Category Archives: quisling elite

What if there is no English Parliament?

English resentment will inevitably grow and have nowhere to go within the political system. The danger will be that people will turn to violence because they have no democratic means  of gaining national representation.  Suppose  no mainstream party takes up the cause. Suppose that English majorities committed to an English parliament were elected to Westminster,  yet were  never able to form a government because an English minority allied to the Celts  formed a Commons majority. Suppose that Proportional Representation was  introduced  and practically removed  forever  the opportunity for a single party to form a government. All this and a media dedicated to preventing honest public discussion of the subject.  Some would think that no  meaningful constitutional or nonviolent opportunity was left?

The most obviously inflammatory  constitutional position would be where  an English party advocating an English parliament gains a majority of English seats in the Commons but did not  gain an overall Commons majority.  Using  parliamentary procedures and keeping their behaviour within customary bounds, they could inconvenience the business of  government but little more. They might boycott Parliament but that would be an impotent ruse unless linked to massive demonstrations. They might set up a self-declared English parliament but it would have no power. The best tactics in such a situation would be for the party with the English majority to take the lead in organising civil disobedience and to announce before the election that they would do so if an English parliament was denied.

Then there is Europe. Our enmeshment in the EU may become so advanced that we could not legally set up an English parliament. Fanciful? Suppose that the EU at some future date insists on Regional Assemblies throughout the EU and this is accepted by a British government. Such Assemblies might then be set up in England without referenda. Suppose further that  the EU insists that the only representation for domestic matters rests with the Regional Assemblies. Add to that entry into EMU the ever diminishing control over policy in foreign relations and  plans for an EU defence force and tax harmonisation, and it would be constitutionally impossible for England to set up a meaningful parliament for it could  decide nothing.  The only nonviolent answer to such a situation would be to elect a UK or an English parliament to declare independence from the EU. 

The English should not be afraid of national feeling. Let them ask themselves why should all peoples except the English  be encouraged to celebrate and defend their ethnicity? The oft cited dichotomy between patriotism and nationalism is contrived. Both words have at their core a pride of nation and a desire to protect and celebrate the nation and culture. Nationalism is a synonym for patriotism. The true difference is between non-aggressive and aggressive patriotism; between those who wish to celebrate and protect their nation within their existing territory and those who wish to invade and compromise the culture and territories of others. The modern English of all peoples can be trusted to remain within  the limits of non-aggressive nationalism.

Devolution and our membership of the EU raise the most profound of political questions: who governs? Those who would deny England a parliament do so because for one reason or another they wish to destroy England as a nation. The English  must  work unceasingly for an parliament both for their self-respect and to prevent the political murder of Albion.

The demand for an English parliament

What demand is there for an English parliament? The British political elite backed up by their stooges in the media like to  pretend that there is no desire amongst the English for a parliament, a proposition which they are strangely unwilling to put to a ballot despite the fact that opinion polls show strong and growing support for the idea, for example,  the ICM for Power April 2010 poll gave this result

Question: England should have its own parliament with similar powers to those of the Scottish Parliament.

Strongly agree: 43%

Slightly agree: 25%

Neither agree nor disagree: 10%

Slightly disagree: 8%

Strongly disagree: 12%

http://riselikelions.co.uk/english-parliament-opinion-polls

The reality is that British  fear the English would welcome a Parliament. That explains the fervour with which the proposition is publicly attacked. No one expends much energy belittling something which does not exist or which is not feared.

There is not of course any great public clamour at present. It would be amazing if there was, because no mainstream political party advocates such a parliament and the national media makes a positive fetish of screaming nationalism or racism whenever one is publicly mooted. The media are also most assiduous in censoring and abusing those in favour of  a parliament. Without mainstream political leadership and access to the mass media, it is next to impossible for a political idea to make headway. Come the rise of a credible political movement  with English interests at heart and things will look very different. The media will not then be able to censor so effectively and there will be a focus for  dissent.

