Ed Miliband addresses the country – only not by name

The BBC website provides a useful word cloud for Ed Miliband’s keynote address to the Labour Party conference yesterday. Here it is:

Two things immediately stand out: 1) after ‘generation’ (frequent references to a ‘new generation’ of Labour politics), the most frequently occurring word is ‘country’ (37 instances); 2) there is absolutely no reference to ‘England’ – not one.

On the one hand, this lack of engagement on the part of the new Labour leader with the idea or reality of England should and does not surprise us. It would be more surprising if Ed Miliband had talked at any length at all about ‘England’ and the need for the party to address the concerns of ordinary English people. On the other hand, the total absence of ‘England’ from the speech belies the new leader’s attempt to differentiate himself from New Labour, as the lack of an English dimension to Labour’s vision of and for ‘the country’ represents a strong thread of continuity with New Labour days. Instead of ‘England’, Miliband resorted to the stock term, ‘country’, that politicians and those in the media employ to avoid being specific about whether they are talking about Britain as a whole or England only, or both.

Nonetheless, Miliband’s speech does represent a break with New Labour practice in that ‘Britain’, too, appears to have lapsed into disuse: ‘British’ and ‘Britain’ garnered only 16 mentions. At least, we’re now not getting ‘Britain’ thrust in our faces at every turn when a Labour politician is talking about purely English policy areas; but that’s partly because there was very little on policy as such in Miliband’s speech, nor was there expected to be. So ‘country’ has come to replace ‘Britain’ as well as ‘England’, probably for the same reason: it allows you to avoid being specific about which country you’re referring to in different contexts, thereby avoiding the embarrassment of having to say ‘Britain’ when everyone knows that what you’re referring to is relevant to England only, but you can’t say so because ‘England’ is the ultimate taboo word.

This lack of references to the name(s) of the country or countries being evoked, and even to particular regions or parts of the country (such as the North or the South), creates a strange impression of non-specificity: a vision for the ‘country’ that is not grounded in any geographical, indeed geopolitical, reality. This is Labour’s, or Ed Miliband’s, vision for ‘society’, ‘the economy’, ‘government’ and ‘politics’ (all among the most commonly used words, as the word cloud illustrates) where the national collectivity and context that are implied and invoked in these terms remain completely nameless during large parts of the speech: as it were abstracted out of the vision. ‘We’ and ‘our’ (as in the endlessly intoned ‘our country’, ‘our society’, ‘our economy’) are among the most frequently occurring words in the speech (not shown in the word cloud, which is limited to nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives). But it’s never spelled out who are the ‘we’ thus addressed. In the end, the inescapable impression is that ‘we’ is above all the collective consciousness of the Labour Party in its aspiration to re-take ownership of ‘the country’:

“The optimism of Tony and Gordon who took on the established thinking and reshaped our country. We are the optimists in politics today. So, let’s be humble about our past. Let’s understand the need to change. Let’s inspire people with our vision of the good society. Let the message go out, a new generation has taken charge of Labour. Optimistic about our country. Optimistic about our world.”

Far from reaching out to the British people, let alone the English people, this is Labour talking to itself about Labour’s vision of ‘the country’ – as it were the ‘Labour nation’, which can be set out in its pure form, untainted by the all-too recent realities of Labour in government, only because it abstracts itself from any real national context.

But if you don’t name the country you’re talking about, can you really espouse and re-connect with the aspirations and priorities of ordinary people, who want their leaders to set out believable visions for their country – England – and, perhaps more importantly, want them to acknowledge ways in which they’ve let down their country in the past. Ed Miliband had a little go at this when he owned up to the failings of the outgoing Labour government in areas such as tuition fees and immigration policy:

“I understand why you felt that we were stuck in old thinking about higher and higher levels of personal debt, including tuition fees”

“this new generation recognises that we did not do enough to address concerns about globalisation, including migration. All of us heard it on the doorsteps about immigration. Like the man I met in my constituency who told me he had seen his mates’ wages driven down by the consequences of migration. If we don’t understand why he would feel angry – and it wasn’t about prejudice – then we are failing to serve those who we are in politics to represent. I am the son of immigrants. I believe that Britain has benefited economically, culturally, socially from those who came to this country. I don’t believe either that we can turn back the clock on free movement of labour in Europe. But we should never have pretended it would not have consequences. Consequences we should have dealt with.”

Note the tic of referring to the sensitive issue in each case almost as an afterthought introduced by ‘including’: including tuition fees (just another personal debt issue); including migration (just another fraught consequence of necessary globalisation). In fact, this is not really apologising for old New Labour’s policies in these areas at all. He’s not actually saying Labour was wrong to introduce tuition fees, just that these were an unfortunate extra debt burden on people. And then his expression of ‘understanding’ about migration turns into a defence of it – including his own personal background – as being overwhelmingly of benefit for Britain and in part a consequence of something regarded as essentially positive: the “free movement of labour in Europe”.

But it’s England and Wales specifically that were burdened by tuition fees and then top-up fees, thanks to the votes of Labour’s Scottish MPs, whose own constituents were exempt from both. It’s English voters who were mainly affected and concerned by immigration, as England has borne the brunt of it. Immigration may have enhanced the stock of Britain, in every sense, including that of the Miliband family, but what has it done for England? Answer me that, Ed. (And that’s an open question, but not one Ed Miliband is really prepared to address.)

In fact, Miliband – at least as exemplified in this speech – is not prepared to ask the English question itself, let alone suggest an answer to it, as this passage amply demonstrates:

“The old thinking told us that for 300 years, the choice was either the break up of the United Kingdom or Scotland and Wales run from London. We should be proud that Labour established the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. And we should make sure that after next May’s elections we re-elect Carwyn Jones as the First Minister in Wales and we elect Iain Gray as the new First Minister in Scotland. And I am so so proud that, against all the odds, we helped deliver peace in Northern Ireland. And it will be one of Tony Blair’s great legacies to this country and we owe our gratitude to him.”

So devolution as enacted by New Labour is something to be proud of. No hint of a suggestion that it might have left England just a tad short-changed and that it raises questions about the governance of England. Here above all, Ed Miliband is keeping faith with the old New Labour certainties and with the former Labour Lord Chancellor Derry Irving’s assertion that the best answer to the West Lothian Question is not to ask it! He can’t even bring himself to mention the ‘E’ word in the one passage throughout the whole speech where the English question is absolutely begging. But that’s precisely it: it’s begging a question he isn’t prepared to even engage in.

So England might as well just not exist at all in Ed Miliband’s vision of ‘the country’: ‘our country’, Labour’s country. And the unwillingness to even pronounce the dirty ‘E’ word signals a failure to acknowledge the ways in which New Labour profoundly let down England specifically – indeed, as we have seen, Miliband actually defends and justifies the outgoing government’s record in English matters even as he appears to acknowledge its failings.

So perhaps we should give the last word to the new leader himself. Nothing changes, really: new generation, same old new Labour and same old new Britain. For ‘the country’, you can in fact read ‘Britain’, or at least Labour’s fictitious, rose-tinted vision or version of it that air-brushes England out of the picture. Yes, you’ve guessed what the last word in the speech, and the last word of the speech, is:

“We are the optimists in politics today. So, let’s be humble about our past. Let’s understand the need to change. Let’s inspire people with our vision of the good society. Let the message go out, a new generation has taken charge of Labour. Optimistic about our country. Optimistic about our world. Optimistic about the power of politics. We are the optimists and together we will change Britain.”

Clegg ducks the English Question

Our new deputy PM, the Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, yesterday announced what he termed the “biggest political reforms since 1832″. There is much to be commended in his proposals, which fall into three categories: 1) reversing New Labour’s erosion of our civil liberties; 2) reform of Parliament and party politics; and 3) further devolution, or what Clegg calls “redistribution of power away from the centre”.

The plans relating to civil liberties are especially welcome. Those relating to parliamentary reform and devolution are less so. I would pick out three main areas for concern:

1. House of Lords reform: “This government will replace the House of Lords with an elected second chamber where members are elected by a proportional voting system. There will be a committee charged specifically with making this happen. But make no mistake: that committee will not be yet another government talking shop. This will be a dedicated group devoted to kick-starting real reform.”

   Is that it then? No wide-ranging consultation of the British people about the sort of second chamber they would like to see for their parliament? The government is simply going to decree that we must switch to a fully elected Upper House, sweeping away centuries of tradition and an organic link to the history of England before it was Great Britain, which the government will bring about through a mere Act of Parliament? Don’t we get a referendum to find out if we like the ideas of this ‘dedicated committee’ chaired by Nick Clegg himself? To say nothing about whether this Upper House is going to replicate the West Lothian Question by allowing non-English-elected Lords or Senators to vote on English legislation while preventing English-elected representatives from doing the same for bills emanating from the Scottish Parliament and soon-to-be Welsh Parliament.

