Committee. His evidence was admission of the defeat in accomplishing the brief his team had been set. He informed the Committee that ‘the closest to a complete answer to the West Lothian Question is a separate English Parliament’.

(7)
On January 7th2008 at the behest of the Campaign for an English Parliament, I made the written submission of evidence to the Committee. On January 10th I was invite to give oral evidence. The Select Committee was, as I see it, acknowledging that its Inquiry ‘Devolution a Decade On’ given developments since the legislation of 1998, had to give consideration to English devolution taking the form of an English Parliament.

(8)
The WLQ is the undemocratic and unconstitutional situation deriving immediately from the 1998 legislation whereby Scottish MPs, either as ministers by proposing legislation or as MPs by voting on it, or both, can participate in the government of England in internal matters while no English MPs can do the same in relation to Scotland. The English Question encompasses the WLQ but is broader and deeper. It is the recognition that while the 1998 legislation made Scotland, and to some extent Wales, self-governing in internal matters, with their own Parliament and Assembly, a First Minister, an Executive and a distinct civil service, England was denied any form of self-government.

(9)
At its meeting the Committee did broach other issues with its five witnesses, such as the Barnett Formula and the issue of decentralisation if only in a very theoretical way, but, as it emerged, they were in fact peripheral to the actual occasion. The focus of the Committee members was on the English Question and an English Parliament. It was with the former that the Chairman opened the session; it was what Ken Clarke MP and Professor Bogdanor addressed themselves to principally throughout. And significantly, when the BBC ‘Today in Parliament’ reported on the Committee later that night, its sole comment was that Ken Clarke MP, Lord Tyler and Professor Bogdanor had spoken out against an English Parliament. The extreme brevity of its comment was unfair to both Committee members and witnesses in that it reduced their two hours of hard labour to a couple of words but it was very perceptive.

(10)
The truth is, the situation has now been reached that any debate tackling the subject ‘Devolution a Decade on’, if it wishes to address it seriously, is really only about two issues: whether the principles of the 1998 Legislation should be applied to England, which would mean an English Parliament; and whether there should be an extension of powers to the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. I anticipate that the Committee will reject the former and support the latter. Whether the latter will succeed in restraining nationalist aspirations in Scotland and Wales remains to be seen. On the evidence to date it will achieve the opposite. But that is a matter for the Scots and the Welsh to decide, not us, not least since Scotland and Wales, by reason of the 1998 legislation, are politically and constitutionally distinct nations within the Union. If, as I anticipate, the Committee does reject the first of the two proposals it will increase the resentment of the English people by proposing nothing effective to address the injustice and the discrimination that has been imposed upon them. I doubt the Committee will address the English Question really. Rather it will probably put forward safe and emollient proposals about local government reorganisation in England such as the introduction of mayors on GLA lines in the fond hope that wrapping it all round in the terminology of devolution and decentralisation will somehow allay dissatisfaction. It will not.

The Committee’s Chairman is Alan Beith, MP for Berwick-on-Tweed.
Mr Beith is a most significant player in this whole matter. His constituency is on the very front line of the whole issue. In a way the Committee could not have a more appropriate chairman. And by sheer coincidence it was a most interesting day indeed to give evidence on the issue. Just the day before in a referendum 60% of the town of Berwick-on-Tweed had voted for wholesale transfer of the town into Scotland –because they want the immense benefits that Scotland is getting out of devolution while they being English are getting nothing.

England in sharpest contrast to Scotland does not have her own voice at all in our system of government. None at all. No Home Rule at all. Not even what the Welsh have. Politically and constitutionally England doesn’t even exist. Not having a legislation institution of its own to govern itself in any way or any degree, it alone of all the nations of Europe has no constitutional existence, identity and recognition. And then there are the concrete benefits of devolution. Free prescriptions and now free hospital parking in Wales, free university tuition, free personal care for the elderly who do not have to sell their houses to pay for it, a three year freeze of council tax and access to the best modern cancer drugs in Scotland. In addition there is the amazing generosity of the Barnett Formula which enables an expenditure on health and education of £1500 more per head in Scotland and Wales than in England, purely on the basis of nationality and not on that of need. At the same time it is the English taxpayer who makes all that possible by paying an extra £281 in tax per annum.

