Debbie Purdy: No unintended consequences from assisted suicide, please; we’re British

I’ve just lost most of the sympathy I had for Debbie Purdy, the multiple sclerosis sufferer who yesterday won a landmark ruling in the House of Lords meaning that the Director of Public Prosecutions must now clarify the basis on which people who assist chronically sick people in taking their own lives will be prosecuted under English and Welsh law.

Asked in a BBC Radio Four Today programme interview this morning whether she thought a change in the law ‘in Britain’ in favour of assisted suicide in cases such as hers would lead to situations where elderly and sick people are bullied into taking their own lives in order not to be a burden on others, or where there is a financial interest on the part of those helping them to die, Ms Purdy dismissed this possibility out of hand by saying – and I paraphrase – that she didn’t think ‘British people’ today would behave in such a manner.

Oh, wake up, Ms Purdy! Of course, people will do such things if they think they can get away with it. That’s just human nature, and the ‘British’ are no better, morally, than anyone else. While I have sympathy for people suffering from chronic or terminal diseases who can’t think of any way they can die with dignity other than taking their own lives, this casual dismissal of the unintended consequences that will surely flow from liberalising the law on assisted suicide exemplifies the selfishness and moral self-righteousness of those who argue for the right for what used to be known as euthanasia: ‘our despair and right to get other people to kill us is morally more important than the unfortunate consequence that others will take their lives or be killed when they didn’t really want to, or when other options for their care could otherwise have been found’.

On top of which, Ms Purdy and the Radio Four interviewer talked continually of the legal situation in ‘Britain’ and didn’t once mention that the change in the law that might follow from yesterday’s ruling would affect England and Wales only, not ‘Britain’. The phrase ‘this country’ also passed the lips of both Ms Purdy and the interviewer to further obfuscate which country they were talking about. I suppose whether the change in the law relates to England and Wales only or Britain as a whole doesn’t affect the ethical issue; but when Ms Purdy appealed to the decency of ‘British’ people as part of her bland dismissal of the claim that people will take advantage of legalised assisted suicide to accelerate the demise of those who wish to die naturally, then I’m afraid she lost me completely. If the woman wants to change the law, then at least she could have the decency to know which country’s law she is changing.

No doubt, though, if this legal change does pass through Parliament – which Ms Purdy suggested she would like to happen – then Scottish and Northern Irish MPs will help vote it through even though none of their sick and elderly constituents will meet an untimely death as a consequence. Whereas, of course, it’s up to MSPs to change the law in Scotland; and, indeed, the MSP Margo MacDonald has been proposing a similar change there. But at least, if assisted suicide is legalised in Scotland, it will be Scottish elected representatives only who are responsible.

But then again, sick and dying English and Welsh patients are British, really, aren’t we? We’re decent people and won’t want to be a burden on our relatively underfunded NHS, compared with Scotland and Northern Ireland, that is; or on our families that might otherwise have to pay for a protracted period of social care, unlike in Scotland where it’s free. So my advice is: do the decent thing; lie back, take the lethal injection and think of the Empire.

Have we learnt the lesson of Harry Patch?

After the death of Harry Patch – Britain’s last living World War I veteran – on Friday, Gordon Brown lost no time in coming forward to suggest that the country should hold a memorial service to honour the ‘sacrifices’ that Harry Patch and his generation had made to safeguard Britain’s freedoms. It would seem churlish, if not downright disrespectful, to object to this proposal. But are we sure that this is something that Harry Patch himself would have wanted? In my own mind, I’m convinced he would not have wanted to be ‘remembered’ in this way. Here’s why.

To keep the record straight, I have nothing but the greatest admiration for Harry Patch and all those who suffered and died amid the horrors of trench warfare in the war to end all wars. Similarly, the stories of those young men and women who were so brave in fighting Hitler in the Second World War – and, indeed, the struggles of the whole British population at that time – often reduce me to tears. Therefore, I do think it is right and proper to remember what Harry Patch’s generation went through in our name, to give thanks and pray for them.

