Category Archives: Democracy

WHY DO WE NEED AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT?

WHY DO WE NEED AN ENGLISH PARLIAMENT?

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland now have their own Parliaments or Assemblies and their own national Governments and First Ministers. It is only England of all the Nations of the “United” Kingdom that is subject to direct rule from the British Establishment authorities in Whitehall and Westminster.

So when British national politicians talk about the NHS, the only NHS that they have control over is the English NHS. When they talk about building more houses and creating developments in our towns and countryside, again the British Establishment authorities only have powers to do so over England. These are the areas compared to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland over which the English have no equivalent say:-

	Scotland	Wales	N. Ireland
LAW AND ORDER
Justice	Exclusive		Exclusive
Civil Law	Exclusive		Exclusive
Criminal Law	Shared		Exclusive
Vehicle licensing		Exclusive	Exclusive
Local Administration Organisation & Finance	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Elections	Exclusive	Under consideration	Exclusive
Civil register	Exclusive		Exclusive
Police	Exclusive	Under consideration	Exclusive
Prisons	Exclusive	Under consideration	Exclusive
Fire services	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
SOCIAL & HEALTH POLICY
Public Pensions (devolved administration)	Shared	Shared
Pensions & Child Support			Parity^[52]
Health Service	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Social Services ( Housing & Student Support)	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Social welfare	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
food safety and standards	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
ECONOMY, ENVIRONMENT & TRANSPORT
Taxation	Shared	Subject to referendum	Shared
Urban Planning	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Environment	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Housing	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Transport	Shared	Shared	Shared
Economic Development	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Agricult., Forestary & Fisheries	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
CULTURE & EDUCATION
Culture/language	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Primary & Secondary Education	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
University & Professional Education	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
Sport & recreation	Exclusive	Exclusive	Exclusive
RESOURCES & SPENDING
Own Tax resources	Yes	Subject to referendum	No
Allocation by UK Government	Barnett Formula	Barnett Formula	Barnett Formula
Other resources	Co-payments (Health & education)	Co-payments (Health & education)	Co-payments (Health & education)
Resources	0% own resources	0% own resources	0% own resources
Devolved Spending as % of total public spending	63%	60%	50%

So housing policy for England is decided by the British Government. The other Nations decide how many houses to build for themselves. Pensions are ‘shared’ which means 90% of Scottish pensions are paid from English tax. Also the British Government can only sell English assets they cannot sell property of the other countries. So if they want to raise money to spend anywhere in the UK they can only sell English assets for that purpose. Every aspect of national policy in England is decided by the British Government.

In the British Parliament itself it is no surprise that Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Members of Parliament have as much constitutional right to get involved in discussions about what happens in England as any MP for an English seat would have. In addition, of course, the political parties that are represented in the British Parliament for England are all British parties rather than specifically English and many of the MPs who represent English seats are Scottish or Welsh whereas no English people are elected to office in Scotland or Wales. So the absence of an English Parliament does mean the English interests are not properly represented.

The wider problem is of course that there is not only an English Parliament but there is also no English First Minister or any English Government, so there is no-one ensuring that England is governed in England’s national interests.

One problem that is becoming increasingly pressing is that British politicians fear that England’s size and population will imbalance the Union. Also that the English will make it difficult to continue to appease Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with English money as we become more assertive about our Nation. The British Establishment’s answer to these problems is to try to break England up into “Regions”.

The English Democrats are wholly against England being broken up into “Regions”. Regionalisation is not equivalent to national devolution to the Scottish and Welsh. That is not to say of course that the administration of England isn’t too centralised. There should be a programme of decentralisation to help re-establish our counties and our towns and cities and to make sure that we are less subject to Whitehall red tape and that our local authorities are able to be more democratically run and more accountable.

The point is that, as we move to a situation where the United Kingdom either becomes a Federal system, or more likely dissolves, England needs its own democratic Government in its own Parliament to ensure that England and the English Nation has a proper democratic voice which is heard loudly and assertively over whatever happens in the corridors of power!

Britain needs electoral reform but the abolition of first past the post (FPTP) is not the answer

Robert Henderson

As parties outside the British political mainstream garner more and more support the call for electoral reform will increase.. It is not simply that the coming general election will produce a House of Commons whose representation will be radically different from the votes cast , because that has long been a feature of the British electoral system. What is different this time is the number of smaller parties such as Ukip and the Greens who will gain significant electoral support but few MPs . The position is further complicated by the unbalanced devolution which allows non-English seat MPs to sit in the Commons and vote on English matters while English seat MPs cannot vote on the issues which have been devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

After the election there are likely to be renewed calls for some form of PR to replace FPTP for Westminster elections. This would be a mistake because it would simply be to swap one unsatisfactory electoral system for another.

There are two major problems with any form of PR:

(1) The link between the parliamentary representative and a constituency is necessarily broken. There are mixed systems with some members elected for constituencies and some from a party list, but they are very messy and do not thoroughly address the main objection to FPTP, namely, the failure to produce representatives in proportion to the votes cast nationally.

(2) Experience shows that where proportional systems exist the political classes almost invariably transmute into conspiracies against the electorate. This happens because majorities for one party are rare and where there is a situation of more or less permanent coalition no party can stand on a meaningful manifesto for the obvious reason that no government will deliver on any party’s manifesto or come close to it unless a coalition is comprised of parties whose policies are next to identical. This means politicians can rarely be held to account for failing to deliver.

It is also true that many forms of PR are complex compared with FPTP and the types of PR which would be likely to be adopted are the ones which would have fair degree of complexity, for example, the Standard Transferrable Vote. Such a system would confuse a significant part of the electorate – ten percent of the UK population have IQs of 80 or less – which could drive those people away from participating in elections. Nor is it clear that having first and second or even more preferences invariably produces something closer to what the electorate wants. As I pointed out above, it is rare for any two candidates, even those of the major parties, to represent policies which overall are similar enough to make the second choice a really satisfying option.

What would be better than PR?

I suggest Britain retains the first past the post system with MPs representing the people who elect them, but moves from single-member constituencies to double-member constituencies . This would have dissolve much of the objection to FPTP as it is now and bring additional benefits.

How would it work? Each constituency would have roughly double the size of the present constituencies. Only one member from each political party would be able to stand in each double constituency. The two candidates with the most votes in each constituency would be elected regardless of how far behind the leading candidate the second candidate came. Second or additional preferences would not exist. People would simply vote for a single candidate as they do now. The beneficial effects of such a system would be:

a) It would undermine the idea of safe seats. There would still be constituencies which returned one party over and over again, but there would be a second MP to elect who would be of a different party.
b) the constituency connection of the voter and MP would be maintained .
c) Electors would be able to vote for the candidate they favoured with a greater chance of getting them elected. If the voter favoured one of the two presently major parties there would be a very strong chance that their chosen candidate would be one of the two candidates sent to the Commons. But even electors who voted for the lesser parties would have some real expectation in many constituencies of success for their chosen candidate, because there are many constituencies where the second party in a constituency is not Tory or Labour. In addition, the fact that those coming second in an election could be elected on a substantially smaller vote than those coming first would increase the likelihood of minor party candidates being elected. Moreover, once such a system was up and running and electors saw how it worked the patterns of voting could and almost certainly would begin to change with more and more people being willing to risk voting for a smaller party.
d) Such constituencies would allow for MPs of radically different views to represent the same set of electors. This would mean most electors would be able to have an MP to represent them whose party policies bore some resemblance to the policies the elector supported. Even if an elector was in a constituency which had two MPs of similar views but different parties, the elector would still have a choice of two MPs to go to for help and advice.
e) Because two MPs from different parties would be elected in each constituency and there is greater opportunity for minor party MPs or even independent MPs being elected, the relationship between votes cast and MPs elected for each of the parties would be much closer than it is under the FPTP system we now have now. However, unlike PR the double-member constituency would not only mitigate rather than remove entirely the disproportion between votes cast and seats obtained under single-member constituencies. This is worth tolerating because it is unlikely that the double-constituency system would produce a Commons in the undesirable state of permanent coalition because it would retain a real possibility for single party governments. In terms of party representation and electoral support it would be a halfway house between what we have now and the conspiracy of permanent coalition which is virtually guaranteed by any form of PR

Other changes to improve alter the balance of power

Other changes to alter the balance of power between voters and politicians to favour electors should be made:

Institute a power to for electors to recall of MPs through a referendum conducted in their constituency.

Citizen initiated referenda on the Swiss model, with tight legal underpinning to ensure that politicians abide by the result of a referendum and take the necessary practical steps to ensure that the will of the electors is realised .

Not perfect, but probably the best which can be done

What I propose would not entirely remove the anomalies and unfairness found in our present FPTP system, but it would remove most of the poison in the system by giving smaller parties much greater opportunity to gain Commons seats whilst retaining the good things such as constituency representation and the simplicity of the system.

It is worth adding that a significant part of Britain’s present electoral deficiencies stem substantially from Britain’s membership of the EU (which increasingly constrains what her major political parties can offer by way of policy) and the imbalance of the present devolution settlement which leaves England out in the cold. If Britain left the EU and switched to a true federal system which included an English Parliament that in itself would make the present British system function more democratically and would enhance the benefits of the double-member solution I propose.

