Time for a Campaign for an Equal Settlement

I am fearful for my country. For the record, my country is the United Kingdom. I am English, British and a passionate Unionist. I believe in the Union and want it to continue for centuries more. 

The Scottish referendum nearly broke up the Union and destroyed my country. 45% of the vote on an 85% turnout should give all Unionists pause for thought. A huge chunk of the people in one of the partner nations of the Union have decided it's not for them. For that reason, even more than the vows made by the 3 party leaders, there will have to be further devolution for Scotland. 

There is something we're overlooking though. One of the important critiques by the Yes campaign was that Westminster wasn't theirs. It was seen as essentially the English Parliament to which Scottish MPs were allowed occasional walk-on parts under sufferance. That's a shocking indictment of the system considering the Prime Minister 2007-10 was the very Scottish Gordon Brown, and we've seen a lot of prominent Scottish politicians at Westminster: Alistair Darling, Douglas Alexander, George Robertson, John Reid, Malcolm Rifkind, Robin Cook, Helen Liddell, Des Browne, Ian Lang, James MacKay, Derry Irvine, Charles Kennedy, Menzies Campbell and Iain Macleod, not to mention the Scots who represent seats in England like Michael Ancram, Liam Fox and Michael Gove. Why is that?

Part of the answer might be the different political traditions in Scotland compared to England. But another part of it surely is that Westminster, because of the lopsided devolution we currently have with a Scottish Parliament but no English Parliament, has to double up as a UK and English Parliament. A lot of the business that comes before it is essentially English not British and consequently a lot of the debates are English not British. That's not the end of it of course because the current rules allow Scottish MPs to vote on English and rest of UK matters. With plans for further devolution to Scotland a situation that was intolerable in theory risks becoming intolerable in practice. 

One solution being touted is English Votes for English Laws (EVEL). That may be superficially attractive but it entrenches the nationalist view that Westminster is really the English not UK Parliament. If it was a really attractive idea, then why do Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland elect separate Parliament/Assemblies rather than simply restrict votes to MPs from those nations? Perhaps for the same reason we don't abolish Kent County Council and suggest the Kent MPs just get together and run things. If you're going to have a separate body to deal with specific issues, then its probably best to elect people especially for the purpose. The Holyrood elections are conspicuously not identical to Westminster elections in Scotland. 

We're not going to get rid of the devolved Parliament and Assemblies. No-one wants to. So what should we do? We need to keep two things in mind: we want to settle devolution, and re-bind the Union together. To me that means one thing: an Equal Settlement for everyone. 

If Scotland is to get more powers, then Wales and Northern Ireland should get exactly the same powers. If Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have devolved Parliaments, then so should England. At that point Westminster would return to definitely being the UK Parliament again, with all MPs definitely equal to each other with the same voting rights. The United Kingdom would return to being a united partnership and stop looking suspiciously like an English empire. 

The first implication of this is that deciding the new Scottish powers isn't solely a Scottish question. If we're all going to have the same deal, we all need to be involved now. 

The second implication flows from this. One thorny issue has already raised its head - what to do about the Barnett formula which allocates public spending to the nations. Some Scottish politicians seem very keen on keeping it, others want Scotland to fund its spending solely out of Scottish taxation. But this presents big problems for Wales who find Barnett is unfair to them, but would find funding all their spending out of Welsh taxes ever more difficult. We're a United Kingdom so moving money around shouldn't be a problem, but we clearly need a new way of doing it, so that's one big topic to talk about. 

The third implication is that we need to start talking about where we devolve to in England. EVEL at Westminster isn't an Equal Settlement, but a separate English Parliament on the same terms as the Scottish Parliament would be. That's not the only option though. Daniel Hannan MEP and Douglas Carswell favour putting county councils and cities in England on the same footing as the Scottish Parliament. John Prescott has come out in favour of regional Parliaments in England which have the same powers as the Scottish Parliament. Even if you favour the regional option, there are different ways to do it - do you follow the regions we use for European elections (e.g. South East, North West etc.) or do you make bigger regions based on culture and identity like Northern England, Midlands, West Country, London, Home Counties and East Anglia?

There's lots to discuss but we need to start talking now. The Campaign for an Equal Settlement starts here. 

Reply to Dan Hannan

Daniel Hannan - Conservative MEP for the South East of England - has written a short piece in the Telegraph outlining his thoughts on the outcome of the Scottish referendum and the consequent pressure for devolution in England. Have a read here: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danielhannan/100287120/where-next-with-uk-devolution-some-quick-observations/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

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. 

Welcome

Welcome everyone. 

This is a blog I'm starting in my own attempt to kick-start a debate on the constitutional reform of the UK - specifically what we're going to do about devolution to Scotland and what that means for the rest of the UK. 

As the title of the blog suggests, I'm interested in getting an Equal Settlement. That means the same deal all round for all parts of the UK. 

I hope to be back soon with further thoughts and reflections. 

Cheers, 

Adam