On the always stimulating Our Kingdom website ("a conversation on the future of the United Kingdom", part of the City University’s OpenDemocracy network) there’s an interesting if somewhat academic debate in progress about the implications for the whole of the UK of a referendum in Scotland on Scottish independence (whatever its result), and the disintegration of the United Kingdom which Scottish independence would entail. This stems from a post by Gerry Hassan, "The long march to Scotland’s independence referendum". Gerry Hassan is a writer, researcher, policy analyst and associate at the think-tank Demos. What follows is based on my comments contributed to the debate at Our Kingdom.
For many of us the destruction by Scottish secession of the United Kingdom, or at any rate Britain, the country which for all its faults claims our loyalty and in my case, anyway, my affection, would be a tragedy for all the people of all its four constituent parts. I am English, of English, German Lutheran and Polish Jewish ancestry, but for me Scotland and Wales (and equally but in a different way Northern Ireland) are just as much part of my national heritage, ingredients in my national history and culture, as England is. Scots, Irish people and Welshmen simply aren’t foreigners in my book, and never can be, whatever constitutional changes might occur, any more than Queenslanders can be foreigners to the people of New South Wales when they are all Australians, any more than Californians can be foreigners to Vermont people when they are all Americans.
What this signifies to me is that it is now quite urgently necessary to consider possible alternatives to the break-up of the UK into its component nations, in ways that would meet most of the legitimate aspirations (and grievances) of the people of all four nations. It’s fairly clear that the distinctive identities of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, plus their common ownership of the United Kingdom, need to be translated into a new constitutional dispensation under which each of the four nations governs itself by democratic right (i.e. not by kind permission of some authority in Westminster, or anywhere else) in all their internal domestic affairs, from the criminal law to education to taxation, each – necessarily including England — with its own separate elected parliament and government (which three of the four of course already have). The four entrust to a single elected authority, comprising a separate central government and legislature, those things which they agree are best run collectively on behalf of all of them: mainly foreign affairs and defence, with collaborative arrangements for revenue allocation and some transfer of resources from the richer to the poorer areas of the kingdom. The division of powers between the four self-governing nations and the upwardly-devolved centre would be defined in a written constitution administered by a central supreme court. The dominance of England as by far the biggest and richest of the four nations, now almost unfettered except by convention, would need to be formally limited, probably by turning the House of Lords as the second chamber of the all-UK parliament into an elected ‘house of the nations’ — call it a Senate — in which all four nations have equal representation, so that English representatives on their own can never out-vote those of the other three nations.
We could call this novel arrangement "a federation". The Australians, Germans, Americans, Canadians, Swiss and several other nationals of functioning democracies might even agree to offer us some useful tips on how to make our federation work, if we asked them nicely. It would, by the way, give Scotland virtually all the advantages of full independence with none of the disadvantages; it would answer the West Lothian question, although not in quite the way that Tam Dalyell, its distinguished author, would approve; it would cure the whole of the UK of its congenital over-centralism; it would complete the half-finished process of devolution while reversing its top-down power trajectory, and remove its present inchoate[1] anomalies. It would take at least 20 years to complete the transformation. It would be a bumpy but exhilarating ride. It would be worth the wait and the effort.
It’s hard to be sure about the reasons for the extreme reluctance of the political and media establishments even to discuss the possibility of moving to a fully federal system, despite the fact that it would solve so many problems and that the availability of a better alternative to the disintegration of our country is daily becoming more urgent. With devolution we are half-way into a federation already, and most of the serious anomalies that have resulted (encapsulated in the West Lothian question) are due to our failure to complete the process.
I suspect that a large part of the resistance to the idea of federation stems from dislike of the idea of England having its own elected parliament and government, separate from the existing Westminster parliament and government. These would automatically become the new federal institutions, much smaller and with greatly reduced powers (mainly over foreign affairs and defence). A separate English government would inevitably wield more real power, although only in England, than the downsized federal government at Westminster, not an attractive proposition for current Westminster politicians with their romantic fantasy of a Westminster parliament and executive with unlimited ’sovereign’ powers. Persuading politicians to give up some of their powers and status is always going to be an uphill task. They should, though, take heart from the reality that the federal governments and legislatures of existing democratic federations, such as the President and Congress of the United States, enjoy far more international and even national prestige, despite their limited powers, than those of the component states that comprise their federations.
I surmise that there are at least four other major obstacles to the required all-party consensus in favour of movement to an eventual federation: (1) It’s too radical for our timid politicos; (2) It would take at least a couple of decades to complete the process, and our political leaders’ congenital short-termism prevents them from looking that far ahead; (3) There’s a cosmic ignorance in the Westminster village and among its attendant media clowns of other democratic countries’ constitutional arrangements, and a deeply ingrained reluctance to learn from them, so every problem that crops up in the course of change requires us laboriously to re-invent the wheel; and (4) The federal idea requires a capacity for a vision of a different way for the nations of the UK to govern themselves — moreover in a new and unfamiliar democratic relationship with each other; and our politicians (with a few rare exceptions) don’t do vision.
Time to wake up before it’s too late.
[1] Inchoate: "Recently started but not fully formed yet; just begun; only elementary or immature." Unconnected with 'incoherent' or 'chaotic', except in (frequent) error.
Note: This is a re-post of a piece on the writer's own blog, at http://www.barder.com/2066. It has also been posted on the LabourList website as http://bit.ly/4a3rr9. Brian would like to emphasise that his support for a parliament and government for England is entirely in the context of the case for a federation of the four UK nations, designed to strengthen and democratise the bonds that unite them, and that it in no way implies his support for the separation of England or any of the other UK nations from the Union.
Or, as I put it when speaking for the CEP at our last London Conference: "We need to separate what divides us from what unites us".
I still believe that this is a perfectly respectable position to hold and yet the Unionist Establishment persists in smearing those of us with such views as "dangerous extremists".
To complete your reforms, Brian, I suggest that the British PM should be elected in presidential fashion. He and his Executive would not sit in the British Parliament, which would act like the US Senate. Such a mandate would counterbalance the PM's relative weakness in relation to the English First Minister, who would, as in Scotland, merely be the party leader or coalition leader within the English Parliament.
Brian, this may be an academic point, but where would sovereignty reside in your federal model: with the federal parliament (and hence, with Britain / the UK) viewed as exercising the ultimate sovereignty of the monarch; or with the people of each of the four nations (or five including Cornwall) separately, as represented by their parliaments / assemblies? On the answer to this question, it seems to me, depends the question of whether the UK or each of its nations are viewed as sovereign. This is also the distinction between federation and confederation.
