The August issue of Prospect carrries a series of articles on the English Question, by Arthur Aughey, Robert Jackson, Malcolm Rifkind and Chris Huhne. For my money, the latter piece is the most interesting:
if the Tories do decide to campaign to end Scottish votes on English laws, they will be on fertile ground. Scotland receives far more public spending per head than England, and there is a sense of injustice in poorer English regions. Moreover, the Tories have a long history of constitutional opportunism—they were prepared to trade a sustainable constitutional settlement for short-term party advantage when Edward Carson’s 1912 Ulster covenant committed its signatories to resist home rule “by all means necessary,” and accelerated the end of the union with Ireland just as assuredly as the 1916 Easter rising. (Chris Huhne)
Like my own recent piece, Huhne’s article argues that a solution to the English question need not lead to a Conservative-dominated Parliament if it were introduced alongside proportional representation.
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