The problem is, were their sufferings a ‘sacrifice’ as such and, if so, for whose sake and to what end? Calling soldiers’ deaths in war a ‘sacrifice’ is a way of justifying the fighting by saying that the deaths in question are ‘worth it’: a willing gift of their own lives for the sake of the higher purpose the war is said to be serving. But were the deaths of all those millions of WW1 conscripts on all sides – British, French, German, etc. – really worth it? What purpose was ultimately served by them? And was the aim of repulsing the German invasion of Belgium and France really a sufficiently just cause to throw so many fine young men to the slaughter?

Harry Patch categorically thought it was not. In one of the TV interviews they showed at the weekend, Patch was asked whether he thought the deaths of his comrades were worth it, and he said they were not. Nor did he think the loss of young British men in today’s wars was worth it. He called war ‘organised murder’ and said that it had proved impossible for him to convey the full horrors of his wartime experiences to people today, who were just not capable of understanding. And he refused to attend the Act of Remembrance celebration, which he termed “just show business”.

Well, it seems that just such an act of remembrance is now going to be organised supposedly to honour the ‘sacrifice’ made by Patch and his generation, with Patch even being held up by some as an “exemplar of a generation that sacrificed itself for the sake of the freedoms we enjoy today” [see above link]. That is precisely what Harry Patch is not and what he would have hated to see himself characterised as. For him, it was not a sacrifice but a meaningless, terrible slaughter. That is how Harry Patch remembered it. But it seems that, as soon as his authentic memory of World War I has been extinguished, we are intent on ‘remembering’ it as something it was not. We have already forgotten. Perhaps we feel it would have been indecent to ‘celebrate’ what the ‘lost generation’ went through while some of its representatives were still alive and could have stood up to accuse us of falsifying the past.

And it’s not only the past that we traduce in this way but also the present. Our celebration of the sacrifice of past generations is also a means to remember and affirm the ‘sacrifices’ being made by British forces today in Afghanistan. No doubt, in the memorial service for the WW1 generation, fine words will also be uttered about today’s wars and the willingness of a new generation of brave young men to lay down their lives for our freedoms. The lustre of the lost generation, now that the sordid reality is past, will be used to once again justify our fighting in foreign fields and to proclaim that the accelerating pace of lost British lives in Afghanistan is ‘worth it’.

But is it? Harry Patch didn’t think so. Is the avowed purpose of the British presence in Afghanistan – to prevent Al Qaeda from being able to mount terrorist attacks against the UK and her allies – really best served by allowing the military conflict there to continue escalating with no obvious end in sight and with growing loss of life (military and civilian) on all sides? And when the conflict does come to an end, under whatever circumstances, will we feel that Afghanistan has been another of ‘our finest hours’; or will we rather just wonder why we ever went there?

Harry Patch’s experience was that of the sheer futility and mindlessness of war, and of the needless destruction of human life it brings. Ultimately, for him, nothing could make this ‘worth it’. Not even the loss of a single life was worth it, he also said. While we may not all follow such insights to their logical conclusion of total pacifism, they do at least stand as a testimony to the truth that war is so terrible, and yet so avoidable, that we should seek to avoid it at all costs and search for any alternative that we possibly can.

The fact that World War I was not ultimately the war to end all wars is the proof that we have not learnt this lesson.

Rest in peace, Harry Patch. We will remember you.

Swine flu: the scourge for our times

Though a Christian, I’m not a subscriber to the view that new diseases, when they first make an appearance on the world stage, are scourges sent by the Almighty as a punishment for our manifold sins. Disease affects the ‘innocent’ just as much as the ‘guilty’; and it would be crass to think, as some defenders and detractors of Christianity alike appear to, that the Christian view is that all suffering represents some sort of direct chastisement for one’s personal sins – even though it may be regarded as something that can be a means to help free the individual from sin. But then that’s a very complex, theological discussion, for another time . . ..