I wonder whether even a loose federation such as that which you describe would be enough to assuage the aspirations towards full independence of increasing numbers of both Scots and English. I think you're right that the ball needs to be set in motion sooner rather than later; otherwise, it definitely won't be enough, and the momentum towards Scottish independence and the consequent break up of the existing UK will be irresistible.
My own preferred option is confederation. But if each of the nations has full responsibility for taxation and macro-economics, and the competencies of the federal 'state' are limited largely to defence and foreign affairs, then there's very little practical difference between confederation and your model.
I might be wrong but I always assumed that in most federal states the powers of the constituent parts is enshrined in a written constitution which is seen as representing popular sovereignty.
So a federal model, irrespective of whether it were a good thing or not, would mean a fundamental change in the way power and sovereignty are understood in the UK.
Effectively it would mean tarting from scratch, usually this kind of kicking over of the existing order has ever only been possible, either when another power has been involved as in Britain's role in forging federal constitutions in its dominions, or after a revolution. It would be interesting to hear of examples where this was not the case.
Ian, I don't see any need to make such a cataclysmic change in our system of government at the centre. The move to a federal system will be quite enough for most people to swallow, without adding more radical change which is not related to federalism and not required by it. Moreover I can see great confusion if we try to run a hybrid system, with a Westminster parliamentary system operating in the nations and a presidential system at the federal centre. One thing at a time!
Alex, I entirely agree that the adoption of a federal system "would mean a fundamental change in the way power and sovereignty are understood in the UK." Devolution is already challenging many of our hallowed assumptions about power and sovereignty, and the development of devolution into federalism would represent a continuum rather than a clean break in many respects, which should somewhat ease the intellectual assimilation of its implications. I would hope that the new written constitution that would be required to define the allocation of powers within the federation, the powers of the supreme court, etc., would specify that under the constitution the people are sovereign. Much more radical changes in political culture have evolved in Britain over the centuries without violent revolution, and I see no reason to suppose that we wouldn't be able to absorb this one reasonably peacefully, too.
Britologywatch: I think it's prudent to avoid getting into too much detail about the precise form of federation (or confederation) that is likely to emerge from the years of Royal Commissions, Constitutional Conventions, national debate in parliaments and the media, referendums and opinion polls that would be essential preliminaries to the adoption of a federal system. Personally I would prefer a federation along Australian lines to a looser 'confederation', but it won't be my decision!
I do, though, think that an essential feature of the new system will be that the people -- all the people -- of the new federated United Kingdom (it will have to have a different name from that, by the way!) are sovereign, and that sovereignty resides in the people of the whole UK, not in the individual nations, which can't acquire separate international identities (unless of course they secede). In other words, the new sovereign federation will comprise the four nations: it won't be a loose association of four sovereign states, akin to the EU. That really would amount to the disintegration of the UK.
Brian
What you are proposing is a diminution of the position that Scotland finds itself in at present and would not be acceptable to most Scottish unionists, let alone Scottish nationalists. The UK is a union state, and as a union state it has always been much more like the EU than most people realise. Scotland has an international identity precisely because it has always constituted a separate legal jurisdiction.
This was one of the main provisions in the Treaty and Act of Union. It has always been one of the main foundations for maintaining Scotland's position within the negotiated union and from it many things flow that do not pertain even in federal systems. It is because of this that the Lockerbie bombing required FBI agents to work with the Scottish police, for al-Megrahi's trail to be held on territory in the Netherlands designated as under Scottish jurisdiction, and why it was a Scottish minister's decision to release him.
The Claim of Right was a reaffirmation of the principle that, as a union state, the UK affords Scots a separate political and legal identity, an identity that your proposals would wish to remove. Remember no member of the SNP signed the Claim of Right. Everyone who signed it professed to be a 'union'-ist.
I do not think there would be any enthusiasm for this type of entrenchment of Britain in England and I know there would be absolutely no interest in it in Scotland. It pretends to go with the trend but is a rearguard again against the trend. The hope that the rise of greater identification with the individual nations and less with Britain is somehow an aberration that can be overcome is doomed to disappointment. This is because this change reflects changed circumstances, especially the end of Empire, which was the only reason Scotland joined the union. Joining the EU changed everything.
I agree with this last point by Alex, though from the English perspective. Arguably, both Scotland and England have remained sovereign nations throughout most of the history of the Union, with sovereignty being (popularly) defined as popular in Scotland, and being formally defined as the sovereignty of the (still fundamentally English) king or queen in the (still fundamentally English) parliament in England. That position changed to the detriment of England through devolution, as a consequence of which there has been an attempt to re-imagine 'Britain' and the UK parliament as sovereign entities in their own right, and no longer as expressing and representing the sovereign will of the English nation. Hence the model of the 'Britain of nations [all the others, not England] and regions [formerly known as England]'.
Your model admittedly rectifies this imbalance by proposing the creation of a 'British federation of nations [including England]'. But if none of the nations are sovereign, then it's arguable they cease to really be nations at all, becoming mere federal 'states', regions, or 'super-regions' in the case of England. I don't think either the Scots or the English will accept a system that deprives their nations of sovereignty and, ultimately, of real nation status.
A confederation allows for fully sovereign nations that pool their sovereignty together (as you state, in the manner of the EU) in matters of mutual benefit, such as trade, defence and foreign affairs. Therefore, the sovereignty of the federal government and institutions would be seen as subsidiary to the sovereignty of the nations, and not vice-versa. Yes, that would mean the end of the United Kingdom as a quasi-nation (-state). But if people in the four (or five) nations of the UK should turn out to want their own countries to be the baseline nations of a redesigned UK (failing which, independence is the only option), then maybe that's the best that unionists can hope for.
The place where sovereignty resides is not an academic point, it's fundamentally important to the debate.
When talking about a 'federation' most people think of a union in which the individual components have some form of sovereignty, or constitutionally entrenched rights. For this you really need a written constitution, and one that is acceptable to all component nations. So we start from a kind of sovereignty whereby each nation has to consent to the new arrangement, and to do this they require a means to consent.
However, the powers that be, the 'British Establishment', would fight to the bitter end to preserve the Parliamentary sovereignty of the Union/Imperial Parliament. If they had their way then the least worst solution would be devolution max to each of the constituent nations, in which the centre retains sovereignty and the nations and their national parliaments are subservient (the Crown would be sovereign in the Imperial Parliament and in each of the national parliaments, as it is now in the Scottish Parliament).
