The United Kingdom is a partnership enriched by distinct national identities and traditions. Scotland has its own systems of education, law and local government. Wales has its language and cultural traditions. We will meet the demand for decentralisation of power to Scotland and Wales, once established in referendums.

Subsidiarity is as sound a principle in Britain as it is in Europe. Our proposal is for devolution not federation. A sovereign Westminster Parliament will devolve power to Scotland and Wales. The Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed.

As soon as possible after the election, we will enact legislation to allow the people of Scotland and Wales to vote in separate referendums on our proposals, which will be set out in white papers. These referendums will take place not later than the autumn of 1997. A simple majority of those voting in each referendum will be the majority required. Popular endorsement will strengthen the legitimacy of our proposals and speed their passage through Parliament.

For Scotland we propose the creation of a parliament with law-making powers, firmly based on the agreement reached in the Scottish Constitutional Convention, including defined and limited financial powers to vary revenue and elected by an additional member system. In the Scottish referendum we will seek separate endorsement of the proposal to create a parliament, and of the proposal to give it defined and limited financial powers to vary revenue. The Scottish parliament will extend democratic control over the responsibilities currently exercised administratively by the Scottish Office. The responsibilities of the UK Parliament will remain unchanged over UK policy, for example economic, defence and foreign policy.

The Welsh assembly will provide democratic control of the existing Welsh Office functions. It will have secondary legislative powers and will be specifically empowered to reform and democratise the quango state. It will be elected by an additional member system.

Following majorities in the referendums, we will introduce in the first year of the Parliament legislation on the substantive devolution proposals outlined in our white papers.

Labour Party Manifesto, 1997

There is a fundamental flaw in the campaign for an English Parliament and its feeble echoes in current Conservative talk of English votes for English bills. They are entirely reactive: negative, sour, mean-minded, ‘me-too’ responses to the wonderful growth of national feeling in Scotland and Wales. So far as I know, no one has yet put forward a positive case for devolution to England, based on a moral vision of what England and the English stand for or might come to stand for.

- David Marquand, Give us a moral vision for England, Our Kingdom; 4th January, 2008

Traditionally, the Campaign for an English Parliament has called for powers equal to those held by Scotland to be devolved to England. The CEP also states that to provide a complete answer to the constitutional problems of the United Kingdom it will be "necessary to upgrade the Welsh Assembly to become a Welsh Parliament with similar devolved powers" [The Aims] because "Each of the three historic nations of this island must stand in the same relationship to the Union and to each other if the Union is to survive" [Submission to the Justice Committee].

This autumn the Government is to set out its proposals to strengthen Scottish devolution based on the report of the Calman Commission. If implemented the Calman Commission's proposals, initially backed by Gordon Brown, could see Scotland gain additional devolved powers and substantial borrowing powers whilst losing some regulatory powers.

The Calman Proposals

• Calman recommends a 10p cut in all income tax rates in Scotland with a corresponding reduction in the annual block grant from the Treasury.
1. Holyrood powers to levy part or all of the 10p rate.
2. Holyrood would make a “tax decision” in terms of the size of its budget.
3. Levying less than 10p would cut its own budget.
4. Levying more could lead to increased spend on public services.

• Control over stamp duty, air passenger duty and land tax could be devolved.
• Holyrood to be given additional borrowing powers for capital expenditure.
• Holyrood to control airgun laws and power to set drink driving limits, landfill levy, speed limits and ability to run Scottish elections.
• Co-operation between Westminster and Holyrood to be strengthened. Ministers from each legislature should appear before relevant committees.
• Calman recommends that powers of insolvency, charity law and registration of health professionals be returned to Westminster.

Essentially (though not explicitly) Unionist in outlook, the CEP lays itself open to accusations of being reactionary and displaying me-too-ism by demanding powers for England that Scotland has for itself.

If Scotland adopts the Calman Commission proposals, what should the CEP's response be?

The CEP should continue to demand for England the same powers as held by Scotland on the basis of equality and constitutional symmetry, irrespective of the suitability of those powers

The CEP should specify the powers of its proposed English parliament and executive, and should take a position on the overall context of UK-constitutional reform that may be required, including possible federal or confederal options

The CEP should forget about constitutional symmetry and should limit itself to campaigning on the principle of an English parliament without taking any position on overall UK constitutional reform

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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.

