Some English political activists have been concerned for years at the disadvantaged constitutional position of England within the Union. With the recent media coverage of the Scottish Government’s proposed independence referendum, constitutional debate has become a hot topic of the moment. The readers’ comments made on various media websites on their vision of the UK’s future have numbered in their hundreds. There is certainly much heat being generated on constitutional reform. A number of the English views expressed fall into these three main categories of opinion:
Andrew Constantine of The Campaign for English Independence
Opinion A – The Union of the UK has served us well and should be kept at all costs
This proposition – often backed up with a resume of selected episodes of British history – seems to be put forward most often by Englishmen living in England, who yet still think they are British and who do not want to lose their ‘British nation’.
Opinion B – We need a federal UK, with an English Parliament and more direct democracy, and we really must cut the subsidies to the other home nations
This opinion is at present very popular and might appear to be moderate, thoughtful and practicable.
Option C – We’re fed up with the ‘UKay’ and England should go it alone!
This opinion is also clearly English and is often expressed in the demotic. It’s the opinion that I share and this article seeks to persuade you that it really is the best and only way forward for England.
General – The multi-national nature of the British Isles
The background to most of the past, present and future arguments about the constitutional arrangements within these Isles all flow from the remarkable fact that the English Crown never managed to take over, annex or permanently subsume the other nations and polities (these latter I will refer to as the three home nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland). The quality and depth of the ‘nationhood’ enjoyed by these three home nations varies widely, and Northern Ireland is of course riven between Loyalist versus Irish affiliations.
It’s no surprise that these three home nations, the non-English parts of these Isles, are all on the geographical periphery, are protected by rivers, seas or mountains and their inhabitants have a well-defined sense of their own national identity and are usually quite sure that they are not English!
It’s true that England did manage to annex Wales and under the Treaties of Union passed by the English Parliament between 1536 and 1543 incorporated it into England. But Scotland and Ireland were not so malleable and our shared history over hundreds of years records English attempts to annex and the Scots and Irish determination to resist. The Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin showed that many Irish subjects did not have any loyalty or affection for the Crown or Parliament, and in the 1920s the British establishment were forced to recognise Irish nationalist ambitions in the major part of Ireland.
So the British state and its constitution have always had a fault line. While the ideal British constitution should have been that of a unified state (with one Monarch, one Parliament, one class of citizenship and equal rights under common laws), British politicians had to contend with the awkward fact that the UK is a multi-national state, where there were and are centrifugal or nationalist forces pushing Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland away from British or London’s control.
The political union of Scotland and England in 1707
The accession of James the First of England in 1603 on the death of Queen Elizabeth is usually referred to as ‘the Union of the Crowns’ as James, King of Scotland, now became King of England. But when the childless Queen Anne’s reign was drawing to a close just after 1700, the English elites decided to ensure a Protestant succession by offering the Crown to the Protestant Prince George of Hanover. There was now a real chance that Scotland might wish to see a Stuart as their next monarch, which would have re-introduced a Catholic and pro-French Scottish monarchy. The later Jacobite rebellion of 1745 which saw French military backing to Bonnie Prince Charlie showed that the danger was real. So a deal was done by leading English and Scottish elites to effect the political unification of the two countries – and yes English bribes were used to smooth the deal. Both the Scottish and English Parliaments passed in 1707 an Act of Union closing down their existing national Parliament and creating a joint British Parliament. It is important to note that these two Acts of Union did not seek to abolish the nations of Scotland and England. The new state or country of Great Britain was to be multi-national.
Despite what some may think, this new state had in 1707 (as it has now) a written but uncodified constitution. Many of the bare bones of the present UK constitution date back to the English Constitution of circa 1700. So we still have a Monarchy, still have a Parliament at Westminster composed of commoners and peers; we even sometimes still maintain the separation of the executive and judicial functions. So when in 1867 Walter Bagehot wrote his classic account of the Constitution, he quite reasonably entitled his work ‘The English Constitution’.
Centrifugal forces exert pressure
We should not look back at the nineteenth century as some golden period of constitutional content. Wales started to re-emerge as separate from England. Scotland saw limited demands for home rule and Gladstone started to think about introducing legislation to provide for this. But even that great Victorian statesman never found an answer to the West Lothian Question! The real political pressures however emerged in Ireland.