Once political leadership is given, it would be extraordinary if the English did not favour control over their own affairs. The mere fact of granting devolution to Scotland and Wales must heighten and clarify English feelings for an English parliament. The natural outcome of such a splitting of political  responsibilities  will be the growth  of  a resentment by the English of the subsidies currently given to the Celts. From such a resentment will come a desire within England for each country within Britain to finance both the cost of home rule and a proportionate share of general charges  such as defence and the servicing of the national debt.  What the Celts cannot reasonably expect to have for very long is home rule financed by England, for that would be having your political cake and eating it. At present we are in easy economic times. Come a depression  such as we have now and English resentment of money being exported to the Celts will be fuelled. Already there is dissatisfaction with the proposed  cuts in welfare.

There is also the increasingly mean-spirited attitude of the Celts to the English. The extent to which the Scots, the Welsh and Northern Irish Catholics actively wish to leave the UK is debatable. Their widespread resentment of England and all things English is sadly not.  To be English in any part of the UK other than England is to risk utterly gratuitous insult. Those who blithely dismiss anti-English Celtic feeling as being either the product of a small minority of political activists whose importance is unduly inflated by media attention or simply sporting chauvinism – implausible even by the dismal standards of liberal apologia  – are either dullards or wilfully dishonest.

The unpalatable truth is that Celts too often  jealously nurse  an ancestral  resentment of the  English.  This resentment expresses itself from the outright terrorism of the Fenian Irish through a belligerent rudeness found most commonly amongst the working class to a snide middleclass dog-in-the-manger attitude. It is something which has grown  greatly in recent times. The comedian and actor, Billy Connolly,  put the matter succinctly when he said that Scottish antipathy towards the English had gone from  being a music hall joke akin to the rivalry between Yorkshire  and Lancashire to a truly vicious hatred of the English. 1 The English, like any other people, do not respond favourably to habitual, gratuitous and sustained abuse.

But even if the English had at present no great desire for a parliament,  circumstances  make one a  necessity.  If democratic politics means anything,  any responsible British mainstream political party would adopt an English parliament as  a matter of prime policy. They are meant above all to represent the interests of their constituents. In this case the  large majority of the constituents are  English. Manifestly, it is not to the advantage of the majority to subsidize those over whom they have no political control and to have no independent political representation.

As with complaints of English nationalism, the bogus nature of the claim that the English should not have a parliament because they do not clamour for one publicly can be shown by the treatment of the rest of the UK. Support for a Welsh Assembly was muted in the extreme: approximately 25% 2 of the total electorate voted for it and 50% bothered to vote. This did not prevent the government from hastily granting such an assembly. Even in Scotland, only 60% of the electorate voted and a parliament was granted on a YES vote of only 45% of the total electorate. Scarcely rampant enthusiasm.

Why nothing short of an English Parliament will do

The  political alternatives to an English Parliament are all insufficient,  impractical or unnatural. The Tories supposed  preferred solution is to allow English MPs a veto  on matters which affect only England.  This  is impractical because it ignores the position of the executive. Such a system would mean in effect that no party elected without an English majority could govern. Suppose for example that the party divisions in the Commons were as follows: for the entire UK (659 seats) – Labour 339, Tories 280, others 40:  for England alone (525 seats) – Labour 230, Tories 280, others 15. The UK wide Labour majority would be robbed of any say over the expenditure of approximately three quarters of all public expenditure in the UK. Further complications  would arise if the English component of the Commons was “hung”, that is no parliamentary party had a majority of English seats. The worst possible situation would be a Commons in which the overall House and the English component were both “hung”, but with radically different balances  between the parties. For example, suppose that Labour and the  Libdems had an overall majority in the Commons, but did not have an overall majority between them of English seats.

There would also be the question of who would make policy to present to the Commons. Obviously it could not be a party without an English majority for that would be pointless. It would have to be the party with a majority of English MPs. This would mean in effect an English government within Westminster, which would have more practical power and  patronage that the UK government.

The other alternatives  are  an English Grand Committee, an English Secretary in the cabinet, a reduction in the numbers of non-English MPs and regional English assemblies . An English Grand Committee would solve nothing for of itself for it would decide nothing. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Grand Committees were of importance prior to devolution, if at all,  because each of the Celtic parts of the UK had a  cabinet minister with the powers of a viceroy, a budget to meet most of their domestic expenditure under the control of the cabinet minister and  a bureaucracy to carry  out ministerial policy. An English Secretary with similar powers would be an absurdity, because he or she would exercise more power than the prime minister for most of UK government expenditure and patronage would be under his control.