   By proceeding in haste like this (‘haste’ being Clegg’s own word to describe the pace of reform in the next sentence of his speech), an opportunity is being missed to consider these major constitutional reforms in the round, and particularly to factor in the English Question. Doing so would force Clegg’s committee to consider the possibility that if the England-specific functions of the House of Commons were transferred to an English Parliament, this might require the Upper House to evolve into a federal British Parliament, as well as a revising chamber, to deal with vestigial reserved matters.

   This is in fact the kind of measured approach the Liberal Democrats advocated in their election manifesto, where they stated that the English Question would need to be resolved as part of a comprehensive constitutional convention involving ordinary citizens as well as MPs. This idea appears to have been abandoned now and, along with it, any determination to really get to grips with the English Question, as the proposals on devolution make clear.

2. Devolution: “You will get more control over the hospitals you use; the schools you send your children too; the homes that are built in your community.

   “In our legislative programme we will be setting out plans to strip away government’s unelected, inefficient quangos, plans to loosen the centralised grip of the Whitehall bureaucracy, plans to disperse power downwards to you instead. And we are serious about giving councils much more power over the money they use, so they depend less on the whims of Whitehall, and can deliver the services and support their communities need. We know that devolution of power is meaningless without money.

   “Our plans to disperse power also include strengthening devolution to other parts of Britain: Working with Holyrood to implement the recommendations of the Calman Commission. Working with the Welsh Assembly on introducing a referendum on the transfer of further powers to Wales. Supporting the continued success of the devolved government in Northern Ireland. And, of course, asking what we can do about the difficult issues surrounding the West Lothian Question.”

   The key sentence, for me, here is: “Our plans to disperse power also include strengthening devolution to other parts of Britain”. In that unthinking phrase, ‘other parts of Britain’, Clegg implicitly admits that the Lib-Cons’ ‘dispersion’ of power to communities (which I discussed yesterday in relation to David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’ policy presentation) relates to England only, even though he never explicitly says so: if Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are ‘other parts of Britain’, then the ‘devolution of power’ from the centre he has just discussed can apply only to England. In other words, the Big Society (devolution of power in England) is what England is being offered by way of equivalence to devolution of power to the other parts of Britain. So instead of there being a national-English government to make decisions on the devolved policy areas Clegg refers to (health care, education, planning / housing, communities and local government), those decisions will be devolved to the sub-national, local / community level.

   But what’s really striking about the ‘other parts of Britain’ phrase is how it blatantly exposes the way that the political establishment simply takes it for granted that devolved policies discussed as if they were British are in fact English, and that everyone is somehow supposed to be aware of this unacknowledged given: it’s the elephant in the room that everyone sees but no one admits it’s there, as they’d then have to do something about it.

   And doing something about it – addressing the English Question – is clearly not Clegg’s intention, as the throw-away phrase, “And, of course, asking what we can do about the difficult issues surrounding the West Lothian Question”, makes clear. Put out almost as an embarrassed after-thought following the important and specific proposals mentioning Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by name. He can’t even bring himself to refer to England explicitly when he’s alluding to it, almost literally skirting around the issue of English governance seen as a series of ‘difficult issues surrounding the West Lothian Question’. It’s not difficult, you twit, just say it: the English Question. There, that didn’t hurt, did it?

   But over and above considerations of political correctness and, in the context of the coalition, expediency that dictate that one must never utter the nasty ‘E’ word in case one conjures the English elephant into existence, there is a practical, political reason and a symbolic reason why Clegg refers to the WLQ rather than the EQ. On the practical level, if you’re dealing with the issue of English governance in the framework of the WLQ, this means that you think or hope there could be some sort of procedural fix allowing English MPs to have the ‘ultimate’ say over English legislation that would be sufficient to keep English governance as the domain of the UK government and parliament. So, don’t mention the ‘E’ word in case the obvious solution of a separate English parliament and government comes into people’s minds.

   Second, on the symbolic level, the very assumption that the UK parliament is the natural home for English governance partakes of the same mindset that regards it as a self-evident truth – and, therefore, one that doesn’t need to be spoken of – that devolved issues as ‘properly’ dealt with by the British parliament are ‘really’ English issues; and that Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland are other parts of the UK. It’s that very English, very Westminster, Anglo-Britishness: the doublethink that both manages to really believe that England and Britain are symbiotically fused, but at the same time realistically recognises they are not the same – but let’s not talk about it, dear, in case we lose our privilege to govern.

   So much for “hand[ing] power back to people” – notice, it’s ‘people’, not ‘the people’, let alone ‘the English people’!

3. Electoral reform: “There is, however, no programme to reform our political system [that] is complete without reform of our voting system. This government will be putting to you, in a referendum, the choice to introduce a new voting system, called the Alternative Vote. Under that new system far more MPs will have to secure support from at least half the people who vote in their constituency.”

   As with the absence of a full debate and referendum on the options for the Upper House, and as with the total lack of any suggestion that the English people as a whole should be offered a referendum on an English parliament, we’re also not being offered a full debate about different electoral systems and a proper referendum that includes at least one proportional option. Basically, this referendum is a choice between two first-past-the-post systems, as the Alternative Vote is just a mitigated form of FPTP that doesn’t even do what it says on the tin.

   The last sentence in the above quote ambiguously points to the inadequacy of AV: ‘far more MPs’ will be elected by a majority of voters in their constituency. This could imply that all MPs will need to secure a majority, as opposed to just some MPs under FPTP. But AV doesn’t in fact ensure this, as the winner has to gain only a majority of votes that are still in play in the preferential system for reallocating votes to the more successful candidates. So it’s quite possible for the winner to still only obtain a minority of the votes of all those who voted in the first place, if there are many voters who do not indicate any of the last two or three candidates left in the race as a second or subsequent preference.

   So Clegg is being dishonest about AV, partly because he doesn’t actually support it – that is, if the policy that was in the Lib Dems’ manifesto (PR) reflects Clegg’s real views. And AV, like all the other proposals for political reform and devolution in Clegg’s statement, basically preserves the privileges and assumptions of parliamentary and party-centric politics intact, as it’s a voting system that’s just as likely (some argue, more likely) to deliver an outright majority in parliament to a single party that can then rule England and Britain with the absolute power of a monarch for the next five years: guaranteed to be a full five years given Clegg’s proposal to introduce five-year fixed-term parliaments.

   Five years. I thought we might at least only have to put up with our unaccountable governments for a maximum of four years if fixed terms were introduced. And do we get a choice in a referendum about this, either?

   Not on your nelly! What do you think this is? This is Whig Britain, don’t you know, not the people’s republic of England!

Lib Dem manifesto: England included, but only as a footnote

I haven’t had the time, I’m afraid, to do a big long hatchet job from an English perspective on the Lib Dem manifesto as I have done on the Labour and Tory documents. However I will say this: congratulations to the Lib Dems for being the only one of the big three parties to a) address the English Question in any shape or form, and b) propose scrapping the unjust Barnett Formula.

On the English Question, they say they would: “address the status of England within a federal Britain, through the Constitutional Convention set up to draft a written constitution for the UK as a whole”. This has been pretty much their established position for a while now; and at least they’re proposing to resolve England’s anomalous constitutional position with some degree of democratic fairness.

On the Barnett Formula, they say they would “Replace the current Barnett formula for allocating funding to the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish governments with a new needs-based formula, to be agreed by a Finance Commission of the Nations”. Not sure I like the implication of the ‘Nations’ concept here (Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland being treated as nations while England is not), nor does this mention any sort of needs-based system for distributing funding throughout England – but it’s a start.

The Lib Dems don’t, however, discuss the West Lothian Question, which might seem a lesser issue than the more fundamental English Question. But the fact they omit this aspect of the English democratic deficit leads one to question the Lib Dems’ full commitment to making the Westminster parliament truly accountable to voters, while at the same time it raises doubts as to how they view the status of England as such within any putative federal Britain.

For a start, in a hung parliament, which is the only circumstance in which the Lib Dems have any realistic hope of being able to implement any of their manifesto proposals, one strongly suspects that they would be prepared to use the bargaining and voting powers of their Scottish and Welsh MPs as part of their support to a minority Labour or Tory government, including in passing England-only bills. If they don’t say explicitly that they wouldn’t do this, one can only suppose that realpolitik would kick in if they found themselves in a position of influence at Westminster, and they would practice non-English votes on English laws.

Secondly, and more fundamentally, they don’t seem to believe in any sort of clear distinction not only between English and non-English policies – the blurring of that distinction being the means by which Labour and the Conservatives attempt to justify using their non-English MPs to vote through English laws – but also between England and Britain per se: the actual identities of England and Britain as nations.