But there does sometimes seem to be what could be called a ‘symbolic appropriateness’ to certain diseases, in some of their aspects. AIDS struck both the sexually promiscuous in the West, and innocent haemophiliacs and large swathes of impoverished Africa, at the end of two decades of ‘sexual liberation’ that had wrecked the previous Christian moral consensus on sexuality and the family. So it was ‘tempting’, but simplistic, to see this as God’s answer: ‘the best way to avoid STDs is lifelong monogamy’, i.e. to adhere to the teaching of Christianity and other faiths on sexual morality and the role of marriage.

Similarly, with swine flu, this struck at just the point where people in Britain were outraged at the way their political leaders had had their ‘snouts in the trough’: claiming for inappropriate ‘expenses’ worth tens of thousands of taxpayers’ pounds in some instances. Well, if we eat at the pigs’ table, no wonder when we catch a cold off them!

Of course, it’s not just the politicians that have been acting like greedy pigs. Swine flu comes in the wake of the credit crunch, brought about by the reckless actions of unregulated bankers driven by the prospect of obscene bonuses. As swine flu looked to be spreading through the UK in an exponential manner over the last few weeks, so more and more parts of what is referred to as ‘public life’ were also being revealed as having been infected with the virus of the ‘bonus bingeing culture’ (BBC): snuffling one’s way to fortune through dubious expenses and ‘performance incentives’ on top of already generous salary awards.

So in this context, it’s ironically ‘appropriate’ that Britain has been particularly severely affected by swine flu: the ‘scourge’ for our previous, and continuing, lust for money? Except, of course, that it’s the innocent children, elderly and sick that are ‘paying the price’ in the case of swine flu – just as it’s the ordinary hard-working wage earners, mortgage payers and voters that are literally paying the price for the bankers’ and politicians’ greed and incompetence.

And perhaps this greed and incompetence are the ‘real’ reasons why swine flu has spread so uncontrollably throughout the UK; that is, maybe the greed and incompetence have had tangible, practical consequences that have assisted the transmission of the virus. Everyone keeps on congratulating the government on how well it’s been handling swine flu. For example, even on BBC Radio Four’s Any Questions on Friday, one of the opposition spokesmen said he thought the government had dealt with the crisis commendably. Swine flu, it seems, is off limits for regular party politics, and nobody seems to be asking why. Should we not be as suspicious of politicians’ motives in this regard as we are in other matters?

‘Handling’ swine flu is precisely what they’re doing. The response to the whole epidemic is being ‘managed’ by a shadowy Whitehall body called the Civil Contingencies Committee, as my previous post reported. This body not only co-ordinates the whole response to the epidemic at a ‘national’, i.e. UK-wide, level; but it also manages ‘communications’ regarding the disease – i.e. it manages the news output on the topic. This latter observation accounts for the fact that after every report on TV and radio on the latest unfortunate deaths from swine flu, they’ve been continually repeating the official observation that ‘all the victims to date have had underlying serious medical conditions’. If necessary, a medical expert or even the Chief Medical Officer for England (and, doubtless, in ‘regional’ output in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, this will be their equivalents to the CMO) pop up with bland reassurances to the effect that this is no more severe an outbreak of flu than regular seasonal flu (except it’s out of season) and people should not be alarmed, just follow the advice that’s been given out, contact the helpline to apply for Tamiflu (is the helpline up and running now? it wasn’t for ages), etc, etc.

Wet blanket, wet blanket: no criticism, no scrutiny of the actions of the ‘authorities’ permitted, in the interests of not spreading panic just as fast as the virus itself is spreading. Do we know whether in fact it’s true that all / most of the victims so far had ‘serious’ underlying conditions? And what qualifies as a serious condition? A good friend of mine’s got diabetes, and we’ve both just had severe, unseasonal ‘colds’. Have we just in fact had swine flu without realising it (there’s a lot of it about in the local area)? She went to the GP but I didn’t bother. She wasn’t given Tamiflu, despite the fact that people with diabetes are on the ‘at risk’ list, although she was prescribed antibiotics. Despite this, if she had unfortunately succumbed to swine flu – if that’s what it was – would her death have been explained away as being due to her having a ‘serious underlying condition’ – diabetes – alongside swine flu?

