The English alone

ONLY ENGLISH parliamentarians should ever debate and vote on laws to do with England. The result of the Scottish independence referendum has finally brought the Midlothian question to a head; and we must thank a Scotsman, Alex Salmond, for achieving it.

            

            It is not acceptable for Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish members of the Westminster parliament to vote on English issues. How this system has been tolerated for so long has had more to do with party political interest than it has to any concept of fairness to the English people.

            

            In the past both the main parties have lived with this anomaly because each of them benefited from the system; and the Labour Party still does, which is why Ed Milliband is opposed to such a notion and wishes to promote a long drawn out inquiry[1], preferably adjacent to what he believes will be his term in office as prime minister after May 2015.

            

            This will not do. Any new settlement of an English constitution, must agree its terms and conditions beforehand; and considering the nature of the inquiry, the following cannot ever be included; simply because they run contrary to the purpose of such an inquiry seeking a purely English settlement.

            

             The exclusion of none English parliamentary representatives debating and voting on purely English subjects within parliament can only be seen as being axiomatic within an English national parliamentary framework, by any fair-minded individual. No one but the English has any right to blue-print and vote through any parliamentary law applicable to England. There is, and can never be, any case to be made for the current arrangement, after the result on Scottish independence last Thursday.

ED MILLIBAND is in a desperate plight. Over the border in Scotland, his party lost many votes to the Yes cause. In England many Labour working class voters, as in Scotland, are beginning to turn their backs on Labour, and in England are steadily turning toward Ukip; as are many Tory voters.

            

            The Labour Party, once the party of the UK's working class, have now become detached from them; preferring their seduction of ethnic minorities as a replacement. The party is now represented by a London elite, as are the other three main parties.

           

            Both north and south of the border, traditional working class Labour voters have now found somewhere else to turn. They can no longer be taken for granted; just as the traditional Tory voter can no longer be – both, however, can now find (if it is their whish) a welcome home within Ukip.

            

            In the coming weeks and months following this momentous vote by the Scottish electorate; more and more English people will put a new English constitutional settlement side by side with the EU and immigration, as their priority over all other domestic issues now the country has freed itself from recession.

           

            Milliband has this morning (Sunday 21^st  September) tried to turn the heads of his supporters with promises of a rise in the minimum wage to eight pounds by (wait for it) 2020, on the eve of his party's conference in Manchester.

            

            Milliband wants the English constitutional set-up to remain the same. He therefore seeks to see it, and hopes his Labour voters will see it; as a mere theatrical backdrop to the standard of living debate he has re-orchestrated, and hopes to win the next election with.

            

             But he will be disappointed if he tries this tactic. He has taken for granted his party's support in Scotland; seeing his party's traditional voters north of the boarder as sheep to be herded to the ballot box by party apparatchiks in the service of a Labour victory.

THE THREE GREAT issues of the day, are not domestic social ones, but national and international ones. The Scottish vote has enlivened the English voter, who have been for so long held almost in disdain by their self-confident, and almost arrogant party leaders from all three main parties. In the past all of the indigenous English have been effectively silenced on immigration; they have been patronised and ignored by the 'we know best attitude' of the political class, when it comes to signing away our sovereignty on Europe, without ever  consulting the people they are supposed to represent.

            

            Now, we, the English people, have allowed separate nations to our own to vote in parliament on issues to do purely with English matters. Scottish as well as Welsh and Northern Irish MP's have been allowed to vote in all the debates at Westminster, irrespective of whether the laws debated and voted upon applied only to England.

           

             It is an unfairness that cannot be challenged even by Milliband, who seeks to change the political agenda to his party's own advantage and not the English nation's – at least while his party conference is assembling.

I HOPE AND BELIEVE THAT the English people from whatever political background they have traditionally belonged; will turn away from their traditional parties (as happened in Scotland) to lay claim to a new English constitutional settlement. This would mean voting for a new party; a nationalist party. A party at whose centre, after the Scottish vote, should be focused on a renewed English constitution bereft of any interference from any other part of the Union of the type Milliband hopes to cling on to – he refused 13 times to give his support to a constitution that sought to end the anomaly of Scottish members voting for English laws.

            

            Ukip has to be given a chance, just as the Labour Party were given, first under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924 and between 1929-31; and then in 1945 under the great Clement Attlee landslide. That Party is now refocusing itself as a liberal middle-class party, the likes of which Dennis Skinner would feel like something Ed Miliband has found on the sole of his shoe.

           

             We need a new English constitution, which, even before it is discussed, it should be agreed that the final constitution should not allow any other nation or federation of nations to have any say in laws enacted by English MP's on purely English issues. Whatever the arrangements contained in a final English constitution; if it does not contain such a guarantee  from the very beginning, then it cannot be an English constitution – if English law makers are not the sole authors of the laws making their nation, then there is no point in providing the architecture for such document…yet this is the kind of  English 'constitution' Ed Milliband seems to want.

                       

           

             

---

[1] The structure and nature of which, as well as the ground rules will no doubt be determined not by parliament as a whole, but by a Milliband government.