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Mr. Elfyn Llwyd (Meirionnydd Nant Conwy): I respect the fact that there is a country called England, with great traditions. Should not the hon. Gentleman put all his efforts behind the movement for an English Parliament?
Mr. Luff: I do not wish to give away the dramatic conclusion to my remarks, but that is exactly what I am about to argue.
The article in The Birmingham Post continues:
To address Englishness is not, as the Minister seemed to suggest, an appeal to crude nationalism. The opposite is true. Anyone who reads the works of Stanley Baldwin, or even the recent book by Jeremy Paxman, can quickly knock that idea into touch. Try telling the Anglican church that to be English is in some sense crudely nationalistic. That is simply not the case.
The House must, however, understand that unless the mainstream political parties, represented in this Chamber, grapple seriously with the issue of how to address Englishness, other much less pleasant forces will do the grappling for us. In my home city of Worcester, we recently faced the prospect of a National Front march. The British National party has been campaigning on the issue already. Unless we address the question of Englishness and defuse it, the consequences could be extremely serious. That is why I am so pleased that the Conservative party decided to have this debate, which I predict will be the first of many on this important subject.
The Government know that there is a problem, and accept that the constitution is no longer balanced. That is why the Minister, in her opening remarks, offered the English the insulting idea of a Standing Committee on Regional Affairs, as if that were some sort of answer to the Scottish Parliament and Wales's National Assembly. I used to support the Minister's idea, but no longer.
Regionalism is wrong, for many reasons. I shall not run through the list, as I have done so at least twice before in the House. Regions have none of the sense of identity from which governance must flow. Democracy depends on that sense, but I have no identity with the west midlands. I accept that it is a useful administrative concept for the delivery of services, but it does not serve for the establishment of legitimate democratic institutions.
Mrs. Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside):
Does the hon. Gentleman accept that billions of pounds of public money is spent at a regional level on vital matters such as the economy, the environment, education, housing, and so on? Does he also accept that the previous Conservative Government recognised the importance of regions when they set up Government offices for the regions?
Mr. Luff:
The hon. Lady obviously was not listening, although the people of Blackburn and Blackpool will have been aware of her mismanagement of the county council when they decided to opt out of its control.
Regional government is a useful administrative idea, but it is not a democratic concept. I do not belong to the west midlands and have no part in it, although I like Birmingham a lot. However, what about the south-west, bits of which lie further north than my constituency in Worcestershire? For example, the village of Willersey in Gloucestershire is well to the north of Broadway. Would Bournemouth, or the Isles of Scilly, be part of some south-west region? It is a ludicrous proposition that makes no sense at all.
In a shamefully loaded opinion poll by MORI, The Economist asked people whether they wanted regional government. However, people were not told what would go with it--the abolition of at least one tier of local government. The tier most at threat is the county council, but that is the one layer with which people identify. Counties have a thousand years of history.
Miss Begg:
I was interested in what the hon. Gentleman said about losing the county council. The previous Conservative Government got rid of the district councils in Scotland. If that was good enough for Scotland, why not for England?
Mr. Luff:
I shall not get into a full debate about local government, which would risk being ruled out of order.
I shall surprise my hon. Friend the Member for Rochford and Southend, East (Sir T. Taylor) by saying that the last of the dangers posed by regionalism is the real and lively one, that Brussels will be able to divide and rule. The ambition is to have a Europe of the regions, but I do not want my region to turn into a dreary outpost of the European Commission in Brussels.
Regionalism does not answer the problem of legislation. The Scottish Parliament is a legislative assembly that takes real decisions. I did not want the Welsh Assembly, but now that it is here, I want it to be a real legislative assembly, taking real decisions. The regions of England will not be able to do that. There will not be one law for beef on the bone in the west midlands, and another in the south-west. Clearly, that is not on: the Government should accept that the idea of regionalism is dead in the water, and that it does nothing to answer the West Lothian question.
England must not feel that it has become a second-class citizen in the United Kingdom. I am driven to conclude--with some reluctance and hesitation--that the only answer is some kind of English Parliament. That would provide the constitutional symmetry of which the hon. Member for Thurrock spoke so persuasively. I also support increased powers for Wales in--I hesitate to use a word that is so unpopular and so often misunderstood--a federal United Kingdom.
I find myself praying in aid strange allies. I never thought that I would quote Enoch Powell in the House but, in the 1976 devolution debates, he said of the United Kingdom that
Dr. Godman:
Am I right in thinking that more and more Conservative Members are coming to support a federal Britain? For some time, the more intelligent members of the Scottish chattering classes have been debating federalism versus separatism, and last week's election will not stop that debate.
Mr. Luff:
The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. Federation or separation is the choice that the United Kingdom must ultimately make. That is where we are being driven. I do not know how long it will take to get there, but that is the fundamental decision facing us. That is why I believe that it is crucial to have an intelligent debate, one not smothered in a blanket of regionalism that fails to address the fundamental question.
"No one is happy now. Certainly not the Scottish who have tasted power and will want for more, nor the Welsh where the successful nationalists will want something better than the talking shop they have been given, and definitely not the English who are bewildered by the whole exercise which has left them in an anomalous and undefined position.
I shall not go over those points again, because my hon. Friend the Member for Woodspring did that so well in his opening remarks. He talked about funding and over-representation. We have discussed the fact that the Cabinet is dominated by Scots Members. The hon. Member for Thurrock made some intelligent and interesting suggestions about how we could deal with the problem of English issues being decided by Scottish Ministers. Although the dry-as-dust constitutional issues still rightly concern the House, the bread-and-butter issues have now come to the fore. I think that I am supposed to say the "kitchen table" issues, which they are literally in the case of beef on the bone, and metaphorically in the case of university fees. Who knows what the next of those kitchen table issues will be? Whatever they are--and the two that I have mentioned took the Government by surprise this week--the English sense of grievance will grow.
In our new murky world, the Frankensteinian result of Dr Blair's mischievous meddlings, the English are the power without a decent throne. The incongruities are legion."
"it is not possible for the same electorate to be represented directly in two legislative Assemblies unless one of two things occurs: either the unitary State must become federal, with a pre-determined area within which the one set of elected representatives is sovereign and another area in which the representation of the whole realm is to be sovereign: or there must sooner or later as a consequence be separation and the recognition of separate sovereignties."--[Official Report, 19 January 1976; Vol. 903, c. 998.]
It is precisely because I wish to avoid separate sovereignties that I am driven to agree that a federal United Kingdom is the only structure that will stand the test of time.
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