The point is, I don’t feel the epidemic is being handled well or consistently, despite – or perhaps because of – the vast propaganda machinery that’s being mobilised to reassure ‘the public’. I don’t generally go in for conspiracy theories; but if it would be wrong to call the present unwillingness of opposition politicians to call the government to account for their response to swine flu a ‘conspiracy of silence’, then it does at least appear to be a concerted, organised silence. Organised by the Civil Contingencies Committee, no doubt: the “Government’s dedicated crisis management mechanism”, as the official document puts it – a body that would step in to run the shop in the event of war or a devastating terrorist attack – has obviously sat all the party leaders down in a darkened room and reached a gentleman’s agreement with them along the following lines, as I imagine the scene: “Now, look here, chaps; we’re facing a pretty serious crisis here that could have devastating consequences for all of us, if you see what I mean. Now we don’t want to be seen to be spreading panic among the public or to let the tabloids get hold of this thing, do we (well, we’ll take care of the popular press, don’t you worry)? Let’s all pull together on this one, shall we? We’ve got a well organised contingency plan, everything’s in place to deal with the situation as best as possible, and even those johnnies from the devolved administrations are on message. So let’s not rock the boat, shall we, and we’ll keep you informed about what’s happening from day to day. OK?”

Joking aside, everybody is on message, and that’s what’s so disconcerting because it’s so exceptional. The government has clearly decided that this is a ‘national crisis’, as they’ve activated the official crisis-management mechanism. And that involves deliberately shutting down media and political scrutiny of how things are progressing, precisely in order to reassure the public, supposedly.

But if it really is a national crisis, wouldn’t it have been far more effective in combating the disease – let alone far more honest – to have acknowledged this fact up front right from the start of the outbreak? But then think what could have happened: normal life, i.e. ‘business as normal’, might have had to be shut down. No international travel, either out of or into the UK. Serious restrictions placed on people ‘suspected’ of having come down with the virus and on those with whom they’d come into contact. Whole businesses, organisations, schools and vital infrastructure could have been paralysed. Think of the impact on the economy, stupid! Only the other day, they were discussing projections of what could happen – in the future – if swine flu continued to spiral out of control: a potential loss of 5% of GDP! Well, such a loss would have been virtually inevitable if the kind of radical measures I’ve just suggested had been taken at the start of the outbreak with the aim of trying to prevent swine flu from spreading among the general population. Better to just underplay it; not impose strict quarantine measures; and hope we can ‘contain’ the virus’s spread and that it won’t be too virulent. And yet, as a consequence, it appears to have got completely out of control and we may yet face those economic consequences anyway!

But even now, the politicians don’t want any whistleblowers going about accusing the government of incompetence in its handling of the crisis and asking it to come clean about the extent of the epidemic and its likely effect on the economy. Why? Firstly, because their own role in sitting back and letting the Civil Contingencies Committee take charge, and in downplaying the disease so as not to damage the economy, will be exposed. There’s a general election coming along, you know. Secondly, they don’t want even more harm to be done to those fragile green shoots of economic recovery by people making out that swine flu is some great national crisis and serious threat to public health, despite the fact that that’s precisely what the government thinks it is.