Like those of Labour and the Tories, the Lib Dem manifesto talks overwhelmingly of ‘Britain’ even though vast portions of it deal with England-only matters like schools and the NHS. When discussing these things in particular, the document stops short of explicitly referring to them as ‘British’ (talking of ‘our schools’ or ‘the NHS’, for instance) but nonetheless omits any reference at all to ‘England’ or ‘English’ in these contexts, even though it is England only for which these policies are intended. In the area of culture and sport, this is even worse, and everything is discussed as ‘British’ including a potential World Cup tournament in England in 2018 – even Labour refers to bringing the World Cup to England.

Now, in the spirit of ‘fairness’ that the manifesto claims as its own (carrying the tag line ‘Building a fairer Britain’), the Lib Dems do actually acknowledge that their policies in these areas relate to England only. But they do this in their customary manner: essentially, in a footnote, which even then admits to the fact only in a rather grudging, indirect way. In the last-but-one page, literally in the manner of a legal disclaimer, or advisory note to investors and analysts in a corporate annual report, they make the following admission:

“Liberal Democrats have championed the devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales, and many decisions made in Westminster now apply to England only. That means that policies in those nations are increasingly different from those in England – reflecting different choices, priorities and circumstances. Our Scottish and Welsh Parties make their own policy on those issues. This document sets out our priorities for a Liberal Democrat Government in Westminster.”

Note that they refer to their “priorities for a Liberal Democrat Government in Westminster”, not their priorities or policies for England, even though they admit that “many decisions made in Westminster now apply to England only”. It’s just not good enough to devote over a hundred pages to detailing your policies for an entity referred to as ‘Britain’ and then, in an obscure footnote, to half-heartedly admit that many of them are relevant to England only. The Lib Dems, like the other big parties, are clearly hanging on to the idea of forming a British government for England – with non-English MPs at Westminster continuing to form policies and pass laws for England – rather than allowing a government for the English people elected only by English people to come into being.

Not setting out their English policies as English policies, and canvassing the support of non-English voters on those policies under the pretence that they are ‘British’, means that the Lib Dems, too, are conning English people out of an honest and accountable election on openly English matters, and are perpetrating the ‘West Lothian Election’ just as much as Labour.

So, full marks to the Lib Dems for addressing the English Question. But, based on this manifesto, can we be really sure that they want England to be anything more than a footnote in their new written constitution: just a UK territory over which Westminster’s writ continues to hold sway?

The Tories’ Big-Society Britain: England in all but name

Firstly, I have to say that the Conservatives’ election manifesto, ‘An Invitation To Join the Government Of Britain’, albeit misnamed, is a much more impressive affair than Labour’s shamefully anglophobic re-hashing of existing policies devoid of vision or principle. If people of a ‘progressive’ disposition were to approach the two policy statements in a spirit of genuine open-mindedness, I think many would conclude that the Tory manifesto is a much more ‘liberal’ document (with a small ‘l’) than Labour’s, with its concern to redress some of the present government’s erosion of our civil liberties and its aspiration to reverse the unaccountable centralisation of government.

That said, the Tories’ manifesto shares much of Labour’s will to suppress any English-national dimension to politics and civic society. On a superficial reading, you’d think the content of the manifesto was as it says on the tin: about revitalising British government and society, and setting them in a new relationship to one another. The document is stuffed full of inspirational references to ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ (140 in total), and to the ‘nation’ – meaning ‘Britain’ or the UK: 83 instances of ‘nation’ or ‘national’. By contrast, there are only 17 references to ‘England’ or ‘English’: admittedly more than Labour’s 11 versus 188 mentions of ‘Scotland’ / ‘Scottish’ in the Scottish version of its manifesto. At least, the Tories aren’t so disingenuous and gerrymandering that they produce a separate set of Scottish policies to persuade voters in that country to elect Scottish Labour MPs to serve as lobby fodder for English bills.

But the Conservatives’ ‘Big Society’ big idea can be realised, if at all, in England alone. The section of the manifesto in which this concept is spelled out in detail – ‘Change society’ – deals almost entirely with devolved policy areas: those in which the British government’s competence is limited to England or, in the case of justice and policing, to England and Wales. So all the proposals to ‘devolve’ power down to communities, individuals, and public-private business partnerships in areas such as local planning, schools and the NHS effectively do not relate to Britain as a whole, but only to England.

The mere fact that the Tories are incapable of honestly acknowledging that their plan to repair ‘broken Britain’ is in fact a blueprint for England should not of itself deter English patriots from voting Conservative if they like the Tories’ ideas, which are indeed much more original and attractive than Labour’s sterile and statist approach in many respects. But if, on the other hand, you do want to see government of England by the English people, you won’t get it from the Conservatives’ programme of ‘people power’.

The Tories’ plan is in effect one of devolution for and within England, rather than devolution to England: devolution of power to English communities, and associations of socially responsible individuals and organisations, rather than devolution of political power to democratic, English-national government and civic institutions. If you’re a localist or libertarian, you may think this is no bad thing. But as well as expressing the Conservative ideological bias in favour of private individuals and associations, as opposed to big government, this is a way of circumventing questions about the governance of England and the legitimacy, or otherwise, of the very ‘Government of Britain’ in which the Tories seek to re-engage the English people above all.

In effect, a British-national-public sector versus local-community-private sector dichotomy replaces the British-national / regional dichotomy in New Labour’s thinking about ‘the country’; but both frameworks leave no room for any sort of English-national tier of government, democracy or identity. This is less sinister than New Labour’s New Britain, in that at least the existence of England is acknowledged even if England is not viewed as distinct from ‘Britain’ in any way. Indeed, the whole manifesto is predicated on a profound but unspoken identification between England and Britain, reflected in the very fact that what is in reality a social programme for England only is expressed as being for Britain.

In this context, it is not surprising that the manifesto fails to propose a satisfactory solution to the West Lothian Question while not even acknowledging the broader English Question: the question of how England should be governed, which is a non-starter for the Tories, because they just unquestioningly assume that England is (governed as) Britain. Nevertheless, at least they do raise the West Lothian Question – which is more than Labour does – because they accept that England exists; even if their answer to the question is no solution:

“Labour have refused to address the so-called ‘West Lothian Question’: the unfair situation of Scottish MPs voting on matters which are devolved. A Conservative government will introduce new rules so that legislation referring specifically to England, or to England and Wales, cannot be enacted without the consent of MPs representing constituencies of those countries.”

This policy does not amount to English Votes on English laws, or to a Grand Committee of English MPs with the exclusive right to debate and vote on England-only legislation. While being extremely vague, this statement appears to confirm expectations that the Tories will adopt ‘English pauses for English clauses’: English MPs only to make revisions to England-only laws at the committee stage of bills, while all UK MPs continue to be allowed to vote on those bills at their second and third reading.

This is a mere procedural tweak that leaves the WLQ in place, if anything in a more pernicious form: it relies on there being the same balance of power among English MPs as in the House as a whole – otherwise, amendments to bills made by English MPs can simply be rejected by the House as a whole, resulting in stalemate. And the measure can be reversed by any incoming Labour government. So apart from being practically ineffective, and liable to contribute to governmental paralysis and constitutional crisis, this measure is a million miles away from the establishment of any sort of English parliamentary forum in which the priorities and needs of the English nation as a whole can be deliberated and decided upon.

Ultimately, then, the Tories’ manifesto might well represent power to the people – but only if they’re content to continue not to be the English people.

Make ITV ask the West Lothian Question

I’ve ranted on enough about the way England-specific topics are unlikely to be explicitly dealt with as such in the much heralded prime-ministerial debates, including in this blog. But now Power 2010 is giving people a chance – however slim – to persuade ITV to ask the leaders where they stand on English votes on English laws (EVoEL) during the first debate tomorrow, on ‘domestic’ (i.e. mostly English) issues.

They’ve set up a web page that allows you to send an email requesting that ITV ask the West Lothian Question that the Labour and Tory manifestoes, published this week, have already shown the parties to be unwilling to even address, let alone resolve in any meaningful way.

Give it a go and, you never know, the leaders might actually be forced to utter the ‘E’ word: it’ll be worth it for the sheer entertainment value of watching Gordon Brown squirm as he pushes that hated word out of his mouth!

England 11, Scotland 188: Labour’s West Lothian manifestoes

‘A future fair for all’, Labour proclaims as its election manifesto title. This is a self-avowed programme for ‘national renewal’, a concept reiterated at the start of each section – apart from in the Scottish version, however, which includes this phrase only once, in Gordon Brown’s preface.

So which nation is Labour intending to renew, and which of Labour’s two manifestoes should we believe? Well, if the version you’re reading is the ‘British’ one, you’d have to conclude that the nation in question was Britain, which is mentioned no fewer than 101 times, with ‘British’ being referred to on an additional 31 occasions. However, if you’re looking at the Scottish document, you could be mistaken for thinking Labour’s commitment was all to ‘Scotland’, with the prime minister’s homeland being proudly referenced on a total of 60 occasions along with 125 instances of ‘Scottish’ and three of ‘Scots’. That’s a ratio of almost 3:2 in favour of Scotland over Britain.

