Ward Off EVEL

Gordon Brown writes:

There is no democratic country in the world whose main lawmaking body is made up of a first and second class of elected representatives.

And there is no state in the world, federal or otherwise, in which one part of the country pays national income tax while the other part is exempt.

Yet these are the two principal constitutional proposals that have come from the Conservative party in its kneejerk response to Ukip’s English nationalism and an ill-thought-out drive to impose what is commonly called “English votes for English laws” (Evel).

Under their plans, “the mother of parliaments”, once lauded as a beacon for fairness and equality before the law, would become home to the first elected body in the world to decree one of its constituent parts – Scotland – half in, half out of its lawmaking process.

Second-class status for Welsh and Northern Irish representatives might soon follow.

But this is not simply a Westminster insiders’ issue, relevant only to the sensitivities of MPs; it is about the status of each nation in what has hitherto been one United Kingdom.

By according a first-class status to England within Westminster and a second-class status to the rest, the constitution would be changed for ever.

And the government of the day would become a servant of two masters, with its ability to govern depending one day on the votes of the whole of the UK and the next day on English votes only.

Taken alongside the Conservative proposal to devolve all income tax decisions to the Scottish parliament, Scottish MPs would find themselves excluded not just from ordinary English lawmaking but from some of the most controversial and sensitive decisions a parliament can make – on income tax and the budget.

Chaos would follow: for, once Scotland and then Wales and Ireland became exempt from contributing to UK income tax – but still benefiting from it through Barnett formula allocations – English consent for pooling and sharing across the UK would quickly dissipate.

Whether by malice or by mistake, the Conservatives would have done the Scottish nationalists’ job for them.

If you had wanted to kill off the UK, you could not have devised a more lethal way.

“A nation divided against itself cannot stand,” Lincoln famously said, quoting Mark’s Gospel. He could have added the rest of that text: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.”

The starting gun for this developing constitutional crisis was fired the morning after the Scottish independence referendum, with the prime minister’s announcement of Evel.

When carefully analysed, his was not a proposal for greater English rights but for fewer Scottish rights. 

Everything that has been said since that fateful morning has confirmed that the central Tory proposition is the reduction of Scots’ voting rights in the Commons – an issue material to the referendum that should have been announced before, rather than after, the vote.

The failure to do so has fuelled the demonstrations, petitions and allegations of betrayal, bad faith and breach of promise, which have dominated the Scottish debate ever since.

What can end this constitutional impasse?

It requires us to recognise that the fundamental problem of our UK constitution is not that English MPs can’t vote on Scottish issues – that is merely a symptom of the problem – but a basic imbalance in the size of the four nations.

England is 84% of the union, Scotland 8%, Wales 5% and Northern Ireland 3%. When translated into representation at Westminster, the 533 English MPs can, at any time they choose, easily outvote the 117 parliamentarians from the rest of the UK.

Recognising this permanent dominance in numbers, every generation has had to find a way to balance the power of the majority nation to impose its will with some protection for the minority nations.

This is not a problem unique to Britain. The US, Australia and many other countries have had to find ways of managing the gross inequalities in the size of their constituent parts.

Their constitutional protections for minorities show that a blanket uniformity of provision – such as Evel mimicking Scottish votes for Scottish laws – does not ensure fairness of treatment.

So, as the price for keeping the American union together, California accepts that it has just two members of the US Senate to represent its 38 million citizens, the same as Wyoming has to represent its 583,000 people. 

Similarly, the price New South Wales pays for Australian unity is one senator for every 580,000 people, in contrast to Tasmania’s one senator for every 40,000.

And nor is fair treatment for minorities in the Spanish senate, the Swiss council of states, the South African national council of provinces, and the Brazilian, Nigerian and Mexican senates achieved by the crude uniformity of the Evel approach, but through special arrangements that recognise minority needs in their states or provinces.

So there is a way forward that can keep the UK together, one that recognises the sizes of each nation and region and is founded on both a sensitivity to minorities and self-restraint by the majority.

It involves retaining income tax as a shared tax, and ensuring the Scottish parliament is accountable for the majority of its spending.

But it could also involve changes in Commons committee procedures that would recognise an English voice on English issues without undermining the equal status of MPs – while enthusiastically supporting more powers for Wales, Northern Ireland and forms of devolution that meet the distinctive needs of English cities, counties and regions.

No longer should we see Britain as a centralised, unitary state founded on an undiluted Westminster sovereignty, but as a diverse partnership of nations, cities and regions that pool and share risk, rewards and resources as part of one United Kingdom.

