Moderator: This is a reply to the many comments on David's post calling for supporters of an English Parliament to back up their claim with a moral vision, and to Man In A Shed's post and comments.
David Marquand (Oxford, author): For the record, I had nothing whatever to do with the campaign for regional government in the Northern region, and thought the scheme for regional government put forward by John Prescott and the Government was pathetically inadequate. Had I had a vote in the referendum on it I would have voted 'No'. As for my own ethnicity (if that is relevant, which I doubt) I don’t consider myself Welsh, though I was born in Wales. Out of my four grandparents, two were Scottish, one was Welsh and one was a Channel Islander. So I’m a mongrel - and proud of it.
Much more serious is that none of the comments and responses to my original post address the fundamental issue: what moral vision does the revived English national consciousness embody? It’s pitifully inadequate to say that England should have a devolved government because that is what the Scots and Welsh now have, and leave it at that. Have any of those who think this read the Scottish Claim of Right that preceded the Scottish Constitutional Convention? That really did articulate a moral and philosophical case, based on a vision of what Scotland stood for. Nothing quite as powerful as that was articulated in Wales, but Plaid Cymru has stood for a kind of celtic socialism for decades.
Also for the record I don’t oppose devolution for England, if that is what the English want. I do say, though, that if their only reason for wanting it is a kind of me-tooism that doesn’t seem to me to be an adequate basis for such a project.
Finally, I am deeply shocked, indeed appalled, by the contempt many of my respondents have shown towards the Milton-Blake tradition I mentioned. That tradition - the tradition of the Levellers, of Milton, of Tom Paine, of the Chartists, of John Bright, of the pre-1914 syndicalists, of George Orwell and R.H. Tawney - is the true glory of English history. It’s been smothered, I quite agree, by the statist centralism of the modern Labour Party, but that isn’t a reason for ignoring or denigrating it: it’s a reason for recapturing and reviving it - of course in twenty-first century clothes. If and when the campaigners for an English Parliament show that they belong to this tradition, I shall campaign alongside them. Until they do I’m afraid I shall continue to regard them as barbarous reactionaries.
