Cometh the Tories, Cometh the English Question

Albert Venn Dicey has received a bad press recently. Anthony King has called him one of the ‘canonical sextet’ of writers on the constitution but he now mainly represents that ‘primordial Unionism’ — according to McLean and McMillan in State of the Union (2005) — founded on the sovereignty of Westminster and out of fashion in devolutionary times.

Moreover, Dicey’s constitutional arguments are too easily dismissed as Anglo-centric. However, Englishness has become an issue of political debate and it is worth reflecting on the central points of Dicey’s England’s Case against Home Rule (1886).

First, home rule must be ‘a scheme which promises to England at least not greater evils than the maintenance of the Union’.

Second, home rule was not ‘Local Self-Government’ which, however extensive, ‘means the delegation, home rule however curtailed means the surrender, of Parliamentary authority’.

Third, home rule represented a dubiously equitable compromise because it meant ‘large pecuniary sacrifice’ for England without a reasonable hope of ‘creating real harmony of feeling’ in the Union.

Finally, the break-up of the UK would likely come not from Ireland but from England: ‘Grant it, and in a short time Irish independence will become the wish of England’ and ‘the Union must for the sake of England’ come to an end.

By ‘England’ Dicey meant Great Britain, but now that England alone is the exception and not the rule, contemporary English nationalism has inverted Dicey’s argument but not his logic. His case against home rule has become England’s case for home rule.

The argument runs that devolution has delivered for England the disadvantages of Celtic separatism without the advantages of union and that the alternative to English home rule, namely regionalism or local self government by another name, reveals the Labour government’s hatred of the English nation. Devolution means subsidised self-determination, in which the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish get the self-determination and the English do the subsidising, and the English must sacrifice their right of nationhood to maintain an unfair, asymmetrical union.

At the moment, this nationalism is a mood rather than a movement but it is finding a voice, and not just in the provocative columns of Kelvin McKenzie at The Sun or in the analytical blog of Gareth Young at the Campaign for an English Parliament.

Hitherto, the attitude of the Labour government has been that politicised Englishness could not and should not be accommodated. That it could not be accommodated is a practical matter of constitutional design: the Union Question. That it should not be accommodated is not a technical but a national question: the English Question. Both of these inter-related questions have a novel political urgency.

They are politically urgent because the Conservative Party now poses a more serious electoral challenge. Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s proposal that there should be an English Grand Committee in the Commons to have the final word on all purely English legislation is only a variant, of course, on the party’s longstanding policy of English Votes on English Laws, a policy upon which it contested general elections in 2001 and 2005.

It is also a variant of the proposals in Lord Norton’s Commission on the Strengthening of Parliament in 2000. When the Conservatives looked unelectable this mattered little, but now it does.

The Rifkind proposal is a Conservative attempt to demonstrate how distinctive English interests could be accommodated within Westminster. That they should be accommodated is the moral case which the party senses is a possible electoral asset. The government is clearly concerned. No longer is it Labour outsiders such as Frank Field, who argue that the government needs to take the English Question seriously. The prime minister’s cabinet colleagues, in particular Jack Straw, have raised concerns about English political resentment.

However, it was not Sir Malcolm who spoke most eloquently to English grievance but John Redwood during the debate on the Queen’s Speech. His theme was equity, his objective re-balancing an unbalanced union. Echoing Diceyean themes, he argued that English regional governance —‘balkanising it into a set of artificial euro-regions’ — is unacceptable because it does not give England recognition ‘matching the devolution offered to Scotland and other parts of the Union’.

While the government worries about Scottish nationalists, it is the people of England who will ‘become advocates of Scottish independence because they will want English independence’ — a Sunday Telegraph ICM poll last year found that 59 per cent of English respondents approved of Scottish independence, a higher percentage than the Scots themselves. A Sunday Mail poll in October last year found 33 per cent of English voters favoured an independent England.

So Redwood, like Rifkind, supported the creation of an English structure within the Westminster parliament because ‘it is the English parliament as well as the Union parliament’. This intimates a potentially potent political intersection of English nationalism and Conservative politics.

But here is a Tory paradox. Playing the English card may win a general election but a Conservative Commons majority would obviate the need for an English Grand Committee. This would solve the technical question at Westminster but having promoted the national question, could the Conservatives then avoid the consequences of alienating the non-English parts of the UK and raising the expectations of English voters? And how is all this compatible with David Cameron’s forceful defence of the union in Scotland in the spring of 2007? A constitutional convention, if not principle, of excluding non-English MPs from Cabinet is hardly a rallying call for Conservatism or Unionism in Scotland or Wales.

The case against Dicey’s polemical logic is that it helped bring about the very thing it opposed. Perhaps that is the lesson the Conservative leadership should heed. And, for different reasons, the Labour leadership too.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster and author of ‘The Politics of Englishness’ (Manchester University Press 2007).