One nation New Labour is definitely not interested in renewing is ‘England’. The name of this country is included only once in Labour’s blueprint for fairness, in the section on ‘Communities and creative Britain’: “We aim to bring more major international sporting competitions to Britain, beginning with our current partnership with the English FA to bring the 2018 World Cup to England”.

Odd that it’s described as the ‘English FA’ here, when the FA goes out of its way to avoid calling itself ‘English’ – just as New Labour goes out of its way to avoid referring to any of its English policies as English. Maybe the phrase ‘English FA’ is a cross-over from the Scottish text, where it was necessary to add the ‘English’ tag, just as they saw fit to clarify – in the sentence before the one I’ve just quoted – that the 2015 Rugby Union World Cup was taking place in England: a fact curiously omitted from the ‘British’ manifesto.

This is not an isolated instance: there are more references to ‘England’ in the Scottish manifesto than the ‘British’ one – seven, in fact. There is, however, greater parity – or ‘fairness’, as Labour would call it – in the number of mentions of ‘English’: 12 in Scotland compared with ten in ‘Britain’. Well, that’s understandable, I suppose, as these references are mainly to the English language as studied in schools or spoken by immigrants.

In addition to the ‘English FA’ allusion, the only two uses of ‘English’ in the British version of the manifesto, other than for referring to the language, also occur in the ‘Communities and creative Britain’ section – not surprising, really, given that the British government’s responsibilities in the area of communities, sport and the arts are in fact restricted to England. The first of these references is to ‘English Heritage’ whose function the manifesto defines as ensuring “the protection and maintenance of Britain‘s built historical legacy” [my emphasis]. Even ‘England”s history apparently belongs to ‘Britain’, let alone its present or future of New Labouresque fairness.

The other reference is to extending the ‘Right to Roam’ to the whole of the English coastline. Neither of these proposals, then, are apparently worthy of mention for Labour’s potential Scottish voters, despite the fact that – as Britons – English British heritage belongs to them, too, as does the right to roam England’s coastline.

When the words ‘England’ and ‘English’ are used in the Scottish manifesto to refer to an actual country that the British document is strangely incapable of acknowledging, this is to make injurious comparisons between the governments and public services in Scotland and ‘England’. For example, the Scottish text states: “Crime is lower than in 1997, but it is falling more slowly in Scotland than in England [sic] and last year in Scotland, there were almost nine thousand crimes of knife carrying”.

By contrast, the ‘British’ document declares: “Crime continued to fall during the recession . . . . and knife crime has fallen”. [NB Ed (Miliband, that is): not in 'Britain' as a whole it hasn't, boy, because you've already told us it's risen in Scotland – you must mean it's fallen in England.]

In similar vein, the Scottish manifesto tells us: “Last year alone in England [there's that word again!] there were 832 positive matches to the DNA database in cases of rape, murder and manslaughter. In order to protect the public, Scottish Labour will ensure that the most serious offenders are added to the database, no matter where or when they were convicted – and we will retain the DNA profiles of those arrested but not convicted for six years”.

By contrast, the British version omits the reference to ‘England’ and also deletes the phrase ‘in order to protect the public’. Why? Because they don’t want the said ‘public’ to realise that, in England, the DNA profiles of people arrested but not convicted for any offence, not just serious offences, are retained by the British database state, whereas in Scotland they are not. And the ambiguous wording is similarly intended to mislead Labour’s Scottish public into thinking they would retain the DNA profiles only of those arrested but not convicted of serious offences if they got re-elected into power in Holyrood, whereas in fact they’d introduce the authoritarian English system if they had their way. And if the systems in the two countries were the same, then – and only then – New Labour could fulfil the promise to make sure that ‘no matter where or when they were convicted’ (e.g. whether in Scotland or England & Wales), all serious offenders throughout Britain could be added to the database.

This example – and there are many similar – illustrates the duplicity behind New Labour’s dual manifestoes (or triple once the Welsh one presumably comes along) for a dual mandate:

• In the Scottish manifesto – quite blatantly and unashamedly – they are canvassing the support of Scottish voters on devolved matters (such as crime, as in the examples above) with a separate programme of Scottish-only policies that they could implement only if they were elected into power in Scotland in 2011. As the introduction to the Scottish text states: “Where responsibility is devolved, Scottish Labour will endeavor [sic] to deliver for Scotland from opposition in the Scottish Parliament, a Parliament of minorities [by implication, one in which they are virtually a party in power], as we have done on new apprenticeships for young Scots. We will carry these commitments through into the next Scottish Parliament.” Hence the negative comparisons they make between policies in devolved areas in Scotland – which is of course actually governed by the SNP – and the situation in the corresponding areas in England.
• In the ‘British’ manifesto, in contrast to the Scottish one, any suggestion that Labour’s policies in devolved areas are de facto English policies is systematically suppressed by referring to everything as being ‘British’ and for ‘Britain’. In England, in other words, Labour is desperate for voters not to make the sort of comparisons with Scotland that they’re so keen for Scottish voters to make the other way round, in case English voters decide their Scottish cousins are getting a decidedly better deal in the public services Labour likes to claim as its own special domain. So they’re deliberately misleading voters – if any ordinary voter can actually be bothered to plough through the turgid document – into thinking that Labour’s past and prospective policies apply across the whole of Britain.
• And the other main reason why they don’t want English readers to realise that their policies in vital areas such as education, the NHS, crime and policing, and communities apply to England only is that those readers might start to question why a Scottish-elected MP such as Gordon Brown feels entitled to propose policies for people who can’t vote him out of office if they don’t like them. Even more so if they were to realise that the Labour Party was trying to get its Scottish MPs, like Brown, re-elected into power on a programme for Scotland, even though it’s the English programme (not the Scottish one at all) that they’d actually implement if they were re-elected. So that’s why they have to pretend it’s a British (i.e. UK- or Great Britain-wide) programme and not what it actually is: English.

It’s only when you read the two manifestoes side by side in this way that you can measure the full extent of Labour’s duplicity and hypocrisy: a Scottish programme for Scotland on which Scottish MPs will be elected to enact a British programme for England Britain – the West Lothian election.

I could pick out many examples, but I think you get the general idea, and I invite readers to read the two manifestoes side by side so long as they’ve got a strong stomach and stable blood pressure. Fortify yourself with a pint or two of good English ale first; or a wee dram or two has the same effect and carries less duty per unit.

I’ll just select a particularly choice example, about social care. In the English British version, it states: “We will establish a new National Care Service and forge a new settlement for our country as enduring as that which the Labour Government built after 1945. . . . From 2011 we will protect more than 400,000 of those with the greatest needs from all charges for care in the home”.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, the ‘national’ service and the ‘country’ in question are actually England, not Britain, as becomes evident when you make the comparison with Scotland that Labour doesn’t want you to make. As the Scottish document says:

“The welfare state, in its broadest sense [yes, in the sense that it's different in Scotland from England], is the most profound expression of the shared values that bind Scotland and the other nations of the United Kingdom together in a social union. As society changes, so the settlement evolves [b******s it does!]. In Scotland we led the way, extending the frontiers of the welfare state with the introduction of free personal care ['for all', as they might say, not just the few]. . . . The Prime Minister’s aim of establishing a National Care Service to forge a new social care settlement for our country as enduring as that which the Labour Government built after 1945, expresses our ambition too. While we start from different circumstances and have services differently aligned, a National Care Service would be a further strand in the social union. [Note: 'would be', not 'will be', because in Scotland, they acknowledge that their faux-British 'national' care service is in fact English and voting Labour in this election can't bring it about in Scotland. Not sure anyone will be too worried about that in Scotland, though.]

Our ambition is for free personal care to be part of a truly integrated service. It will be different in each nation of the UK, but will reflect our shared values.”

Try telling that to the English, you b******s, and see if you get re-elected then! No wonder they don’t insult the English readers of the British manifesto with all that baloney about a social union. Social union, my arse – if you’ll pardon my English.

So Labour promises a future fair for all Britons. It’s only that some Britons (e.g. the Scots) are treated ‘more fairly’ than others (e.g. the English), to adapt a famous phrase. Except New Labour would reject that analysis, because they scarcely acknowledge the very existence of England; so how can a country that doesn’t exist be treated less fairly than ‘another’ part of Britain which, they’d have you believe, is treated in exactly the same way? Orwellian New-Labour Newspeak, indeed!

So it comes as no surprise, in the section of the ‘British’ manifesto dealing with democratic reform, that absolutely no mention is made of ‘England’ while whole paragraphs deal with the ongoing processes of devolution in the UK’s other nations – proving incontrovertibly that Labour’s approach to the West Lothian Question, let alone the English Question, is not to ask it.

The reason: they are utterly dependent on the West Lothian Question in its most aggravated form – the West Lothian Election – if they are to have any chance of being re-elected: conning Scottish people into voting Labour on a Scottish ticket merely in order to secure power in Westminster – power over English matters, in other words. A con that they try to deny at all cost; mainly by denying there is any distinction between ‘Britain’ (including Scotland) and England.