Devolution and the House of Lords

Robert Henderson

There is one important aspect of the devolution mess created since 1997 which receives little or no attention in the mainstream media or from mainstream politicians, namely, the role of the House of Lords. As things stand all legislation which affects England goes through the Lords, while ever increasing swathes of legislation affecting Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland avoid such scrutiny because the legislation is initiated, debated, amended and either passed or not at the will of the three devolved assemblies. Yet another instance of how England is grossly disadvantaged by the unbalanced devolution in Britain.

Many will shrug their shoulders and say what does it matter, isn’t the Lords just a talking shop with no power? The answer is an emphatic no. Government ministers sit in the Lords, the House can initiate their own Bills, amend or strike down completely Bills sent to them by the House of Commons ,ask questions orally and in writing, including questions of ministers, sit on their own select committees and on joint committees of the Lords and Commons . Members also have the great privilege of a national political platform to get their views to the public.

The power of the Lords to delay

The sharpest power the Lords has is to delay. This can be achieved by being tardy over their examination of Bills sent to them by the Commons, by heavily amending Bills sent to them by the Commons (this means they have to go back to the Commons for re-consideration) and by refusing outright to pass Bills. (There is one important exception to the power of the Lords to amend or refuse outright to pass Bills from the Commons and that is what are called money Bills, legislation which involves the collection or spending of money by the government. Such Bills have to be signed off as Money Bills by the Speaker. )

If the Lords does refuse to pass a Bill from the Commons in its entirety or in part, the 1949 Parliament Act allows the Commons to force through a Bill regardless of the wishes of the Lords in the session of Parliament in which the Bill was originally introduced into the Common. This procedure typically results in a delay of around a year. When the Bill is reintroduced it is passed without the Lords having any opportunity to delay it further. This is a very rare procedure with only seven Acts have been passed in this way either under the 1949 Parliament Act or its 1911 predecessor.

Being able to delay Bills sent from the Commons is a powerful weapon because government legislation may be lost for want of Parliamentary time if an election is looming or a session of Parliament (which normally lasts a year) is coming to an end and other government business takes priority in the new session. Even if time is not absolutely pressing, governments are generally anxious to get their legislation through quickly and will often accept a Lords’ amendment to Bills sent from the Commons simply to get the legislation passed quickly.

The political composition of the House of Lords

“As at 16 December 2014, the total membership of the House of Lords was 847. However, excluding those currently ineligible to sit (such as members on leave of absence or those holding particular posts), the ‘actual’ membership was 791. The average attendance of the House of Lords in the 2013–14 session was 497.”

The 791 Members eligible to sit in the House of consisted of 679 Life Peers, 86 ‘excepted hereditary’ Peers and 26 Bishops. Their political allegiances, where declared, were:

Conservative 230

Labour 216

Liberal Democrat 105

Crossbench 180

Bishops 26

Even on the declared allegiances the House is heavily tilted toward the liberal left who are instinctively anti-English. Not only do Labour and the Libdems have a majority together over the Conservatives, those who take the Tory whip will more often than not have much the same politics as the Labour and LibDem peers . As for the officially politically non-aligned, it is reasonable to assume that most of the Bishops will also be of liberal left because the upper reaches of the Anglican Church has long shown themselves to be consistently left of centre with their unwavering support for political correctness . The crossbenchers will also have a healthy component from the liberal left simply because they are selected by those who generally subscribe to political correctness with the consequence that they will do the very human thing of selecting those who resemble themselves.

The geographical spread and size of the of the Lords is very important. Peers can come from any part of the United Kingdom and there is no limit to their number. This means that the Lords could easily become imbalanced, if it is not already so, by the creation of disproportionately large numbers of peers who were not English. Moreover, because peers are not elected , in principle, a government could create any number of new peers to push through legislation which is damaging to English interests, for example, to Balkanise England with regional assemblies regardless of the wishes of the English.

Less dramatically, because of the power to delay and force compromise from a government, it is easy to see how a House of Lords which was against England controlling its own affairs could cause considerable difficulties if the Commons voted , for example, to end the Barnett formula or to set up an English Parliament simply by delaying matters, for example, if General Election was due in less than a year’s time and sufficient numbers in the Lords thought there was a fair bet that the election would result in a change of government.

If England had English votes for English Laws

Would English votes for English laws solve the constitutional imbalance? The idea raises many problems such as how to define what is English only legislation while the Barnett Formula is in place because the Formula determines what Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland gets from the UK Treasury because it is linked to government spending in England. But the Lords adds another complication because the proposal as it has been suggested to date makes no mention of removing from the Lords’ the power of scrutiny of any House of Commons Bills which are deemed English only Bills. If that were the case then there would still be the anomaly that the Lords could interfere with English only legislation while having no power to intervene over the equivalent legislation for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland .

The difficulty could be surmounted by giving English only laws the same status as money Bills but in reality, only an English Parliament and a truly federal constitution for each of the four home countries will permanently solve the problem of the imbalance of the present devolution settlement.

Devolving powers to Manchester is the thin end of the Balkanising of England wedge

Robert Henderson

The government have recently announced the passing of responsibility for the £6 billion of NHS money spent in the Greater Manchester area to a consortium of ten local councils. This is in addition to the creation of a Mayor for Greater Manchester and the devolved powers granted to Greater Manchester in November which are intended to place around £1 billion in the same local government hands by 2019 to administer new powers over transport, house building, skills training and the police (the Mayor will replace the police commissioner). Contrary to some reports The Mayor will not have formal responsibility for the NHS and Care budget spending, but will probably exert some unofficial influence in those areas.

Greater Manchester is to have an elected mayor foisted upon it despite voted against having one in 2012 with the Tory minister responsible Grant Shapps stating at the time of the referendum that “People should have the right to decide how they are governed in their local area. The whole point is to give people a say. No-one is forcing mayors on anyone.” That one is being imposed now tells you all you need to know about the real attitude of the coalition government and their commitment to local democracy. It is a case of you can vote anyway you like provided we approve of your choice. Shades of the EU’s way with referenda which do not go their way.

All of this has got nothing to do with improving local services and everything to do with fudging the issue of devolution in England. Our political elite are utterly determined that England will not have a Parliament or government to represent her national interests. Labour and the LibDems are reliant on Welsh and Scots MPs for a significant number of their Commons seats and are concerned that an English Parliament and government could seriously upset the UK political apple-cart by forcing the reduction of the per capita Treasury funding for Scotland, Wales and N Ireland, for example, by reducing it to the per capita funding for England (that would take around £16 billion a year away from the Celtic Fringe at present).

This shifting of powers to an English region is the beginning of a process which all three major Westminster parties in one form or another all support. The policy has two great advantages for the Tories, Labour and LibDems. It allows them to claim however absurdly that the imbalance in the UK devolution settlement has been addressed and creates political institutions which once granted would be very difficult to abolish.

The mere existence of regional political institutions with differing powers would be a great barrier to an English Parliament and government. Such devolution would create a patchwork of differing powers and provide a ready-made argument for why England should not have her own Parliament, namely, that an English Parliament would not be able to legislate on a great swathe of policies because so much had been devolved to the regions and so varied are the different devolved powers that no meaningful national legislation on those policies would be possible.

Apart from the Balkanising effect on England, there are the practical effects which would be obnoxious. Because it would be impossible to have such devolution throughout the country so inevitably differences in service offered and the rules under which it is offered would arise. The post-code lottery already afflicting much of public service, especially in NHS provision, would be greatly amplified. There would also be an ugly battle for resources by different regions.

There is a further good practical reason why such devolution is wrong-headed: the quality of both local politicians and their senior officers is generally poor. If anyone doubts this go and attend a few local council meetings and committees. They simply would not be up to the job of administering such responsibilities. If local authorities whether singly or in concert as is proposed in Manchester are given extensive new borrowing powers there is every chance they will behave recklessly and run up debts which they could not service and central government would have to bail them out. Spain is a gruesome example of such misbehaviour by devolved governments.

The fact that it is Greater Manchester which is receiving the extra powers rather than individual councils or even just the councils for the city of Manchester suggests that what is being aimed at is a surreptitious resurrection of the goal of Balkanising England which was so roundly rejected in 2004 under Blair’s premiership.

Regional bodies such as those proposed for Greater Manchester will have some ostensible democratic respectability because their members will be drawn from elected councils. But this democratic respectability will be specious if there is a Mayor of Greater Manchester who is not attached to any council heading the consortium. Individual councillors from each council will have little if any influence because you can bet the Mayor will form a council of the leaders of the component councils which will proceed to stitch up deals that are then presented as a fait accompli to the individual councillors. Anyone who has had experience of a council which has adopted the “cabinet” system will be only too well aware of how councillors who are not part of the cabinet are left virtually powerless to affect any council policy or behaviour because they are effectively excluded from decision making.

Scottish Welsh and Northern Irish politicians will welcome such devolution within England because it lessens the opportunity for England to exert its natural power in the Union by making a national voice for England less likely. However, they could find it a wrong-headed move if English regions start demanding some of the additional exchequer funding over and above that provided to England that the Celts currently receive.

These new powers for Manchester are not a done deal because the Tory Party may well not be in power after the General Election in May. Certainly in the case of the devolution of NHS power Labour have made it clear that they do not want it to happen with the Shadow Health Secretary Andy Burnham rejecting the NHS Proposal viz:

“If I was health secretary I wouldn’t be offering this deal.”

“My worry is having a ‘swiss cheese’ effect in the NHS whereby cities are opting out.”

“This deal is only being offered to certain parts of the country too and there’s a real concern that it could cause a two-tier service and challenge the notion of a National Health Service.”