For me it is confederation that provides the best answer, if you take it (and I do) that there is political value in a form of union and a desire from the people of the British Isles to maintain their close political, economic and cultural links
Confederation is not so very different from independence in that it recognises that it is the nations that are sovereign. The price of Union for the nations should be the incentive to compromise for the common good. England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland have so much shared history and culture, and so much common political and economic interest, that there is an incentive for them to pool sovereignty. To what degree they decide to do this and how they appoint the federal level of government is difficult to forsee.
The beauty of confederation for someone like me who believes that there is a British cultural identity and who sees benefit in maintaining some form of British political identity, is that confederation allows a great degree of flexibility. England can keep its bicameral system and monarchy if it wants and Scotland can have a unicameral system and ditch the monarchy, or not as the case may be. And they can decide how they want to appoint people to the federal 'council-of-the-isles' level.
It's all pie-in-the-sky at the moment. Confederation won't be seriously considered until there is real secessionary pressue on the United Kingdom, but when separatism becomes a likelihood expect both unionists and separatists to start talking about it earnestly as a compromise (and far less messy and acrimonious) solution.
It sounds counter-intuitive but until there is real seccessionary pressure on the United Kingdom the further we are away from creating a stable settlement for the future. They will try all manner of sticking patches until they're in the last ditch.
So my favoured solution is to leave England governed by Westminster, by a House of Commons and a House of Lords, suitably reformed. Somewhere up North, possibly Liverpool because it is equidistant between the four national capitals, or even roving between cities as the England football team did when Wembley was being built, the British Council of the Isles would sit. It might even include the Republic of Ireland.
Brian,
Out of interest under your model would your 'Senate' scrutinise the legislation of all four national legislative chambers as well as acting as a legislative federal parliament from which a federal government is drawn? Presumably the Senate, if it is also a legislative chamber, would have to be fully elected; so you would abolish the hereditary principle, and with it, presumably, the Privy Council, Lord Chancellor, Lords Spiritual and the CoE's constitutional role?
Under the confederal model England can retain these things should she so choose.
Quoting Graig Cockburn at http://www.siliconglen.com/Scotland/19_5.html.
Scottish sovereignty was not subsumed by English sovereignty in 1707. In the case of MacCormick v Lord Advocate 1954 (1953 SC 396), Lord Cooper stated that "The principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law. ... I have difficulty in seeing why it should have been supposed that the new Parliament of Great Britain must inherit all the peculiar characteristics of the English Parliament but none of the Scottish Parliament...." This case dealt with the styling of the current monarch as the "second" of the United Kingdom (there never having been a previous Queen Elizabeth of the UK). There is a section on the nature of Scottish constitutional law within the UK in G Mitchell's 'Constitutional Law' (2nd Ed. Wm Green and Son, Edinburgh 1968(ish))
"we are sovereign within the Union and we can walk out any time we want". Those are the exact words once uttered by Michael Forsyth, an arch-unionist and Secretary of State for Scotland under the last Conservative government, uttered January 1997
Alex, I believe that position would be backed up by international law too.
What I'm talking about is legal sovereignty, not political sovereignty. Ultimately political sovereignty lies with the people of the UK and they can break it up whenever they wish. Legal sovereignty, however, lies with Westminster.
"We -the people- are sovereign within the Union and we can walk out any time we want" would be a more precise statement. Insertion of 'the people' differentiates between legal and political sovereignty.
You might argue that idea of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament has no Scottish pedigree (is an English concept) but it is fact that Westminster has legal sovereignty over the Scottish people, even if the absoluteness of that sovereignty is challenged http://tinyurl.com/pqjnwz
My point is that confederation can accommodate the Scottish idea of popular sovereignty and the English idea of Parliamentary sovereignty.
In England,the English people- ie the people who count themselves English- must be soveriegn and that soveriegnty must be exercised through an English parliament. This is quite different from saying that sovereignty must reside in parliament. It must not, it should be explictly set down and accepted once and for all that it resides with the people and only with the people. Amongst other reasons, this is why we need written constitution and why England is ever the poorer for not having one.
We did have a go once at trying to establish this principle. It was the Great Rebellion from 1642 to 1661. Regrettably, it was none other than the English leader himself,ie Cromwell, who called a halt to the full transfer of sovereignty from the Crown to the People.
(he got cold feet and blocked the army mutiny after the Putney debates which called for popular soveriegnty).
For a while the issue remained confused with sovereignty effectively lying with the Commonwealth.
The issue was revisited in 1689 when soveriegnty was specifically allocated to the "Crown in Parliament" ie to parliament where it has lain ever since.
The English of New England, where the Crown was weakest,grabbed it in 1789 and established the principle (We, The People-----".
To this day,the people of Old England are denied the national soveriegnty that many other nations exercise as a natural right, that is, the basic right to be their own people in their own borders and have a parliament and governement specifically elected and loyal to them only.
Sovereinty in any parliament that calls itself English must ly with the English people. It is entirely secondary whether, after due consideration, the people should care to go into union with other countries on strictly recognised terms for their common greater good.
I agree with you John, the people of England, constituted as such, should be sovereign. But that too is a choice for them/us.
Thank you Gareth for the link.
I suspect Forsyth’s comment have far more significance than that. He was Secretary of State at the time and the term arch-unionist arises from his vociferous campaign against the Labour opposition’s plans to establish a Scottish Parliament.
His comments need to be taken alongside his personal decision as Secretary of State to return the Stone of Destiny to Scotland. This was a hugely symbolic move and showed his determination in the face of an imminent resurrection of the Scottish Parliament to mount a last gasp attempt to articulate the Scottish Unionist tradition of Walter Scott, i.e. deeply wedded to the defence of Scotland’s rights and dignity, while staying steadfastly loyal to the Hanoverian British crown and state.
His comment can be seen as saying yes, as a nation we could leave at any time, but instead we freely choose to stay as a morally superior choice, which also makes economic sense. This is the rhetoric of old fashioned Tory Scottish Unionism, backward looking Scottish patriotism as a foil for the pursuit of naked self-interest through access to the City of London and the Empire and perfectly revealing in its sense of unease.
I think Forsyth was pandering to Scotland's sense of popular - political - sovereignty whilst trying to shore up the legal sovereignty of Westminster.