But what are English voters to make of this? Well, if they want accountable government for England as England, they can do none other than reject Labour’s false account (narrative) of a Britain that denies England. And if Labour offers no policies for England, then they deserve no votes from English people.

No Representation Without . . . Representation: The West Lothian Election and Avoidance Of the ‘E’ Word

I’m gearing up to a fight at the election. I’ve got my complaint emails primed in the full expectation that none of the leaders nor presenters will say ‘England’ in the leaders’ debates, even when discussing England-only policies; and that news item after news item will report on parties’ proposals on education, health or policing (etc., etc.) without bothering to mention that they relate only to England (and Wales, in the latter instance).

Does any of that matter, or am I just being an ‘indignant from Tunbridge Wells’ Little Englander pedantically pulling the media up on every slightest slip? Surely, everyone knows that when the politicians refer to ‘the NHS’, or the Tory spokesman sets out that party’s proposals for the ‘British’ education system, they’re really talking only about the NHS and education in England?

Well, the politically literate might realise this, but the default position of the average English citizen is to assume that when people in the media say ‘Britain’ or ‘this country’, they actually mean Britain as a whole, not just a part or parts of it. That this is not so is undeniable. But this does not necessarily mean that politicians and the media, in every case, are deliberately suppressing all reference to ‘England’, rather than just forgetting to include the word because it all starts to sound fussily pedantic after a while. This might be more Freudian slip than political censorship. However, if you know your Freud, you’ll know there’s no such thing as ‘innocent’ forgetting, and that what you omit to say, just as much as what you let slip, reveals the self-censorships and internal struggles involved in conforming to socially and politically acceptable norms.

Be that as it may, one thing all three party leaders will definitely agree on in their TV debates is avoidance of the ‘E’ word. But just what is the inconvenient, naked truth that the politicians wish to cover up by not referring to the actual name of ‘the country’ their policies address?

Well, perhaps it’s just that: the country they’re primarily addressing is England.

I’ve written extensively elsewhere on the way the proposed structure for the TV debates is almost diametrically the reverse of what it should be to properly reflect the post-devolution realities. Instead of having three ‘UK’ debates excluding the leaders of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, with separate debates in Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland that do include the leaders of parties that stand only in those countries, the UK debates should include the key players from the devolved nations because – for those nations – the election is only about UK-wide (reserved) matters, not nation-specific ones. What is more, the non-English parties may hold the balance of power in a hung parliament; so it is especially crucial in this election for viewers across the UK to hear what their leaders have to say.

By contrast, the only nation-specific debate(s) should be restricted to England, because only English voters are (or, at least, should be) voting on devolved issues in this election. As it’s turned out, one of the debates (on ITV) will be dealing mostly with English issues such as health and education, billed as ‘domestic’ issues. But you can bet your bottom English pound that these topics won’t be referred to as English. At least, ITV hasn’t yet deigned to respond to my helpful email suggestion that they do flag up the England-only policy areas as English in the programme.

Joking aside, the structure that has been adopted in fact ironically reveals the England-specific nature of the ‘national’ debates that politicians and media would rather have us not notice through their non-use of the word ‘England’. The ‘UK’ debates are all being held in England; they exclude the leaders of the Scottish- and Welsh-nationalist parties, thus enabling the perspective to be ‘English’ in the sense of being that of English viewers; and one whole debate is also mostly limited to English matters. And the fact of there being separate debates focusing on issues and parties specific to Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland makes the ‘national’ debates even more England-centric in all but name.

This structure itself replicates the structure of the debates and proceedings of the UK parliament, which has become a British parliament for England at the same time as an English parliament for the UK. The parties don’t want the public in England to realise that they’re using the debates and the campaign in general to seek the votes of non-English voters on English matters (what you could call the ‘West Lothian Election’), resulting in government of the English people by the British parliament. And they equally don’t want the public in the non-English countries to realise that their MPs will be beholden to the interests of parties whose power base and national focus is primarily England (though, and for that reason, unacknowledged): parliamentary lobby fodder whether voting on England-specific or reserved matters.

That’s why they don’t want Alex Salmond or Ieuan Wyn Jones showing up at the party (or showing up their parties). It’s ironic that they think it’s OK to exclude Alex Salmond, who has a legitimate say in reserved matters, while including Gordon Brown, who has no legitimacy in devolved (i.e. English) matters. But after all, you couldn’t have Alex Salmond turning up at the ITV debate and accusing Gordon Brown of proposing policies for England that he can have no democratic mandate to implement, could you? That just wouldn’t be ‘British’ fair play. But it would be democracy. And it would be an accurate representation of the facts.

But will the broadcasters in fact be in breach of their statutory duty to ensure accuracy and impartiality if they fail to point out that some of the policies being debated are relevant only to their English viewers? It would probably be easier to make a case for bias than inaccuracy, despite what I’ve said so far. It clearly is biased to provide an exclusive platform for the ‘English’-party leaders to speak to voters in Scotland and Wales, even if you take only reserved matters into consideration. It is doubly biased if the party leaders refer to devolved (i.e. English) issues as British, and by implication as relevant to Scotland and Wales, because this would amount to turning the UK election into the opening battle in the 2011 election for the Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly while at the same time excluding two of the parties presently in power in those bodies.

So this is bias, but it’s bias that rests on inaccuracy and, frankly, a sheer lack of understanding about the actual mandates of MPs from the UK’s countries in the wake of devolution. The most egregious consequence of this at the election is likely to be in relation to the debate about spending on education, health and policing. I notice the Labour Party is now promising not to make any cuts in these areas, which will be paid for by even more swingeing cuts to other areas of the budget. But what Labour is not saying is that it’s only in England that it won’t be reducing the budget for these things; and that, as a result of the overall cuts, the Scottish and Welsh block budgets will be reduced (not before time, in some people’s view), resulting in likely cuts in education, health and policing in those countries. By not explicitly stating that it’s English education, health and policing that will be protected, Labour is deliberately misleading the electorate in Scotland and Wales into thinking that their funding in these areas is ring-fenced – in order to win their votes. And in allowing Labour to get away with this, it could be argued the media is showing bias towards them – except, of course, it’s allowing all the main parties to do the same thing. In this way, the Scots and Welsh are being wooed on English matters; and English voters are being cheated of the result they want in relation to the matters that affect them.

But apart from this West Lothian aspect to the election, are English people put in any kind of direct disadvantage through the inaccuracy of referring to English policies as British? It would be difficult to make a watertight case that calling English laws ‘British’ is inaccurate, as – strictly speaking – they are British laws: enacted by the British parliament comprising representatives from across the UK. So if you were going to be really pedantic about it, you would in fact have to call them ‘British laws for England’. And is it inaccurate, as such, to omit the ‘for England’ or ‘in England’ part (e.g. ‘the NHS in England’ or ‘schools in England’)? Or is this just a form of ellipsis made possible by the fact that the words omitted contain information which it is assumed people know about anyway?

OK, so calling English policies and laws ‘British’ is only partially inaccurate. But is it good enough for the media and politicians to be only partially accurate here? And isn’t presenting only a partial version of the facts again partial in the other sense: the opposite of ‘impartial’?

In this instance, this is a partiality that goes beyond specific policies or parties, and amounts to a bias in favour of the whole British-parliamentary system, of which the general election is meant to serve as a collective act of validation. The mis-representation of England-specific policies as UK-relevant helps to uphold the viewpoint that British-parliamentary democracy itself is ‘adequate’ for English voters: that it provides sufficient expression to the voice of English voters and an adequate representation of their views.

In order to maintain this perception, it is vital that the language politicians and media use to refer to the political process, system and community – the polity – is adequate to the country of which that polity is meant to be a representative expression, in the other sense of the word ‘adequate’: descriptively / epistemologically appropriate to, or commensurate with, the object described. In other words, if the British-parliamentary system is to be seen as adequate for England, then ‘Britain’ / ‘British’ must be seen as adequate terms for ‘England’ / ‘English’: the system of government and the country governed must become mirrors for one another – the British parliament as ‘representing’ the (British) people.

This whole fiction falls down if you start referring to the people Parliament is meant to represent as English in some matters and British in others. Apart from calling the democratic legitimacy of the whole system – and accordingly, the election – into question, it would actually be rather hard to keep switching between ‘England’ and ‘Britain’, sometimes within a single sentence, when referring to the country for which (British) policies are intended. It would require mental gymnastics on the part of our occasionally intellectually challenged politicians, for a start. But imagine the confusion and the linguistic overload if you had to start presenting the interdependency between genuinely British and English policy decisions in their true light. Parties would have to tell voters they intend to raise British taxes (or decrease some and increase others) in order to maintain spending on English education, health and policing while cutting the British defence and welfare budgets, reducing the Scottish and Welsh budgets, and cutting spending on English social care, local government, transport, environmental protection, etc.

