THAT QUESTION IS BACK TO HAUNT US

THE sleeping beast at the heart of British government is finally starting to stir. And as it wakens, after slumbering for over 25 years, it could damage the United Kingdom, poison relations between our peoples and our Parliaments and lead to another constitutional upheaval.

If that seems over-dramatic, just remember that the beast in question is our old friend the West Lothian Question. For too long, and too flippantly, it has been dismissed as “the question without an answer’. Another stalling tactic has been to say: “The answer to the West Lothian Question is not to ask it and hope it will go away.”

The farcical sacking of Tory Shadow Scottish Secretary James Gray for suggesting the abolition of MSPs may seem a trivial event; but it is a timely reminder of what can happen when politicians bungle relations between Scotland and Westminster.

Gray is not just an eccentric backwoodsman; although Scottish-born, he represents truly rural England and is voicing their growing anti-Scottish resentment.

For it is not just the ‘West Lothian Question’, it is the United Kingdom Question. And, over the decades, it has simply refused to go away. Now, in the aftermath of the general election result and Tony Blair’s ambitious legislative plans, it is back in a big way to bedevil Britain.

In the last two Parliaments, the Prime Minister could afford to ignore the WLQ. His landslide majorities meant he was sure of getting his way even if every Scottish MP missed the trains and planes to London.

Now his majority is slimmed down to 67 and that includes a hard core of twenty or so Labour rebels who are spoiling for the confrontation that will lever him out of the leadership.

Despite this, Blair’s bold strategy is to finish his unfinished business before he calls the removal men to Number Ten sometime in the next couple of years. His ‘Big Bang’ programme of Bills to be got through by November 2006 is bristling with difficulties – and the biggest one is that he can only get through it by using Scottish MPs to out-vote the English on purely English issues.

In any circumstances, that would be enough to make the English see red-white-and-blue. But their sense of grievance is aggravated by the outcome of Election 2005, in which more of them voted Tory than Labour – and the South of England voted overwhelmingly Conservative - but they got 92 fewer seats

The post-election map shows how Britain has become starkly divided. The swathe of Labour red stops somewhere south of Birmingham while the southern half of England is overwhelmingly blue, with dots of red in the large towns, and Lib-Dem yellow towards the South West.

London and the South East are the hotbeds for the issues on which the Tories majored during the election - crime, immigration, congestion, over-burdened public services, runaway house prices. Nearly all of these are addressed by the controversial Blair bills which will need the support of Scots MPs to become law in England.

An obvious flashpoint will be ID cards, which will be imposed by the Blair government, while the majority in the Scottish Parliament have rejected them and the Scottish Executive has declared they will not be needed to access NHS treatment and other services.

Add to that the phenomenon bitterly described by arch-Englishman Jeremy Paxman as ‘The Scottish Raj’. the number of politicians and others from north of the border who are in positions of power and influence in London.

After his TV spat with John Reid (the Scottish MP then Secretary of State for the ENGLISH Health Service) Paxman was only speaking for many of his fellow-countrymen when he grumped that Britain is ruled by Scots: “I don't see why there is any reason for them to feel chippy.”

During the election campaign, the egregious George Galloway told me: “Do you realise that sometime in the next Parliament all the main party leaders could be Scots? There’ll be Gordon Brown, Malcolm Rifkind, Charles Kennedy – and, of course, me!”
The gravelly Glasgow diction of Mr Speaker, Michael Martin, also gives Parliament a distinctive Scottish flavour – not to mention Cabinet members Lord Falconer, the Lord Chancellor; Alistair Darling (Transport and Scotland), John Reid (now Defence), Des Browne (Treasury Chief Secretary) and Ian McCartney (Minister Without Portfolio).

Hence the dry comment from the classic London cabbie as he dropped me at the Houses of Parliament: “It doesn’t matter who we vote for down here, we end up with bloody Scots in charge to screw us …” I’d have withheld his tip, but that would only have confirmed his opinion of our nation.

In an article in the latest issue of History Today Murray Watson, history research fellow at Dundee University and author of Being English in Scotland, says this is nothing new: “The English-based media routinely complain about the influence of a Parliamentary Scotia Nostra.

“This kind of attack is not a recent phenomenon. Disraeli, in one of his spells in opposition, complained ‘the Whigs are only maintained in power by the votes of the Scotch members’.

“The media in England and Scotland have largely ignored the fact that around one in nine Members of the Scottish Parliament was born in England. English-born MSPs have seamlessly integrated into the political landscape in Edinburgh. They may even become more Scottish than the Scots.”

Watson, who has interviewed a large sample of Anglos in Scotland for an oral history project, quotes Yorkshire-born Nick Johnston who was in the first Scottish Parliament when a group of English Tory MPs visited: “Their attitude to me, as an Englishman who has lived in Scotland for a number of years, was frankly patronising, almost colonial. We are still an outpost of the Empire that needs to be controlled and we get far too much money.”

Increasing the English perception of Scots as the hand-out neighbours from Hell is the reappearance of headlines like the one that appeared in a far-Right daily last week: ‘How Tory England bankrolls Scotland’.

The latest figures show £5,593 will be spent on each person in the affluent and high-taxpaying south east, while £7,786 will be spent per head in Scotland. In Wales, the figure is £7,312 and in Northern Ireland £8,566.

The difference between England and Scotland is even sharper. Pre-devolution, spending was £1,089 per head more in Scotland; this year, the gap will be £1,368 - equivalent to 9p in the £ on Scots income tax.  Across the board, the English see Scots apparently getting a better deal:  health -  £1,456 per head in Scotland, £1,225 in England; education and training - £852 in Scotland, £695 in England; transport - £386 in Scotland, £297 in England.