What is proposed for Manchester is the thin end of the Balkanising of England wedge. It needs to be opposed on principle.

750th Anniversary of the First English Parliament:- 1265 – 2015

OUR PRESS RELEASE

20th January – English Parliament – First Meeting

The English Democrats are calling for all English people to have pride on the 20th January that our Nation held its first meeting of the first Parliament on the 20th January 1265. This Parliament is the ancestor of every Parliament on earth today and is one of the many unique, historic and important contributions the English Nation has made to the foundation of the modern world and in creating representative democracy.

Whilst Simon de Montfort’s Parliament in 1265 was a revolutionary development, subsequent adoption by Edward I of Parliament and its embodiment into Medieval English Royal Government was a reflection of Parliament’s usefulness in getting consent for Royal tax raising powers.

Robin Tilbrook, the Chairman of the English Democrats said:- “Sadly on the 20th January 2015 almost unnoticed by officialdom in England there will pass an anniversary which demonstrates even more than the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, how ancient some of England’s institutions are.”

“The Earl of Leicester, Simon de Montfort, called his parliament the first proper English Parliament on the 20th January 1265 and so began the progress towards representative democracy.”

“A progress which has been of huge importance, not only in English history, but in the history of the entire modern world and is yet another unique and hugely significant contribution of the English Nation to the culture of the whole human race!”

Robin Tilbrook
Chairman,
The English Democrats

DID HER MAJESTY, THE QUEEN, BEHAVE UNCONSTITUTIONALLY IN THE SCOTTISH INDEPENDENCE REFERENDUM?

The highly respected journalist, Severin Carrell, who writes for the Guardian has published this detailed account of the Scottish referendum campaign. I have put the parts of his narrative that relate to the Queen in bold at the beginning of the article and then reproduced the whole of the article. The reason for doing this is that he states, as a fact, matters which do raise constitutional concerns.

If what he says is correct, then it is at least arguable that the Queen stepped outside of the proper role of a constitutional monarch in intervening in the Independence referendum.

See what you think, but bear in mind that while it is proper for a constitutional monarch to discuss policy with individual politicians and perhaps even to some extent lobby them in the way of trying to persuade them of the monarch’s view, it would never be proper for the monarch to push their view too firmly towards elected representatives, nor should the Queen be seeking to intervene in a democratic decision. It is only by not doing so that the role and position of the monarchy can be maintained in any State which has a claim to be a functioning democracy. It is therefore at the very least of concern that it seems from Severin Carrell’s narrative that the Queen may have over-stepped that very important demarcation line.

First here are the relevant passages relating to the Queen:-

“In a quaint ritual of Britain’s political calendar, the prime minister repairs to the Queen’s Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend break at the end of every summer. The atmosphere is meant to be relaxed: the prime minister is treated to an annual barbecue served up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who do the washing up afterwards. Tony and Cherie Blair entered into the spirit during their Balmoral stay in 1999 by conceiving their youngest son, Leo.

But there was a distinct sense of unease this year when David Cameron arrived for his stay on Saturday 6 September. The Queen was taking a close interest in the referendum, and was said to have noted a poll published in the Times earlier that week, which found the no side’s lead had shrunk to only six points.

The news was even worse that Sunday morning as the prime minister came down to breakfast with the Queen – on the day that the banner headline in the Sunday Times declared “Yes vote leads in Scots poll”, reporting the shock YouGov survey putting independence in the lead for the first time.

You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.

One Whitehall source insisted that the atmosphere was friendly, as the Queen resorted to her famous – and at times pointed – humour. “I think there were one or two bits of humour,” the source said. “Obviously it is not the ideal thing to come down to breakfast and there’s the Queen with a little pot of marmalade or whatever and porridge and kippers and you see the headline. I think the Queen, as far as I understand – I mean I don’t know, obviously, none of us know – likes having the prime minister there because he does all the stuff that well brought up young men know how to do. So I don’t think it was frosty. I think there might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge about supposing he had some work to do next week.”

It turned out that it was not just the prime minister who had his work cut out that week, as No 10 went into “meltdown” – in the words of one senior Downing Street source – as the full (peaceful) force of the British state was mustered to save the union. Senior figures in Whitehall were so worried by the prospect of a collapse of the union that it was suggested to the palace that it would be immensely helpful if the Queen could say something publicly.

Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, and Sir Christopher Geidt, the Queen’s private secretary, embarked on discussions to work out how the Queen might register her concerns at the prospect of a yes vote while upholding her constitutional duty to remain wholly impartial. The Whitehall machinery was fully apprised of the prime minister’s concerns that the yes side was developing an ominous momentum.

The talks between the most senior civil servant in the land and the palace’s most senior official, the two key figures at the heart of what the Whitehall source described as the “deep state”, focused in the first place on the wisdom of a public intervention by the monarch, who has been scrupulously impartial during her 62 years on the throne. Once it became clear that the Queen was minded to speak out, Geidt and Heywood then needed to fashion some words that would ensure that the she remained within the bounds expected of a constitutional monarch.

I don’t think it was frosty. There might have been the odd humorous comment over the porridge.

Jim Lawson, a veteran freelance reporter who has dutifully covered royal visits to the Scottish Highlands for decades – he remembers covering Prince Charles at Gordonstoun boarding school in the 1960s – got the answer a week later on Sunday 14 September, outside Crathie Kirk, the small church where the Queen attends Sunday services while at Balmoral. As he has done at these events for years, Lawson wandered over to the crowd behind the barriers after the Queen had departed, to harvest quotes from her greetings to wellwishers. To his surprise, one woman disclosed that the monarch had offered a coded warning about the impending referendum, telling her: “Well, I hope people will think very carefully about the future.”

“The Queen looked almost uneasy,” Lawson recalled. “It was strange. [She] didn’t look supremely confident.” When he asked the woman who had spoken to the Queen for her name, a friend standing with her urged her not to reveal it. When Lawson asked her why not, she replied “It’s my job.” For Lawson, this was a first. “It has never happened in my life before,” he recalled. “Normally if the Queen has talked to someone, they’re delighted to give you everything. I was baffled, to be honest.”

Buckingham Palace declined at the time to comment publicly on the Queen’s remarks, but in private, officials were keen for reporters to broadcast every syllable uttered by the monarch. The Whitehall source said that the Queen’s statement was no accident: “She knew exactly what she was doing. There are two possible responses on the referendum: one, you buy into this as a fantastic festival of democracy; or two, you suggest this is a decision filled with foreboding. So by saying I hope people will think carefully, you imply the second. If they’d said: ‘What do you think of the referendum Ma’am’ and she’d said: ‘Oh it’s lovely’, that would be very different. Without her taking a side, it cast just the right element of doubt over the nature of the decision.”

The Queen’s remarks were crafted with great care by the two men at the heart of the “deep state” to ensure that she did not cross a line – as some had alleged she did decades earlier, when she spoke of the benefits of the UK in her silver jubilee address to a joint session of parliament in 1977. In remarks that were seen as an attempt by the Labour government to warn of the dangers posed by the SNP after it had won 11 seats in the October 1974 general election, she said: “I cannot forget that I was crowned Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Perhaps this jubilee is a time to remind ourselves of the benefits which union has conferred, at home and in our international dealings, on the inhabitants of all parts of this United Kingdom.”

It was felt, 37 years later, that it would have been wholly inappropriate for the Queen to make such pointed remarks in the heat of an independence referendum. It was decided that she would make remarks which were wholly neutral but which would leave nobody in any doubt about her support for the union – as she made clear she had no intention of reverting, as Alex Salmond had suggested, to the ancient title of Queen of Scots.

The delicate negotiations explain why the prime minister was so relieved by the result of the referendum, a point illustrated when he told the former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, in an unguarded moment a few days later, that she had “purred down the line” when he informed the monarch that her kingdom remained intact.

The Queen’s intervention showed the stakes could not have been higher for the pro-UK side, which had started the final countdown to the referendum amid rancour, divisions and bust-ups.
………………………………….
In the end the union was saved, allowing the prime minister to telephone a mightily relieved monarch.”

Here is the full article:-

The real story of the Scottish referendum: the final days of the fight for independence

As the vote neared, Britain’s breakup seemed a real possibility. In the second part of their series, based on extensive interviews with key players, Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and Patrick Wintour track the final days of an epic campaign

In a quaint ritual of Britain’s political calendar, the prime minister repairs to the Queen’s Balmoral estate in the Scottish Highlands for a weekend break at the end of every summer. The atmosphere is meant to be relaxed: the prime minister is treated to an annual barbecue served up by the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, who do the washing up afterwards. Tony and Cherie Blair entered into the spirit during their Balmoral stay in 1999 by conceiving their youngest son, Leo.

You could imagine the chilly atmosphere at the breakfast table, the prime minister is said to have remarked to friends afterwards.

The Queen’s intervention showed the stakes could not have been higher for the pro-UK side, which had started the final countdown to the referendum amid rancour, divisions and bust-ups.

March 2014: Bitching sessions

When the Scottish Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, sat down for a discreet lunch at a Holyrood restaurant with a few close advisers on 27 March, the no campaign still enjoyed a comfortable lead in the polls. But George Osborne’s rejection of a currency union appeared to be backfiring, as the yes side gained momentum in opinion surveys – while Better Together was about to be plunged into “a week from hell”.