Those are some of the better known notorious aspects of the situation; it is an injustice however which takes more devious forms. As one member of the Committee, Dan Kawczynski MP (Con) for Shrewsbury, pointed out to Messrs Clarke, Tyler and Bogdanor at the meeting, Welsh people using Shropshire hospitals are costing the Shropshire NHS Trusts an extra £3 million a year and saving Welsh Trusts that amount while the British government under our -proudly British- Prime Minister does nothing about it whatsoever. It was noticeable that Messrs Clarke, Tyler and Bogdanor made no suggestion how that injustice might be put right.

On arrival at Portcullis House I bumped into Mr Beith in the corridor. I recognised him, so I stopped him, told him who I was and what I was there for, and then asked him what he thought of the outcome of the referendum in his constituency the day before. To my surprise he just dismissed it with a wave of his hand, airily, blaming it on the way a ITV channel went about it. His response made me wonder if he has caught on yet. There is deep disquiet and resentment in England about the outcomes of devolution. I wouldn’t say that the moment has arrived just yet for Mr Beith to scale Big Ben in Superman tights like Fathers for Justice but he has cause for some pretty serious concern. The geographical location of his constituents has made them more exposed than anyone else in England to the huge injustice, the discrepancy between what his constituents are not getting and what their Scottish neighbours are getting out of the 1998 devolution legislation. But looking at his website I can find nothing whatsoever to indicate he is as concerned and disturbed as he should be. It just doesn’t seem to be on his radar. Yet the population of the town of Berwick on Tweed is a very considerable proportion of his electorate. If I were him I’d be drafting my leaflets now for the 2009 or 2010 general election.

THE INQUIRY SESSION
There were five of us giving evidence that day: Kenneth Clarke MP, former Lib Dem MP now Lord Paul Tyler CBE, Professor Vernon Bogdanor from Oxford, Peter Facey of ‘Unlock Democracy’ a privately funded think-tank concerning with decentralisation, and myself for the Campaign. All five of us were there to address the same issue. Very significantly however Bogdanor, Clarke and Tyler, -Oxbridge, the Commons, the Lords- were called first, together and separate from Peter Facey and myself, whether at their own request or by decision of the Committee I do not know. I found that a real eye-opener -the Establishment going first and separately. When they had finished giving their evidence, they did not stay to listen even for a minute to what Facey and myself had to say. They did not say goodbye. They walked past us as if we were not there. I found their behaviour very revealing. I believe that what they were saying to us was that we did not matter, they did; our witness did not matter, theirs did. We were irrelevant to the hugely important issue the Inquiry was addressing, and so was our evidence to the Committee; whilst theirs, based on being on the inside and in positions of influence and power for a very long time, alone was worth listening to. They knew the system, we hadn’t a clue.

‘What do you understand by ‘The English Question’?’ was the first question the Chairman put to the three of them. Now, for ‘English Question’ one could suspect that what Mr Beith actually meant was: ‘I’ve got trouble in a part of my constituency, and I’m not the only English MP either. Thanks to the way the devolution settlement has worked out, the people of England haven’t had any of the very neat lot of benefits the Scots and the Welsh have received; and it is now starting to cause us a bit of grief; and to make it worse Scottish and Welsh MPs, despite having their own parliaments to run their own internal affairs and us English MPs having no say in any of that at all, have kept all their rights to vote on every single English matter. So, tell us, how do we get out of this awful mess which I admit is of our own making since we voted for it in 1998? And has this mad, bad and ghastly situation produced anything that might really prove a mortal threat to the Union? And even be putting our jobs on the line? ‘