That brings us to regional assemblies. These present  daunting practical difficulties. There is no natural division of regions in England. Even those parts which are most commonly cited as having a strong regional identity – the South West, Yorkshire   and the North East – are far from being homogeneous. There is an emotional division between Cornwall and the rest of the South West.  Yorkshire is extremely diverse, the south with its large cities and very substantial ethnic population having little in common with the North Riding, which is largely rural.  As for the North East, anyone who knows the area will realise that the people are far from seeing themselves as a single entity and often display considerable rivalry, for example between Sunderland and Newcastle. As for the rest  of England, there is no obvious division anywhere. Moreover, traditional regional loyalties are much diluted by internal migration. In Cornwall, for example, less than forty percent of its population was born in the county.  There are local loyalties in England, but they are precisely that, local, being based on neighbourhoods, towns, cities and villages.

If Regional Assemblies were set up, all the complaints which are now levelled at Westminster will be replicated and most probably amplified, because local animosities are greater than national animosities. There will be accusations of remoteness – the likely representative  regions would be physically large – complaints of unequal spending within the  region and disputes about the distribution of centrally raised taxation. There is also the problem of subsidies. The richer regions would come to resent paying for the poorer in the same way that England resents subsidizing the Celts. Eventually this dissatisfaction would be given a political voice. Already there are political stirrings in London about  the amount of money which is redistributed to the rest of the country. For example, on 22/7/99 the London local paper, the Evening Standard, carried an article by the chair of the Association of London Government, Toby Harris. It began: ” For too long the taxpayers of England have been bank-rolling the rest of  the UK. Too much of the tax revenues generated by our households and businesses are recycled to the supposedly more needy regions of the UK, while too many of the capital’s own needs go unmet.” As London has an economy larger than Sweden’s, a reduction in her willingness to pay tax would have very serious implications for the poorer parts of England. Everything I have said about the problems facing the Celts  within a federal UK apply to English  Regional government. Regional Assemblies would lose whatever appeal they might have once it became clear that subsidies from the wealthier parts of England might cease or be reduced.

There is also the question of what powers Regional Assemblies could  be reasonably given. The natural tendency for Westminster will be to give them as little power as possible, indeed to produce bodies which are little more than local councils. Yet this will be easier said than done. The Scottish Parliament controls most domestic matters other than major tax raising. Even the Welsh Assembly deals with  a great deal of domestic legislation – those who doubt this should tune into Welsh Questions in the Commons. Time and again questions are rejected because they deal with matters now outside Westminster’s competence. It is difficult to see how English Regional Assemblies could be given anything less than the Welsh and improbable that they could be denied that which has been granted to Scotland. Indeed, it is improbable that the Welsh will be satisfied with a lesser status for long. This has profound implications. That Scotland or Wales may institute new laws which differ from those in England is one thing because they can claim to be a national governing entity: for English Regions to do the same quite another. To take an example, we could end up with different laws on abortion in the South West and Yorkshire.  Even  more problematic would be regional differences with commercial implications, such as different rates of tax or safety regulations. In effect, we would have not one system of English law but many.

Reducing the number of non-English members at Westminster is a non-solution. It is true that there is an imbalance which should be addressed because seats in England are on average substantially larger than those in the rest of the UK , for example, Welsh seats are around 14,000 electors short of those in England. . However, even if the imbalance is remedied, it would  not address Tam Dayell’s  West Lothian Question, namely why should non-English members vote on English matters when English MPs may not vote on Celtic matters?.

There are those who argue that no change is necessary because English MPs are always in the majority. This argument  is bogus because it ignores the reality of party discipline. It is highly improbable that English MPs of any political colour would regularly breach three line whips.  Most particularly, it is difficult to imagine Labour and Tory MPs sitting for English seats combining to defeat a Labour government. But the difficulty goes beyond the obvious. Any future Labour or LibLab coalition government would probably be substantially dependent on non-English seats.  Consequently,  such  a government would never introduce policies driven solely by what is best for England. Good examples of such behaviour  already exist in the present Labour government’s failure to take action to reduce either the number of Celtic seats in the Commons or the subsidies paid by England to the Celts.  The suggestion is a piece of casuistry worthy of a sixteenth century Jesuit.