Davidson had been lunching with Professor Adam Tomkins, a constitution expert from Glasgow University, Eddie Barnes, her trusted head of communications, and Chris Deerin, a Daily Mail columnist. Craig Harrow, a leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats and a Better Together board member, was at a neighbouring table – and when Davidson left her guests to return to her office, he joined the others. It was already a “bitching session”, Harrow said, so he unburdened himself.

He described a major dispute within the pro-UK campaign over the tone of its advertising, its failure to energise middle-class no voters, and its perceived negativity – which pitted Harrow and Phil Anderton, a marketing expert and executive known as Fireworks Phil after he introduced pyrotechnics to Scottish Rugby Union matches at Murrayfield stadium, against senior executives at Better Together, particularly Labour’s chief strategist Douglas Alexander and its Labour chief executive, Blair McDougall. The three Tories were very sympathetic: there had been debates for months about whether Better Together needed to be more positive. “Labour ran [the pro-UK campaign] as a national by-election and we wanted it to have a bit more to it. We wanted a concert, something that took it beyond politics [such as] some of the things you saw develop, some of the celebrity stuff from down south, Let’s Stay Together and all that sort of stuff,” Davidson recalled.

The next morning that story was splashed across the front of the Scottish Daily Mail under the headline “Campaign to save the UK in crisis”, reporting Harrow’s case that “hard-hitting messages about the disastrous consequences of a yes vote appear to be backfiring.” The no campaign had another setback later that night, when the Guardian published a story revealing that a member of the UK government had said that a currency union would be formed after a yes vote.

Alistair Darling and the Better Together campaign are wounded by the yes side’s claim that the NHS would be under threat if the Conservative-backed no side won the referendum. Illustration by Ellie Foreman-Peck

The Guardian story was seized upon by a jubilant Alex Salmond: it was proof, the first minister said, of the UK government’s “bluff, bullying and bluster” over currency. The opinion polls were starting to shift towards yes – some putting the yes vote as high as 46%, and the yes campaign had widened dramatically to involve groups beyond the SNP. such as the National Collective group of artists, musicians and cultural figures, the Common Weal left-green think tank and a new radical left umbrella group called the Radical Independence Campaign (RIC).

Yet behind that upbeat front, Yes Scotland was suffering its own turmoil at its headquarters on Hope Street in Glasgow, leading to increasing involvement from SNP executives and Sturgeon, then deputy first minister and referendum minister.

After a purge of senior staff in 2013, yes campaign chief Blair Jenkins and the SNP, which dominated the pro-independence campaign’s strategy and messaging, sacked the last two executives hired in 2012 as part of Jenkins’s “vastly experienced” team. Sources involved say Jenkins was deeply unpopular among senior staff, who were unhappy about his taking several long holidays; on at least one occasion, staff staged walkouts. There were significant tensions over the campaign’s lack of a clear strategic plan and the factional disputes within.

As the two sides jostled for position over the summer, the yes campaign sought to establish its credentials as a mass movement; in contrasting style, Better Together strived to be seen as sober. The no camp got an unexpected lift at the start of June from US president Barack Obama, who said he hoped the UK would remain “strong, robust and united”. Better Together strategists believed the White House and Obama had been considering for months whether he should intervene: Darling was approached during a visit to Washington for an IMF event in April by what one source described as “very nervous” British diplomats, who were worried an Obama intervention would backfire. The message from Darling was clear: it would be extremely helpful because Americans have more latitude in Scotland than England does. A few days later, JK Rowling donated £1m to Better Together, describing independence as an “historically bad mistake”. It was a crucial gift, largely enabling Better Together to pay for the final 100 days of campaigning – though Rowling was less generous than the SNP’s most lavish funders, the Euromillions winners Chris and Colin Weir, whose donations to yes and the SNP topped £5.5m by early September.

The SNP had hoped that the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, at the end of July, would give the independence campaign a lift by boosting national pride. But non-partisan audiences at the Games treated it as a festival of sport, often applauding English and Welsh athletes as heavily as their own. Salmond broke his own pledge to keep the Games non-political by referring to Glasgow as “freedom city” – an ill-concealed reference to the prediction that Scotland’s largest city was already on the brink of voting yes. In private, discussions of the referendum were unavoidable: on an official bus to the opening ceremony, Danny Alexander and Nick Clegg pressed Ed Miliband to be more ambitious on agreeing to a joint strategy on more powers. But Miliband was reluctant to allow his name to appear alongside the prime minister’s – for Labour, there was a danger of being associated too closely with the Tories.

5 August: Salmond and Darling face off

Two days after the Games ended, and after much wrangling with broadcaster STV, Alex Salmond confronted Alistair Darling in the first televised debate of the referendum – a duel that set the tone for the last six weeks before polling day. In the weeks before their setpiece confrontation at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow, Scotland’s premier music and drama academy, Darling’s team had been coaching the former chancellor at Better Together’s wood-panelled offices on Blythswood Square.

The two men had never debated each other, and their styles were quite different. A former advocate – the Scottish version of a barrister – Darling was an experienced Commons debater after nearly 30 years as an MP, and had withstood torrid encounters at the dispatch box as chancellor. But he was dry, managerial. Salmond, in contrast, was famous for this rapier wit and putdowns.

Darling was put through training bouts with Scottish Labour’s master of first minister’s questions, the party spin doctor Paul Sinclair, pretending to be Salmond. He also received detailed briefing on how to behave in a TV debate by Scott Chisholm, the broadcasting adviser who had prepped Nick Clegg for his definitive general election debates in 2010.

Distracted by the Commonwealth Games, Salmond was snatching training sessions as he travelled the country, even dragging his team up to Inverness. His colleagues implied that he was under-prepared, but he was also more nervous about the encounter than expected.

Salmond was clearly tired; Darling more aggressive and intense than expected. Despite delivering well-aimed punches on Darling’s lack of detail about future tax powers and Scotland’s viability outside the UK, the first minister flailed on his “plan B” proposals for a currency now that the UK parties had vetoed a deal on the pound, relying on poorly judged quips about no campaigners worrying about aliens invading Scotland.

Darling’s camp had decided to focus their fire on Salmond’s weakness on an independent Scotland’s currency options, now that the UK parties had vetoed a currency union. Darling deployed a line he had written the previous weekend: “Any eight-year-old can tell you the flag of a country, the capital of a country and its currency … you can’t tell us what currency we will have. What is an eight-year-old going to make of that?” The first debate was notable for its unexpected outcome: a Darling victory. A snap ICM poll for the Guardian put Darling head by 56% to 44% for Salmond.

But the no camp’s jubilation was short-lived. The yes team had already begun unfolding a far more damaging campaign for the final weeks: attacking the UK government and Better Together over the future of the NHS.

Better Together officials insist that the decision to focus on the NHS was a panic measure after Salmond’s debate defeat. They were wrong: Yes Scotland and the SNP had put the NHS on their campaign grid months before, after watching the powerful reaction on Facebook and YouTube from yes voters to a speech by Dr Philipa Whitford, a Glasgow-based breast surgeon, claiming that privatisation could kill the NHS within a decade. Within the yes movement, Whitford’s speech had gone viral.

Nicola Sturgeon said the NHS was always in mind. As Scottish health secretary, she had rehearsed the key arguments at an SNP conference speech in spring 2012.

“It was always an argument we intended to make and I am absolutely convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that the reason the Better Together parties reacted so ferociously to that was that they knew how important it was,” Sturgeon recalled. “It was one of the arguments that I think started to shift opinion towards yes.”

It was immensely effective and played very well indeed in Labour-voting neighbourhoods, largely because it triggered a gut anti-Tory reaction and played to Yes Scotland’s conceit that Scots were more socially liberal than England. Yes and no campaigners began hearing the Yes Scotland arguments played back by voters on the doorstep: proof that it was hitting the target. The SNP’s private and unpublished polling had already found that warnings around NHS privatisation and spending in England could flip no voters into yes: one showed that the number backing independence jumped from 45% to 55% when the NHS was raised to voters. “It was very effective,” said Kevin Pringle, the SNP’s director of communications. “It was a very powerful dramatization of what the yes vote was for.

After two weeks of floundering in response, Better Together eventually ended the crisis by asserting that Scottish ministers had complete autonomy over NHS policy and spending in Scotland. But Blair McDougall, the chief executive of Better Together, admitted that the NHS issue cost the no campaign up to three points on referendum day, losing it some 110,000 votes. A senior Scottish Tory source, and other no campaign executives, put the damage higher, estimating that without the impact of the NHS campaign and Darling’s hammering in the second TV debate, the no vote could have hit 60%.

Welfare issues and the Tories’ toxic reputation in Scotland were serious problems for the no campaign: remarkably, Darling had managed to block Iain Duncan Smith, the Tory secretary of state for work and pensions, from coming to Scotland in April 2014 to launch the Scotland Analysis paper on welfare and pensions.

The NHS campaign fuelled an upsurge in mass events by yes activists and supporters, who swelled a series of demonstrations in Glasgow’s George Square, and Buchanan Street, where they gathered under the statue of Labour’s first first minister, and the father of devolution, Donald Dewar.

By the second debate, staged by the BBC in the Edwardian grandeur of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum and screened live across the UK and overseas, Salmond was in sharper form and better briefed, largely thanks to Sturgeon.

Pringle argues that Salmond is more self-critical than his enemies realise: “Alex is most often at his best when he is in a situation of adversity. When things are going very well he sometimes gets a bit impatient as to why they are not going better, but he was actually very calm after the first debate,” he recalled.

