Gareth Young (Lewes, CEP): 2008 is set to be an interesting year for English parliament campaigners, but we shall have to wait until the Democracy Task Force publishes its findings before we see the battlefield mapped out before us. The Task Force will recommend a form of English Votes on English Matters - most probably Malcolm Rifkind's Grand Committee - but the Conservative Party will drag its heels (the report is already almost a year late) in adopting this as policy for fear of being labelled 'anti-Scottish' and allowing Brown to claim the mantle of 'Defender of the Union'.
For all their renewed claims to be the party of the union it is better for the Tories to let Brown muddle on in uncertainty amid growing Anglo-Scottish hostility. The Liberal Democrats are an unknown quantity but largely irrelevant now that the General Election - and the possibility of a hung parliament - has been put off to the latest date possible in 2010. Gordon Brown is only too aware that he has no mandate on 'his priorities' in England (Health, Education and Housing) - unelected, as he is, by any voter, be they English or Scottish, in these areas. His job now is to show the people of England 'his vision' without us becoming too aware of the fact that his writ does not run up in Scotland. This task requires a more delicate tread than he is capable of, and there are sign that appeals to our sense of 'Britishness' are having the opposite effect to what was desired. The politics of the UK could become very interesting if the Conservatives begin to highlight Brown's Scottishness, a policy that they could vindicate by pointing to the fact that it is they, not Labour, that won the popular vote in England at the last election. However, I don't believe Cameron will adopt this stance, preferring instead to let Alex Salmond in Scotland, and the Tory press in England (blue in the face over Barnett), to do his dirty work for him.
My gut instinct is for the Campaign for an English Parliament to indicate its support for EVoEM and to help the Tories drive this policy forward, simply because such a policy would be constitutionally unstable and will inevitably lead to a break down in Union relations, hastening the formation of an English parliament. However, the CEP national council are a principled bunch and they will ignore my pragmatic (if cynical) advice and continue to campaign along ideological grounds for a fair and stable settlement that affords national democratic institutions equally to each of the UK's nations. I expect that much of the CEP's time will be consumed arguing against regionalists who want to balkanise England. Whilst fun, this is time wasted, because regionalism is a spent force; in Brown they may have a PM with the desire to emasculate England into regions (which for all his other faults Blair didn't) but they also have a PM who lacks the political authority in England to achieve any meaningful or lasting constitutional reform of any kind, or even the consensus necessary to even begin thinking seriously about it. The fastest route forward is to fatally undermine the status quo, if it is not fatally undermined already.