Alex, you make an extremely interesting point, but I suspect that it's academic and unlikely to affect attitudes in the way you suggest. Far from being 'removed' by what I suggest, the guarantee in the Act of Union of the continuation of Scotland's separate legal system and right to continue to administer it would be reaffirmed and institutionally strengthened -- perhaps explicitly -- in a fully federal system. Scotland's powers to govern itself internally without interference from England would be substantially increased by comparison with its present limited range of 'devolved' powers, most of which could at present be withdrawn at any time on the whim of a predominantly English government, whereas this would be impossible in a federal system: I don't believe this could be rationally interpreted as diminishing Scotland's present position, as you suggest.
Scotland's international status would be strengthened, not weakened, by the entrenchment in the federal constitution of its identity and internal autonomy: the Act of Union would not be affected. Scotland would not of course become an independent sovereign state: but it isn't that now, and apparently a majority of Scots at present don't want it to be.
True, Scotland's status would no longer be unique within the UK, as it is now, but only because the other three nations would enjoy much the same status at last (although without the Holy Grail of the Act of Union). But it would be a strange intellectual objection to the federal proposal that the benefits now enjoyed mainly by Scotland would be extended in magnified form to the rest of the UK, without any abridgement of Scotland's position -- indeed, with its enhancement.
I agree that federation would be opposed by the SNP and other whole-hog Scottish nationalists, because it would blunt the case and therefore the demand for full independence. Since part of the rationale for federalism is to preserve the essential unity of the United Kingdom and to avert its disintegration through the secession of Scotland, that's inevitable. But it surely doesn't represent a valid objection to the federal concept: it's just one of many obstacles that would have to be overcome on the road to its achievement.
How does pandering to political sovereignty in any way help shore up Westminster's claims to legal sovereignty? Surely, unless one is using political sovereignty as a basis for reform, as in the Claim of Right, to raise it in contradistinction to British popular political sovereignty undermines rather than bolsters Westminster's legal sovereignty. That is, unless one is pushing a contractual model, drawing on the nature of the 1707 union itself.
The only thing you can take from Forsyth's rhetoric is that, although hostile to devolution, Tories philosophy is wedded to old fashioned pandering to national sensibilities.
Thatcher may seem an exception but it is a mistake to think so. What happened during Thatcher's reign was that devolution became the litmus test of whether Westminster was sensitive to Scotland's sensibilities, or not, and, in setting her face against that, she was seen as anti-Scottish, even though she allowed her policies to be watered down in Scotland and never questioned extra spending in Scotland.
John Major was the first Tory leader to have no sense of this tradition. He was so ignorant of it that he suggested that the Archbishop of York should lead the service of thanksgiving in Scotland at the end of the first Gulf War.
The Tories by temperament are therefore as opposed to any pan-British modernisation as they are to the break up of Britain. So, given that they are likely to be in power for a very long time, one shouldn't expect much movement on the constitution, along the lines people are keen on here, in the next decade.
Their default position is maintaining the constitutional status-quo, that's why I don't, for one minute, think that Cameron will cut a deal with Salmond. Nor do I think he will seriously address the English Question.
'Britologywatch', I think this debate is distorted by different usages of the concept of sovereignty. In international and legal terms, neither England nor Scotland is sovereign, nor can either exercise sovereignty as long as both belong to the United Kingdom which alone possesses a formal international identity. Formalising and completing the idea of devolution by adopting a federal system of government couldn't affect that position.
If however we are talking about where the source of power resides, I would hope that in a new federal constitution it would be laid down that the people of the four nations and of their federal union are sovereign, that all power proceeds from them, and that their sovereignty is symbolised, as in all countries, in the person of the head of state of the United Kingdom (also known, indeed, as its 'Sovereign'!).
But isn't there something unreal about this whole debate? How many people in the saloon bar of the Dog and Whistle or even in the leather chairs of the gentlemen's (and now increasingly the ladies') clubs in Pall Mall are actually exercised by the abstract question of where sovereignty lies and whether it lies in different places in Scotland and England? Indeed, does it matter? Who cares, apart from contributors to this website -- and only some of them?
Brian, if you don't mind my saying so, I think that's a rather cavalier dismissal of the importance of the issue of sovereignty, which I introduced into this thread to begin with. OK, the bloke at the bar at the Dog and Whistle might not discuss things in terms of 'sovereignty'; but he is likely to be exercised about who ultimately is in charge of his country and what precisely his 'country' actually is: 'Britain', the UK, England, Scotland, or whatever.
Indeed, this whole debate wouldn't have arisen in the first place unless there weren't sufficient numbers of ordinary people up and down the land who are no longer satisfied with the status quo - specifically, in England, articulating it in terms of England being lorded over by a 'Scottish mafia' that is seeking to erase England from the British map; or, as I would put it, British political sovereignty overriding the traditional English political sovereignty (England being basically in charge of Britain) at the heart of the British state.
In other words, this debate is about which state and which country the drinkers at the Dog and Whistle owe their loyalty to. The members of the gentleman's club on the Mall are likely to still be British establishmentarians; but their pub-regular counterparts are increasingly likely to want England to run its own affairs (political sovereignty) or even to break away from the UK altogether (legal sovereignty).
"How does pandering to political sovereignty in any way help shore up Westminster's claims to legal sovereignty?"
It doesn't really, but in a way that's what devolution was designed to do. Give Scots the impression that they are sovereign, whilst retaining legal sovereignty. It's an attempt to show Scots that they can enjoy both.
"shore up" wasn't really what I meant, "retain" would have been better.
Gareth
I'm not sure that crouching the discussion in terms of this contrast between political and legal sovereignty is actually very real. The real issue is power.
Before the UK joined the Common Market the issue was straightforward. Parliamentary Sovereignty meant that the executive embedded in, and working through, parliament had a monopoly on power.
Now power is diffused, which is why Vernon Bogdanor has said that the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty is now a fiction. Power has been ceded upwards to Europe and downwards to Scotland, and Northern Ireland, but much less so to Wales.
The situation with regards Wales is instructive. Westminster originally retained power by not ceding legislative competence. Now that legislative competence is being ceded, Westminster MP are clinging to power over Wales by insisting on scrutinising each legislative order.
Bogdanor's point is also that, although technically no legislation can be entrenched, realistically one can think of no circumstances where the UK could withdraw from the EU or where a UK government could revoke the Scotland Act. What really counts is where power lies.
