Debate on the Address

The point is that the constitutional argument is moving on. The idea driving Scottish nationalism is to radicalise English voters so that they, too, become Scottish nationalists—by proxy. That is what the Scottish nationalist strategy is all about. As an English MP who has always in the past defended the Union, I am conscious that the political mood in my country of England is moving rapidly in exactly the direction that the Scottish nationalist party wishes for, as it tries to turn England into a battering ram against the Union. As a result, my right hon. and hon. Friends have reached the point of thinking that unless the problem of Englishness receives some recognition that goes some way towards matching the devolution offered to Scotland and other parts of the Union, that problem will get far worse, and the Scottish nationalists are more likely to get their way. The people of England will, effectively, become advocates of Scottish independence because they will want English independence. That is the process on which we are now embarked. My advice to the Government, who still claim that they want to save the Union, is that they must do a much better job of that now that Scottish nationalists are radicalising English voters. At the very least, the Government should understand that splitting England up, balkanising it into a set of artificial euro-regions, is the very opposite of what is required to deal with the problem of Englishness. Far from making English people happy, some kind of second-best devolved Government in bogus regions—such as, in my case, the south-east, which we cannot define and do not wish to—will make them far angrier. They will say that such changes are a deliberate ploy to stop them being English, and they will be made more English and more anti-Union than if the Government had not gone down the route of trying to split the country up and pretending that creating artificial regions with unsatisfactory degrees of devolved power was some substitute for tackling the problem of England. So I welcome the proposal of my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) of English votes for English issues, although I would go a little further, because the movement is rapid and Englishness is on the rise. I certainly like the idea of creating an English structure within the Westminster Parliament; I feel that, because of history, it is the English Parliament as well as the Union Parliament. My colleagues and I are happy to do both jobs for the same money. I do not want the development of an English movement that wants a large and expensive English Parliament, which would be in other buildings, with other politicians and bureaucrats, producing nothing of value at enormous cost to taxpayers. We can happily do both jobs; we have the plant, the building and the staff. A lot of the business now being conducted by the Union Parliament relates to England; we are saying that there needs to be a different way of handling that business to deal with the problem of England. Otherwise, the Scottish nationalists will win and the Government will look silly. They will discover that in creating a Parliament in Scotland to provide a platform for the Scottish nationalists, they have radicalised not only some Scottish voters, but an awful lot of English voters, and that that will start to pull the Union apart in exactly the way that they said would not happen. As someone who was sceptical about the devolution proposals when the Government first put them forward, I find that completely unsurprising. I wrote a book entitled ““The Death of Britain?””, which put forward my view that the Government's constitutional approaches of more powers for Europe, trying to balkanise England into artificial regions and giving lopsided devolution to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales combined to make up the best possible way to start pulling the Union apart. It was almost as if the Government were on the payroll of the Scottish nationalist party, because they were doing its work.