Ken Clarke particularly was confidence, complacency and solidity personified. Yes, he said, there were mutterings of discontent, there has been the occasional display of resentment here and there in England, and devolution was indeed throwing up anomalies, but it was all very containable, and MPs could sleep safely in their beds. His two colleagues by and large agreed. When Mr Clarke was asked about the Barnett Formula, he was equally dismissive –I interpret: ‘Now that you ask about it, yes, of course it works completely to the advantage of Scotland and Wales, but that’s what it was meant to do in the first place and nothing can be done about it. It keeps the Celts happy and in return we get the whisky, so there’s really nothing much to worry about.’ I heard nothing from the other two which added to that very thoughtful analysis. ‘And what about regional assemblies?’ they were asked. Lord Tyler quite lost the attention of his listeners when he went into detail on how far down into local government decentralisation might be taken; Professor Bogdanor thought the 2004 referendum outcome had buried regional assemblies for the foreseeable future, and Ken Clarke let the MPs know how completely irrelevant they –the regional assemblies, not MPs like himself- were in places like Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Lincolnshire. And when the three of them were asked about the WLQ, the Professor served up the weirdest reason of all why it wasn’t a problem. ‘Aren’t there 550 English MPs out of the 650? They can easily get together and do whatever they want for England, whenever they like.’ It was as if he thought England could have the Welsh and the Scots for breakfast any day of the week. I myself thought we had stopped doing that sort of thing at Culloden. His two colleagues were too nice to correct this pretty basic misreading of how the House of Commons works, but Peter Facey and myself, not being in that club, had no hesitation when our turn came. The trouble was though, by then the Professor was already well on his way back to Brasenose College where he lectures and writes on matters constitutional. Just possibly a colleague at High Table one evening might have a word in his ear.

In short, this Establishment representation reassured the Committee that basically all was well and matters should be left well alone to let the usual process of muddling through work its effects. In other words, the peasants will not revolt; and that was what mattered. And the cynic in me wonders if that was actually what the Committee was hoping to hear, and why the Rt Hon. Kenneth Clarke MP, resident bastion of accepted common sense, Lord Paul Tyler slightly to the left of the norm but not worryingly so and basically reliable and Professor Vernon Bogdanor, the safest of safe constitutional authorities were called in. Maybe my cynicism is not altogether unfounded. Between Alan Beith the Chairman, and Alun Michael of the Committee on one side of the horseshoe and Paul Tyler and Ken Clarke on the other the heartiness and rapport of the best club in England was on parade, a sort of arm in arm, cheek to cheek, toe to toe Fred and Ginger routine, mates despite political differences who had spent a long time in the House together, nodding and smiling as Ken took them down the passage of the years, his recollection of RDAs, Heseltine’s gallant regeneration schemes and the utter irrelevance of RAs to the vast majority of the people of England. He certainly can do the tour-de-force, can Ken.

I was the only witness of the five supporting an English Parliament. If I were to record the exchange between the Chairman and the Commons/Lords/Oxbridge trio on that point as in the following manner, I would not be guilty of anything more than only the tiniest error in its representation: ‘And what do you think, Lord Tyler, of an English Parliament,’ asked the Chairman. ‘Total Rubbish.’ ‘And you Mr Clarke?’ ‘Complete rubbish.’ ‘And you Professor? ‘Complete and total rubbish.’ There was a little more to their analysis of the matter but that is a fair summary..

However, it wasn’t the question that the Chairman put to me in fact. He hardly needed to, did he? His question to me, was: ‘Is the English Question more about the role and status of England within the UK or more about decentralisation within England?’ I think he was expecting me to go for the first of the two possibilities. My reply however was to say that the one should not be set against the other, that the English Question is directly and specifically about both. The reply which I provide here immediately below is accurate as to what I said, but the actual delivery was not so smooth. It is so important, I want to get it across to the reader of this account very clearly. I had been told the question in advice, so I was able to prepare my answer. I told the Committee that we were demanding:

(1) England to have the same constitutional and political recognition as a distinct nation within the UK as Scotland and Wales have, and Home rule like they have over its internal affairs

(2 Recognition that the degree of centralisation of government in England is grossly undemocratic. The CEP wants England therefore to be decentralised in two crucially important respects:

(3) First, an English Parliament responsible for England’s internal affairs, physically separate and elected separately from the Union Parliament just as happens in Scotland and Wales, maybe in Manchester or Stoke or Derby just to name three possibilities. I asked the Members to consider the immense decentralising consequences if that happened. If it happened, England would then experience the biggest and most radical transfer of economic, political and cultural power, of employment and media from London and the South East into the rest of England in all its long history. It would be decentralisation like none other.