If, on the other hand, you pretend that there’s just one British tax pool and one British budget in all these different areas, it makes the message easier to get across. The fact that it also enables the parties to gloss over the West Lothian Election and the question of Parliament’s legitimacy as a dual-purpose British and English legislature is almost a secondary but nonetheless highly convenient benefit of this linguistic economy with the truth. The fiction that there is only a single national budget that has to be apportioned between different government departments is also substantially true, but only if the nation in question is England. But in order to maintain the fiction that that nation is Britain, it’s imperative to never invoke the name of ‘England’. This results in what is actually quite a surreal situation where the country whose election this primarily is, and whose people are the main ones being targeted, is never mentioned by name.

But English people deserve more than this partially representative democracy: where the ‘part’ (England) is (mis)represented by the whole (the parliament for the UK), which – in order to maintain the fiction that it adequately represents the part – refers to the part as if it were the whole. Or, putting this another way, can UK MPs for English constituencies claim to truly represent them if they can’t even represent (accurately refer to and acknowledge) the country of which their constituencies are a part? Those MPs can, in effect, only represent the whole – the in fact partial (party-determined) interests of ‘Britain’ – and not their constituency as an integral part of another whole, the nation of England, for which the British parliament legislates. But if they don’t want to acknowledge their constituencies and their remit as English, they cannot be said to stand for (represent) England in any way, nor do they deserve the support of those who seek to defend the legitimate interests and rights of English people as a distinct part of Britain with its own legal system, for which Parliament is responsible.

In other words, when talking the language of the whole (Britain), our English politicians are only partly telling the truth; indeed, they are being party to a fiction that involves the representation of the part as if it were the whole. And yet, that part is a whole – England – that is only partially represented in this way, while this fiction serves the interests of parties that seek the mandate of the whole to govern the part. And, by being party to this fiction, the media is maintaining the partiality this involves: making the Union Parliament an adequate form of representation for England, and supporting the Union parties that defend the whole system.

Ultimately, then, by conspiring with the politicians to effectively bleep out the ‘E’ word (if that is what they do at the election), the media will be displaying institutional bias in favour of the British-political establishment and system of democracy. The upholding of this system requires that the emergence of an English-national politics be suppressed; and the most effective way to achieve this is by suppressing all reference to ‘English’ policies even when talking about British policies that only affect England.

This is not an innocent act of forgetting or a failure to be journalistically accurate in one’s choice of words; it is indeed more of a Freudian omission: a superficially casual and non-deliberate suppression of language that reveals profound, hidden truths and motivations. That said, the broadcasters cannot be singled out for blame in showing bias and support towards the very democratic system of which the election is supposed to be a vindication. The problem is with the system itself, not merely the media.

But if the media does, as I suspect it will, omit to refer to English policies as English policies, then this calls the validity of the whole process into question. The public – English and non-English alike – have a right to be informed about how, indeed whether, the parties’ policies might affect them. And if the media systemically fails to do that – because it is serving and enabling the stratagem that the British-political system itself employs to conceal the naked truth that it is a government for but not of England – then the general election will not deserve to be called an act of representative democracy.

At the very least, it will result in a continuing mis-representation of England.

Vote EVoEL!

Just looked at the rankings in the Power 2010 poll for the top five ideas for UK-political reform that candidates at the general election are going to be asked to support. As I write, I note with dismay that an elected second chamber is on the point of overtaking English Votes on English Laws (EVoEL) as the fifth-most popular idea, which would mean that EVoEL would not be included in the Power 2010 pledge.

Of itself, this would not be much of a disaster given that EVoEL is a poor alternative to an English parliament, would probably be almost impossible to implement and could easily lead to a constitutional crisis. However, the idea of EVoEL is the only proposal in the Power 2010 poll that keeps the English Question on the agenda – the suggestion of an English parliament having been eliminated via a deliberative process in December whose validity I have questioned elsewhere (notably here).

In addition, the Conservatives reportedly abandoned their commitment to EVoEL yesterday and seem intent on completely ignoring the English Question as they fall over backwards to appear to have Scottish interests – including financial ones – very much at heart.

I’m sure some online campaign has got going for people to vote for an elected second chamber, as this proposal was more than 200 votes behind EVoEL when I looked yesterday but was only four behind when I visited the Power 2010 site a few moments ago. In itself, an elected second chamber is not a bad idea. But if it were introduced before the English Question is addressed, it would duplicate the West Lothian Question and increase the English democratic deficit. That’s because it would be a British second elected chamber comprising representatives from the devolved countries as well as England. So not only would non-English MPs be voting on English bills but so would would non-English senators, or whatever they’d be called.

That would absolutely tie England up in a constitutional double bind. Imagine, even if there were an English Grand Committee through which England-only bills had to pass before becoming law: those bills would still have to pass through the second chamber, which of course would see its role as protecting the interests of ‘the Union’ as a whole – i.e. making sure the devolved countries were well looked after and weren’t ‘disadvantaged’ by any English legislation. So not only could the views of English MPs – if EVoEL in some form came in – be vetoed by non-English MPs in the Commons but they’d also be subject to ‘revisions’ from non-English senators! I don’t hear any proposals for legislation from the Scottish, Welsh and N. Irish parliament / assemblies to be revised by this elected second chamber, which would at least even things out a bit. Can’t see that happening, can you?

We can’t let this scenario of a double WLQ even be contemplated, and we mustn’t let the English Question fall off the constitutional reform agenda altogether. So go to the link and cast your vote for EVoEL if you haven’t done so already!

The only ‘positive’ thing that could come out of an elected second chamber being ‘preferred’ to EVoEL is that it could accelerate the constitutional crisis that must inevitably result from the English Question being ignored and actively suppressed in the ‘interests’ of the Union. But I’d rather not suffer the indignity and the humiliation of seeing ‘reform’ go through that completely ignores the largest democratic deficit in Britain and the most gaping wound in our unwritten constitution. Plus it would be prolonging the agony and could well bring down the Union altogether in the long run.

But please don’t take that as an excuse not to vote for EVoEL!

The Dark Nationalist Heart of New Labour’s Devolution Project

I was struck last night by how the panellists of BBC1′s Any Questions displayed a rare unity in condemning the ‘nationalism’ to which they imputed the recent assaults on Romanian migrants in Northern Ireland. ‘There can be no place for nationalism in modern Britain’, they intoned to the audience’s acclaim.

Apart from the fact that statements such as this articulate a quasi-nationalistic, or inverted-nationalist, pride in Britain (‘what makes us “great as a nation” is our tolerance and integration of multiple nationalities’), this involved an unchallenged equation of hostility towards immigration / racism with ‘nationalism’. This was especially inappropriate in the Northern Ireland context where ‘nationalism’ is associated with Irish republicanism, and hence with Irish nationalism and not – what, actually? British nationalism à la BNP; the British ‘nationalism’ of Northern Irish loyalists (no one bothered to try and unpick whether the people behind the violence had been from the Catholic or Protestant community, or both); or even ‘English’ nationalism?

Certainly, it’s a stock response on the part of the political and media establishment to associate ‘English nationalism’ per se with xenophobia, opposition to immigration and racism. But this sort of knee-jerk reaction itself involves an unself-critical, phobic negativity towards (the concept of) the English – and certainly, the idea of the ‘white English’ – that crosses over into inverted racism, and which ‘colours’ (or, shall we say, emotionally infuses) people’s response to the concept of ‘English nationalism’. In other words, ‘English nationalism’, for the liberal political and media classes, evokes frightening images of racial politics and violence because, in part, the very concept of ‘the English nation’ is laden with associations of ‘white Anglo-Saxon’ ethnic aggressiveness and brutality. English nationalism is therefore discredited in the eyes of the liberal establishment because it is unable to dissociate it from its images of the historic assertion of English (racial) ‘superiority’ (for instance, typically, in the Empire). But the fact that the establishment is unable to re-envision what a modern and different English nationalism, and nation, could mean is itself the product of its ‘anti-English’ prejudice and generalisations bordering on racism: involving an assumption that the ‘white English’ (particularly of the ‘lower classes’) are in some sense intrinsically brutish and racist – in an a-historic way that reveals their ‘true nature’, rather than as a function of an imperial and industrial history that both brutalised and empowered the English on a massive scale.

This sort of anti-English preconception was built into the design of New Labour’s asymmetric devolution settlement: it was seen as legitimate to give political expression to Scottish and Welsh nationalism, just not English nationalism. Evidently, there is a place for some forms of nationalism in modern Britain – the ‘Celtic’ ones – but not the English variety. While this is not an exhaustive explanation, the anomalies and inequities of devolution do appear to have enacted a revenge against the English for centuries of perceived domination and aggression. First, there is the West Lothian Question: the well known fact that Scottish and Welsh MPs can make decisions and pass laws that relate to England only, whereas English MPs can no longer make decisions in the same policy areas in Scotland and Wales. This could be seen as a reversal of the historical situation, as viewed and resented through the prism of Scottish and Welsh nationalism: instead of England ruling Scotland and Wales through the political structures of the Union, now Scotland and Wales govern England through their elected representatives in Westminster, who ensure that England’s sovereignty and aspirations for self-government are frustrated.