After all, this is the summer tourist season, and tourism is one of Britain’s biggest industries. We don’t want people from other countries thinking it’s unsafe to come into Britain now, do we? So what if they do contract the disease here; at least, we won’t have to deal with the consequences! And does anybody know – and have the media investigated – how seriously the tourist industry has been affected by foreign nationals’ fear of coming into Britain and catching swine flu? A search for ‘swine flu’ in the ‘Enjoy England‘ website (“The official website for breaks and days out in England”) yielded the response: “Unfortunately we are unable to complete your request at this time”. A general web search on ‘impact of swine flu on British tourism’ yielded little of relevance to the question of how swine flu was affecting levels of visits to Britain by foreign nationals; although the Daily Telegraph have a dedicated page that today carried reports on restrictions being placed on British nationals who are thought to have swine flu travelling abroad.

The website of English UK – an umbrella organisation for the ‘TEFL’ (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) industry in the UK – reported three days ago that it was ‘business as usual for UK ELT industry’: “At present, the virus is no more dangerous than a typical seasonal flu and the UK is well-prepared for such an outbreak.  English Language Teaching (ELT) providers are operating as normal”. However, the organisation and its members are participating in a survey being carried out by a quango known as TIER (Tourism Industry Emergency Reaction Group) (!) monitoring the impact of swine flu on UK tourism. It turns out that submissions can be made to this survey until 26 July, and presumably, they won’t issue their report till some time later. Bit too late to do anything to prevent innocent visitors to the UK from taking swine flu back to their own countries, or worse. But, as they say, it’s ‘business as usual’.

So swine flu may not have been inflicted on the UK as a divine chastisement for the corruption and greed of our national institutions, politicians and bankers; but its rapid spread certainly has been encouraged by the unwillingness of the said institutions, politicians and bankers to disrupt their precious cash cow known as the UK economy. And don’t expect them to be too open and transparent any time soon about their role in downplaying the disease and acquiescing at half-hearted containment measures in the hope that the economic and political damage could be limited. Just as well that swine flu has turned out to be relatively ‘mild’, at least ‘at present’, as the English UK website puts it. Just imagine the carnage if it had turned out to be as lethal as they were fearing bird flu might be a couple of years ago! And, of course, swine flu could still turn nasty in that way, and we don’t know how it will mutate over the autumn and winter, and over the coming years. Next time we might not be so lucky; but can we have confidence that the initial response by the ‘authorities’ will be any different?

There is one thing we can do about it. After all, we’re not obliged to let the pigs eat at our table; and, at the next election, we get the chance to boot them out of the door.

Government response to swine flu: over-complicated by devolution?

In media coverage yesterday of the change in the official response to swine flu from ‘containment’ to ‘treatment’, I was struck by the usual ambiguity as to whether the information provided related to England only or the whole of the UK. For instance, in the BBC News website’s report, it stated: “Andy Burnham, the health secretary in England, said: ‘The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August'”. Pleasing that the BBC correctly characterises Andy Burnham as the English health secretary; but then, is the “national focus” one for England only or for the whole of the UK? Probably the latter, as the 100,000 cases per day figure was being talked of as the UK-wide total. But all the same, this got me wondering: how is the response to swine flu being co-ordinated – if at all – between the UK government and the devolved administrations, with their separate responsibilities for health care? And is the apparent failure of the containment strategy in part a consequence of different approaches having been adopted in the different UK nations?

Unlike the radio and TV coverage, the BBC website article did report that, “Scottish Health Secretary Nicola Sturgeon announced similar changes to the flu strategy at a simultaneous briefing in Edinburgh”. So it appeared that there is a single UK-wide strategy and a co-ordinated response across the different health departments. This was even more apparent when I visited the Department of Health [England]‘s and the Scottish Government‘s websites and read their remarkably similar statements on the change in tactics.

After much further investigation, it turns out that the Department of Health [England] has retained the responsibility for drawing up the overall UK strategy for dealing with flu pandemics, along with the lead role in co-ordinating the operational response to any actual outbreak; although the devolved administrations are supposed to put in place their own NHS and civil-contingency systems and resources for responding to any crisis – in line with the UK plan.

