He makes some good points, and I fear some bad ones. I'm going to tackle them and reply point by point:
1. I agree with Hannan that British identity is valued. I was at the Unity Rally in Trafalgar Square where the place was filled with people saying they wanted Scotland to stay in the Union and doing so because they felt themselves to be British. This identity was sufficiently important to us to assemble en mass in the middle of London in a couple of days notice because we'd heard TV historian Dan Snow was trying to put something together. The implication of this is that whatever the plans for a new constitutional settlement are to be they have to re-bind the Union. Britain is important, and if we want it to survive we need to stabilise the Union with a new settlement.
2. I don't know whether Devo Max is inescapable (largely because no-one seems to know what it means) but some new devolution settlement is inescapable. As Hannan says this is as much because 45% of Scottish voters opted for independence as it is because of the promises of Cameron, Clegg and Miliband.
3. Cameron may not have been spooked, but there was still an error. Writing a devolution settlement for Scotland and pretending that only need involve Scottish opinion, and that the settlement for Wales, Northern Ireland and England can be not only separate but entirely different, is naive. Worse radically different terms of settlement for different parts of the UK destabilises the Union and underscores that we're not all equal participants in it.
4. The West Lothian Question matters enormously, but there are different ways to solve it. English Votes for English Laws is problematic. It re-casts Westminster as an English Parliament to which Scots are occasionally invited to participate, when it ought to be the UK Parliament for everyone equally.
5. We'll have to see how Labour play this. At the moment there seem to be some voices agitating for English Parliaments in some form (John Denham, Andrew Adonis, and Peter Hain spring to mind).
6. We shouldn't cut Labour out of the deliberations if we don't have to. More importantly, if we want the devolution settlement to be the same all round we can't have a solely Scottish conversation. If nothing else we need the Northern Irish and Welsh parties in the discussion - something that's particularly important if we're going to talk about maintaining or dismantling the Barnett formula.
7. Devolution all round is the right principle, but that means we all have to be involved from the beginning.
8. What form of devolution is the tricky problem. It shouldn't be whatever Scotland wants and which we then impose on the rest of the UK. We all need to be involved together if we want an equal settlement that works.
9. English Votes for English Laws (EVEL) is an inadequate answer. Not only does it create a constitutional nonsense (e.g. a Health Secretary who can't get his legislation through because although his party has a UK majority it lacks an England majority, or you have MPs who are elected simultaneously for two Parliaments) it also confirms the nationalist critique of Westminster - that it's an English, not UK, Parliament to which non-English are begrudgingly allowed a walk-on part. And of course if you want an Equal Settlement then why should Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have separate Parliaments but not England?
10. Yes going the whole hog and having a separate English Parliament makes more sense than EVEL (although it's worth thinking about Regional Parliaments too).
11. There are good arguments against having another political tier. Those arguments however, apply as much to the Scottish Parliament as they do to an English Parliament. We're not going to scrap the Scottish Parliament, so if we want an Equal Settlement then it's hard to avoid having an English Parliament.
12. There is no appetite for synthetic regions (I was involved in the campaign against the North East Assembly - North East Says No) but who says the old Government Office Regions, currently used as constituencies for European elections, are the only ones on offer. Are the identities of northern England or London or the West Country synthetic? I don't think so. If the regions on offer were, say, Northern England, the Midlands, the West Country, London, the Home Counties and East Anglia might the answer be different? I don't know, but it's worth thinking and talking about.
13. Hannan proposes his alternative - devolution to counties and cities. Does that work? I'm not at all sure. Does transport policy work at that level? Do we expect Rutland to levy a different income tax to Leicestershire? Is it sensible to try and run a separate agriculture policy for Dorset? Some people find the fact that public health policy has been devolved to the counties terrifying - how would they feel about the whole NHS going that way? Things get even more problematic if you expect the counties to be self-funding rather than helped by central government grant.
14. At least supporting similar in Scotland is consistent, although I'm not sure if Hannan is arguing for the abolition of the Scottish Parliament (logically he should, but it's politically untenable which should give us pause for thought before leaping enthusiastically to it in England).
15. Supporters of an English Parliament may not command majority support, but we're at the start not the end of the debate, and I see no majority support for Hannan's version of localism either.
16. We need a spirited national debate - I absolutely (and obviously) agree.
17. The British-Irish Council may need/want to get involved anyway if we're thinking of changing the settlement for Northern Ireland.
18. We ought to end up with something less centralised, although noting that the Scottish Parliament has been accused of centralising Scottish government, we ought to note that decentralisation and devolution aren't the same thing.
19. EU - another story.
20. I'm a committed Unionist too - that's why getting this right matters so much. The Union was preserved this week. We need to work now to ensure it's preserved in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment