The CEP has posted a follow up to its interview with Arthur Aughey, in which Aughey backs Malcolm Rifkind’s solution of an English Grand Committee.
As far as I can see, this is open to the same objection as English votes for English laws. What happens when a British Government has no majority in the English Grand Committee?
And what happens when the EGC majority legislates for, say, West Yorkshire when it doesn’t have a majority of Yorkshire MPs? (The West Yorkshire question.) I would suspect – in fact I know, because they opposed regionalisation – that the Tories would not find this a serious constitutional problem, although they claim to find it so with regard to Scotland.
I theorise that this is because subtracting Scottish MPs from the Commons would permit a Tory fiefdom over England. Further subdevolution would mean a leftwing dominance over most English cities and hence most things worth having. The Tory position is entirely self-serving.
The majority in different regions is bound to get outvoted all the time. When the Tories are in it will tend to be the people in Labour strongholds and vice-versa. That’s just the normal rough and tumble of democracy.
The difference with Scotland is that there is no reciprocity. Scottish MPs can outvote the majority in England, but the reverse is not true unless Westminster over-rules the Scottish Parliament, which by convention it does not do.
Also, if someone in say Surrey votes to impose a law on Yorkshire, by and large the same law applies in Surrey as well.
At the moment, Scottish MPs can be decisive in imposing one rule on England, while there is another rule in Scotland.
Tuition fees and foundation hospitals are good examples, which is one reason why I’ve argued previously that the real losers from the status quo are not the Tories but Old Labour:
http://tomgriffin.typepad.com/the_green_ribbon/2006/07/ever_since_euro.html
Of course, the Tory position is driven by self-serving electoral considerations, but so is the Labour one.
Labour wants Scottish MPs to shore up its majority on English issues. The added bonus for Blair and Brown is that those MPs face no constituency accountability on those issues, so there is no incentive for them to be anything other than lobby fodder for the whips. That’s not a good thing for West Yorkshire or anywhere else.
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