For the moment yes, the real issue is power, for so long as we're talking about devolution. But when we move into the realms of federation and confederation it does become a matter of sovereignty. Westminster is an imperial parliament and we will have to address that matter if we are to dabble with solutions other than independence or devolution.
In his Prospect Magazine piece on what it means to be British Vernon Bogdanor wrote: "To be British, surely, is to wish to be represented in the House of Commons".
I find this an interesting statement because it makes British identity out to be a completely legalistic thing - an institutional identity. Is Britishness about the power of the House of Commons (which as you say has been ceded), or is it about the House of Commons' sovereignty over Britain (which unionists are loathed to cede)?
At the Portillo diner party Bogdanor made the very strange comment that he felt it had been wrong to resist Irish demands for independence but professed to not understanding why the Irish hadn't wanted after independence to continue sending MPs to Westminster. The only thing I can take from this is that from the perspective of the metropolitan centre the idea that someone doesn’t want to be at the centre of things, influencing events, seems difficult to fathom.
Is it fear of littleness, or of ordinariness? There is a sense that if one is not involved at the highest level in international politics and on the big issues of war and peace then politics is meaningless. I don’t know how Irish people feel, but my own feeling is that the Irish have gained immensely from being independent and want to be equal to Britain, not in London trying to exert influence.
So to answer your question: Britishness from Bogdanor’s perspective, is about buying into a project to exert power on the world stage. If one has no interest in this then Britain ceases to have any appeal. So when the Scots cease, like the Irish before them, to be interested, then their participation in the union is guaranteed to be nearing its end.
Yes, he said he regretted the Irish decision to not send MPs to Westminster, even after they had won independence. He went on to say that if Scotland left the UK - England, Wales and Northern Ireland - would have no 'primordial identity' and would be meaningless. This certainly suggests a view of Westminster as an imperial parliament and a means of projecting power.
Britologywatch, I'm sorry if my comment on sovereignty sounded cavalier. It just seems to me far more useful to discuss the subject in terms of loyalty and power, as your comment helpfully suggests, and not by reference to such an abstract and multipurpose concept as sovereignty, best left to lawyers and philosophers. As to loyalty and power, I agree totally with you that the present situation is unsatisfactory, or worse, and unsustainable: that's why I argue to the point of tedium for a radical change, namely to a federal system of government. Power should surely be regarded and defined as emanating from the people -- identified by belonging to both Scotland (or whichever other UK nation) and simultaneously to the United Kingdom. Most of us have no problem maintaining a loyalty to (in my case) both England and the United Kingdom, and rather fewer of us also feel a strong loyalty to the European Union and what it stands for. Personally for various reasons I also feel a loyalty to the Commonwealth, an even rarer commodity. There is no reason in the world to try to make me choose between these various loyalties. One of my daughters is a dual (UK and US) national: she feels genuine loyalty to both countries as well as to England and New York State (and Oxford and New York City). The world has moved on, mercifully, from the days when everyone 'belonged' to just one country and no other.
Yes, I found Boggy's contribution curiously naive and also revealing. To most people(ie the English)it would appear blindingly obvious that that was what Irish independence was about. There appears to be a mentality amongst the British class which I hadn't quite appreciated that assumes that even after we are all independent of each other then we still foregather in Westminster regardless. Hm.
One point made was that Westminster is an imperial parliament which rather confirms that it is not an English parliament- something which needs to be emphasised to those who will keep trying the old line that it is an EP.
I hadn't to meant watch this but in the end did so and found it useful.Of course, its only a few people at dinner and not representative at all but it will make a significant impact in medialand.
Remarkable how the Scots are now trying to say RBS and BOS are British banks and not Scottish.
Also remarkable that some of the Scots envisaged Trident still being at Faslane after independence. Doesn't sound much like independence.
It must be just about the first time that a subject dear to my heart, ie division of the national debt, has been mentioned on TV - briefly- but it was mentioned and no one demurred.
Rather a pity that Scotland appears to be coming to accept exiting from the world stage and becoming just another funny little country with odd customs and a history of long ago a la Alex Buchan. Probably quite a prosperous one but of no great account any more. Also hm. I suppose the mental fires are burning down. One thinks of Sicily and modern Ireland and embers.
The most striking thing was the the general acceptance that the end of the Union is nigh although Portillo did keep on about Scotland "leaving the Union" and would keep using the word "Britain" for what was left. We English still have work to do. Clearly the British class in England have yet to make that mental jump back to England, though they are beginning to shift. Unlike Scotland, which, as Professor Fry openly said, will have to learn a few things they don't know- including obscurity- England can reasonably look forward to remaining on the world stage I think once that fact has been accepted by the British class , our cause will also begin to be accepted.
Brian, first of all why would Scottish independence be a tragedy for the Scots, the Welsh or the Northern Irish and especially the English? To be quite blunt most English people wouldn't notice. Westminster would still be the supreme Parliament, the BBC would have a name change but still have the same programs and newsreaders, no laws in England would change, the Queen would still be Queen Elizabeth the second of England, the education and legal systems would be exactly as they were and apart from a reduction in the number of MP's and the loss of the rump Scottish Office the functions of Government would be exactly the same. If you're going to call Scottish independence a tragedy then you have to explain why and for who.
I think part of why you fail to understand what drives Scottish nationalism and what drives the rise of the SNP in Scotland is your failure to grasp the idea of the UK as a political union not a nation. I don't regard myself as British in nationality. I'm British because that is the current political state I live in. It's a name on a passport not a sense of identity. Comparing the identity politics of Scotland, Wales, NI and England to the differences between administrative units in former overseas colonies is not a good analogy.
The idea of a federal UK would be a good one if what was driving the SNP was simply a desire for more local control in Scotland but that is not what the driver is. What is driving the rise of the SNP is a desire for Scotland, which is a nation, to re-emerge as a state again. Federalism is simply a reorganisation of local government within the current unitary UK. I don't get on my bike to deliver SNP leaflets in order to create a new UK with more localism, I do it to create a new state of Scotland and that is the same for all others in the party.
Even if the UK starts to go down the federal road it is going to be a rocky one, not only because the SNP are not going to buy into it but because it would require the renegotiation of the Treaty of Union which is the founding document of the UK. As an example a "central supreme court" is fine but under the Treaty of Union you cannot join the English and Scottish legal systems so would it operate under Scots Law or English Law? No politician wants to raise awareness of the Treaty of Union at all because that undermines the narrative of the UK as a unitary and ancient state.