As the government’s national framework document puts it: “A ministerial committee (MISC 32), comprising ministers from across central government departments and the devolved administrations, oversees and coordinates national preparations for an influenza pandemic”. Then, in the event of the World Health Organisation declaring that a pandemic has reached phase 4 or higher (currently, we’re on phase 6 for swine flu), the following happens: “the Government’s dedicated crisis management mechanism – the Civil Contingencies Committee (CCC) – [is] activated in support of the Department of Health. The CCC will direct central government activities, coordinate the wider response, make key strategic and tactical decisions on the countermeasures required and determine national priorities. The CCC will be guided by input from central departments and agencies and from local responders through Regional [English] Civil Contingencies Committees (RCCCs) and the devolved administrations. It will work with the national News Coordination Centre to maintain public confidence [i.e. manage the news]”.

So we’re currently in a situation where a nebulous Civil Contingencies Committee is co-ordinating the response UK-wide, in keeping with a pre-established plan, and managing the news in such a way as to maintain morale. No wonder that the English-UK and devolved health departments appeared yesterday to be singing perfectly from the same hymn sheet in their media pronouncements in a display of quite exceptional synchronisation and unity! And that, despite the imminent prospect of 100,000 new cases of swine flu per week, we’re being blandly reassured that we’re now moving in a controlled, pre-planned way from containment to ‘treatment’ – implying that it can be successfully ‘treated’ in the vast majority of cases; whereas, in reality, we’re all just desperately praying that it doesn’t suddenly become much more virulent or resistant to Tamiflu.

But, as I said above, one can’t help wondering whether the failure of the containment approach (surely, prevention is better than cure?) is partly the result of the wheels of co-ordination between the UK central government and the devolved administrations not running as smoothly as yesterday’s united front would have us believe. If you read the national framework document, the sheer number of organisations – international, national-UK, ‘regional’ (English), devolved and local – that are involved in formulating strategies and co-ordinating the response is mind-boggling. Amid this already hugely complicated landscape the fact that the NHS and civil-contingency measures are replicated with slight variations in each of the devolved nations and the ‘English regions’ surely cannot help to streamline processes and ensure that everybody knows what everybody else in the chain of command is supposed to be doing.

Take a look at the section that deals with the different organisational elements involved in each of the devolved administrations (pages 49 to 52). This is a masterpiece of bureacracy-speak, and of bureacracy full stop, with departments, committees, sub-committees, groups, sub-groups, directors, trusts, agencies, directorates, etc. etc. all having a role to play. I can’t prove that having these complicated and distinct organisational schemes in each of the devolved countries has contributed to the ineffectiveness of the containment measures; but they surely cannot help. And it is the case that Scotland is one of the ‘hotspots’ of the disease, in part – allegedly – because no Scottish-Government advice for people to stop travelling to Mexico was given out in the early stages of the outbreak.

But, for the time being, we are supposed to be resting assured that all the UK health departments are acting perfectly in concert according to a well-structured plan. But the only reason they’re able to both act in this way, and be on message to such an extent, is that their actions are being centrally directed by a shadowy Whitehall committee, which is also driving the media communications in such a way as to reassure the populace that ‘the government’ has everything under control.

And one of the principal, and well-tried, weapons of media misinformation at the fingertips of the national ‘News Coordination Centre’ is to imply – to gullible people in England, at least – that everything forms part of a homogeneous UK-wide health-care and emergency-response system. Well, the plan may be UK-wide – and the operational direction currently is, too, now we’re in an advanced phase of the pandemic – but the delivery certainly is not.

Gordon Brown makes the case for an English parliament

In what is, on one level, an astonishingly insulting and complacent article in the Daily Record yesterday, commemorating the tenth anniversary of Scottish devolution, our hapless unelected First Minister unwittingly demonstrates the case for an English parliament. He achieves this feat not only by extolling, as successes of the Scottish parliament, the very things that most embitter the English about their democratic deficit and fiscal inequality compared with the Scots (“free personal care for the elderly, tuition fees, free travel for the elderly and prescription charges”) but by advancing arguments in favour of the Scottish parliament that undermine the very integrity of the Union and can logically be applied to England in just the same way as to Scotland.