The 1790s had seen an attempted Irish revolution supported by France, but which was crushed by London. The nineteenth century was to see the Irish famine, mass emigration and the rise of Irish terrorism, the latter often supported by American money and arms. Some think that if one of the Gladstonian attempts to provide Irish Home Rule had been successful, then Ireland would have stayed part of the United Kingdom. We will never know for sure and I for one doubt it. In 1914, the British Liberal Government’s attempt to force Home Rule on Ireland in the teeth of Unionist sentiment looked as though it would lead to civil war. The First Wold War – in which Ulster made enormous sacrifices of men – prevented that outbreak of civil war, but the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin saw the start of the end of British rule over all of Ireland.
Devolution in the 1980s
In the 1970s the SNP started to gain popular support and electoral traction in Scotland and the Labour Party (which had been created by Scottish socialists) saw its heartland under threat. The first Labour government of Tony Blair brought in the Scotland Act of 1998 which gave Scotland back its own Parliament, and which while reserving a defined list of competences or matters for Westminster, surrendered control over unreserved competences to the Scottish Parliament. Labour had three partisan aims in bringing forward this limited Scottish devolution or home rule. They wanted to give Scotland protection from any future British Tory government; they wished to undercut SNP demands for independence and to lock in the Labour party’s traditional control of Scotland. Labour then introduced more limited devolution arrangements for Wales and Northern Ireland.
How the British elites keep the British state on the road
Following Labour’s devolution arrangements, there is now a very strong consensus among the British elites (irrespective of their affiliation to any or none of the major British political parties) on how to keep the UK together in its present trajectory of long term economic decline and deepening multiracial and multicultural societal trends.
The British elites, whether based in Westminster, Whitehall, the BBC or in NGOs have three consistent policies to keep the British state going:
1. They buy off separatist sentiment in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland by letting them run their own domestic affairs and by bunging them loads of English money and jobs.
2. As England comprises 84% of the total UK population and is too large to be included in a federal state, the British elites ruthlessly suppress any expression of English national identity. In particular, while allowing the other three nations to have their own parliament or national assembly, England (which in John Bright’s famous words is … ‘the Mother of all Parliaments’) is allowed neither.
3. The British elites having rigged the electoral system so there is no possible threat to their Con, Lab, Lib monopoly (for on so many major political matters they are all the same ideologically) can then enjoy power unchallenged and indulge in their favourite pastimes of drawing parliamentary expenses, and of ’vanity statesmanship’ (such as playing at being America’s favourite poodle, and general cheerleader for all worthy causes such as climate change and overseas aid).
So which is the best way forward for England – Opinion A, B or C?
In the light of the above, let’s return to the three popular reactions of the Englishman in the street when discussing constitutional reform and the threat of Scottish independence.
Those espousing Opinion A (i.e. we are all British and hence Scottish independence is a bad thing) are doing exactly what the British elites wish. Well done, you idiots!
Those espousing Opinion B (hoping for a federal UK and an English parliament) need to think about the following two points:
A federal UK can never work! As England has some 84% of the UK’s total population, it is just too large to fit within a federal state. No real Englishman wishes to see England broken up into Euro regions. Who wants a multiplicity of tinpot regional assemblies anyway? (Answer: the EU and those who wish to undermine England).
These ‘Opinion B’ advocates are effectively saying to the British elites ‘Please bring in an English Parliament and in doing so give up your favoured status as British elites, thus surrendering your prestige, your power and your well paid positions!’ Well really, there is not a hope in hell that the British elites will agree to this course.
Those advocating this Opinion B include the three current largest English political groupings: the Campaign for an English Parliament, the English Democrats Party and the English People’s Party.
So if we rule out two of three opinions, and you still want England to have her own Parliament and to quit the UK, then we are left with the remaining Opinion C of breaking the British Union and hence the power structure of the British elites.
Opinion C calls for an independent English national state, with its own sovereign parliament, to re-emerge after some three year hundred years.
There are two ways that we English can effect Opinion C and regain our national independence and an English parliament:
- By our own efforts … and I so wish that my fellow Englishmen would devote themselves to this most noble and important task; or
- Scotland breaks the Union for us, by voting ‘Yes’ to independence in their forthcoming referendum.
What do I want you to do? I remind you of the closing sentences from the St Crispin’s Day Speech as written by England’s national poet in the play Henry V:
“We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition;
And gentlemen in England now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”
So I call for we English to get out of bed or off our sofas and instead to agree to work together in co-operating English political and campaigning groups to demand an English Parliament and English Independence. We should of course support the Scots in their campaign for their independence. The English and the Scots, and the Welsh and Ulster – we all have a shared interest in breaking the grip of the British elites upon our nations and then co-operating as independent and democratic nation states thereafter.
Do you agree?
