David Marquand (Oxford, author): There is a fundamental flaw in the campaign for an English Parliament and its feeble echoes in current Conservative talk of English votes for English bills. They are entirely reactive: negative, sour, mean-minded, ‘me-too’ responses to the wonderful growth of national feeling in Scotland and Wales. So far as I know, no one has yet put forward a positive case for devolution to England, based on a moral vision of what England and the English stand for or might come to stand for. Sadly, this is not surprising. There is no English national Myth comparable to the Scottish Myth of popular sovereignty or the Welsh Myth of Celtic socialism. The only English political leader who has tried to articulate an English national Myth in our time was Enoch Powell; and the Powellite Myth was self-consciously archaic and reactionary as well as profoundly anti-democratic.
Unless and until the English decide who they are, and rediscover the buried republican tradition of Milton and Blake, they will not be fit for self government. They will have to stagger on in their usual ‘pragmatic’, negative, utilitarian way and leave the task of building democratic political cultures in an increasingly threadbare Britain to the Scots and Welsh.
Moderator: This started life as a response to Gareth Young's post in our 'The Year Ahead' series, which discussed the best strategy for the Campaign for an English Parliament.
