Wendy And The Lost Boys

Another uncontested Labour Leadership Election, this time in the Scottish Parliament, where the winner is Wendy Alexander, former employee of George Galloway and stalwart of Scottish Labour Action (for people who should have been in the SNP but, in those days, saw Labour as a better electoral bet), and (like her brother) late of the CIA's British-American Project.

Put the first and third of these aspects of her history together, and we find a classic neocon: a Marxist who has merely changed the ending so that her own bourgeoisie wins in the end, and who owes to the superstate embodying the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that transferred patriotic allegiance which Stalinists the world over used to owe to the superstate nominally embodying the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Such people hate Britain (they believe an Irish-American saloon-bar rant about a global Anglophile network either opposed to or manipulating the American Empire), and indeed one of their greatest heroines, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, used her position as American Ambassador to the UN to give very strong backing to Argentina during the Falklands War. So it is no surprise that, as a neocon, Wendy is also a Scottish Nationalist.

For be in no doubt: if devolution is "a process, not an event", as she has now forced Labour to climb down and say that it is, then that "process" can having only one possible conclusion, namely separation. That was the rationale for the Nationalist entryism of Scottish Labour Action, which also wanted the Scottish Labour Party to have full autonomy over policy is its considerably extended list of devolved areas. Watch that space. The Unionist majority in Scotland, and not least the working class, now has the "choice" of four haute bourgeois separatist parties out of four.

Meanwhile, what is the bulk of the United Kingdom to do in the face of yet further devolution. Demand an English Parliament? Certainly not!

There is no West Lothian Question. It does not exist. The Parliament of the United Kingdom may still legislate in any devolved policy area (no matter what those areas might be, and no matter how many more of them there might be), with full effect in Scotland or Wales. And that legislation would prevail over any enactment of a devolved body if the two conflicted. At present, Parliament merely declines to do this. But that is beside the point.

There is absolutely no doubt about this. It is written into the Acts creating the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. The MPs who voted for those Acts, and everyone who voted Yes in either referendum, voted for this. It is high time that they got what they voted for. After all, don’t Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have views on health, or education, or transport in their own constituencies? I rather suspect that they do. And now they have the opportunity to give legislative effect to those views. They should take that opportunity.

Consequently, there is no need for an English Parliament. Which is just as well, since how many more politicians could this country possibly sustain or endure? Imagine who would vote or stand in the elections to such a thing, elections including the use of closed party lists, and thus barely fit to be called elections at all. Imagine the cost of housing, staffing, securing and generally servicing an English Parliament.

No, there is a far better alternative. The Parliament of the United Kingdom should simply resume giving practical effect to the fact, for fact it is, that there is no state in the United Kingdom except the United Kingdom, and no nation except the British nation. In other words, it should simply resume enacting legislation just as it did before devolution, thereby actually implementing, for the first time, the Scotland and Wales Acts in full. It has a duty to do so, a duty not least to the disenfranchised Unionist majority in Scotland.