Faced by a more combative, vocal audience, Darling was comprehensively outboxed, appearing wooden and incoherent. Salmond hit him with well-aimed jabs over the alliance with the Tories, increasing poverty, and the vague offer of extra powers. Afterwards, Better Together were furious, blaming the BBC for shambolic security which allowed yes campaigners to confront Darling as he arrived at the Kelvingrove, and poor screening that seemed to result in two-thirds of the audience being ill-disciplined yes voters. It went very badly for Darling. An ICM snap poll for the Guardian gave Salmond a convincing 71% to 29% victory.

2 September: Poll dancing

The Westminster elite, who had assumed that the referendum would be easily won by the no side, started to stir when the shadow cabinet minister Jim Murphy suspended his 100 town Irn-Bru crate speaking tour at the end of August in the face of intimidation from yes supporters. But the first major jolt that woke London from its slumber came on 2 September, when a YouGov/Times poll found that the no side’s apparently impregnable lead had shrunk from 14 points to six in under a month. Alistair Carmichael, a Liberal Democrat bruiser who had been drafted in as Scotland secretary a year earlier to confront Salmond, told the cabinet on the morning of the poll that the union was in grave danger. “This was a time to hold your nerve and to take the prospect seriously but we had to stick to the strategy,” Carmichael said of his intervention. Later that week, a meeting of the “quad” – the coalition’s senior members – was called to hone the message on the risks posed by independence. The government’s aim was to counter the threat from the yes campaign by fleshing out new powers for the Scottish parliament. On the following Sunday, 7 September – while Cameron was visiting the Queen at Balmoral – the referendum finally became a story of global proportions when a YouGov/Sunday Times poll put the yes side in the lead for the first time – by 51% to 49%. “God, it was nerve-racking, I don’t ever want to go through that again,” Danny Alexander said.

But UK ministers and senior civil servants had already had private warnings about the sharp surge in yes support. Because of the unprecedented threat posed by independence to the future of the UK and the state, the Cabinet Office commissioned more than £537,000 worth of extremely detailed but unpublished polling from Ipsos Mori between May 2013 and the end of the campaign – at one stage paying up to £100,000 a month for these surveys, in what is believed to be a record sum spent by Whitehall tracking one political event.

Those Ipsos Mori surveys, which included conventional opinion polling, focus groups, and qualitative attitudinal research into how voters behaved, had tracked the rising support for yes since chancellor George Osborne’s currency zone veto in early 2014. They also echoed the sudden sharp rise in yes support in the closing weeks of the campaign, and confirmed what YouGov and TNS BMRB had discovered: that the referendum vote was too close to call. The Cabinet Office refused to publish the poll findings, insisting they were wholly confidential, and it is now vigorously resisting freedom of information act requests for disclosure.

Ipsos Mori executives had also briefed Whitehall that the last Quebec independence referendum suggested that polling figures could exaggerate support for yes – Ipsos Mori staff in Canada had advised their UK colleagues to assume that on polling day, undecided voters would break two to one for no; that had been the experience in Quebec, where the polls had over-estimated the pro-independence vote. In hindsight, the Better Together chief executive Blair McDougall described the YouGov polls as a “godsend”: “Those two YouGov polls were the best thing that happened to the campaign in terms of making the economic risk real, in terms of energising activists and getting the parties to work through the painful process of sorting out this stuff,” he said.

8 September: Gordon takes a Vow

The new urgency of the pro-UK campaign saw the return to the frontline of the man who had suffered Labour’s second-worst election defeat since the introduction of suffrage. Gordon Brown had delivered many speeches on the referendum, but they had barely received any attention outside Scotland – until he roared into action in a speech on the evening of Monday 8 September in the small Midlothian town of Loanhead. Addressing a packed meeting of Labour supporters at a miner’s club, Brown said, “What people are looking for is a timetable, a plan, a mechanism for delivery and a clear idea of what would happen after a no vote.” His crucial intervention was to provide wavering voters a guarantee that further devolution would be delivered on a clear timetable, with a broad plan finalised by the end of November and a final agreement reached in January 2015. The former prime minister had managed to fire up natural Labour voters, after a month in which it seemed the key theme of the no camp – the danger posed by independence – had been seized by the yes side, as Salmond hammered on the risks to the NHS if Scotland remained in the UK. There was also the small matter of Labour’s neglected base in Scotland. “We realised that the Labour party in Scotland was a bit like the Russian army in the first world war,” a Downing Street source recalled. “Superficially it was impressive but the reality was it wasn’t there in numbers or in fighting energy.”

The “silent nos” – Better Together’s description of the voters who eventually swung the referendum – were mobilised in what will be remembered as one of the most gripping weeks in modern British political history. The shock YouGov poll on 7 September prompted a fall in sterling and knocked billions off the value of companies with exposure to Scotland. One government source spoke of “an air of disbelief” among senior officials in Whitehall. The source added: “So [there was] disbelief, helplessness, a sense among the senior civil servants that, Christ, if this goes the wrong way, we have got our work cut out.”

Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander, the Scottish shadow foreign secretary, were so alarmed that the Labour leadership suggested to David Cameron that they should abandon prime minister’s questions at Westminster and travel instead to Scotland. It was a difficult judgment call: the pro-UK leaders’ trip north of the border risked looking “heavy-handed”, according to one government source. In the end, the three main party leaders travelled separately to Scotland in a move that eventually won widespread praise from the no side. “On balance I still think it was the right judgment in that it robbed our opponents of the argument that somehow the choice was for us as Scots but the consequences wouldn’t fall elsewhere and it rendered transparent the fact that the whole of the UK was engaged,” Douglas Alexander said.

Alex Salmond mocked the “total disintegration” of the no campaign, but day by day, Better Together was moving into gear as business leaders at last began to voice their private concerns about the dangers of independence. As shares in Scottish companies tumbled, Danny Alexander and Paul Sinclair, a senior aide to the Labour leader in Scotland, cooked up a headline that made the front page of the Daily Record – the key paper to reach out to core Labour voters: “Salmond’s Black Wednesday”.

But the defining moment of the final phase of the campaign came six days later when Gordon Brown persuaded the Daily Record to emblazon across its front page a declaration by the leaders of the three main UK parties that they would start the process of delivering “extensive new powers” to the Scottish parliament. The Vow, which appeared on mock parchment paper on Tuesday 16 September, was so named by imaginative editors. But it was almost wholly the work of Brown, who is credited with doing the most in the final two weeks of the campaign to stabilise the no vote and save the union – in the words of the veteran Whitehall watcher Peter Riddell, it was “Gordon’s second premiership”.

Douglas Alexander, who had been drafted in by Darling to take day-to-day command of Better Together in its final months, was in regular contact with the prime minister’s Scotland adviser Andrew Dunlop in the negotiations over the Vow. But Downing Street was also kept informed by another route – Brown sent regular emails, in his trademark capital letters, to senior civil servants including Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary. Cameron also spoke to Brown in the final stages of the negotiations over the wording of the Vow, though their conversation focused on the prime minister’s final speech of the campaign, in Aberdeen on Monday 15 September. The prime minister had sent the man he dislodged from Downing Street a copy of his speech, asking for suggestions. These were then incorporated into the speech, in which Cameron warned that independence would lead to a “painful divorce”.

A Downing Street source says the prime minister took an “indulgent” view of his predecessor. Recalling their telephone call ahead of the Aberdeen speech, the source said: “Gordon Brown couldn’t resist saying I’m the saviour of the world and you take my advice. I think the prime minister’s view was indulgent – that is Gordon, Gordon has a role to play, there you are. It wasn’t the case that he felt, why is this man so central to this situation? It was just, we’ve got to win, he has a part to play, if I have to cope for half an hour as he tells me why the campaign should have been run in an entirely different way, then that’s fine, OK I’ll do that.”

Douglas Alexander, a former protege who fell out with Brown over the abortive plans to call a UK general election in 2007, experienced something of a reconciliation with his mentor, whose role he likened to that played by the Quebecois former Canadian prime ministers Pierre Elliott Trudeau and Jean Chrétien in the closing stages of the 1980 and 1995 Quebec referendums. “I was clear that we needed a Scottish voice closing the campaign, the most powerful and eloquent voice that we had in our side of the argument was Gordon, and that was why we scored him for the closing days of the campaign.” A self-confessed political anorak, Alexander’s study of the Quebec referendums also provided an answer to one of the dilemmas of the pro-UK campaign: how to dress up No as a positive message. Pierre Trudeau, Alexander discovered, had made his final speech in front of a banner saying “Non Merci”. Alexander says: “As soon as I found ‘Non Merci’ we put that into qualitative research and it tested out the park. I mean, one of the ways you can tell in a campaign that your messaging is working is when your merchandise flies out the door, and just as soon as we produced ‘No thanks’ badges, buttons, leaflets, they flooded out.”Following a series of successful public appearances, Brown gave a barnstorming speech in a community hall in the Maryhill area of Glasgow on the eve of the poll in which he warned that independence would be irreversible: “Once it’s done, it’s done.” Willie Rennie, the leader of the Scottish Liberal Democrats who watched the speech from the stage, was blown away. “I thought he was going to chew the heads off everybody in the front row, he was that dynamic.”

