Minette Marrin twigs English Democrats' threat

The following are some extracts from a column in today's Sunday Times titled 'England is waking up to the patriot game' by Minette Marrin, which may be read in full from this link.

Scottishness is a nail-biting problem for Brown. Generally speaking most people in England quite like the Scots, even though they seem to hate us. Surveys show we find their accents suggest intelligence and reliability. Politically speaking, however, this easy affection is disappearing fast, as Brown is well aware. Devolution in Scotland and Wales — fought for and introduced by new Labour — has much undermined our common sense of Britishness and fostered instead a new and rather irritable sense of Englishness in the South. Meanwhile Scots feel more Scottish and less British than at any time since 1707, according to some surveys, led astray, possibly, by films such as Braveheart.

More importantly the English public is at last beginning to sit up and take notice of the famous West Lothian question — the problem first identified by the then MP for West Lothian, that Scottish MPs at Westminster can vote and carry the Commons on domestic policies such as education and health that don’t affect them or their constituencies. The government has increasingly relied on the Scottish vote to push through purely English legislation, against English votes, and yet the reverse is not true; English MPs have no say over comparable Scottish affairs.

This is obviously unfair, as is the fact that more taxpayers’ money goes to Scotland, per head, for public services than in England, following the old Barnett formula. Devolution has only made this long-standing injustice feel worse.

In response, a feeling of English separatism is growing; the English hardly need Scotland and Wales and would be much freer and richer without them. It is not only those on the far right, now, who complain of the number of Scots at Westminster and their undue influence. Devolution as of now is plainly unjust. Scottish MPs are overmighty and a Scottish prime minister at Westminster, post-devolution, would find himself in a false position.

Remarkably slowly England’s voters are beginning to wake up to all this. The higher their perception of it becomes, the lower will be Brown’s chances of arriving at long last at the summit of his smouldering ambition. So he has to persuade us somehow that he is not all that Scottish at all. No, he’s British. We’re all British (though this leaves out the awkward position of the Northern Irish, who aren’t exactly British.) He might even fly the Union Jack. But these questions are not going to go away.