An English Parliament for the English People

Committment to the United Kingdom by the Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English could not be at a lower ebb. Every nation within the Union that has had the opportunity for democratic expression of their requirements in the present, and plans for their future, has voted for a separation of the United Kingdom governance into national Parliaments.

The English People have had no chance to speak directly through the ballot box, as have the other nations, but in the strangled inadequacy of recent elections to drained-of -power local authorities, the insistence on an English Parliament can be heard.

Not English regional bodies, de-humanised and detached as they are from long-determined regions of England, nor even English regional bodies that could be more appropriately carved from England's realm.

An English Parliament that stands for all of England, from its south western tip to the Scottish borders, from the North Sea to the Welsh Marches is right. There is nothing to prevent a more local representation of, say, Cornwall, or the Ridings of Yorkshire, should that be desired. An English Parliament suffers no threat from the expression of local ties, but is strengthened by the clarity with which real regions can express their aims, and sustained by providing a forum and the means by which those aims can be reconciled within England.

Formerly the Westminster parliament was the English parliament, governing northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland. With the last elections this has ceased to be so. The governing Party at Westminster is not the governing Party in northern Ireland or in Scotland (in the case of Wales it probably won't be very shortly, once the perfidious 'Democrats' of the Liberal Democrats pull themselves together.)

The factors that have caused the urgency and essential requirement for an English Parliament for England are: the effects of economic globalisation on the wealth producing sectors of the British Isles; the effects of membership of the European Union; the complete unresponsiveness of the head of state of the United Kingdom to all and any of the wrenching changes that have occurred in the last decade. From within there has been the constitutional wrecking and anti-democratic destruction, accompanied and facilitated by the skewed redistribution of England-generated wealth; from without the opportunities presented by accession to a larger federated Union that remedies many of the failures that have destroyed the lesser federation of the United Kingdom.

England should accept a Prime Minister and Executive exercising all the powers of the English state (but not those of northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, whose people have chosen to confide their democratic authority to their own Parliaments) elected only by the English people, and answering only to an English Parliament.