Brown had, in fact, first raised his concerns with Cameron and Osborne more than two years earlier, in March 2012, complaining that the SNP had been allowed to set the terms of debate by framing the referendum as a clash between Scotland and London. Brown warned the pair who had ended his premiership that the majority of Scots now felt more Scottish than British, and suggested English politicians wrongly believed these identities to be equivalent north of the border.

Leading figures in the no camp found it hard work to pin down Brown on his plans during the campaign. “As ever with him, you dance through intermediaries,” one source said. But in the end they were immensely thankful for Brown’s interventions, though his impact was not clear until the last hours.

The final polls – and the visible jitters among the British elite – gave the yes side confidence that they were on course for victory. But Pringle acknowledged that amid the excitement, the yes campaign failed to appreciate the late surge for no.

Sturgeon said voters were subject to an “onslaught of fear-mongering” after a second YouGov poll gave the yes side a lead. “The Vow and [the poll] came together for enough people who in their hearts probably wanted to vote yes, but for reasons that I totally understand, were scared of what they were being told might be the consequences. Suddenly they had something that sounded as if it were the safer option to give them a lot of what they wanted, but without the risks,” Sturgeon recalled. “If that poll had been the following Sunday we’d have won. It was too soon. We had private discussions in our campaign meeting about not wanting to go ahead too early.”

The mood in the Better Together camp in the final days was supremely nervous. Ed Miliband was forced to abandon a walkabout in an Edinburgh shopping centre as pro-independence supporters drowned him out with cries of “serial murderer”. In the final days of the campaign the Labour leader struggled to move much beyond his hotel.

“[The SNP] presumed that the closing 10 days of the campaign would be a cavalcade towards independence,” said Douglas Alexander. “They wanted to suggest Better Together was in a perpetual state of crisis and that ever more support was coming to ‘yes’. So when we set out the strategy – ‘faster, safer, better change’ on the Monday evening, they had very little in their locker to push back with.”

18 September: Up all night

A period of almost unbroken sunshine ended on the eve of referendum day, forcing voters to trudge through the rain when the polls opened at 7am on Thursday 18 September. Undeterred by the return to normal autumnal weather, voters came out in their millions to record the sort of turnout (84.59%) unseen in a UK general election since 1950 when 83.9% of voters turned out.

The yes side thought their chances were strong as vast numbers of supporters turned out. “It felt to me on polling day as if we were winning,” one SNP source says.

But the Better Together camp knew they were in a strong position after the final polls gave them a lead and the postal vote returns showed they were comfortably ahead in areas where they could have faced trouble. By midnight, after a YouGov poll suggested a 54%-46% no win, the momentum was clearly with the no camp. Muted celebrations became a little more joyous around 1.30am when tiny Clackmannanshire, which had been in the sights of the yes camp, voted for the union by 53.8% to 46.2%.

Salmond was pictured looking dejected as he was driven from his north east home in the early hours for the flight down to Edinburgh (aides later said he was simply monitoring results on his iPad). Hundreds of miles south in London the atmosphere was looking up in Downing Street where George Osborne had hosted a takeaway curry dinner for the prime minister and their close aides in No 11 in the final hours of polling. The Tory leadership were so nervous about the results that camp beds were brought in for staff to ensure that everyone was on hand if the prime minister had to go out into Downing Street to admit that he had outdone Lord North, the prime minister who lost the North American Colonies, by losing the United Kingdom.

In the end the union was saved, allowing the prime minister to telephone a mightily relieved monarch.

Amid the rejoicing, the unlikely allies who had secured victory for the no campaign would soon be back at each other’s throats, after Cameron seized the moment of triumph to play the English card – providing the SNP a quick route back from defeat. But one prominent Scottish unionist urged that the outcome not be forgotten. “The dream that Salmond had campaigned for all his life had come to a halt,” said Lord Strathclyde, the former Tory leader of the House of Lords. “He had done everything in his power to make sure that the vote went his way. He decided the date of the referendum, he decided the length of the campaign, he decided the question, he changed the franchise so that schoolchildren had got a vote, he was wholly in control of the Scottish government and the civil service. There was nothing more he could do. So he lost. The people have spoken. The sovereign will of the Scottish people has been heard. A once in a generation – once in a lifetime – opportunity occurred in September, and the decision is final.”

Here is the link to the original article:- The real story of the Scottish referendum: the final days of the fight for independence | Severin Carrell, Nicholas Watt and P

The Only Fair Constitutional Settlement For All Is The Same Settlement For All!

We must put an end to the outrageously racist approach to constitutional settlements in the UK. I say racist because heretofore any settlement has used racial characteristics like ethnicity or identity for determining who gets what settlement, if any. The … Continue reading →

The Scottish referendum and the accidental emergence of the English voice

Robert Henderson

The outcome of the Scottish independence referendum has resulted in the breaking of a particularly effective omerta within the British political classes, namely, that there should be no acknowledgement of the wilful damage done to English interests by the devolution settlement of the late 1990s which has excluded her from having a national political voice while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were given such a voice and ever increasing devolved powers.

Having denied England her due for 16 years the Tory Party has suddenly embraced the idea constitutional equality with the rest of the UK with the necessary changes being made in tandem with the new powers so recklessly promised by Gordon Brown during the last days of the Referendum campaign. No matter that the Tory Party has had this sudden conversion to being the upholder of English interests because it is a way of marginalising the Labour Party through both threatening to remove the influence of its many non-English seat MPs; no matter that so far all that is proposed is English votes for English laws rather than an English Parliament; no matter that the Labour and LibDem leaders have rejected the idea. What matters is that the English devolution train has started to move and once moving it will be very difficult to stop.

Cameron’s “solution” to the constitutional imbalance

The morning after the NO in the Scottish independence referendum vote David Cameron proposed this:

“Just as the people of Scotland will have more power over their affairs, so it follows that the people of England, Wales and Northern Ireland must have a bigger say over theirs.

The rights of these voters need to be respected, preserved and enhanced as well.

It is absolutely right that a new and fair settlement for Scotland should be accompanied by a new and fair settlement that applies to all parts of our United Kingdom.

In Wales, there are proposals to give the Welsh Government and Assembly more powers.

And I want Wales to be at the heart of the debate on how to make our United Kingdom work for all our nations.

In Northern Ireland, we must work to ensure that the devolved institutions function effectively.

I have long believed that a crucial part missing from this national discussion is England.

We have heard the voice of Scotland – and now the millions of voices of England must also be heard.

The question of English votes for English laws – the so-called West Lothian question –requires a decisive answer.

So, just as Scotland will vote separately in the Scottish Parliament on their issues of tax, spending and welfare so too England, as well as Wales and Northern Ireland, should be able to vote on these issues and all this must take place in tandem with, and at the same pace as, the settlement for Scotland.”

Whether Cameron could deliver much of this in the seven months before the General Election is highly dubious, both on the grounds of time and the difficulty of getting agreement with the other major Westminster parties . Labour leader Ed Miliband has already refused to back the idea of linking English constitutional reform to the granting of extra powers to Scotland. This is for a crude political interest reason: without Labour MPs from outside of England the Labour Party would have no chance of forming a government in England for the foreseeable future. LibDem leader Nick Clegg has also refused to back Cameron’s proposal, but has said he would support the formation of an English Grand Committee to scrutinise and amend English-only legislation. However, this would still leave the UK parliament as it is present constructed with the final say which would include MPs for seats outside of England.

But even if Cameron could do it in the time and the other major Westminster Parties agreed to his proposal, it is difficult to see how Cameron could achieve what he wants – an equality of control over national affairs in the four Home Countries – because he is determined not to have an English Parliament. English votes for English laws suggests he wants to have only MPs for English seats voting on issues which affect only England. (It is not clear at present whether Cameron would exclude Welsh and Northern Irish MPs . If they were not excluded the problem of non-English MPs voting on English issues would remain. But there is a difficulty in doing this insofar as Welsh and Northern Irish devolved powers are less than those already in Scotland and even more inferior to a Scotland with the proposed new powers. The solution to this is to give all four Home Nations equal devolved powers.)

But excluding non-English seat MPs from voting on English issues would not entirely solve the problem. There would still be the question of who makes the policy on which the MPs vote. It is easy to see how a situation could arise where a Labour government or a coalition government with MPs drawn from non-English seats could have an overall majority in the Commons but be in the minority amongst English MPs. If that was the case it would not be for such a government to make laws for England because it would be non-English MPs making English policy. English laws would have to be formulated and developed by an executive drawn only from English-seat MPs. That would mean two executives in the Commons, one dealing with English affairs and one with all other affairs. It would be unworkable. If there was both an English Parliament and a Federal government the problem would not exists because the two executives would be clearly delineated and their areas of responsibility obvious.

Consider also the position at a UK wide general election. How would those standing for seats outside of England campaign? If such MPs were allowed to be part of the policy making process for English-only legislation but were not allowed to vote, what exactly would they put in their election manifestoes about such a situation? Similarly what would the parties they represent put in the Party manifesto? If MPs outside of England were excluded from both voting and policy making on English-only matters would the Party manifestoes for seats outside of England have to exclude any mention of what the Party manifesto for England said on English-only issues?

