Anyone can understand – and accept – that a political party with its future under threat will fight to protect its position.
What is not acceptable in this struggle is outright rabble-rousing deception – and particularly not from one of the most senior politicians in the country whose reputation has majored on probity.
But in the desperate Labour fight against the wildly unintelligent and chaotic mess of the Conservative proposals for how English votes for English Laws may be put into operation, former Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is talking the most complete constitutional nonsense in an attempt to out-inflame nationalist paranoia in the interests of his party.
In the middle of last week he pronounced that: ‘The Conservatives have acted with huge cynicism. It was they who proposed devolving all Scottish income tax and they have now made this the pretext for giving English MPs the power of veto on the annual budget vote on income tax rates.
‘They are thus seeking to embed at the heart of our constitution two classes of elected representatives: the English, who vote on everything; and the Scots – and over time Welsh and Northern Irish, who are allowed to vote on only some things.’
This is designed to compete with the SNP in inflaming the Scots sense of always being hard done by. It is doing so in flagrant misrepresentation of the reality.
MP’s are elected to represent their constituents in matters relevant to their area which are the responsibility of the government of the union.
The democratic discrepancy in the unfinished botch of devolution has been that, while powers relevant to the devolved statuses of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been removed from Westminster and placed within the power of elected representatives in regional state parliaments, the affairs of England have been left as open to every Jock, Taffy and Paddy as to the elected representatives for English constituencies.
The reality is that, in one parliament or another:
- elected representatives for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland may currently vote on everything devolved to their own national parliaments, on the affairs of England and those of the United Kingdom as a whole;
- where elected representatives for England may vote on and control absolutely nothing alone.
The affairs of England have, since devolution, have simply been assumed to be – and therefore made – coterminous with those of the United Kingdom, which of course they are not.
The democratic deficit this has inflicted on England would never have been accepted in any of the other three states – and particularly in Scotland – with the degree of passivity that has been the case.
No one should be surprised that now England has woken up – or been prodded awake by UKIP.
What the Conservatives are proposing is an unstructured and untenable mess – but that is not what Mr Brown is complaining about.
What he is saying – that the outcome would see English MPs voting on ‘everything’ and, progressively [as Wales and Northern Ireland caught up with what will be Scotland's almost fully devolved condition] the other member nations’ representatives at Westminster able ‘only’ to vote on UK-wide matters.
It does not add to the probity of politics to weave the bright threads of concocted wrongs into the fabric of what is an already vulnerable union.
Until the UK engages in considerative and objective collective constitutional reform – with federalism the only constructive model that fits where we are now – the union will continue to be unstable.