It might seem a somewhat extreme characterisation of the present state of affairs to say that Scotland and Wales ‘govern England’; but it certainly is true that a system that involves the participation of Scottish and Welsh MPs is involved in the active suppression not only of the idea of an English parliament to govern English matters (which would restore parity with Scotland and Wales) but of English-national identity altogether: the cultural war New Labour has waged against the affirmation and celebration of Englishness in any form – the surest way to extinguish demands for English self-rule being to obliterate the English identity from the consciousness of the silent British majority. In this respect, New Labour’s attempts to replace Englishness with an a-national Britishness – in England only – are indeed reminiscent of the efforts made by an England-dominated United Kingdom in previous centuries to suppress the national identity, political aspirations and traditions of Scotland and Wales.

This notion of devolution enabling undue Scottish and Welsh domination of English affairs becomes less far-fetched when you bear in mind the disproportionate presence of Scottish-elected MPs that have filled senior cabinet positions throughout New Labour’s tenure, including, of course, Gordon Brown: chancellor for the first ten years and prime minister for the last two. And considering that Brown is the principal protagonist in the drive to assert and formalise a Britishness that displaces Englishness as the central cultural and national identity of the UK, this can only lend weight to suspicions that New Labour has got it in for England, which it views in the inherently negative way I described above.

However, the main grounds for believing that devolution enshrines nationalistic bias and vindictiveness towards England is the way New Labour has continued to operate the Barnett Formula: the funding mechanism that ensures that Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland benefit from a consistently higher per-capita level of public expenditure than England. One thing to be observed to begin with is that Barnett is used to legitimise the continuing participation of non-English MPs in legislating for England, as spending decisions that relate directly to England only trigger incremental expenditure for the other nations.

But New Labour has used Barnett not only to justify the West Lothian Question but has attempted to justify it in itself as a supposedly ‘fair’ system for allocating public expenditure. It seems that it is construed as fair primarily because it does penalise England in favour of the devolved nations, not despite this fact. This sort of thinking was evidenced this week during a House of Lords inquiry into the Barnett Formula. Liam Byrne, the new Chief Secretary to the Treasury, described the mechanism as “fair enough”, only to be rounded on by the Welsh Labour chair Lord Richard of Ammanford: “It doesn’t actually mean anything. Look at the difference between Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland – is that fair?” So it’s OK for England to receive 14% less spending per head of population than Wales, 21% less than Scotland and 31% less than Northern Ireland; the only ‘unfairness’ in the system is the differentials between the devolved nations!

The view that this system is somehow ‘fair to England’ – except it’s not articulated as such, as this would be blatantly ridiculous and it ascribes to England some sort of legal personality, which the government denies: ‘fair for the UK as a whole’ would be the kind of phrase used – exemplifies the sort of nationalistic, anti-English bias that has characterised New Labour. It’s as if the view is that England ‘owes’ it to the other nations: that because it has historically been, and still is, more wealthy overall and more economically powerful than the other nations, it is ‘fair’ that it should both pay more taxes and receive less back on a sort of redistribution of wealth principle. But this involves a re-definition of redistribution of wealth on purely national lines, as if England as a whole were imagined as a nation of greedy capitalists and arrogant free marketeers that need to pay their dues to the exploited and neglected working class people of Scotland and Wales: the bedrock of the Labour movement.

In short, it’s ‘pay-back time’: overlaying the centuries-long resentment towards England’s wealth and power, England is being penalised for having supported Margaret Thatcher and her programme of privatisation, disinvestment in public services and ruthless market economics. ‘OK, if that’s how you want it, England, you can continue your programme of market reforms of public services; and if you want a public sector that is financially cost-efficient and run on market principles, then you can jolly well pay yourselves for the services that you don’t want the public purse to fund – after all, you can afford to, can’t you? But meanwhile, your taxes can fund those same services for us, because we can’t afford to pay for them ourselves but can choose to get them anyway through our higher public-spending allocation and devolved government’.

Such appears at least to be the ugly nationalistic, anti-English backdrop to the two-track Britain New Labour has ushered in with asymmetric devolution. This has allowed Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to pursue a classic social-democratic path of high levels of funding for public services based on a redistributive tax system; that is, with wealth being redistributed from England, as the tax revenues from the devolved nations are not sufficient to fund the programme. Meanwhile, in England, New Labour has taken forward the Thatcherite agenda of reforming the public sector on market principles. In a market economy, individuals are required to pay for many things that are financed by the state in more social-democratic and socialist societies. Hence, the market economics can be used to justify the unwillingness of the state to subsidise certain things like university tuition fees (an ‘investment’ by individuals in their own economic future); various ‘luxuries’ around the edges of the standard level of medical treatment offered by the state health-care system (e.g. free parking and prescriptions, or highly advanced and expensive new drugs that it is not ‘cost-efficient’ for the public sector to provide free of charge); or personal care for the elderly, for which individuals in a market economy are expected to make their own provisions.

These sorts of market principle, which have continued and extended the measures to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ initiated under the Thatcher and Major governments, have been used to justify the government in England not paying for things that are funded by the devolved governments: public-sector savings made in England effectively cross-subsidise the higher levels of public spending in the other nations. Beneath an ideological agenda (reform of the public services in England), a nationalist agenda has been advanced that runs utterly counter to the principles of equality and social solidarity across the whole of the United Kingdom that Labour has traditionally stood for. Labour has created and endorsed a system of unequal levels of public-service provision based on a ‘national postcode lottery’, i.e. depending purely on which country you happen to live in. Four different NHS’s with care provided more
free at the point of use in some countries than others, and least of all in England; a vastly expanded university system that is free everywhere except England; and social care offered with varying levels of public funding, but virtually none in England. So much for Labour as the party of the working class and of the Union: not in England any more.

There’s an argument for saying that English people should pay for more of their medical, educational and personal-care needs, as they are better off on average. But that’s really not the point. Many English people struggle to pay for these things or simply can’t do so altogether, and so miss out on life-prolonging drug treatments or educational opportunities that their ‘fellow citizens’ elsewhere in the UK are able to benefit from. A true social-democratic- and socialist-style public sector should offer an equal level of service provision to anyone throughout the state that wishes to access it, whether or not they could afford to pay for private health care or education but choose not to. The wealthy end up paying proportionately more for public services anyway through higher taxes. Under the New Labour multi-track Britain, by contrast, those English people who are better off not only have to pay higher taxes but also have to pay for services that other UK citizens can obtain free of charge, as do poorer English people. One might even say that this extra degree of taxation (higher income tax + charges for public services) is a tax for being English.

But of course, it’s not just the middle and upper classes that pay the England tax; it’s Labour’s traditional core supporters: the English working class. On one level, it’s all very well taking the view that ‘middle England’ supports privatisation and a market economy, so they can jolly well pay for stuff rather than expecting the state to fund it. But it’s altogether another matter treating the less well-off people of England with the same disregard. It is disregarding working people in England to simply view it as acceptable that they should have to pay for hospital parking fees, prescription charges, their kids’ higher education and care for their elderly relatives, while non-English people can get all or most of that for free. What, are the English working class worth less than their Celtic cousins?

How much of this New Labour neglect of the common people of England can truly be put down to a combination of Celtic nationalism, anti-English nationalism, and indeed inverted-racist prejudice towards the white English working class? Well, an attribution to the English of an inherent preference for market economics – coming as it does from a movement that despised that ideology during the 1980s and early 1990s – could well imply a certain contempt for the English, suffused with Scottish and Welsh bitterness towards the ‘English’ Thatcher government.

But an even more fundamental and disturbing turning of the tables against the English is New Labour’s laissez-faire attitude to job creation, training and skills development for the English working class. The Labour government abandoned the core principle that it has a duty to assist working people in acquiring the skills they need to compete in an increasingly aggressive global market place, and to foster ‘full employment’ in England; and it just let the market take over. It’s as if the people of England weren’t worth the investment and didn’t matter, only the economy. And it’s because of Labour’s comprehensive sell out to market economics that it has encouraged the unprecedented levels of immigration we have experienced, deliberately to foster a low-wage economy; and, accordingly, a staggering nine-tenths of the new jobs created under the Labour government have gone to workers from overseas. Is it any wonder, then, that there is such widespread concern – whether well founded or not in individual cases – among traditional Labour voters in England about immigration, and about newcomers taking the jobs and housing that they might have thought a Labour government would have striven to provide for them?

