Memorandum submitted by Lord Tyler CBE
DL
THE ENGLISH
QUESTION
1. Background
Nearly two decades of Conservative government
saw electors and politicians in Scotland identify a serious consent-deficit
between their electoral choices, and the public policy outcomes
which were meted out to them. Though the poll tax (or "community
charge") was emblematic of this disjuncture, it was by no
means the sole genesis of a sense that Scotland was being governed
by an English administration, which had no democratic mandate
north of the border. Opposition parties were united in their censure
of that situation, even if members of those parties were divided
as to the most appropriate solution. In 1989, the Scottish Constitutional
Convention was founded and though Conservatives and Nationalists
declined to participate, the other main parties in Scotland came
together with significant community and faith groups to produce,
in 1995, a report entitled Scotland's Parliament, Scotland's Right.
Its proposals for a Parliament of 129 members, elected under an
additional member system, with a power to vary the basic rate
of income tax by up to 3p in the pound; and substantial devolution
of legislative and executive functions to an Executive formed
from it, were made a reality by the Scotland Act 1998. After a
very narrowly-won referendum, on a low turnout, Wales gained a
lesser degree of devolution, with only secondary legislative powers
devolved to a new National Assembly.
2. Devolution to Scotland and Wales has,
however, resulted in a new anomaly. Every MP in the United Kingdom
is able to vote on all legislation at Westminster, even though
much of it now affects only England. Great Departments of State—health,
education, the Home Office—have Ministers who can, and have,
represented Scottish constituencies yet whose ministerial remit
largely relates to England.
3. Piecemeal changes to the constitutional
settlement
Since the creation of Government Office Regions
by the Conservative Government in 1994, the UK has had an element
of regional administration—implementation of central government
policies by regional offices—but without effective democratic
scrutiny or accountability. While Britain's constitution prior
to 1997 was certainly defective, it had the advantage—in
constitutional, if not in political terms—of being equally
unsatisfactory wherever you lived in the United Kingdom. Our centralised
state was concentrated in one place, and our unrepresentative
electoral system had the capacity to under-represent the political
values of any citizen as much as another.
4. The 1997 devolution settlement in Scotland
and Wales gave new life to those countries' politics and (for
a time, at least) neutered nationalism in both territories; for
the first time in some 300 years, big public policy decisions
were taken by politicians—and, crucially, by political institutions—which
were not just native but politically representative, since both
the National Assembly for Wales and the Scottish Parliament are
elected by a system of proportional representation. The logic,
however, of these changes, is to give that same life and representative
capacity to politics in England; after all, it can scarcely be
fair or just to grant it to one part of the United Kingdom but
not to another. England is the missing piece in new Labour's devolution
arrangements.
5. Asymmetrical devolution abroad
The situation in which England finds itself
is not peculiar to the British constitution; indeed Canada, Spain,
Finland, and Portugal all have forms of asymmetrical decentralisation,
with, for example, remote islands having more autonomy than the
mainland regions. This is reflected in the present arrangements
at Holyrood and Cardiff, where territories with a distinct political
identity, and a quite different political culture (the most obvious
feature of which is the existence of four-party systems) have
greater powers conferred on them.
6. An English Parliament
The English Democrat Party has advocated the
idea that an English Parliament should be set up to counterbalance
the Scottish and Welsh devolved institutions. The logic of this
position is that there would be separate elections for that Parliament,
and that a separate Executive would be formed out of it; Westminster
would retain power over foreign policy, defence, social security,
economic policy and, crucially, taxation, while a separate assembly
and Executive would decide how to spend the money it raised. This
would reduce Westminster's role significantly and would divorce
the aphorism, Expenditure is policy and policy is expenditure,
since significant expenditure would, for all parts of the United
Kingdom, be decided outwith the institution with the capacity
to fund it. This could certainly cause serious tensions between
the two administrations.
7. An English Grand Committee
Sir Malcolm Rifkind MP has proposed that a Grand
Committee of English MPs be constituted on the floor of the House
of Commons to decide on what he terms "purely English business".
Yet this solution appears not to acknowledge that its logical
conclusion is identical to that of an English Parliament. A separate
Grand Committee, which had no executive arm to implement its legislation,
would soon become an impotent talking shop.
8. If the parliamentary arithmetic is to
be different on different issues, and a majority UK government
(whether or not it was composed of a single Party) could well
hold only a minority of seats in England, so would be unable to
command support for the bulk of its domestic business. The English
Grand Committee might repeatedly instruct the Government to take
particular policy decisions, which were at odds with the direction
in which UK Ministers were heading in that area. Conversely, if
the Rifkind plan were to acknowledge the need for a separate executive,
it would prove quite unsatisfactory to have it subject to scrutiny
by the same legislature as that for the UK Government, since the
Speaker would be placed in the unremittingly political and invidious
position of determining which business ought to be the responsibility
of which Ministers, and which MPs could decide on which issues.
