There was an article on the West Lothian Question last night on BBC Parliament, Radio 4. Listen again here (about 18 minutes in).

A justice committee has interviewed three witnesses as part of an MPs enquiry into the “Impact of Devolution. The witnesses were ex Conservative Chancellor Ken Clarke, Vernon Bogdanor who is professor of Government at Oxford University and former Lib MP Lord (Paul) Tyler as witnesses.

It started off well with Ken Clarke explaining clearly how Scottish Mps had influenced the decision on tuition fees in England and then MSPs had voted to exempt their own students. He accepted there was “considerable annoyance” and that annoyance could lead to anger “if you had a parliament where that started happening over and over again I think you would be damaging, you would be taking a risk”.

The Justice committee asked “Was an English Parliament an answer to that question?”

“Definitely not” said the academic Vernon Bogdanor, who went on to say “An English Parliament would be an absurd solution”

Lord Tyler said there was “no public demand” and waffled on that an “English Parliament would automatically mean a separate English administration” and went onto say “I don’t think there’s any public demand for that and the complexity that would be caused by its interrelationship not just with the UK parliament but the UK government would be so wasteful in terms of resources and energy that I think would be very soon decided that we should dispose of it which would of course be absurd”.

Ken Clarke also said there was no demand for an English Parliament “the average Englishman actually thinks they have got a parliament which is the Westminster Parliament” and also that “English parliament would be quite a dangerous remedy because it would take a little step further this sense of separate identity”.

Apparently Ken doesn’t support Sir Malcolm Rifkind’s English Grand Committee idea either. So what his democracy task force is going to come up with to answer the West Lothian Question remains a mystery. It looks like we’ll have to wait until the Conservative manifesto is published to find out.

Don’t hold your breath.

If you have a Conservative MP, now is the time to let them know there IS a demand for an English Parliament.

But this is one of the biggest problems:

“the average Englishman actually thinks they have got a parliament which is the Westminster Parliament “

How do we enlighten the average English person?

Tags: democracy taskforce, English Parliament, Ken Clark

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 9:57 am and is filed under English Parliament. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.