The idea that devolution is a half-way house to federalism is completely wrong. The prime principle of devolution is that it does not affect the central government which is exactly what happened in the UK with no changes to Westminster which gave rise the the West Lothian Question. Devolution is the granting of powers from the centre to the fringes and the retention of the right to remove these powers at any time. Devolution is a provincial solution for a unitary state. Federalism requires that the rights of the provinces/states are protected and it would require the complete scrapping of the current devolution legislation before starting again from scratch. Devolution and Federalism are completely different beasts and devolution is not a step towards federalism but the creation of a state which abhors federalism.
The main reason no politician from any of the big two and a half, (Labour, Conservative and Lib-Dems) are even looking at an English Parliament is because the creation of an English Parliament is not a devolutionary step but a federalist step. There is no "unfinished" business of an English Parliament under devolution because the concept of a devolved English Parliament is ludicrous. The centre cannot devolve power to itself. From Brown to Cameron to Clegg the political establishment regards the UK as a unitary country and though they are happy to devolve power to the provinces of Scotland, Wales and NI, the creation of an English Parliament would legitimise England as a nation and by implication also all the rest as nations and break the idea of the UK as a unitary nation not a political union.
As I said earlier, the drive for the SNP is not a desire for more local control it's a drive to break the UK and to give Scotland back its identity as a state. Federalism is not the end point of that drive though it could be on the path there and that's exactly what stops the British Establishment contemplating federalism.
The example of the Calman Commission is telling. Given a Commission created and supported by all three unionist parties in Scotland the best they could come up with was a minor transfer of powers between Holyrood and Westminster and an increase in the never used current 3p in the pound variable tax rate with a 10p in the pound variable tax rate which was tied into a mind-bogglingly complex method of assinging taxes from HMCR. All changes to devolution in the UK are hamstrung by fear of giving advantage to the SNP and federalism is way beyond the pale.
Perhaps you could also tell us what the disadvantages of independence for Scotland are. Since no European state is currently negotiating to merge with any others it seems to be advantageous for all of them and I can't see Scotland being any different.
Gareth, you put these questions to me earlier:
Under 'my' model, which is fundamentally the same as the Australian model (and the US model but without the presidential system), the federal Senate would not "be" the federal parliament, as you imply: it would be the second chamber of a bicameral federal parliament whose powers would be strictly limited to the subjects delegated to it by consent of the four nations -- principally, but not exclusively, foreign affairs and defence. The federal Senate would have no more power to "scrutinise", debate, comment on, or otherwise claim any say in, the legislation or executive decisions of the parliaments or governments of the four autonomous constituent nations of the UK than the US Senate can scrutinise the legislation of the Connecticut state legislature. The federal Senate's powers in relation to the 'lower' house of the federal parliament [the present House of Commons] would be further limited, probably in much the same way as the powers of the House of Lords are limited with regard to the House of Commons (or as the Australian federal Senate's powers in relation to the Australian House of Representatives are limited).
Yes, I would certainly expect the federal Senate, like the federal lower house (House of Commons, House of representatives, whatever) to be 100% elected, like almost every democratic legislative chamber in the world. There could be no justification for giving places in it to bishops. I see no reason to abolish the Privy Council, which has no connection with the legislature and is basically a formal or ritual body, and harmless. I would certainly not "abolish the hereditary principle" and nor would or could anyone else: a federal system would be irrelevant to the Act of Succession to the monarch and to the system whereby holders of hereditary titles pass them to their descendants on their death. These, desirable or not, are quite separate issues. There could of course be no place in either house of the elected federal legislature for persons either appointed rather than elected, or for persons who had inherited their seats from their ancestors or other relatives. They could go on calling each other the Duke of this or the Marquess of that, and they could stand for election to either federal house: but no title would carry entitlement to an unelected seat.
I'm not sure what the Lord Chancellorship is doing in your list of possible abolitions. The Lord Chancellor is now no longer the head of the judiciary; he no longer presides over sittings of the House of Lords, indeed is not even a member of that House and is not a Lord; he no longer sits in court as a judge. The title has to all intents and purposes been abolished already, but since formal abolition would require boring legislation, it has been found simpler to maintain the ritual duties of the office along with the faintly absurd title and costume, and present the lot to the Justice Secretary in the House of Commons. A federal minister in a federal system would probably still be needed to deal with the affairs of the federal courts and federal criminal and civil law affecting more than one UK nation, as the US has a federal Justice Department headed in that country by the federal attorney-general. Whether the UK's federal equivalent would be called the Lord Chancellor is a question of unimportant though comical detail: it would be decided at a late stage of the general reform.
I'm puzzled by your remark that "Under the confederal model England can retain these things should she so choose." The word 'retain' seems inapposite, since England currently has none of these things: they are elements of the United Kingdom parliament, and can't be part of an English parliament because there is no such thing. Once a parliament and government for England as part of the eventual federal system are established, it would be up to the English electorate, through its own constitutional convention, Royal Commission, England-wide debate and probably several referendums at various stages, to decide whether the new English parliament should have one chamber or two, its composition and size, the electoral system or systems to be used for it, whether there should be any ex officio members of it, what they should be called, and so on. Predicting how all these decisions would come out of an exhaustive consultative and plebiscitary process is harmless fun but in the end an impediment to discussion of the basic principles of the kind of federal system we need. All this would be true of either a federal or a confederal system, although the latter seems to me ill suited to the circumstances of the UK.
I hope I have answered your many-sided questions!
Doug, I think you may be under the misapprehension that for the UK to adopt a federal system it would first have to be agreed by the SNP. Since the SNP's principal aim is full independence for Scotland, it must follow that it could not accept the continued status of Scotland as a part of the UK under a federal or indeed any other system. The SNP, in your words, seeks "to break the UK". Those of us who advocate a federal UK seek to save it. The two aims are manifestly incompatible. The fact that several aspects of a federal system would not be accepted by the SNP is thus (a) obvious, and (b) beside the point. However, there's plenty of evidence that many Scots who support the SNP at election and other times do so without being committed to the aim of Scottish independence, and one of the objects of the federal project would be to satisfy such people, and many other Scots, that a federal system could meet the great majority of their concerns and would represent a much preferable alternative to full independence (as well as to the status quo).