There is also a serious procedural problem with English votes for English laws, namely, who would decide what is an English only issue. It has been suggested the Speaker would make the decision. That would place a dangerously large amount of political power and influence in the hands of one man. (Imagine the present speaker John Bercow making such a decision when faced with a Tory government). But whatever the arrangements for making such a decision there would be immense opportunity for dissension and many seemingly English-only issues could end up classified as not qualifying as English-only. Indeed, while the Barnet Formula remains any English legislation with spending implications could be argued to not be English-only because what England gets to spend is linked to what Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland receive: England gets more for the NHS, the other home nations gets a proportionate boost to their spending . That difficulty could be removed by abolishing the Barnett Formula but that would cause a great uproar amongst the Celtic Fringe. There would also be the a problem if the Welsh and Northern Irish assemblies were not given the same powers as the Scottish parliament because that would also cause great confusion and argument.

But the question of English representation goes beyond mere numbers. Even if a Westminster government is formed with a majority of English MPs, the fact that MPs from outside of England would still be able to both vote on and help frame English-only legislation and policy would colour that legislation and policy because personal relationships between politicians of the governing party would compromise the desire of the government to act in England’s interests. (The smaller the government majority amongst English MPs the more influence non-English seat MPs would be able to exert because their voice would be louder and the Government would always be afraid of a general rebellion by the non-English seat MPs if non-English interests were not being pandered to. With a government with a tiny majority of English seats this could well result in defeat for the government.)

If the Westminster government with a majority English-seat MPs was formed by a party with strong representation in one or more of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish, the temptation not to act solely in English interests would be strong because of the fear that what was done at Westminster could damage their standing in the other Home Countries. A coalition with an English-seat majority which excluded the Tory Party would be particularly difficult for England because it would have non-English seat MPs from different parties pulling in different directions.

The plain truth is that the only practical and honest solution to the constitutional mess is an English Parliament. It would allow an exact equality of powers and national focus to be granted to each of the Home Nations. The Parliament could be created very simply at little or no additional cost: only MPs for English seats would be elected to the House of Commons which would become what it was originally, an English institution.

An English Parliament would remove not only the practical difficulties of deciding who should make policy to put before the Commons and what legislation was to be dealt with only by English seat MPs, it would force England’s representatives to concentrate on England’s interests first, second and last.

The UK federal Parliament could be created simply by forming it of the MPs of the four Home Country national Parliaments. With federal matters restricted to a handful of important issues – defence, macro fiscal policy, foreign affairs, homeland security and suchlike – the federal parliament would not have that much to do. This would allow it to meet at Westminster if a physical gathering is required or it could be conducted through linking the four national parliaments via the Web The federal government would be formed as the UK government is now, on a majority drawn from the four Home Country parliaments.

The attempts to fudge the English constitutional question

There are already frantic elite attempts to fudge the English question in play. As soon as the NO vote was certain the mainstream media and Libdem and Labour politicians started pushing the idea of devolving the powers Scotland had to either English regions or councils. The BBC was particularly assiduous in this respect with Radio 5 who started their propagandising for devolution which would deny England a Parliament as soon as it became clear in the early hours of the morning that the NO vote would win.

Devolving to English regions or even councils the powers enjoyed by the Scottish Parliament after the new powers are added manifestly cannot achieve what Cameron wants, namely, equality of treatment for England. For example, Scotland is to have new tax raising powers over income tax. If such powers were given to English regions or large conurbations , this would simply result in a hideously complex post-code lottery which would set one area against another. But it would not simply be a matter of setting one area against another which would be an ill consequence of such devolution. Imagine what would happen if one area suffered a severe shortfall in revenue under such a tax regime? This could happen because they set the rates too low to make up for any new taxpaying businesses or individuals they attracted or because there was a flight from higher tax areas. Would what remained of central government in the UK be willing to stand idly by and allow vital public services in the afflicted area to fall into disuse? Most probably not, but that would raise a problem: if much of the revenue raising had been devolved where exactly would the money come from to bail the at risk region or council out? But even if central government did have the funds, it would be politically toxic for them to be handing out money to a region or city which could not fund its public services because it had set its local tax rates too low. Solvent regions or cities would be up in arms. There would be plenty of issues such as this. The whole thing would be an administrative mess of heroic proportions.

Regional assemblies would not work even if their remit was restricted to genuinely local matters and their taxation powers remained small. . This is because there are no English regions which have anything approaching as strong an identity as any of the home nations. Most of England has no strong regional identity. Even the North East and Cornwall – the two English areas most commonly touted as having a strong regional identity – would be unsuitable. The North East is comprised of Northumberland and Durham but that has strong antipathies within it, for example, the rivalry between Newcastle and Sunderland. Cornwall is too small to stand on its own – with much of its population not being Cornish but incomers – and a South West Region comprising Cornwall, Devon and Somerset would have no natural unity. The Northwest would include Manchester and Liverpool, two major cities with little love for one another.

At the level of devolution to towns and cities, this would raise the problem of what to do with the considerable stretches of England without large cities or substantial towns. That would rule out extending the powers of large cities and towns to the surrounding countryside in much of England..

What needs to be done now?

Although English votes for English laws on policies developed by MPs from England and put forward by an English executive would be very messy and ultimately impractical, the adoption of the scheme could be used as a springboard to an English parliament. This would be partly because the public would see that it was not working efficiently or fairly and partly because the habit of publicly speaking about English interests and English constitutional circumstances would have been formed. That would embolden politicians and the mainstream media to advocate an English parliament. If it was only English votes for English laws with MPs outside of England still forming part of the policy determining group for the legislation for England, this clear evidence of blatant inequality between England and the other Home Nations would boost demand for English votes for English laws to be scrapped and English Parliament put in its place.

The danger for England is that she will end up without anything which goes anyway towards remedying the disadvantage she is presently under. Nothing will be decided before the 2015 General Election and if Labour form a government, whether on their own or in coalition with the parties other than the Tories, the chances of English votes for English laws getting off the ground is remote. In such circumstances the issue of English devolution would be likely to be kicked into the long grass with things such as a constitutional convention and the devolution of some unimportant extra powers to the cities. I doubt whether regional assemblies would be attempted because of the resounding rejection of an assembly in the North East in 2004. It would also look like treating England as a second class citizen. The idea of devolving important powers such as those granted to Scotland to cities would be a non-starter .

If the Tories have a modicum of sense they will go to the country on a platform of English rights. Ideally, this should contain support for an English Parliament , but even English votes for English laws would have considerable traction with English electors because at long last there would be a major Party which appeared to be “speaking for England”. Such a platform would place both Labour and the LibDems in an impossible electoral position because a refusal to allow the English to have the same powers as the Scots, Welsh and Irish would be self-evidently unreasonable.

An English Parliament – The Least Cost Approach to Governance in England!

The fact is that some of us English fail to think deeply on important topics, and that some prefer to use the English language to deceive the rest of us, as is shown in the phrase: “An English parliament would … Continue reading →

The future of England

Meeting arranged by the Campaign for an English Parliament (CEP)

House of Lords 20^th November

Speakers

Frank Field Labour MP

Lord Maclennan (Lib Dem)

Professor Wyn Jones ( Professor of Welsh Politics, Cardiff U)

Eddie Bone CEP

There were around 100 people attending including a sprinkling of young faces which is always encouraging. The audience was also pretty hostile to any suggestion that England should not have a Parliament or be Balkanised with regional assemblies. This type of audience reaction has been growing in meetings I have attended over the past couple years which have dealt with the EU, immigration and England’s place in the Union. I would suggest it is indicative of a growing anger and desperation amongst the native population to what they rightly see as the selling out of their country one way or another. People have had enough of what in any other time would have been given its true name: treason.

Frank Field MP on the need for an English Parliament

Field began by pointing out that he had been against devolution in 1998 (when he voted against it) because he could see that it was a flawed settlement that was on offer which would inevitably lead to future conflict. The chief flaw in the settlement was the absence of England within the devolutionary plan.

To his credit Field argued for an English Parliament despite the fact that his Party derives great advantage from having many Scottish and Welsh MPs sitting in the Commons and, consequently, Labour would struggle to form a majority in the Commons if either the Union dissolved or it remained intact but with ever more powers being given to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Indeed, even as things stand it is difficult for Labour to get a majority of English seats. His reasoning was this, if Labour does not embrace the cause of an English Parliament the increasing dissatisfaction felt by the English would erode Labour’s electoral base, because sooner or later those in control of the Tory Party would recognise that it is de facto the English party and successfully appeal to the English . This would radically undermine present Party loyalties. Because of this Field saw the only hope for Labour in the long term was for the Party to embrace the cause of an English Parliament and accept that it was desirable for the English to be able to assert their identity.

Field rejected regional assemblies for England because it was clear the English do not want them and would divide the country with different regions competing against one another. Instead he favoured a federal system for the four home countries with foreign policy, defence and finance being federal matters dealt with in a federal parliament and the rest left to the four national parliaments.

I would support this structure (I would even go so far as to invite the Republic of Ireland to join) , but some further matters would need to be decided at the federal level most especially immigration policy. There would also be the problem of welfare benefits, NHS provision and educational facilities if each home country funded its expenditure from taxes it raised within its borders. If there were significant differences in benefit levels in the four home countries, eligibility for the benefits would need to be decided at federal level because otherwise people would flock from the lower benefit level countries to the higher benefit level countries. Nonetheless, a federal government would deal with only a minute part of what Westminster deals with now.

Field’s explanation for the failure of the English in the past to display national identity strongly is the loss of Empire (he seemed to be unaware that the English never had any shyness about doing so at the height of Britain’s imperial power). He argued that while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland used the occasion to carve out a new national rather than imperial identity for themselves, England did not because her people went on in the imperial mindset because they could not face the loss of world importance.

