Category Archives: Irish Nationalists
Answers to the “England is too big” to have its own Parliament argument
Answers to the “England is too big” to have its own Parliament argument
I have recently been hearing of several Tory MPs who have been doing the rounds making arguments against an English Parliament.
One of those is Sir Oliver Heald MP, who recently spoke at a meeting of Oxfordshire Conservatives, in which he claimed the reason why England could not have its Parliament and Government like the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones was because England is too big at 85% of the population of the United Kingdom. According to him the provision of an English Parliament would apparently lead to the breakup of the Union because Federal States cannot survive where one part of the State is 85% of the Federation.
On hearing this I immediately responded that first of all one of the things that Federal States always do is have measures in place to balance out the dominance of their larger States. So for example in the United States, California is by far the most heavily populated US State and also the richest. However it only has two Senators, just like Oklahoma in the Federal Congress.
It is also the case that Oliver Heald’s argument does not hold water in terms of history.
The reason the Soviet Union collapsed was not because Russia was “too big”. The USSR collapsed because the Soviet system had become economically bankrupt, partly as a result of the Soviet defeat in war in Afghanistan, but also partly because of the attempt to match American defence spending with regard to Reagan’s “star wars”.
Equally Austro-Hungary did not collapse because Austria was “too big”, it collapsed because Austro-Hungary was defeated in war (also because of the idiocy of Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to negotiate with multi-national states!).
As Oliver Heald’s suggestion as to how to cope with England being “too big” is to split up England into “Regions” of one sort or another (the latest being “City Regions”), my response to him, and any of his ilk, is that any question to which the answer is to split England up is the wrong question.
If the choice is between splitting England up or splitting up the United Kingdom, I have no hesitation in demanding that the split is that of the vastly overrated, expensive, grandiose and laughably decadent United Kingdom.
When it was suggested, before the First World War, that Ireland should have Home Rule and the then Liberal Government forced through Home Rule legislation, Tory troublemakers stirred up Ulster with cries of “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”. How much more justification would we English have to fight if the cry was to split England up? Perhaps we should have a cry that “England will fight and England will be right”?
I mention the bloody history of Irish Independence intentionally because unthinking Tory unionists like Oliver Heald MP need to remember that it was Tory intransigence and the refusal to grant the reasonable request for a devolved Irish Parliament and instead the call for Ireland to be split which led not only to the bloodshed of the struggle for Independence but the still worse Civil War. This has stained Irish politics with blood ever since.
The idea that patriotic Englishmen and Englishwomen will not only indefinitely allow England not to have its own proper voice of political expression but also quietly sit by whilst over a thousand years of English history is discarded and England is broken up, is simply crazy. In fact it is not only crazy but it is utterly irresponsible!
Our General Election Press Launch – Even Sky News came too!
Our General Election Press Launch – Even Sky News came too!
As I mentioned in my previous Blog item, over the years we have tried hard to get our press launch covered.
This has always previously been a struggle but this year we did get some interest, both from ITV and, in particular, from Sky, who actually sent a reporter.
We were briefly on the Sky News and also a more detailed report was done for Sky’s website. Here is a link to the article, click here >>> Coalition With Nationalists ‘Would Be Treason’
The text is slightly off what I said because I wasn’t accusing Scottish and Welsh Nationalists of being traitors to their countries, but my point was focussed more on Ed Miliband and the Labour leadership.
But leaving that aside, I think the Sky reporter has done a good job.
What do you think?
The view from the other side of St George’s Channel.
Scots and Welsh quick to distance themselves from England’s shame
The Irish Independent:- http://www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/mary-kenny-scots-and-welsh-quick-to-distance-themselves-from-englands-shame-2848180.html
An unexpected outcome of the riots which took place in London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Huddersfield, Nottingham, Leicester, Gloucester and the Medway last week was the revival of the concept of “England”.
When some commentators referred to the “riots which broke out in Britain”, the Scots and the Welsh were very quick to point out: “No, not Britain. England.”
