Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

It’s over four years since I last blogged regularly about constitutional issues in the United Kingdom.  During that time independence for Scotland was rejected at a referendum and we've had a Prime Minister who emphasised repeatedly his unionist credentials.   So is the Union in a healthier state in 2015 than it was in 2011? If you look at its prospects for the very short-term, the answer is probably ‘yes’. The ‘Better Together’ coalition managed to fend off a muscular movement for independence, in the Scottish referendum.  That campaign was polarising, ill-tempered and, at times, looked nail-bitingly close, but the Union between Scotland and England survived.  Whether it emerged from the fight unscathed, is another matter. In the afterglow of victory David Cameron told the UK that there would be “no disputes, no re-runs, we have heard the settled will of the Scottish people”.   Even the ever-pugnacious Alex Salmond, winded by defeat, app...

I read, with a great deal of interest, O’Neill’s post on English nationalism , which examines a speech by David Wildgoose, from the Campaign for an English Parliament, delivered to the Liberal Democrat conference. He begins by quoting Arthur Aughey, who has observed that English nationalism is ‘a mood, not yet a movement’. It is a useful distinction. There exists, fairly commonly in England, an amorphous sense that the country has been disadvantaged by its exclusion from the devolution experiment, but it has not yet been harnessed to a popular or coherent campaign. In his book ‘The New British Constitution’ , Vernon Bogdanor contends that the United Kingdom requires a certain degree of English forbearance, in order to function smoothly. By this reading the identity, ‘English’, has to be suppressed in order that ‘Britishness’ can operate unfettered. Certainly the United Kingdom is dependent on the acquiescence of its largest ‘national’ unit, but I would argue that the English iden...

Totnes' open primary deserves a mention, given the democracy versus diversity conundrum which some commentators suggested such a contest would produce. In an article on the Guardian politics website Andrew Sparrow quoted research implying that women would not flourish when this type of selection was used. One swallow (or perhaps that should be sparrow) does not a summer make, but the Conservatives first employment of an open postal ballot contradicts the thesis. Sarah Wollaston, a local doctor, won 7,914 votes, beating Sara Randall Johnson into second position. 25% of qualified voters participated. Iain Dale points out that the costs of the system are prohibitive (the Tories sent out postal ballots to each eligible voter), but there is room to retain the participative element whilst limiting expenditure. This experiment appears to have got off to a successful start.

To judge from Question Time last night the Norwich North public are a little angry at being asked to vote at all. However it looks odds on that 27 year old candidate Chloe Smith will take the seat from Labour for the Conservatives. The count is taking place this morning and you can follow the action at the Guardian Politics blog where Orwell shortlistee Andrew Sparrow is updating one of his patented live posts .

I’m currently reading an interesting, if insubstantial, little book called ‘A Useful Fiction: Adventures in British Democracy’ , by Patrick Hannan. It is an amiable read, written with a light touch: arguably too light for the subject which it purports to examine. I intend to write about the book more comprehensively when I get time. However, I was interested to note that its speculations about an English parliament forming the last component of a long term devolution settlement are echoed in a piece on Conservative Home , written by a Scottish activist. I am broadly of the view that an English parliament would dwarf its Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts to an extent that would unbalance, perhaps fatally, the United Kingdom’s equilibrium. Asymmetries in the current devolved constitutional system form its inherent weakness, but creating an even bigger asymmetry would not be my chosen means to recalibrate the Union. And yet I am aware that there is no appetite in Engla...

I’ve read two extracts from a book entitled, ‘Breaking up Britain: Four nations after a union’, over the past couple of days. One , by the volume’s editor Mark Perryman, is full of sweeping assumptions and portentous, imprecise sentences which squirm like eels in a bucket whenever the reader tries to grasp one and attribute to it a definite meaning. The other , by Arthur Aughey, is its antidote. Aughey believes that history cannot be understood in linear terms, and it is dangerous to interpret it as if it were a path which leads to an inevitable destination. He delivers a sober, realistic appraisal of devolution in Northern Ireland. And he explains his ideas clearly, picking illuminating, rather than obfuscating, images by which to illustrate them. In order to tiptoe carefully around apoplexy I will leave Perryman’s piece to be inspected in readers’ own time. It is sufficient to quote the opening two sentences, “Once the union between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland...

Carlisle United’s fans are renowned throughout English football as the heaviest drinking supporters of any football league club. Is it any wonder? After Michael Knighton’s ball juggling escapades at Old Trafford came to nought, he purchased the Cumbrian club and subsequently claimed that he’d been abducted by aliens. Goalkeeper Jimmy Glass may have saved Carlisle from relegation to the Conference in 1999, but it was only a temporary reprieve. The Borderers lost their football league status in 2004 after five seasons in the lower reaches of Division 3. United have enjoyed relative success since their visit to the non-leagues. Two successive promotions propelled them into League 1. Indeed last term the Blues finished fourth, making the play offs, before succumbing to dirty Leeds. Now, once again, the trajectory is downwards. Hernandez explains the intricacies on ‘Down and Out’. Carlisle could well return to the football league’s basement on Saturday, and whether in celebration ...

When the Conservative party announced the contents of a green paper on local government reform in England, I welcomed the initiative rather ruefully, given that regional government is soundly entrenched in the rest of the United Kingdom courtesy of devolved institutions. Nurturing the grassroots of democracy, decentralising power, localising decision making – all intrinsically noble goals which aim to facilitate the type of participative society Cameron Conservatives are keen to encourage. To further these objectives, the Tories intend to remove a layer of regional assemblies in England. The party’s goals won’t be as readily achievable where emasculated local councils subsist under an expensive stratum of regional government, which, in order to justify its existence, must retain functions local government could perform. However, in April’s ‘Prospect’ Demos Director Richard Reeves emphasises (subs required for full article) that the sound theories of localist policy are not always ...