9. Financial arrangements
Both the Rifkind proposal and that of an English
Parliament fail to identify how public spending would be managed.
Liberal Democrats have long advocated a fundamentally decentralised
state, with taxation devolved in commensurate proportion to political
power, yet this has never been the basis on which the British
devolution arrangements are predicated. Instead, the Barnett formula
has persisted as the method by which funds are allocated; the
formula allocates public funding per head of population on a proportionate
basis (or, more accurately, on a disproportionate basis) according
to the public spending settlement for England. If England were—in
a body without Scottish and Welsh representation—deciding
its own public spending arrangements, these would under present
arrangements impact substantially on Scotland and Wales, yielding
a further democratic deficit. Moreover, the UK Government would
be able substantially to hamper the efforts and scope of any English
Executive by reducing the funding available to it.
10. A bicameral Parliament
The Rifkind proposal fails fundamentally to
take into account the role of the House of Lords. Would legislative
decisions for England be taken by the House of Commons alone,
in the English Grand Committee without recourse to the second
chamber? Or would England benefit from the checks and balances
of a second chamber where Scotland and Wales do not? Would Peers
from outside England be able to vote on English legislation? Further,
if substantial areas of domestic public policy for England were
devolved to a separate English legislature, and the Lords is presently
precluded from pronouncing on financial matters, what functions
would the UK's second chamber have left? Crucially, the Lords
would not be able to take a view on the overall funding settlement,
which would otherwise become the key function of the UK Parliament
as a whole.
11. Possible solutions
Devolution to Scotland and Wales is a permanent—and
welcome—feature of our constitutional arrangements, and
as such calls to return to a unitary Parliament are misplaced.
However, simplistic attempts just to `plug the gap' in which England
clearly lies do not constitute an adequate response to the fundamental
problem of centralisation in Britain, and particularly in England.
As we have identified, "English" solutions to the English
Question are fraught with problems and threaten to undermine the
UK Parliament and, by extension, the Union. Instead, Ministers
should return to the question of devolution within England, radically
decentralising power to English regions.
12. These regions need not necessarily be those
agreed as Government Office Regions, and in certain cases we would
argue they definitely should not be. The principle of regional
devolution is not contingent on the credibility of the present
regional boundaries. Nor should the 2004 referendum in the North
East region be taken as a signal that real decentralisation is—or
was -rejected by the English in principle. There were, of course,
manifold weaknesses and flaws in the devolution settlement offered
to the North East, chief among which was that the powers offered
from Westminster were marginal, while the powers to be arrogated
up from County Councils were to be substantial.
13. Not all regions will want the same powers.
This is the case in Spain's autonomous communities, and there
is no reason to suggest the same would not apply in Britain. However,
we work on the basis that where centralisation is allowed to persist,
it should do so by choice, not default. Power over local services;
healthcare, education, the police, and so on, should rest with
people close to those who use those services and, where practicable,
with service users themselves. This can hardly be achieved while
key services in Wigan remain accountable only to the Secretary
of State in Whitehall. Since the Government has already moved
towards the principle of unitary government at local level, these
authorities ought properly to be able to take on enhanced responsibilities
in their areas, even if more effective regional boundaries take
time to agree. If the problem is that Scottish MPs vote on legislation
affecting only England, the solution is not to prevent them from
voting on it, but to devolve power in those areas of policy away
from all MPs to more effective, responsive and accountable government
beyond Westminster.
14. Liberal Democrats argued before the present
Scottish and Welsh arrangements came into effect that devolution
would strengthen the Union. If the present settlement is straining
relations between its constituent parts, it is because the process
of devolution has stalled at its first stage. That process must
now be driven forward to afford all the citizens of the United
Kingdom fair representation and accountable governance.
15. To this end, Liberal Democrats are committed
to the completion of a comprehensive constitutional settlement,
and we recognise that this could only be sustained in the long
term if it benefited from popular "ownership". Hence
our proposal for a British constitutional convention to look at
Britain's constitutional arrangements in the round, and to involve
people directly in their development. At least half of the members
of the convention should be drawn by lot from the general public,
putting our present constitutional processes and difficulties
(of which the English Question is a key component) on a real "jury
trial". We outlined these proposals in our recent policy
paper For the people, by the people, which was endorsed by the
party's Autumn Conference in 2007.
February 2008
Lord Tyler was Chair of the Liberal Democrat
Better Governance Working Group, 2006-07, which prepared the recent
party policy paper.
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