It is no use telling a Little Englander the historical and sociological reasons for a recognition of the different needs of the various parts of Britain, with the less populated areas requiring proportionately more to be spent on transport, schools, health and other services.

Especially when one of the leading critics of this ‘Barnett Formula’ is none other than Lord Barnett himself, Treasury chief secretary in charge of public spending in the late 1970s, who now says he is embarrassed to have his name associated with the system: ''It was never meant to last this long but it has gone on and on and it has become increasingly unfair to the regions of England.”

Together, the West Lothian Question, the Barnett Formula and the ‘Scottish Raj’ make fertile ground in which to sow the seeds of English discontent. And there is no shortage of trouble-makers and buffoons to make them grow.

Boris Johnson, the shock-haired Tory MP and journalist, rants at the ‘constitutional outrage’ of having Scottish MPs who can impose measures on his constituents in South Oxfordshire while he, as an English MP, has no say over those questions in Scotland: “That is a democratic enormity. It can be rectified, as the Tories propose, only by having English votes for English laws.

“That is why in current circumstances I don't believe the electorate would tolerate a Scottish prime minister, or at least not one sitting for a Scottish seat.”

The hasty afterthought must have been that he suddenly remembered Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the Edinburgher who is Member for Kensington and Chelsea and a contender for the Tory leadership. Ignoring the irony of his own position, Rifkind warns that the new make-up of the House of Commons makes it inevitable that  Labour will be under renewed pressure to tackle the West Lothian question: "Decisions that only effect England should only be decided by MPs in England.”  

Where have we heard that before? Ah, yes, in every constitutional debate and every election since … wait for it … 1977!

Nearly 30 years later, Tam Dalyell who first raised it (and, for his persistence, became known as ‘Tam the Bam’) must now be sitting in stately retirement at The Binns, shaking his head in disbelief. He did not name the problem; it was Enoch Powell who said: “We have finally grasped what the Honourable Member for West Lothian is getting at, let us call it the West Lothian Question”.

But it was Tam who defined it: “For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable Members tolerate… Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on British politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?”

Two decades later, he was still hammering away: “For how long could the MP representing Blackburn West Lothian, vote on education affecting Blackburn, Lancashire but not the very same matters in Blackburn, West Lothian? How long could the MP representing Linlithgow in Scotland, vote on local government in Liverpool, but not in Linlithgow? Twenty-two years have gone by, and what answer has there come: none.”

More recently, we have had the constitutional nonsense of my local MP John Reid being in charge of the NHS in England – yet unable to speak for his own constituents who were fighting a controversial hospital proposal in Lanarkshire.

Former First Minister of Scotland Henry McLeish, who steered the Scotland Act through Parliament says: “Tam was quite right to diagnose an apparent absurdity.

Devolution did not change the rights of Scottish MPs, who are full members of the United Kingdom Parliament, on every subject that comes before that Parliament

“At present Scottish MPs may have a constitutional right, but it is not a popular right and it does not make sense in the eyes of the English public.

“The only way it can be resolved in my view is devolution for England, preferably through some form of devolved federalism. It is what is happening in Europe; Spain has autonomous regions, Germany, Austria and Belgium have federal systems.

“Scots, while remaining full members of the Westminster Parliament, would be debarred from voting on matters devolved to English regional assemblies – just as they are debarred from voting on devolved matters in Scotland. That is the only practical solution to the West Lothian Question.

“We cannot have a virtual state of warfare developing where the Tories, or anybody else, may want to throw Scots out of Westminster. That would be unthinkable. It would also be doing the Scottish Nationalists’ dirty work for them – and the 2007 Scottish election will be difficult enough.”

The devolution genie cannot be put back in the bottle and reducing the number of Scottish MPs at Westminster from 72 to 59 has not appeased the English discontent. Some other way has to be found to stop it from becoming a destructive spirit and prevent Sassenach resentment from boiling over.

One suggestion has been for a separate English Parliament: for years, a lone campaigner has been squatting outside Parliament in London with a banner demanding just that. When former ‘Essex girl’ Tory MP Teresa Gorman tried to introduce a private member's bill, she gave a foretaste of today’s English complaints: “We have a fudge, pleasing neither nationalist nor unionist, bought at the expense of the United Kingdom and paid for by the English.

“Why should the English, who are the principal funders of the Union, get nothing at all out of Labour's shake up? ‘No taxation without representation’ the huddled English masses will soon cry.

“If we are not to be represented in decisions on Scottish affairs then we should not pay for them. Nor can Scottish MPs expect to vote funds for their homelands from the

pockets of English taxpayers.”

An ‘English parliament’ is an unlikely solution. For one thing, it would not have an in-built Labour majority but even less likely are some other Tory suggestions. Their Shadow Scottish Secretary James Gray, a Glaswegian who represents North Wiltshire, favours sacking all the MSPs and having Scottish MPs sit at Holyrood a couple of days a week, like the old Scottish Grand Committee.

His predecessor Peter Duncan, who lost his seat at the election, wanted to give the  Speaker of the House of Commons the power to designate some legislation as English-only, barring Scottish MPs from voting – which would have been incongruous, given that the present Speaker is Scottish.

Blair is unlikely to deal with the West Lothian Question in the 18 months or so remaining to him, and it will be up to Prime Minister Gordon Brown to come up with some form of English self-government. What a turn-up that would be: a Scot giving the English their ‘freedum’, Braveheart-style!

Despite the failure of the referendum in the north-east of England, Henry McLeish’s solution of devolved federalism and regional assemblies in England seems the only workable way forward. The English, heaven help them, could then have the benefits we Scots enjoy in our own Parliament …

The big questions will then be: Will the English assemblies be as big a disappointment (and as costly) as Holyrood? What is Scouse, Geordie, Brummie or West Country for ‘numpties’…?