Maintaining the constitutional status quo is unthinkable

Forget for a moment, if you can, the furore over Scotland’s future, the kerfuffle over independence and ‘devolution max’.  Or rather, put these debates into perspective.  From a Scottish point of view this is rightly all about Scotland and deciding its future.  However, as the other members of this multi-national state have realised or are beginning to realise, this is about the constitutional future of the whole of the currently United Kingdom.

Devolution has severely unbalanced this union but has conversely produced a democratic deficit which cannot be ignored, or indeed denied.  The ramifications of devolution, granting limited but substantial powers to Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, were only perceived by a few at its inception.  Some saw it as a remedy to the problem of Scottish nationalism, others saw it as a highway to independence.  What is becoming clearer by the day is that the constitutional arrangement that has been constructed is a fudge.

It is the English who have been the biggest losers, suffering for the most part quietly as Scottish MPs vote on English laws.   Calls for an English Parliament to rectify this anomaly are growing, fuelled by a steadily building resentment which has been thus far largely ignored by politicians of every stripe.  Establish an English Parliament and the UK becomes a federal union.

Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones has argued that a rethink of the Houses of Parliament would be necessary if Scotland became independent.  I think it is necessary that, if Scotland does not become independent, England gets its own parliament.  In this situation it would also be necessary to create a new bicameral legislature with one house following the lines of the US Senate.  This is radical, and it is salutary that Mr. Jones is raising these issues.  Continued devolution is a probable outcome if full independence is rejected, and this major restructuring of the Union cannot be done unilaterally.

At the various stages in the creation of the UK as it now is—Laws in Wales Acts (1535–1542); Crown of Ireland Act (1542); Union of the Crowns (1603); Acts of Union (1707); Acts of Union (1800); and Government of Ireland Act (1920)—there was understandably little consideration of the problem of nationalism, at least before 1900.  Religious differences and conflicts were, of course, rife, but nationalism as we now commonly understand it did not fully emerge until the nineteenth century.  For the largest member of the Union, England, this was not a central consideration; Britain was essentially ‘England writ large’.  Ours is a cobbled-together union, lacking a plan for cohesion, essentially directionless.

Acts of union which technically dissolved pre-existing parliaments and established new ones in practice subsumed smaller legislative bodies into the English Parliament.  This was a recipe for future malcontent, for the smaller nations of these isles could never achieve proper representation when they were outnumbered so heavily by English MPs and peers.  But this was not an early modern concern; one king should have meant one people.

Imagine if the United States had been created in a like manner: the largest state absorbing all the others, dissolving their representative bodies and creating a legislature dominated by the one state.  This didn’t happen because America was founded in a more enlightened age.  We who now live in the shadow of the enlightenment find ourselves not at the beginning of a new nation, but at the genesis of a new political settlement, one which should be tailored to fit twenty-first century needs.

Or, another thought experiment, imagine if it were England holding an independence referendum in 2014.  If England became independent, would what is left be thought of as the remaining-United Kingdom?  I don’t think so, because, however we like to slant it England, in a fundamental way, is the Union.  ‘Britain’ and ‘England’ have long been interchangeable semantically, culturally, politically and even geographically for some, one of the many factors which have led us to this point.

Whatever happens in 2014, one thing is certain: the only option off the table is the constitutional status quo.  No matter whether you support independence or not, the Union cannot and will not remain the same.  If the majority of English people want Scotland to leave the Union, as some polls suggest, then they need to think creatively about what sort of Union will follow.