The English Question should be simple to fix
Labour’s opposition to fair treatment for England is risking Britain’s integrity - Gordon Brown, its former leader, has missed the point
By Telegraph View
6:20AM BST 15 Oct 2014
Sometimes, Parliament rises to the occasion – and it did so yesterday with an all-day debate on the constitution, in the wake of the Scottish independence referendum.
It was apparent that the passions inflamed by the two-year campaign had not subsided in some quarters. Gordon Brown, the former prime minister, fulminated like an Old Testament prophet against what he perceived as Conservative perfidy. He considered David Cameron’s decision to raise the English Question in the aftermath of the referendum to have been partisan and dangerous, railing against any suggestion that there should be English votes for English laws and calling it a recipe for constitutional crisis. It would, said Mr Brown, create two classes of MP, be unbalanced because of the disproportionate size of England, and hasten the break-up of the Union that its proponents claim they want to preserve.
Not for the first time, Mr Brown missed the point. The devolutionary settlement of 1998 left an injustice at the heart of our democratic system that the last government did nothing to address. It created not so much two classes of MP as, in the words of Sir George Young, the former Commons leader, two classes of voter, with those in England possessing less leverage over events in the UK than their Scottish counterparts.
If Mr Brown had a point, it was in warning of the consequences of devolving full income tax powers to Scotland – a proposal put forward by a Conservative committee chaired by Lord Strathclyde, which went further than anything suggested by Labour. This is an important argument that will need to be resolved by the all-party committee established to consider the way forward. But that would require a full contribution from Labour, one it appears reluctant to make. Its leaders complain they are being bounced into something politically advantageous to the Tories, and want to refer the whole issue to a constitutional convention after the 2015 general election. In other words, they want to kick this matter yet again into the long grass.
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/11162204/The-English-Question-should-be-simple-to-fix.html