How much of the liberal establishment’s contempt and fear of English white working-class racism and anti-immigration violence is an adequate response to a genuine threat? On the contrary, to what extent has that threat and that hostility towards migrants actually been brought about and magnified by New Labour’s pre-existing contempt and inverted racism towards the white working-class people of England, and the policies (or lack of them) that flowed from those attitudes?

Has New Labour, in its darker under-belly, espoused the contempt towards the ‘lazy’, ‘loutish’, disenfranchised English working class that Margaret Thatcher made her hallmark – and mixed it up in a heady cocktail together with Celtic nationalism, and politically-correct positive economic and cultural discrimination in favour of migrants and ethnic minorities?

One thing is for sure, though: English nationalism properly understood – as a movement that strives to redress the democratic and social inequalities of the devolution settlement out of a concern for all of the people residing and trying to earn a living in England – is far less likely to foster violence against innocent Romanian families than is the ‘British nationalism’ of the BNP or the various nationalisms of the other UK nations that have seen far lower levels of immigration than England.

But is there a place not just for English nationalism but for England itself in a British state and establishment that are so prejudiced against it?

Lies, damn lies and censuses: nationality, national identity and ethnicity in the proposed 2011 UK censuses

It’s been said before, but I’ll say it again: there are lies, damn lies and statistics. And the 2011 census belongs, clearly, in the latter category. Or the 2011 censuses, rather; because, in the wake of devolution, there are now three censuses for the UK – or four, if you include the superficial differences, mostly relating to the sequence of the questions, between the forms that will be sent out to households in England and Wales.

The questions about ‘national identity’ and ‘ethnic group’ in the proposed forms for England & Wales and Scotland respectively neatly illustrate how the way you gather statistics can pre-determine the answer you want, in the service of a political agenda; whether that agenda is to reinforce the cohesiveness of a British ‘national identity’ or to insidiously drive a wedge between the different national identities of the UK by defining them in ethnic terms.

First, the form for England and Wales. As reported by Toque, the 2011 census will ask people the following question about their ‘national identity’:

So far so good: very good, in fact. In contrast to the 2001 census, there are at least separate ‘English’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Scottish’ and ‘Northern Irish’ tick boxes; and they’re not indented underneath the ‘British’ category (making ‘British’ the implied primary national identity for all UK citizens), as they were in an earlier proposal for the ethnic categories in the census (see my previous discussion). And you can also pick more than one of these national identities, if you so wish; e.g. English and British, Scottish and British, etc. However, Cornish nationalists will understandably decry the absence of a ‘Cornish’ check box. And there’s also still a big problem with this ‘national identity’ list when set against the ‘ethnic group’ question:

It’s undoubtedly a good thing that people aren’t asked to differentiate in ethnic terms between Englishness, Scottishness, Welshness, Northern Irishness and Britishness: there’s a single ‘white’ category for all white persons who have selected one or more of these terms as their national identity (-ies). However, this implicitly sets up a ‘white-British’ ethnic group (like the one used in the 2001 census), as all of these five ‘national identities’ are basically those of Britain / the UK. This white-British ethnicity is differentiated in the ethnic-group question from ‘white Irish’; in contrast to the 2001 form, which defined a single ‘white Irish’ ethnicity that could include people with political loyalties or affiliations to either Northern Ireland or the Republic. In other words, the form is making an ethnic distinction purely on the basis of a political division: between Britain / the UK (including Northern Ireland) and the Republic of Ireland.

This definition of ethnic categories along the lines of state frontiers is completely inappropriate and unacceptable, politically and methodologically. In actual fact, this introduces into the census a third, unspoken type of ethnic / national categorisation – nationality – that is subtly different from ‘national identity’ but will inevitably skew the way respondents describe their national identity. White-British people are being forced by the form to define their ethnicity in relation to this third type of identity (nationality), i.e. their status as British citizens. If the form succeeds in getting English people to accept a definition of their ethnicity that is based on their nationality (i.e. ‘white-British’), then those same people are far more likely to tick the ‘British’ check box in the question on ‘national identity’ (No. 15 above), whether in addition to or instead of ‘English’.

In this way, the census manipulates the power of ethnic identity to reinforce a political identity: Britishness. In relation to all the ‘non-white-British’ ethnic categories, it also effectively biases people in favour of choosing ‘British’ as their ‘national identity’ by again using the political category ‘British’ as an ethnic identifier (e.g. in the top-level categories ‘Asian British’ and ‘Black British’). If, on the other hand, the terms ‘Asian English’ and ‘Black English’ were used alongside ‘Asian British’ and ‘Black British’, respondents selecting those ethnic groups would be far more likely to select ‘English’ as their national identities in addition to or instead of British. But if their very ethnicity is defined in relation to Britishness, this subliminally induces them to also pick an exclusively British national identity.

In the proposed Scottish census, by contrast, ethnically Asian and Black persons are allowed to view themselves ethnically as Scottish; i.e. the terms corresponding to the ethnic-group categories C and D in the England & Wales form shown above are ‘Asian, Asian Scottish or Asian British’ and ‘African, Caribbean or Black’ – a heading that includes the sub-categories ‘African Scottish’, ‘Caribbean Scottish’ and ‘Black Scottish’ alongside ‘African British’, ‘Caribbean British’ and ‘Black British’. This is of course designed to produce the same effect as would the inclusion of the categories of ‘Asian English’ and ‘African English’ in the English census (or ‘Asian Welsh’ and ‘African Welsh’ in Wales): it encourages people of those ethnicities to indicate ‘Scottish’ as one of their ‘national identities’ or even their only one, especially as the ‘ethnic’ designator ‘Scottish’ precedes that of ‘British’ in each of these ethnic-group categories.

To this extent, the Scottish form works in a similar way to the English & Welsh one, although to politically diametrically opposed ends: it encourages people to identify ethnically as Scottish so that they will also select ‘Scottish’ as their national identity, and perhaps their exclusive one. However, the Scottish census exploits ethnic identification in an even more pernicious way still. In contrast to the England & Wales form, the Scottish questionnaire explicitly separates out the terms ‘Scottish’, ‘English’, ‘Welsh’, ‘Northern Irish’ and ‘British’ as distinct ethnic categories, albeit only when identified with the white ethnic group, as illustrated below:

There are many things that could be said about these categories; but the most important point is the utterly insidious way that these ethnic categories are intended to influence the way people will fill in the checkboxes relating to ‘national identity’ (see below). If respondents are forced to define themselves ethnically as either Scottish, English, Welsh, Northern Irish or British (when these are political and cultural identities, not ethnic), then this will inevitably induce more of those that choose ‘Scottish’ to select only ‘Scottish’ as their national identity, and not Scottish and British. Here is the bit of the form relating to national identity:

Note the quite astonishing omission of ‘Welsh’, ‘Northern Irish’ and even ‘Irish’ as options for national identity, whereas these terms are options for ethnicity, a discrepancy that was reported on with some bemusement in Wednesday’s Wales Online. This seems to me to be a complete reversal of the correct way of looking at things: Welsh and (Northern) Irish, and Scottish and English for that matter, are properly to be seen as national and cultural identities, not ethnic ones.

What on earth is going on here? My interpretation is that the form is trying to foster an ‘ethnic-Scottish’ identity as the ‘primary’ national identity of Scottish people: one that takes precedence, precisely, over their British nationality. As people work their way through the form, they may well tick both ‘Scottish’ and ‘British’ in question No. 14 above on national identity. Then, when they come to question 15 on ethnic group, they are forced to choose between Scottishness and Britishness, purely on supposedly ethnic grounds. Scottish people going through this process will then think to themselves: ‘well, am I more Scottish or more British in terms of my genealogy and family affiliations’, which is how people think of their ethnicity. And, of course, they’re much more likely to answer ‘Scottish’ if they’ve got Scottish family roots and have lived in Scotland all their lives; whereas ‘British’ is a merely political affiliation: nationality as opposed to this faux ethnicity. So, once they’ve decided to describe themselves officially as of Scottish ethnicity, then they are a) much more likely to go back and cross out ‘British’ as one of their national identities (or not select it at all if they fill in question 15 before question 14); and b) more importantly, they may henceforth come to see their national identity as Scottish in the first instance, as the form invites them to see this concept in relation to a spurious Scottish ethnicity rather than their British nationality.

So whereas the England & Wales form defines ethnicity along the lines of nationality to reinforce an acceptance of a British national identity on the part of English people, the Scottish form defines national identity along the lines of a concocted Scottish ethnicity in order to undermine Scottish people’s identification with their British nationality.

It’s hard to say which is worse. If anything, I think it’s the Scottish one, which uses a totally unjustifiable division of the UK along dubious ethnic lines in the service of a nationalist agenda. This is the kind of ethnic nationalism that undermines the cause of civic and multi-ethnic nationalism. But both approaches will inevitably generate misleading results designed to support the national-identity politics of the UK and Scottish governments respectively.

As I said: there are lies, damn Scottish lies and UK censuses.