Regional assemblies may appear to be off the political agenda at present but there are three reasons why they may reappear. The most potent is the fact they are the Euroenthusiasts’ preferred means of preventing England from realising her political potential . The groundwork for this has already been  done through the institution of eight Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) and the creation of unelected  consultative bodies which roughly correspond to the physical areas covered by the RDAs. Interestingly, these divisions of England correspond to the English regions planned by the EU. It is true that the coalition government is committed to abolishing the RDAs, but it is a fair bet that something similar will take their place.

The second reason why regional assemblies may again become a live political option is that it suits both Labour and the LibDems, both of whom are less than dominant in England at national level.  They would see such assemblies as a means of building support and power in England. That would be particularly so if some form of PR was used to elect the assemblies. It would also have the advantage from their point of view of weakening England as a political force by politically Balkanising it.

The third reason is that should the Alternative Vote become the system for electing the Commons Britain would be in a situation of  more or less permanent coalition, with at least one of the coalition partners being in favour of regional assemblies. The fourth reason is that regional assemblies would kick the West Lothian question into touch for a while at least as the English were distracted by the novelty of the new assemblies. The fifth reason is the ambition of would-be politicians of any stamp  who will see new opportunities to get their feet under the political table and their snouts into the taxpayer filled trough.

Although people do not generally realise it, the process of English political regionalisation has already begun with the mayor and assembly for London . As London and its environs has an substantially larger economy than Scotland this is of considerable significance.

Regional assemblies in England would not utterly destroy English national feeling,  but they would  lead to the  development of regional political classes which would,  out of self-interest or ideological conviction, actively work to create bogus divisions within England. In the absence of a national English parliament, such regional voices would be difficult to counter.

Why are the British political elite so Hell-bent on denying England a Parliament?

The Scots have a parliament; the Welsh have an assembly; the implacable factions of Ulster shall run their own affairs if they can but remove their hands from one another’s throats; yet the English, the most politically mature of all peoples, shall possess no such means of political expression and  control over their own affairs, neither now nor ever. So runs the curious view of our political masters.

When I say our political masters I mean the entire British political elite,  for no mainstream party  advocates an English  parliament or gives any sign that it will do so.  This is more than a little strange, because a English parliament is not merely the most just but also the most obvious and economical solution to the inequality of democratic representation and opportunity wrought by devolution..

Why is our political class so  utterly determined that England shall be given no voice? The obnoxious truth is that our political elite  oppose an English  parliament  for Anglophobic  and  self-serving reasons, both domestic and supra-national. There is a general  terror amongst them of what they describe as English nationalism, but which in reality is a dread of English interests being realised and fought for. To that general motive may be added two particular reasons,  the knowledge of Euroenthusiasts that  a strong self-confident England would subvert their federalist plans and the Labour Party’s fear that an English parliament could  mean a near permanent Tory majority in England. Those things are obvious enough.  But there is something deeper, more subtle, more poisonous, whose acid growth has slowly corroded our entire public life, namely  elite sponsored Anglophobia which has its roots in the currently dominant elite ideology of the West, liberal internationalism.

For more than a generation there has been assiduously nurtured amongst our elite a habit of public belittlement of England and the English. The disease spreads far beyond politics and infects the worlds of mediafolk, academics, public servants, pressure groups and important businessmen.  These people I shall call the Public Class.  The habit has become so ingrained and so widespread, that gratuitous insult by public figures of all things English  and the energetic promotion of all peoples and cultures other than the English, has become the norm rather than the exception. Things have come to such a pass that it is now commonly suggested by the Public Class that Englishness does not exist and any attempt to protect English interests is treated as at best chauvinism  and at worst racism. We have the unsavoury spectacle of a native ruling elite actively denigrating their own culture and generally acting against the interests of the mass of their people. Historically, such behaviour is commonly found in monarchies, aristocracies and despotisms. In a supposed democracy, it is best described as bizarre.