Let me pre-empt anticipated criticism (hello Fair Deal) and acknowledge that I am not amongst the most convincing or consistent advocates of ‘localism’. I have instinctive distaste for anything that smacks of the parish pump; I am quick to condemn parties that are excessively preoccupied with local issues to the exclusion of national questions; I am dismissive of ‘unionists’ who show scant regard for the retained sovereign power of parliament; hell, I even hate most regional variations on TV. Not that any of these predilections, of course, are inconsistent with a belief that nourishing the grass roots of democracy is to the ultimate benefit of our kingdom. I have therefore read Conservative proposals to revamp local government and decentralise powers from Westminster and Whitehall with interest and without prejudice. The difference between David Cameron’s plans to devolve power and haphazard constitutional vandalism inflicted by Labour is that the former will seek to organically c...

Via Tom Griffin , blogging at Our Kingdom, a long article examining comparative strength of the Union in all four of its constituent parts. John Loyd writes in the Financial Times, marshalling a range of mainly unionist opinion, expressing both optimism and pessimism as to the Union’s future and differing in its analysis as to how execrable and irreversible the influence of Labour’s devolution experiment has proved. Although there are voices which view devolution as a necessary means of recognising difference and siphoning off nationalist virulence against the Union, there is little doubt, amongst these interviewees, that Labour’s piecemeal, asymmetrical approach has provided succour to nationalism. It is worth looking at a few of the views propounded by the figures whose opinion Loyd sought. Neil Kinnock, “There is no devolution ‘settlement’, in the sense of a stable deal. There is a slippery slope, which presently benefits the nationalists. They have a permanent excuse: all bad ...

On the Today Programme this morning , there was an interesting encounter between the BBC’s sports’ correspondent, Mihir Bose, and former Labour Minister for Sport, Richard Caborn. Bose abandoned any serious pretext of neutrality in order to launch a fairly explicit call for the government to pre-empt financial crisis in football and appoint an industry regulator. Bose has been charting football’s malaise closely on his BBC blog for some considerable time and offers strident argument that all is not well. Previously, Premier League football clubs had become high status vassals to be traded among a coterie of foreign businessmen. Now the credit crunch has put into question the sustainability of debt which clubs have obtained and the financial structures which have allowed their owners to acquire them. Football Association chairman, Lord Triesman, last week revealed that English clubs were £3 billion in debt and argued that measures must be taken to bring the situation back under con...

As a GCSE English Literature student, the only text that I loathed more than Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ was ‘Cider With Rosie’ by Laurie Lee. You might say that I was not exactly entranced by bucolic English idylls at the age of 16, whether they were rapidly changing or not. I wanted instead, to read some god-awful nonsense by William Burroughs or subject myself to fifteen hundred pages of Norman Mailer. Honestly, I cannot remember whether Lee’s book deserved my disdain, I suspect not. Nevertheless, when I discovered that Liam Byrne’s Demos report, ‘A More United Kingdom’ (PDF), quotes ‘Cider With Rosie’ at the outset, it immediately acquired a bundle of negative associations, before I had even begun to inspect it properly. Byrne’s report has already attracted ridicule , with its 27 suggestions to celebrate a proposed national day, one of which is drinking! Undoubtedly, despite weighing in at 90 odd pages, much of this document is fairly fatuous stuff. Nonetheless, leavi...

Before 1997 the greatest danger to the United Kingdom, as it is currently constituted, was posed by Irish nationalism. More than ten years later, after Labour’s ill-considered devolution experiments, the inconsistencies and asymmetries inflicted by Tony Blair and his government form a considerably profounder challenge to unionists. In concert with the insidious creep of electoral nationalism in Scotland and Wales, these structural problems offer a far more pressing threat than anything which is currently happening in Northern Ireland. The Ulster Unionist party has signalled its determination to be actively involved in a pan-UK debate concerning the Union’s future, in order to address the most pertinent challenges which unionism now faces, by investigating a new arrangement with the Conservatives. The idea is to carve out a far more central role at the heart of the UK’s politics. As O’Neill highlighted last week , even the DUP’s leader, Peter Robinson, with his party’s politics sti...

Robert Hazell is Director of the Constitution Unit at the University of London. On Comment is Free he has outlined why the route to independence along which the SNP would wish to steer Scotland is much more circuitous then it is often presented. Those who present the Union’s demise as an inevitability would do well to read Hazell’s article in full. I’ll provide a brief synopsis. 1) The SNP must have authorisation from the Scottish Parliament to hold a referendum. Currently the SNP hold 49 seats whilst unionist parties hold 79. 2) An initial referendum would need to show a positive result for independence. Over the past 10 years support has run between 25-30% for an independent Scotland. The referendum for a North East regional assembly, held in 2004 suggests that opinion poll support for separatism / localism diminishes when it is required to crystallise at the polls. 3) Supposing the SNP gained the result they were looking for they would merely be entitled to start negotiati...

Perhaps as a reaction to Brown’s appropriation of the idea of Britishness, and perhaps because leftist politics have, since the disintegration of the USSR, turned increasingly away from internationalism to embrace localism, those who presumptuously term themselves ‘progressives’ have become increasingly inclined to raise the English nationalist banner. In a review of a new book entitling itself ‘Imagined Nation – England After Britain’, Arthur Aughey offers a critique of the conceptual knots which these ‘progressive patriots’ tie themselves in, and challenges the false assumptions about Britishness which inform the narrative these people are advancing. In order to rationalise attempts to break up the United Kingdom, and in order to cleave their new found nationalism to an identity which they adjudge convivial, it has become de rigueur to write naval gazing tomes in which the English national identity is offered a set of civic, multi-ethnic, liberal clothes. Aughey notes the incohere...