Bothered To Maintain

So whoever pulls the strings of Boris Johnson as he exercises what would be an almost entirely titular position even if a serious politician occupied it has caused him to denounce a high-speed rail link from the North? No surprise there, of course.

Ed Miliband has restored Labour’s historic norm as a party far more Scottish and Welsh than the country at large, but nevertheless overwhelmingly English, like the country at large. For that matter, Alex Salmond has restored Scotland’s historic norm, in which Labour was always considerable and sometimes predominant, but was certainly never dominant. Glasgow had a Conservative-controlled City Council into the 1970s. Durham has had a massively Labour-controlled County Council for a hundred years. This also points to the fallacy of the ever-monolithic Labour cities and the ever-monolithic Tory countryside.

For Labour dominance, you needed, and you need, to look to the North of England, where, pace the BBC, the Labour Party was founded. The combined population is significantly larger than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. There is a highly distinctive culture of economically leftish social conservatism serving and served by agriculture, manufacturing and small business, with its roots in Catholicism, Methodism and a form of High Churchmanship very different from that in the South; all three reach back to ancestrally Jacobite doubts about the legitimacy of the Hanoverian State and its capitalist ideology.

We probably have to talk about the three Northern regions, even if we would prefer to talk about the historic counties from before an unprotesting Thatcher was in the Cabinet. In each of those regions, both Labour support and Labour membership were proportionately higher than in Scotland even before the recent elections, and are very dramatically so now. Labour experienced heavy losses to the SNP in Scotland and heavy gains from the Lib Dems in the North. But the Lib Dems, among other people, have not gone away. And loyalty is a two-way street.

So Miliband’s price for supporting the Scotland Bill should be two amendments. One would concern each of the present or, where they have been abolished in the rush to unitary local government, the previous city, borough and district council areas in the North, twinning it with a demographically comparable one in Scotland and with another in the South East. Across each of the key indicators – health, education, housing, transport, and so on – both expenditure and outcomes in the Northern area would have to equal or exceed those in each of its twins, or else the relevant Ministers’ salaries would be docked by the percentage in question. The other such amendment would provide that in any policy area devolved to Scotland, no legislation would apply in any of the three English regions unless supported at Third Reading by the majority of MPs from that region.

The Lib Dems might then insist on the same for the South West. Fine. After all, no one would lose under any of this. There would be no more politicians than there already are. Both expenditure and outcomes in Scotland and in the South East would have to be maintained in order for the twinning system to work. And the Conservative Party could continue to enact any legislation that it liked for its electoral base in the South, or at any rate in the more easterly parts of the South. But without these amendments, there should be a Labour three-line whip to vote against this Bill. After all, it would undeniably be consistent for the party that introduced devolution to say that the matter was settled. Nor do Labour, or indeed Lib Dem, MPs from Scotland exist in order to give more power to the SNP, which on past form stands absolutely no chance of unseating them no matter how well it does for Holyrood. Just ask those MPs.

What if either or both of Scotland and Wales ever really were to secede? See above as to the distinctive political culture of the North. All of that might as well be in Swahili to most people in London and the South East. There are probably more Swahili speakers there than there are people who would know what any of it meant, London being the only city in these Islands where it is impossible to assume that everyone can speak English if addressed in it – less British than Dublin or Cork. The South holds us in undisguised cultural contempt despite depending on us for something as basic as water. If our vast reserves of coal were once again being tapped, then British energy independence could easily be achieved, especially if assisted by lots of lovely nuclear power stations, all without the slightest need for windmills or to entreat Poseidon. But when the City needs to be bailed out, then that corner of the country is happy to take the money of people who have bothered to maintain as much as we can of a proper industrial base, in the teeth of governments of both parties over 30 years.

Without the farming, fishing, manufacturing and shop-keeping land of an economically leftish social conservatism rooted in Catholicism, Presbyterianism and Episcopalianism; without the farming, manufacturing and shop-keeping land of an economically leftish social conservatism rooted in Catholicism, several varieties of Nonconformity, and the sane High Churchmanship that provides the background music to the Church in Wales; then what, exactly, would there be in the Union for our enormous population and, compared to the South East, our vastly more reliable economy?

The MPs for, and the municipal leaders of, the 12 ceremonial counties of Cheshire, Cumbria, Durham, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Merseyside, North Yorkshire, Northumberland, South Yorkshire, Tyne and Wear, and West Yorkshire should issue a Declaration that, in the event of the secession of either or both of Scotland and Wales, each of those ceremonial counties would become a State of the Union of the North of England. Both the Union and each State would be headed by the monarch, as in Australia. Here as there, the relevant heraldic shield would be imposed on the Blue Ensign in order to produce, in this case, the flags of the last outposts of the Britain and the England in which most British and most English people grew up.