David (Cambridge, Britology Watch): You'd be forgiven for thinking that England was a dirty word. It's certainly not politically correct to utter it in certain circles. It's as if it were / was a linguistic marker of class division. In the parlours of Buckingham Palace, for instance, it's simply not done to say ‘toilet': it's the loo, don't you know. In the same way, in the Chambers of Parliament and the corridors of power, one does not say ‘England'. One doesn't like to refer to the specifics: that's toilet talk. No, here, one refers to the United Kingdom, Britain or, better still, the pleasingly vague ‘this country'.
But it's the Union they're flushing down the pan all the same. There's no Union without England. But, from the way they carry on, you'd think it was the other way round: no England apart from the Union.
Every marriage has its ups and downs. Friction inevitably arises as relationships change. In the UK, there remains a chance for reconciliation and a renegotiation of the ground rules, while there's still only a partial separation - before we have to call in the divorce lawyers.
But which lawyer would represent England? No one seems willing to even speak its name. Joking aside, who does represent England, really, in parliament, government and the law? The prime minister, who I like to call ‘GB', appears to have a pathological aversion to mentioning the ‘E' word: countless speeches on English matters where it's ‘Britain' this and ‘this country' that but hardly ever ‘England'. And yet, on education, health and planning, to name but three areas, he is effectively the unelected First Minister for England, as his remit stops at the Welsh and Scottish borders.
Government departments that deal almost exclusively with English matters similarly seem to be ‘E'-averse: coy about fronting up to their diminished England (or England and Wales) only briefs, and pretending to be UK-wide. You often have to do quite a lot of delving, including cross-checks to Scottish and Welsh Assembly Government departments, to work out which of their functions are England-only and which also relate to other parts of the UK. And press releases carry the derisive footnote: "This press notice relates to ‘England' ".
Does it matter when politicians and government departments are not open and transparent about differentiating between England-only and UK-wide responsibilities? Yes: because the refusal to ‘say England' is part of the denial of accountable, representative democracy to the English nation. More profoundly, this censorship of ‘England' (which must to some extent be deliberate government policy, as the use of words officially denoting the state and its constituent parts is strictly controlled) involves a denial of nationhood per se to England comparable to that which has been granted to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland through devolution.
It's for this reason that I've started a mini-campaign on my blog, Britology Watch, called the ‘Campaign for Plain England': picking up on examples of bad practice where government representatives, departments or the media fail to adequately specify when the policies, statements or laws they're discussing relate to England only, not the UK. Because if they can't say ‘England', then they're not properly representing England as a nation, in both senses of the term.