This dangerous habit of mind for England extends to the one parliamentary  party, the Conservatives, which might be expected to rebel against it.  William Hague, an Englishman born and bred, gave the game away in an interview in the Daily Telegraph (8/7/98) when he stated “I am not an  English nationalist” and declared that he “is determinedly British rather than English” and was “dismayed to see so many  St George Crosses at the world cup.” It comes as no surpriseto learn that he has since rejected an English parliament on the ground that “it could prove a decisive step in the break-up of the United Kingdom” (translation:  Mr Hague is unreservedly willing to subordinate England’s interests to  preserving the union at all costs).

The bogus nature of the claims made by those who scream blue murder at the slightest public expression of English pride or defence of English interests is shown by the uncritical support the same people give to Scotch, Welsh and Irish nationalism. They also give the game away when they argue that England is so large in comparison with the other parts  of the UK that a Federation would be unbalanced. In other words, their fear is really that England would naturally dominate a federation. The argument about federal imbalance can be simply shown up for what it is, a demonstrable nonsense, by referring to the examples of the USA, Canada and  India. There are sixty Californians to every Alaskan; seventy bodies  in Ontario for each person in Prince Edward Island and one hundred and eleven inhabitants of Uttar Pradesh for every human being in Goa.

What exactly is this terrible danger our political elite see in their misnamed English nationalism? It is not that England would oppress her Celtic neighbours. It is not that England would engage in any form of aggressive action against the rest of Britain. The fear quite simply is that an England with its own voice and political focus would attend to its own interests. The political fat would then would be in the fire.

The prime political fact of the UK is that England  enjoys such a preponderance in population, wealth, educational opportunity, industry and commerce  that she inevitably dominates the other parts of Britain. In fact, England has such a predominant position that she could, if she but  had the political will, utterly dictate the terms of any future  Union or dismantlement of the Union. She has five sixths of the population. She has more than five sixths of the wealth, commerce and industry. An English parliament with the same powers as the Scots would account for approximately three quarters of total UK state expenditure. Most pertinently the English taxpayer pays massive subsidies to the rest of the UK.  An English parliament would eventually mean an end to these  subsidies. It is this fact above all others which frightens those who oppose such an assembly. The effect of ending these English payments to the Celts  would  be profound.

The Eurofederalists  share the fears of English interests being realised and defended, but their reasons are different. They understand that a strong, self-confident England would spell the end of their plans to embed Britain within the EU. That Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland should have a means of national political expression is nothing to them, because these countries are too insignificant and above all too poor to resist the march of Eurofederalism. England with fifty million people and the third or fourth largest economy in the EU is a different kettle of fish. It is also a fact that opinion polls show the English to be considerably more Eurosceptic than the rest of the UK, many of whose peoples  harbour fantasies of being given massive subsidies by the EU  in the manner of the Irish Republic, as “nations within Europe”.

Before the 2010 election the Tory position was for “English votes on English laws”, a misnomer because what they really meant was all MPs except those sitting for Scottish seats voting, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies not have the same depth of devolved powers as the Scots’   “Wee pretendy parliament”, as Billy Connolly described the largely English-taxpayer funded edifice in Edinburgh.  Since the formation of the Big LibCon coalition, Cameron has made no mention of this. It is a fair bet that the proposal is dead while the coalition exists. If the proposal to shift from first-past-the-post to the Alternative Vote system for general elections becomes law, then Britain will probably be cast into a situation of perpetual coalition, one at least of the partners in which would be the LibDems or Labour. Neither would countenance a move to any measure which would give the English any political voice.  Hence, it is difficult to see how either English-votes-for-English-laws or any other move short of an English Parliament such as an English Grand Committee will be on the agenda for the foreseeable future.

The English-votes-for-English laws or anything else short of would have been of little use in immediately changing the disadvantage under which England constantly suffers, not least because the Welsh and Northern Irish MPs would be voting on much of the legislation because it would apply to them. However, it would be of great utility in forcing MPs to publicly address the imbalances produced by the present devolution settlement. That in turn could spill over into the question of our immersion in the EU which is the other end in the pincer movement between Westminister and Brussels to Balkanise the UK .