The Campaign for an English Parliament has picked up on some stuff I wrote in the Newcastle Journal about the "democratic deficit" in England compared to Scotland and Wales. For years I supported the idea of regional assemblies as a means of addressing this, but the referendum in the North-East last November sort of blew this out of the water somewhat. Meanwhile, Scottish and Welsh MPs continue to have a big say over how public services are funded and managed in England, while English MPs have no such say over how they are delivered in Scotland and Wales. This is not really politically sustainable in the long term. The recent election result narrowly missed landing us in a situation where Labour's entire Parliamentary majority was dependent on the votes of Welsh and Scottish Labour MPs - but this is bound to happen at some future point unless the problem is addressed.
You can access the CEP newsblog here.
2 comments:
Thanks for the link to the CEP Paul. I only just discovered your blog and have linked back to it from the CEP blog.
Hopefully you will start blogging again as you will undoubtedly be receiving some traffic.
Hi Paul,
I am conducting some interviews for the CEP website - some can already be viewed here. I was wondering whether you would be interested in giving an email interview, I would be particularly interested in your views on regionalism.
Please get in contact if you feel like indulging me in this gareth.young@thecep.org.uk
BTW, you need to activate 'word verification' to prevent spam comments.
Thanks
Post a Comment