Quite so. There were no such disturbances in Scotland or Wales. Britain consists of England, Scotland and Wales.
There were no such disturbances in Northern Ireland (much less the Isle of Man or the Channel Islands): the United Kingdom comprises Great Britain, Northern Ireland and the other islands under the writ of the crown.
All the trouble happened in England. The riotous week is now referred to as “the burning of England”, or “land of loot and burning”.
In London, some commentators took to referring to the rioters as “Englishmen”. One commentator, advocating tough policing, said that in Northern Ireland the police were known to use robust methods of crowd control. “If we don’t mollycoddle Irishmen, why should we mollycoddle Englishmen?”
It is interesting that it has taken this distressing and sometimes shameful series of events to restore the concept of “England” — a concept that had been buried, for many decades now, under the wider description of “Britain” or “The UK”.
It’s funny, because until The Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1970s and 80s, Irish nationalists traditionally spoke about “England” as the hereditary oppressor — rather than Britain. All Michael Collins’s writings about the national struggle refer to “England”. So do all Patrick Pearse’s. So do Yeats’s — in his celebrated and rousing poem, ‘Easter 1916’, he wrote that line, “For England may keep faith/After all that’s been done and said”.
But from the 1970s, and perhaps even before, England became “the Brits”. As Welsh and Scottish regiments were very much part of the Crown forces, perhaps that was accurate.
Yet it was all linked to a wider agenda in which “England” had been subsumed into “Britain” and “the United Kingdom”. Partly this arose because Scots who were nationalists — but also, paradoxically, unionists — wanted to be included in “Britain”, but did not want to be included in “England” (as the French would refer to the British in general as “Les Anglais”).
Meanwhile, airport schedules referred to the whole realm as the “United Kingdom”. Scroll down the booking system of an airline for “country of origin” and the United Kingdom pops up just before the United States, (and just after the United Arab Emirates).
Thus “the UK” came into common parlance, and hardly anyone spoke about “England” any more, except in the context of tourism. Even then, it was minimalist. Crossing into Wales, there are huge signs, in Welsh and English, telling travellers they are welcome to Wales (‘CROESO I CYMRU’); cross back the other way, and there is just a little apologetic signpost somewhere along the road bearing the information that you are now in Shropshire.
England, having been the dominant nation in what was once the four nations in the Union of Great Britain and Ireland, in recent years became the most invisible one. Especially as the Scots and the Welsh followed the examples of Irish nationalists and affirmed their identity. But you can never suppress what is inherent in any culture, and “England” began to reassert herself in a number of ways.
First came the cross of St George, often hoisted at football matches. A perfectly nice group representing English Heritage emerged and then a rather nasty one called the English Defence League followed.
As Scotland got its own parliament, there were English protests about “the West Lothian question”: it was unfair that Scottish Members of Parliament could vote on English matters at Westminster, while English MPs could not vote on Scottish matters in Edinburgh.
And then came the riots which, the Celtic nations were insistently pointing out, were confined to England — which indeed they were.
There are social problems in England which are different from those in Scotland and Wales. Scotland has a better education system (although a more serious national problem with alcohol, and with sectarianism too); Welsh society is more family-based and with greater community cohesion based on language and religious ties, and it has not had to absorb so many migrants.
So England has re-emerged as a separate concept. It’s just rather sad that it has taken this week of civil disorder — and loss of life — to make that point.
Britain, and the United Kingdom, are political, or passport, definitions. England, Scotland and Wales are cultural and even national distinctions, and it is right that they should be seen separately. Poetry and rhetoric, too, have always favoured cultural identity, rather than political entities: Browning didn’t write, “Oh, to be in Britain, now that April’s there” and Nelson didn’t say, “Britain expects that every man this day will do his duty”.
And there is one consolation for the men and women of the English nation this week: the triumphal performance of “England” in its cricket game against India.
Mary Kenny – Irish Independent