Ironically, under the logic of the Conservative proposals, London MPs could be excluded from voting on matters devolved to the London assembly. But there is a bigger truth: that the most powerful part of England – London – has secured the greatest devolution of decision-making in England.

It is time we supported greater devolution to empower England’s other great cities and regions.

By embracing every nation and region, and every interested civic group, in a 2015 constitutional convention, the voice of England would be heard – and not in angry opposition to the voices of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but alongside them.

There is no West Lothian Question. The Parliament of the United Kingdom reserves the right to legislate supremely in any policy area for any part of the country. It never need do so and the point would still stand, since what matters is purely that it has that power in principle, which no one disputes that it has.

If an English Parliament, or “English votes for English laws”, would be so popular, then put it to a referendum of the people of England. It would pass in the South East, although I only suspect that, just as I only suspect that it would pass by far less in East Anglia and perhaps also in those parts of the South West that were not too far south and west.

Whereas I know with absolute certainty, as do you, that it would not obtain one third of the vote anywhere else, that it would not manage one quarter anywhere beyond the Mersey or the Humber (or, I expect, in Devon or Cornwall, either), and that it would not scrape one fifth in the North East, or in Cumbria, or, again, in Cornwall. If anyone doubts this, then bring on that referendum.

As for Labour’s needing Scottish MPs in order to win an overall majority, certain grandees of the commentariat need to be pensioned off, or at the very least to have their copy subjected to the most basic fact-checking by editorial staff.

In 1964, fully 50 years ago, MPs from Scotland delivered a Labour overall majority of four when there would otherwise have been a Conservative overall majority of one that would not have lasted a year.

In October 1974, MPs from Scotland turned what would have been a hung Parliament with Labour as the largest party into a Labour overall majority so tiny that it was lost in the course of that Parliament.

In 2010, MPs from Scotland turned what would have been a small Conservative overall majority into a hung Parliament with the Conservatives as the largest party and with David Cameron as Prime Minister, anyway.

On no other occasion since the War, if ever, have MPs from Scotland, as such, influenced the outcome of a General Election. In any case, with the Government committed to the Barnett Formula, there cannot be any such thing as exclusively English legislation, since it all has knock-on effects in Scotland and Wales. What “English laws”?

The grievance of England, and especially of Northern and Western England, concerns cold, hard cash. What, then, of those who bellow for an English Parliament to bartenders who cannot follow everyone else and leave the room? They fall into two categories. There are the Home Counties Home Rulers. And there are those wishing to live under the Raj of the Home Counties Home Rulers.

On the one hand are those from the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire. Their definition of England is the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, or at least a certain idea of that area. Give them something for that, and they would be perfectly happy, at least until the votes started to be tallied up. Everyone gets a vote. Even the people whom they have bawled out.

On the other hand are those from everywhere else. Their definition of England is also the South East, Essex, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, or at least a certain idea of that area. Although they are often professionally “local” to elsewhere, especially in Yorkshire but also in pockets of other parts of the country, the basis of their political position has always been that they were a cut above their neighbours.

That made them Conservatives until recently, and it increasingly makes them UKIP supporters. That is who the UKIP supporters in the North and elsewhere are. They were never Labour. That is also the context for the fact that there has been a UKIP MEP in Wales for some years and that there is now a UKIP MEP in Scotland, too.

They may never have elected an MP or even a councillor in their lives, or they may live in the only ward or constituency for miles around where their votes ever elected anyone. But enough MPs were returned from elsewhere to make Margaret Thatcher Prime Minister. That suited them down to the ground.

Quite wrongly, since it would be run by Labour as often as not, they see an English Parliament in the same terms. Their more numerous and concentrated brethren elsewhere would deliver them from the rule of their neighbours. It is very funny indeed that those brethren think that they are those neighbours.

In 1993, 66 Labour MPs voted against Maastricht, far more than the number of Conservatives who did so. Yet there were far more Conservative than Labour MPs at the time. Of those 66, at least three campaigned for a Yes vote in the Scottish independence referendum, including that campaign’s chairman, Dennis Canavan.

While it is true that several of those from Wales went on to be among the strongest opponents of devolution, the 66 also included the late John McWilliam, one of the first campaigners for a North East regional assembly.

So much for the dissolution of the United Kingdom as some kind of EU plot, and I write as an inveterate social democratic Eurosceptic and Unionist. If anything, the pressure for that dissolution is a reaction against the effects of Thatcher’s Single European Act, of Maastricht, and of the Stability Pact to which we are pretty much adhering despite not being in the euro. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership looms large.

