The question of how the United Kingdom should organise itself is a pretty important one. The nation has played around with its constitutional order many times in service of this question – it has melded four nations into one union, handed these nations various institutions and unbalanced powers, and watched as they have then begged for more. It is an experiment which, to this day, remains far from finished. Experimental devolution by the state has solved some of the deeply complex constitutional questions facing the UK, but has also been the source of other headaches. Yet, to this day, one question has remained persistently unsolvable: the ‘English question’. It is a question so tricky, and unsolvable, governments have simply dug a hole into the heart of the nation. Now, Labour thinks it has the answer to this question no one in England – or the rest of the Union – can seem to answer, but does it?
The United Kingdom’s political system is complicated at the best of times. Nowhere is this clearer than in England – a unique part of the UK, one with no distinct identity that moors those who live in it. To be English is to claim everything in the Union, but also nothing. The English claim the Parliament at Westminster as their own, when it is not. They seem to think the Prime Minister speaks for the English, when, in fact, he does not (he speaks for four nations at once). As a result of this strange identity – one where the English have enlarged their own identity beyond just their own – England has a void at its heart: it has no English Parliament and English government where there should be one.
Thanks to this uniquely English quirk, English issues seldom cross the lips of our politicians. No English cabinet has ever been convened to tackle issues that are fundamentally English, and no English legislature has sat (if you ignore the convoluted contraption that was EVEL) to debate the problems of England and its English cities, economies and services. This was because, as the rest of the UK marched forward with the project of devolution, England remained motionless, both unwilling and unbothered by its lack of representation in the Union. After all, the English supposedly had a Parliament and leader that was already working for the nation.
Of course, England has not sat completely still as the project of devolution has evolved. It has long had a patchwork quilt of local institutions, ones which collect our bins and council taxes, but none with the power to deliver true direction for England and its distinct regions. Even as devolution has been tentatively fostered in English regions, its new leaders and institutions remain unfit to serve England and its desire to ‘level up’. Today, England and its various elected leaders – who come in myriad forms – hold little in the way of transformative power, and as a result mean almost nothing to those they serve. If you were to ask an English person what they thought of a metro mayor, they would almost certainly reply with confusion (and much trepidation) about what this person actually does.
It also remains up to the luck of a draw as to which, if any, representation someone growing up in England today will get – next year around 40% of England’s population will remain without a basic devolution agreement. In the rest of England, where there are devolution agreements, figuring out what kind of local government you have can be daunting. Is there a metro mayor, or another one of the four different types of mayors? Is there a combined authority, or a district council, or county council? The sheer disparity within the English system, and its woefully defined contours, is enough to render it worthless at times.
This brings us to Labour’s big devolution plans for England. It wants to deliver ‘devolution by default’ to England. The new government is promising to supercharge devolution across England, spreading new authorities and elected mayors right across the regions of England. Labour also wants to tool up mayors, new and old, with more powers to tackle transport and planning in England. Yet, as bold and useful as these plans are, they remain shy of the real problem at the heart of England: it has no one to speak for it. As useful as these new mayors will be, and they can be useful, a mayor for one area cannot speak about the English health service at large, or how England as a whole should tackle education and inequalities. Labour’s plan, as much as it attempts to unify, leaves the English system as fragmented as the one before.
To deliver real, lasting change, Labour must confront the fact that the largest part of the UK still doesn’t really know itself, let alone have any true representation within an ever more strained Union. Just maybe, the solution to Englishness, and the void at the heart of the nation, is to give England a government and parliament so it can know itself and fix itself to its own identity. After so long, England needs to speak for itself and confront the issues that face it. Until Labour sees this, the English question will remain a square that can’t be circled, and its plans will continue to move devolution’s march forward unevenly.
Image: Flickr/Keir Starmer
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