Tuesday, 22 November 2016

The Campaign for an English Parliament recommends John Denham's article "Gordon Brown's English problem".


The article, “Gordon Brown’s English Problem” by John Denham, former Labour Minister and now director of the Centre for English Identity and Politics at Winchester University, has been recommended on the CEP website.  I recall that Labour's Lord Prescott once said something along the lines of: “There is no such thing as the English”.  Now, according to John Denham’s article, when discussing constitutional change within the UK Gordon Brown can hardly bring himself to mention England or the English at all and seems to prefer the term “rest of the UK” instead.

I reproduce below, from the Fabian Society website, the section of the article I found the most telling.

The problem is that Gordon also seems to have decided what the outcome of the constitutional assembly should look like. And that does not include any acknowledgement of the existence of England as a nation or as a political identity. By extension, it excludes all of that large majority of English residents who describe their national identity as English, or English and British. It is odd that a man who has fought all his political life for the right of the people of Scotland to determine their own future should be so resistant to allowing the English to do the same.

In an analysis of the Scottish devolution published before the Scottish referendum, Gordon showed the same myopia. Amid numerous references to Scotland, he had 104 to a non-existent ‘rest of the UK (rUK)’ and just four to England or the English. The fact that the English were exclusively referred to either as taxpayers or as pensioners betrays a narrow view of English interest. This marginalisation of England has long been the view of celtic Labour: England should not want a political voice and, in any case, cannot be allowed to have one. This is no longer tenable.

http://www.fabians.org.uk/gordon-browns-english-problem/

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