For a start, though, the above list of benefits that devolution has secured for Scotland really is rubbing English noses in it – does he not realise that these are the very stuff of English grievances about the Barnett Formula and the lack of an English government accountable to the English people? If he does realise this, then this can only be described as indulging in Anglophobic schadenfreude. Brown has the gall to imply that the absence of such benefits in England reflects a different political culture and national priorities: he calls these policies “Scottish solutions to Scottish issues”, as if they weren’t issues in England and the different policies that apply to England were somehow the expression of England’s democratic choices – whereas we know that top-up fees for English students in particular were passed into law only with the support of Scottish MPs whose constituents are not affected by them.

This law, and the equally unjust fact that elderly persons in England have to meet the cost of their personal care, which is provided free of charge in Scotland (only yesterday the government was proposing a new system where English people only will have to pay into an insurance scheme – effectively, a top-up tax – or else pay a lump sum on retirement to cover the costs of their care in old age), are perfect examples of the kind of “unpopular decisions [that] were made on health, education and policing”, which Brown brings forward as justification for a Scottish parliament.

Well, just because a government’s policies are unpopular, that doesn’t make them illegitimate if the government is properly democratic and accountable. But Brown implies that the policies for Scotland of successive Westminster governments were insufficiently democratic and responsive to the wishes of the Scottish people, and that they were not only bad policies but bad government: “people now often forget . . . how poorly Scotland had been dealt with in the past. People rightly felt frustrated in recent decades as unpopular decisions were made on health, education and policing. Scotland could be governed better. People deserved better”. Well, if this is the case for Scotland, then it is equally valid for England: New Labour’s policies for England only on health, education and policing are not only unpopular with the people they affect but are an instance of deficiently democratic, unaccountable government, with decisions being made for England by Westminster politicians that are not answerable to the English people.

In fact, the situation now is even more unjust than that which applied to the Scots before devolution. At least then, the legislative activity of non-Scottish MPs affecting Scotland was democratically legitimate, as Britain was a fully unitary state at that time; so there was in principle no distinction between Scottish and non-Scottish MPs, as there was just one national government accountable to all the people in the Kingdom. Ironically, though, the fact that Brown singles out these policy areas is indicative of the fact that, in his thinking, Scotland was not an integral part of a unitary kingdom even before devolution.

Ever since the Acts of Union in 1707, Scotland has maintained distinct policies and systems in education and justice; or rather, the Union state has seen fit to allow Scotland to hold on to its different approaches and traditions in these areas. And this in essence is why Brown views the pre-devolution settlement as unfair to Scotland: the differences between Scotland and England in these regards, and with respect to the Kirk (an aspect of Scottish culture that is highly familiar to Brown), are seen as constitutive of a Scottish national identity that is distinct from that of ‘mainstream Britain’ (aka England). Consequently, the Scottish parliament, when it started its work in 1999, was truly Scotland’s ‘own’ parliament precisely because it handed back to the Scots the responsibility for legislating about those aspects of Scottish life that had always remained distinctive and defining of Scottish identity. So it wasn’t so much that devolution opened up a breach in the unitary British state but rather it acknowledged the pre-existing fact of the difference between Scotland and Britain. As Brown says: “For the first time in 300 years, Scotland once again had its own parliament”.

