Guy Lodge (London, ippr): In his review of a recently published ippr north paper - Where Stands the Union? by John Curtice - Gareth Young challenges the view that the English are content with the current constitutional arrangements for governing England, and suggests that there is growing public support for the establishment of an English Parliament.
Much of this debate rests on how you interpret various polling evidence, with Young preferring a series of commercial polls to the data Curtice draws on from the British Social Attitudes survey. Like Curtice we believe that the BSA survey is a more robust data source because of its sample size, more neutral wording of questions, and because it gives respondents a series of options to choose from, which many of the commercial polls do not. For these reasons its results tend to deviate from the commercial polls: the latest BSA data finds that only one in five want an English Parliament, whereas just over half of people in England support the status quo.
But this does not mean that we do not recognise that something important is going on. As Curtice notes, only 50% support the status quo, hardly the strongest endorsement for doing nothing. Moreover, Curtice shows that the English do seem to be frustrated by both the West Lothian Question and the way public spending is distributed across the nations of the UK, which is creating a source of tension. This suggests a stirring sense of dissatisfaction within England - but one that has yet to translate into concrete support for a particular policy. The English may be waking up to the anomalies of devolution and might want something done about them but they remain unclear as to what should happen, and as the BSA data shows, they have certainly not decided that they want an English Parliament. There is a mood for change but no clearly defined movement.
Given this ippr north has called for a root and branch review of English governance. Such a review should address the issues raised by devolution to Scotland and Wales, and explore options for reform, including discussion of the pros and cons of an English Parliament. It would also need to look at the way public money is distributed. Crucially though, its remit should spread further than this, and it should also focus on what we consider to be the real problem facing England: the excessive degree of centralisation. How should power be decentralised within England? How should our public services, like policing, be held to account? How can the quangos that rule so much of public life in England be more effectively democratised? These are the English Questions that the public really care about and which demand answers.
Such an initiative would compliment the government-backed review of the Scottish devolution settlement and ensure that the government engaged in the politics of England. This would make a welcome departure from their current fingers-crossed approach, in which they hope that this debate will simply disappear. But it won't. It is time it was taken more seriously.