You say that
but of course the Treaty (or Act) of Union would be unaffected by a federal system: Scottish law would continue to operate in Scotland (subject to the actions of the Scottish parliament), English law would continue to operate in England (until and unless the English parliament changed it), and the new system of federal law would operate throughout the UK -- just as Minnesota law operates in the state of Minnesota and federal law operates throughout the US, including in Minnesota. But the scope of federal law would be limited to the subjects laid down in the federal constitution as being the sole or shared responsibility of the federal legislature. In other words, the federal legislature would have no power to change or repeal Scottish law affecting, e.g. education, health, the Scottish electoral system, Scottish taxation, or any other aspect of Scotland's internal affairs.
You remark that 'There is no "unfinished" business of an English Parliament under devolution because the concept of a devolved English Parliament is ludicrous. The centre cannot devolve power to itself.' But in the federal system England and its parliament and government are one thing, while "the centre" -- by which I take it you mean the new federal government and parliament -- is entirely something else, separate and different. In any case, "the centre" would not 'devolve' power to anyone: the federal constitution, approved by the four nations, would allocate certain limited powers and responsibilities to the federal centre, all other 'residual' powers and responsibilities belonging as of right to the four nations. It would be truer to say that the nations, including England, would agree to delegate certain powers to the federal centre to exercise on their behalf.
I think I can safely leave it to the good sense of the Scottish (and Welsh and English and Northern Irish) people to compile a list of the manifest benefits that each constituent nation derives from belonging to the larger entity of the United Kingdom. Of course those benefits are sometimes liable to be negated by the tendency of the largest nation to interfere in the domestic affairs of the smaller ones. The object of federalism would be precisely to prevent any such interference and to limit the capacity of the UK as a whole to reflect English dominance as it affects Scotland to a small number of subjects where it's obviously to Scotland's and everyone else's advantage to manage those defined subjects collectively. For Scotland, England, Wales and Northern Ireland to be forced to raise and maintain their own armies, navies and airforces, and to have separate embassies and high commissions in all the major countries of the world, would be an obvious nonsense. If the benefits of having full internal autonomy while at the same time belonging to a larger national entity were not obvious, there would be a majority in each of the four nations in favour of breaking away and claiming full independence. Fortunately there is no such majority in any of the nations.
Finally (phew!): I'm saddened to see you write:
However you choose to regard yourself, the fact is that you are 'British in nationality', and it's a small tragedy that you're apparently incapable of feeling any sense of belonging (still less loyalty) to both Scotland and Britain, or even a cautious pride in the many positive things about both Scotland and Britain. It's sad that you evidently feel no sentiment of kinship with your fellow-countrymen other than other Scots. Fortunately millions of us do manage to rise above that narrow and exclusive nationalism of which you seem to boast, and a federal system would aim to symbolise and give concrete expression to that more generous-spirited awareness of a wider citizenship that would in no way conflict with your simultaneous Scottishness.
All of this is highly entertaining speculation; and believe you me, I've indulged in it myself at considerable length on more than one blog-post occasion! However, I can't help feeling that the contributions of the Scottish contingent in this thread are the most revealing: I just don't think that the substantial and potentially growing groundswell of Scottish nationalism will ever be satisfied by a federal system that does not grant full (legal and political) sovereignty (that word again) / power to Scotland and the Scottish people. Such federal blueprints, including your version, Brian, seem to be basically attempts to preserve the idea of the UK / Britain as a unitary nation-state, which has historically been the English or, more precisely, the Anglo-British idea of the UK.
My own view is that this idea of Britain is a proxy for English identity and nationhood; but an identity that is magnified, idealised and elevated almost to the status of universality via its association with Britain as a 'world power', and 'British values' as absolute and universal. That's the Britain whose end so many in England are unwilling to contemplate: the continuation of imperial Britain, 'great' Britain, which must necessarily be in and of itself a unity, organised around and expressing commonly held, universal values and traditions. But that's an English idea of Britain, suffusing the political union that is the UK with the idealised view of (English) nationhood.
A (unitary) federal UK continues this idea of Britain; indeed, in your conception, that's a key purpose of it: to hold 'Britain' together as a (national) unity. But it also risks adding the contemporary twist that Britishness has assumed in the wake of devolution: Britain, in the figure of the British Parliament, becoming in and of itself the ultimate instance of sovereignty, rather than expressing and symbolising - as far as the English are concerned - the sovereign will of the English people, as it has done since the Acts of Union. This would in fact potentially be an altogether different Britain from the one we've known hitherto: no longer a projection of English power and identity, but a sovereign nation-state that would deny England, and indeed Scotland, as distinct sovereign nations in their own right.
Britologywatch.
I’d like to pick up on your points. First this thread is exactly as you say entertaining speculation. There is zero likelihood of the UK ever becoming a federal state. It is not for nothing that Britain chose to follow the example Spain rather than Australia and the logic of that choice is likely to persist as long as the British establishment persists.
Secondly you are also right about the growth of a groundswell of Scottish nationalism. This has three aspects as follows. Devolution has broken down the old order where unionism was an unspoken assumption and has made it possible to question things that before where treated as taboo. The fact that the civil service in Edinburgh, which is still technically part of the British civil service, have been laying down plans for an independent state shows how far this process has gone. The second point is that the attitude towards British nationality expressed above by Doug is extremely common even amongst people who are not SNP supporters. Thirdly the SNP may be only marginally dominant electorally, but it is more decisively dominant in the number and enthusiasm of its supporters.
You’re also right that they wouldn’t be satisfied with any new pan-Britain settlement, federalist or otherwise, for the reasons you say: that it would be seen as an attempt to preserve the Anglo-British state as a means of stopping Scotland breaking away. Your point about the different attitudes towards Britain north and south of the border is also apposite. Scots seen Britain in terms of a contract between two nations but what is projected into Scottish homes, in the underlying assumptions of people on TV and radio, is a very different English understanding, which in part explains the persistence of Scottish attitudes of grievance. I’d be very interested to see your comments above on Britain as representing the idealised view of English nationhood expanded. I think this attachment to Britain as an idealisation and universalisation of Englishness is the crux of the problem campaigners for an English parliament face.
Thanks, Alex. If you want to check out my expanded views about the complex relationship between Britishness and Englishness, you could do no better than to take a look at my two blogs, where I wax lyrical on the subject at considerable length . . .: Britology Watch and National Conversation for England, particularly the former.
I think you're right that persistent attachment to the Anglo-British project and ideal is indeed the crux of the problem faced by campaigners for English self-government. There has first to be a shift in identity, with English people coming to see themselves as primarily English as distinct from British (rather than the two as merged and (con)fused), in order for the rationale for a separate tier of English government to be accepted. Otherwise, English people will continue to believe that the British parliament is their 'national' parliament - a unitary parliament for the whole of Britain elected by the whole of Britain - whereas of course its remit in so many areas now stops at the borders with Scotland and Wales, as we know.