Well, I’m sorry, no: for 300 years (i.e. ever since the Acts of Union), Scotland did have its own parliament – the Union Parliament. If Scotland and England are parts of a genuine Union – two nations merging into one state – then the parliament for that state is the only legitimate parliament for each of those nations. You can’t have it both ways: either Scotland, before devolution, was part of an integral Union, so that devolution brought about something fundamentally new (a distinct Scottish-national polity); or it was never truly integrated into the United Kingdom state, so that Holyrood was in fact the restoration of something that had been lost for 300 years: a properly Scottish parliament. This is clearly how Brown sees it. But if this is the case, it undermines the legitimacy of the Westminster parliament to act as a parliament for England and, indeed, it undermines the foundations of the Union itself. If the Union Parliament’s jurisdiction in properly Scottish domestic matters has never been legitimate – if it has never been ‘Scotland’s own parliament’ – then how can we accept its legitimacy in English domestic policy and legislation? But, more fundamentally, the assertion of a distinct Scottish polity that is said to have continued in a suppressed form throughout the duration of the Union implies that the Union has never been authentic or complete: not the two nations merging to form one but remaining two separate entities merely governed through a common system that did not really belong to either of them – a common-law (indeed, Commons-law) partnership and marriage of convenience, rather than a true marriage of equals on the basis of which there is no longer any distinction between the spouses, who hold everything in common after they are married.

Either that, or the model is that the Westminster parliament – despite being avowedly the parliament for a unitary state – remained fundamentally the English parliament it had historically been, to which Scotland was effectively subordinated through the Union: a situation that the present Scottish parliament remedied. This indeed seems to be the model that Brown adopts with all of his talk about “how poorly Scotland had been dealt with in the past”: as if Scotland were something that the Westminster parliament merely ‘dealt with’ as an object of policy, rather than being a nation that governed its own affairs through the parliament of a Union of which it was an integral part. This model undermines the assumptions of the Union just as much as the idea of Scotland and England remaining separate entities while governed by a common system: in this instance, the Union is merely the political instrument of an English nation that ruled Scotland essentially in its own interests; as opposed to a common structure of government that belonged to neither of the distinct nations.

Well, if the Westminster parliament has always in essence remained the English parliament, let it become an authentic English parliament once more, just as Holyrood, in Brown’s view, is an authentic Scottish parliament: English-elected MPs only making the laws that apply to England; rather than England being ruled, as now, in the interests of the ‘Union’ (i.e. of the devolved nations) by a parliament that is not accountable to the English people. This is a direct reversal of the historical situation that Brown adduces as the justification for creating the present Scottish parliament: a Union parliament (effectively, the proxy of England) ruling Scotland undemocratically in a way that placed the needs of the ‘Union’ above the wishes of the people of Scotland.

But, in such a restored English parliament, there would be no place for unelected (non-English-elected) prime ministers such as Gordon Brown: there would be no opportunity for gravy train-riding Scottish politicians to have their Westminster cake and eat devolved government or, as I would put it, have their own Scottish cake and eat England’s, too. The way Brown puts it, in his article, is: “devolution gives Scotland the best of both worlds”. Well, yes. That statement comes after Brown has reeled off a list of ways in which the fact of being part of a ‘Union’ works to the advantage of Scotland (and very often to the corresponding disadvantage of England), such as: the bail-out of “Scotland’s two main banks” (I thought they were financial institutions vital for the British economy), which “saved thousands of Scottish jobs and protected Scots’ hard-earned savings” (what about the HBOS jobs in Halifax? Well, you see, as the Scots are so hard-working and thrifty, they deserved it more than us spendthrift English); and preferential treatment of Scottish shipyards in defence contracts building two “state-of-the-art aircraft carriers” whose actual benefit for the Armed Forces, in terms of providing capabilities that are needed (as opposed to offering subsidies to Scottish industry), is highly questionable.

And that’s to say nothing of “the [Scottish] parliament’s £35billion annual budget” that enables Scottish people – good luck to them – to enjoy 20% higher levels of per-capita public expenditure than the English: those free university and personal-care places being subsidised by the lack of them in England. No wonder that Brown affirms, towards the end of this homily to Scottish self-interest, that “I’m proud that this Government [i.e. the UK government] has never stopped focusing on delivering for the Scottish people”.

Well, perhaps it’s time we had an English government that would focus a bit more on delivering for the English people. And we know who wouldn’t be in charge of it.