If there is one group of people to be avoided at all costs, then it is the ones who go on about some EU map with England divided into regions. If anyone had paid any attention to them, then the toothless and Tyneside-dominated regional assembly would have been set up in the North East, purely and understandably in order to spite them.

City regions are what used to be called metropolitan counties, which Thatcher abolished because she did not like Ken Livingstone. No, that never did make any sense. But that was what she did. Similarly, many unitary authorities bear more than a passing resemblance to county boroughs. These things have to keep going around and coming around, in order to justify the salaries of the people who write the research papers.

But since city regions are now to be revived under that name, whatever powers are proposed for them must also extend to a body covering each of those 40 English ceremonial counties which are neither Greater London, nor the City of London, nor any of the former metropolitan counties.

In many cases, the obvious body already exists. Where it no longer does, then that raises the question of why it no longer does. And where, as here in County Durham, the legacy of the last Government is such as would leave that body unbalanced, with existing local government responsibilities for part but not quite all of its area, then that, too, would be called into question. Leading to the restoration of the former district councils.

This promise of significant devolution to rural communities might go some way to making up the support that Labour has been too lazy to build up during this Parliament by properly opposing cuts in those communities’ services, and by selecting strong local campaigning candidates, with or without prior party allegiance.

Whatever the conurbations are getting, as well they might, then so must the counties. The loyally Labour old coal and steel belts of County Durham, South Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire are among the places that will need to be convinced that our, as often as not Conservative or Lib Dem, urban neighbours quite deserved all of this city regions carry on.

At the very least, we are not having the powers of our own local authorities transferred to them. In fact, since we are fairly populous, we may reasonably demand that whatever they got, then so should we. At least that money and those powers would always be under the control of members of Ed Miliband’s own party.

Will Devo Max really be opposed only by implacable Tory ultras? What about implacable Labour ultras? Or implacable Lib Dem ultras? Labour MPs for Scotland hold the Scottish Parliament in extremely low regard, and they did so even before it fell under the control of the SNP, as it did quite some time ago now.

Labour MPs for the North of England have spent an electoral generation voting powers to Scotland and to Europe, to Wales and to London, to Northern Ireland and to the judiciary, to everyone but themselves or their constituents. It is not as if Scotland has proved loyal to Labour in the way that the North very largely has.

All these years after devolution, Lib Dem MPs see that the Highlands and Islands are the only part of Scotland among the 11 parts of the United Kingdom that are poorer than Poland. Although Cornwall and Devon are both also on that list, as well as both being among those nine out of the 10 poorest parts of Northern Europe which are in this country.

Bringing us to the Barnett Formula, which has been elevated to the status of an article of the Constitution, but which in fact has never had any force of law. Lord Barnett has long been on record that it was only ever supposed to last for one year. It is an outrage against social democracy and even against basic justice, being not remotely needs-based.

The canonisation of the Barnett Formula imperils the Union by raising serious questions among the Welsh about why they should bother with a State that treated them so shabbily. Heaven knows, it does no good to the poorest people in Scotland. Their condition is as abject under Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon as is that of their counterparts under David Cameron and Iain Duncan Smith.

Labour MPs for Wales and the North of England need to band together with Lib Dems for Wales and the West Country, and indeed for the North of Scotland, so that, perhaps even joined by Plaid Cymru and undoubtedly alongside all parties from Northern Ireland, they might propose a long-overdue replacement, based on need and organised through direct funding to localities without reference to the Nationalist nomenklatura in Scotland.

The areas of Scotland that would benefit most from such a new approach are those which suffer most as a result of the old one. Outside the rural Lib Dem strongholds, those are mostly the areas that return devosceptical Labour MPs to Westminster. As much as anything else, this offers the possibility of taking Holyrood seats from the SNP, by correctly presenting it as the party that hordes money away from the communities that need it.

Devo Max will pass. In order to force these concessions in the course of that Bill’s parliamentary progress, there should be 200 votes against it at Second Reading, perhaps even 250, and possibly even 300. There ought to be. But will there be? If not, why not?

The parts of the United Kingdom that are listed as one or both of poorer than Poland and among the 10 poorest places in Northern Europe are West Wales and the Welsh Valleys, Devon, Cornwall, Durham and the Tees Valley, Lincolnshire, South Yorkshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire, Lancashire, Northern Ireland, East Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire, the Highlands and Islands, and Merseyside. There are of course many other very poor places in this country.

All MPs for those areas should vote against any legislation that would give the force of law to the Barnett Formula. Likewise, all MPs from the 40 shire counties of England, but perhaps especially from the old coal and steel belts, should vote against any extension of the powers of the Scottish Parliament without devolution not only to English MPs en bloc or to city regions, but also directly to those county areas.