'Britologywatch', once again you seem to misinterpret the whole thrust of the case for a UK federation when you say:
First, a federation can't on any definition also be a "unitary" nation-state, unitary being the exact opposite of federal. Secondly, the Anglo-British (whatever that might mean) idea of the UK can never have perceived the UK as a "unitary nation-state" since the very title of the UK is a standing reminder that the state is a union, originally of Scotland on the one hand with England-and-Wales on the other. Since at the latest 1707 it's been possible to describe the country as a union state, but even before 1707 Britain was clearly an association of England and Wales, each preserving its own separate national identity, and with Ireland making its own periodic appearances in various roles and relationships. It's of course true that some people both in England and overseas sometimes carelessly equate England with the UK, or with Britain: the colloquial name of the British embassy in Moscow in Russian is "the English embassy"! But that can't disguise the permanent awareness of all thinking and literate people throughout the UK that we live in an association of varied nations within a single nation-state and that most of us have no difficulty at all in combining a sense of loyalty and belonging both to our individual UK nation and to our overall United Kingdom.
Just one other comment before I leave you (see below). Others here have referred to this discussion as being in the context of the campaign for an English parliament -- not surprisingly, since that's the rationale for this website. But I stress again that I have no interest in any such campaign for its own sake. I have nothing in common with English nationalists who seem to be motivated mainly by resentment of their fellow-Britons in Scotland or Wales, or their fellow-countrymen in Northern Ireland,and who see their campaign mainly as a way of breaking or loosening their bonds with the people of our other nations. If the case for an English parliament is based on exclusivity and narrow nationalism, I want nothing to do with it. The failure to understand the need for a separate English government as well as a parliament makes me suspicious. Above all, the apparent lack of interest on the part of too many English campaigners for an English parliament in linking that demand with a root-and-branch reform of the present lopsided and anomalous relationship between all the four UK nations, and between the four nations and the UK itself, seems to me unforgivably short-sighted and chauvinistic: it's all of a piece with the obsession with the English flag. What I campaign for is a federal constitution for a genuinely united United Kingdom that brings its four nations closer together. That, for me, is the only context in which the demand for an English parliament -- and government -- is defensible, relevant, and worth-while.
This must I fear be my swansong. I have now devoted so much time to responding to numerous comments on my original post both here and at http://www.barder.com/ephems/2066 and at http://bit.ly/lYtm5 that I fear the time has come to hang up my keyboard, at any rate on this subject, if only for a few weeks. I have said just about everything that I need to say on this issue, here and in the other two locations (qv). I'll continue to read with either approval or weary dissent any further comments on my post contributed here or elsewhere, but I shan't attempt to respond further to them. Time to get on with my life -- even if that means only that it's time for me to resume posting elsewhere on other things. Thanks again for the provocative and sometimes informative comments here: see you all again, I hope, under another post, another time. Come and visit me at my own blog some time!
Brian
http://www.barder.com/ephems/
Brian, Thanks for your thoughtful piece, and the subsequent comments. Labour list have a rather peculiar follow up from Paul Burgin, who appears to have read something entirely different to the piece you actually wrote.
"First, a federation can't on any definition also be a 'unitary' nation-state, unitary being the exact opposite of federal". However, other federal states regard themselves as, at least, 'united' / integral nation-states, e.g. Germany, Canada, Australia, US, etc.
But agreed, as far as strict a definition of 'unitary' is concerned. But then you also write:
"What I campaign for is a federal constitution for a genuinely united United Kingdom that brings its four nations closer together"
and
"we live in an association of varied nations within a single nation-state and . . . most of us have no difficulty at all in combining a sense of loyalty and belonging both to our individual UK nation and to our overall United Kingdom".
'Unitary nation-state' (my description of your federal blueprint) versus 'federal state of four united nations' (resume of my first quote from you), versus 'association of nations in a single nation-state' (your description of the present UK) but put on a more equitable, rational and symmetrical footing through a federal constitution. I can't see much difference in practice: either the UK (present or federal) is a united (nation-)state, or it is not. Your federal blueprint actually seems more unitary than the present lop-sided Union, as you describe it, in that it is bringing all four nations closer together (as you say) within a single overall legal and political framework. By contrast, the lop-sided arrangements since 1707 or earlier have at least preserved the separate legal identities of Scotland and England & Wales.
These lop-sided arrangements are not to be confused with asymmetric devolution, however, which basically attempts to suppress English nationhood altogether in a last-ditch attempt to hold on to (the idea of) a unitary British state, in the strict sense. I fear that your federal solution would 'rectify' this imbalance by cancelling out the distinct nationhood of all of the UK's constituent countries (in favour of a 'federal united kingdom of Britain', or whatever) rather than just that of one. Federations involve regions or provinces subordinated to nation states. The only way to preserve the nations of the UK as such, outside of the old lop-sided arrangements blown apart by devolution, would be confederation. But then that puts an end to the idea of a united / single / unitary nation-state of the UK.
Very interesting comments here. If I may contribute a simple solution. It seems to me that the main objective is, at least from my point of view, to ensure that England gets proper Parliamentary representation. For me that is and will remain the primary purpose in my involvement in this campaign. The nice ideas put forward here do not seem address these issues in a practical way. I say this simply because it will be, or seems to me, to be impossible to sort out the details before England is properly represented.
It is putting the cart before the horse to think that anything can be achieved until the primary objective of an English Parliament is resolved.
Therefore step 1 should be the English Parliament. The UK can function as is. Time can be split in the existing house to discuss UK wide issues.
Step 2. Mechanisms for dealing with other issues can be put in place over time.
In my opinion to get any one in the UK to agree to the many possibilities here would simply confuse the public and would doom the whole process to failure.
Someone suggested that we should consider having an English Parliament sitting in various parts of the country. This is so implausible. Can you possibly imagine the expenses scandal that would arise if we have the whole mechanism of government wandering around the country accompanied by the press and media. Would the MPs ever have time to meet their constituents or see their families. We would create a gypsy army of MPs, civil servants and so on. Thousands of people would be involved, they would have to set aside hotels, conference centres and god knows what else. It would cost a fortune and would truly turn us into a banana republic.
Continue down this route and an English Parliament will not happen. Keep it simple for now.