(4). Second, and following on from that, the people of England then to decide themselves in their own parliament how to decentralise power etc further, to its counties and its cities, in an arrangement of England which is organic and natural to its history and its culture, and not as decided by Whitehall or EU dictat.

I provide this amount of detail relating to just this one question out of the six or more put by the Committee because of its primary importance. The rest were also very important. The whole session was fascinating, absorbing and very instructive indeed, and can all be watched on www.parliament.uk/justicecom.

The Response of the Committee MPs.
The Justice Committee is a group of 14 MPs in a system where they and all their 550 colleagues, as government and/or parliament, exercise power over every single detail of national legislation and local government in England. Not in Scotland and Wales any longer, but in England. At the same time it is England that matters in the UK, it is England where 90% of the UK’s wealth is produced, England where 84% of the people live, England where the power of the Union resides. These Committee MPs have no experience of an existence other than that situation. Furthermore till now, and even now only initially, they have never given consideration to what an English Parliament will actually be if established on the principles of the 1998 legislation. Their attitude towards an English Parliament has been affected by the hostile myths, misunderstandings and misrepresentations of its opponents; and Messrs Clarke, Tyler and Bogdanor reproduced a lot of the pathetic and misleading stuff on the night. Listening to the trio I realised that not one of them had ever given the subject the slightest independent study. All three are creatures of a rapidly passing era. Possibly the most important element of my being there was that for the first time in their lives the MPs actually heard what an English Parliament is actually about and what the Campaign actually stands for; and met with an EP supporter in the flesh. I did my best on the day. Let’s hope it was good enough.

What came across to me about the MPs at the hearing was that all but one of them were seriously interested and felt that there had to be some serious change, that just muddling through was not going to work any longer; and indeed shouldn’t. Only they and the Committee clerks know if I just kidding myself or not but I felt they were very aware of the problems and issues the 1998 legislation had created but were very unsure how to address them. For one thing, they can never address the issue of an English Parliament as a devolution possibility objectively and adequately as long as their parties are dogmatically opposed to it and even exclude it from discussion. And to make the matter even worse, all three parties inevitably will only give it real thought if they think they can see some party advantage in it. And then, to compound the problem even more, the parties are all screwed up anyway with their outdated notions about the Union. For all that there was –I believe-a sense of genuine engagement in the room. I could have stayed there late into the night discussing it with them. But I couldn’t. Because of the fix I was in, I was the one who had to leave and the last five minutes were lost.

The exception I’ve just mentioned was the Welsh MP Alun Michael. I mention him individually because he came across as the very problem which bedevils the whole issue. He very obviously has a huge problem with England and he showed it, not just in the sort of the questions he asked and the remarks he made, which certainly were indicative enough, but even more in the faces he pulled and all his body language. Freud and Jung would have had a field day. The present shape of the Union suits him fine, it has been very good to him indeed, as indeed has England in particular if you look at this education history and his career. But devolution for England as a nation like his own Wales has got? An English Parliament? His attitude to both was one of hostility. There are immense psychological as well as political problems there with him, and didn’t it come across? The thing is, there is a whole massive phalanx of Alun Michaels in the Labour Movement which is really holding everything up and holding everything back. They haven’t the slightest problem with Scots loving Scotland and the Welsh loving Wales and all of them shouting about it. But when it comes to England they become different people altogether. Still Mr Michael serves a purpose. If his colleagues on the Committee can somehow take him forward, even kicking and screaming, then there is real hope. But even then, ahead there are still the Gordon Browns and the Jack Straws. Massive problems there indeed. Politics are only a part of it. When it comes to England, with some people it is something else as well. There is such a long way to go. It is fortunate that a Select Committee is able to produce an independent report.

The Devolution legislation of 1998 has changed the Union radically. Just tinkering with the consequences and with how England works, as most MPs and many organisations and think-tanks still think they can do, is not the way forward. England has to start again. Just as Scotland and Wales have started again.

Michael Knowles