Frankly, I think this is unsustainable. I was born in 1947 and I have never encountered anyone outside a political group or meeting where any lament for the loss of Empire was heard. The much more likely explanations are that the English being the dominant nationality in the UK never felt to the need to bumptiously press their nationhood. Then came Post War mass immigration with the vast majority immigrants ending up in England. The British elite who permitted the immigration saw the danger that this could and probably would lead to English nationalism being hitched to anti-immigrant feeling and set about ruthlessly suppressing it by the law and the support of the mainstream media. English nationalist became shorthand for racist. But devolution has made it increasingly difficult for them to censor the subjects of England’s place in the Union and with that debate comes the wider one of immigration.

Lord Maclennan (Lib Dem) A Constitutional Convention for England

Maclennan described himself as a man of many allegiances saying he was a Glaswegian (he speaks with an RP accent and anyone would take him for English), a Scot, a Briton, a European and God help us a citizen of the world. Just in case the audience had not got where he was coming from, Maclennan added that he was very pro-EU.

He is in favour of an English Constitutional Convention being but there is a good deal of fudge in it. Maclennan says he wants it have popular input to prevent it being a body which simply hands down its ideas from on high. Rather curiously he thinks that popular involvement means that it should not be time limited. This lack of a time limit could be a device to allow the Convention to be manipulated by those controlling it by choosing the time most favourable to their interests for any final proposals to be made. At worst the process could even be deliberately stretched out until a government favourable to the wishes of those controlling the convention was elected. Moreover, unless the Convention was elected by the general population it is a little difficult to see how popular opinion could override the wishes of those making the final recommendations. It would not even be a question of saying the Constitutional Convention’s recommendations should be put to a referendum, because the electors would still be unable to control what the question was and what the proposals were. Those two things would go a long way to determining the outcome of any referendum.

Maclennan raised the spectre of regional assemblies by speaking warmly about them, something which produced considerable dissent amongst the audience, with people shouting out their disapproval. He tried to justify them by making a comparison between Bismarkean Germany and a UK where England had a parliament to look after her affairs. The newly unified Germany in 1870 was dominated by Prussia and Maclennan said he feared the same would happen if England had her own parliament. This was a poor analogy because the newly unified Germany had two substantial states – Bavaria and Saxony – as well as Prussia while the UK has only one large state, England. Hence, England dominates the UK naturally through her vastly larger population whereas Prussia did so by her political and military standing, the Kaiser being a Prussian. Because England is naturally dominant it will always be so. It is also insulting to the English to suggest that her Parliament or government would abuse their dominant position to the disadvantage of the other home countries.

To justify regional assemblies in a slightly less obviously Anglophobic way, Maclennan introduced the EU concept of subsidiary and trotted out the EU line of “taking decisions at the level at which they could be best implanted”.

In short, Maclennan peddled the Balkanisation of England, just as the last Labour government had done.

Professor Wyn Jones ( Professor of Welsh Politics, Cardiff U) The data on the English

Jones is Welsh. However, that did not prevent him providing a good deal of useful data to knock on the head the claims of the Anglophobes that England is too diverse for Parliament for the entire country to meet the aspirations of devolution or that the English are content with the present constitutional settlement. He drew his data primarily from two papers he had been involved with published by Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR): The dog that finally barked (http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/8542/the-dog-that-finally-barked-england-as-an-emerging-political-community) and England and its two Unions. (http://www.ippr.org/publication/55/11003/england-and-its-two-unions-the-anatomy-of-a-nation-and-its-discontents).

Jones made these points from the research:

1. With exception of London, there are no significant differences by English region of the English attitude towards both seeing themselves as English and their attitude towards the devolutional disadvantage England labours under. In London the presence of large numbers of ethnic and racial minorities makes the attitudes towards devolution and how people see themselves in terms of their nationality less pronouncedly English. However, this is simply a reflection of the attitude of ethnic and racial minorities throughout England where there is a strong tendency to describe themselves as British rather than English.

2. The English are discontented with the constitutional settlement and are growing ever more so: the more English you feel, the more discontented you are.

3. There is a strong correlation between feeling you are English, Euroscepticism and the desire for England to have a Parliament or independence.

4 IPPR research which offers the people being questioned a series of political policy areas to rank in order of importance finds the EU at number one and England’s devolution predicament at number two.

5. The English overwhelmingly do not want regional assemblies. Fewer than 1 in 15 are in favour.

6. In the IPPR research there was a dead heat between those who want an English Parliament and those who want English votes for English laws. This division would almost certainly vanish if the choice was put to a referendum and the matter discussed honestly in the mainstream media, in particular discussion of the severe problems of definition when it comes to deciding what constitutes and English law. Moreover, once it became a matter of public debate with politicians and the media making the case for a Parliament , the public would begin to ask why should England not have what the other home nations have? However, I suspect that if a government simply announced English votes for English laws it would probably dampen English discontent in the short term.

7. English nation feeling is becoming politicised.

8. There is only a weak demand for English independence – 15% according to the IPPR research.

I take issue with the Professor on one major point. Jones, claimed that what he called political Englishness is a recent growth and this explains why there has been so little public dissent from the English following devolution.

The reasons I disagree are very simple. First, there was no English politician let alone Party with substantial representation in the Commons who would voice English anger at what has happened, while the mainstream media has been very reluctant to give the subject any space. To that censorship can be added the gross intimidation offered both by the state in the form of ever greater legal restrictions on what may be said in public, the disgusting eagerness of the police to harass any attempt to provide public demonstrations of English national feeling, the complicity of the media who conduct hue and cries after anyone deemed to be non-pc and large employers, particularly those in the public sector, who routinely sack or demote people “convicted” of pc “crimes”.

If a public voice is denied and the power of the state used to intimidate people it is scarce to be wondered at that no public campaign for an English Parliament has entered the political mainstream.

Eddie Bone CEP

Bone began by pointing out that 32 million people in the last census described themselves as English. He followed this by asserting that people were no longer demonised for being English. (I took issue with this strongly– see under questions from the audience).

Bone then turned his guns on the IPPR (and by implication Jones) for being behind the curve, of concentrating on what Englishness is rather than discussing the governance of England.

On the question of English independence, Bone said that the idea that there was little support as yet did not agree with his personal experience whilst working for the CEP. He believes it is a strong trend and getting stronger.

Bone dwelt on the dismal fact that there is not major British political party producing policy for England. Nor are there regional parts of the major party which are devoted to England, no English Tory Party , no English Labour Party as there have long been in Wales and Scotland.

For Bone an English constitutional convention is wanted before the Scottish referendum on independence is held to both allow policy for England to be made and demonstrate to the Scots what independence would mean.

He described the Blair devolution settlement as stupid and lamented the fact that the cabinet papers relating to the cabinet meeting where the decision on devolution was agreed have not been made public despite FOI requests.

Bone derided regional assemblies as a tool for divide and rule and believed that piece of elite mischief at least was over and done with for ever.

Questions from the audience

The questions from the audience (not that many) centred around particular issues such as the recent sacrificing of warship building capacity in Plymouth in favour of Glasgow to curry favour with the Scots and considerable hostility to any suggestion that England should be Balkanised with regional assemblies. There was also a certain politically correct concern with whom can be considered English following the mass post-war immigration.

Lord Stoddart, who was there simply as a member of audience, said that he had recently put down a question asking whether the government had any plans for an English parliament to which the answer had been a curt no.

The Lib Dem MP for North Cornwall Dan Rogerson raised the question of Cornish separatism claiming that the Cornish “are not English”. Apart from the howling impracticality of Cornwall existing as a sovereign entity, I would doubt whether more than 50% of the present population of Cornwall have been there for two generations, there having been a considerable influx of people from outside the county over the past 50 years. But even if every person living in Cornwall was born there it is difficult to see how they could be anything but English, the county having been effectively part of the English state since the Norman Conquest and arguably before that time.

I managed to put two questions after a decent preamble:

1, Where is the evidence that the English are no longer being demonised for asserting their Englishness?

Against this idea I pointed out the EDL’s crawling adherence to multiculturalism had not saved them from a shameful level of harassment by the state most plausibly because they had English in the movement’s title. When I described their treatment as more suited to a police state than a democracy this brought sounds of approval from the audience but looks of disapproval from some of the speakers. I further pointed out that as far as the Labour Party is concerned, the fact that two of their current MPs, Gisella Stuart and Jack Straw (who both sit for English seats), had referred to English national feeling as being “dangerous”.

I ended that part of the preamble by saying that before the English could feel safe from the persecution by the state all laws which proscribed speech which was un-pc would need to be repealed and the police restrained from their current pathetically eager interference with any public political activity deemed to be un-pc.

2. In the absence of any major British party showing any interest in taking up the English question how will anything change?

I received no meaningful answer to either of these questions.

It is difficult to see how progress can be made while the major political parties are controlled by elites who are resolutely opposed to giving the English a voice and a focus for political action through an English Parliament. Ironically, the most likely instrument for change would be a vote for independence by the Scots.

The other event which could provide impetus is an EU IN/OUT referendum, if one is ever held. A vote to leave would toss British politics up in the air and force the British political elite, whether they want to or not, to concentrate on national rather than supranational issues.

Robert Henderson 22 11 2013

Hertfordshire English Democrats Supporters Club

Not Left, Not Right, Just English!

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