The release of Abdelbaset Ali al Megrahi to Libya seems to have focussed the London media's attention on Scotland in a way that we haven't seen since the SNP came to power. Gerry Hassan believes that the al Megrahi case has revealed an English ignorance of Scotland's constitutional status:

A whole host of English based commentators: Alexander Chancellor, the Daily Mail, The Sun and more, seem to barely know Scotland exists as a nation with a separate judicial and legal system, which long predates devolution and stretches back hundreds of years. This ignorance, this absence of an understanding of Scotland and the nature of the union, matters, and matters when it spills over into in places to uncontrollable rage and fury at a small nation and polity daring to do things differently.

Tony Travers, writing for the Local Government Chronicle, encourages us to support Scotland's freedom but recognises that for many in England this affair is demonstration of an abrogation of Westminster sovereignty.

For the people of England, the revelation that a Scottish politician can make such a life-and-death decision with massive international ramifications serves to point out how privileged the Scots now are within the UK’s so-called constitution.

The New Statesman's James Macintyre believes that devolution itself is to blame and suggests that "the furore over the Lockerbie release may hasten the decline of the union":

This is precisely the sort of decision that should be taken - and be seen to be taken - at a national level by the British government, not by nationalists in one part of the UK. But devolution has led to a grave failure of accountability.

Regardless of whether you agree or disagree with the decision to release al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, who do you think should take this sort of decision?

The Scottish Justice Minister

The Scottish Parliament

The most senior Scottish judge

The English and British Justice Minister, Jack Straw

The UK Parliament

The UK Prime Minister and Cabinet

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This poll is prompted by the setting up of the UKIP 1997 Group and its associated Facebook group.

In his address to UKIP’s 2006 Party Conference, Vernon Coleman told the audience that "The English desperately needs a party to represent them" and that UKIP should "fight hard" for an English Parliament.

Look at the results of any election. UKIP gets very few votes in Scotland or Wales. Most don't fly union flags in Scotland. Many Scottish and Welsh nationalists genuinely believe that they are one step from independence. In reality, they are further from independence than they've ever been and if they had any sense they would be fighting against the EU with all their might.

We need to fight hard for an English Parliament, where Englishmen and women can decide the fate of Englishmen and women. It is outrageous that Scottish MPs can introduce legislation on health and education which don't affect their constituents. And it's equally absurd that anyone should consider foisting a Scottish Prime Minister on us.

The present UKIP position, evolved from David Campbell-Bannerman’s 2006 press release, advocates dual-mandate governance and a consistent UK-wide approach, in contrast to the present constitutional asymmetry.

The UKIP Solution

• The Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly will be retained but MSPs and Assembly Members for Wales and Northern Ireland will be scrapped.
• An ‘English Parliament’ [a Grand Committee of UK MPs with English constituencies] will sit in the present House of Commons on ‘English Days’ to debate English affairs and English legislation.
• Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish Westminster MPs would sit as members of their respective national parliaments/assmblies (129 MSPs would therefore be reduced to 55 dual mandate Scottish MPs, the 60 Welsh Assembly members would be replaced by the 32 Welsh Westminster MPs and the 108 Members of the Northern Ireland Legislative Assembly will be replaced by 18 Westminster representatives).
• For some time in every month, assuming 1 week, the national bodies of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would meet in plenary within their home nations, and conduct additional committee work during Westminster weeks or recesses, as necessary.
• The unicameral nature of the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish national chambers would be addressed by the House of Commons when it meets as the UK Parliament (the dual mandate chambers of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would be scrutinised by Westminster MPs).
• England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will each have their own First Minister selected from among their Westminster MPs.
• Devolved powers would be amended to prevent any UK citizen being disadvantaged in another nation within the UK (for example it would not be possible for Scottish universities to charge English students for services that they provide for free to Scottish students and students from other EU nations).
• Dependent on function Whitehall will be reorganised into either UK-wide or English departments. For example, a UK Department of Health will specify common standards, frameworks and approaches for the NHS across the UK, but national bodies will hold the Northern Irish NHS, Scottish NHS, Welsh NHS and English NHS to account at the national level.
• UKIP would seek a fair and balanced new alternative to the Barnett Formula based on rural, suburban and urban criteria, and on need, not arbitrary measures.

[Source (pdf)]

UKIP’s proposals raise a number of interesting questions.

1. Would the UK parties still have (for example) both a Scottish manifesto and a UK manifesto, and; which of these manifestos is a Scottish politician being elected and held to account on?
2. Do dual mandate MPs suffer from a conflict of interest, and; does a chamber comprised of dual-mandate MPs have any power of independent thought and action?
3. Are UKIP's proposals actually achievable; do the Scots, Welsh and Irish actually want their national bodies, comprised of representatives with an explicity national mandate, replaced by dual-mandate British MPs, and; if they don’t, could a Westminster government realistically impose this compromise upon them?
4. Would the English vote for a dual-mandate ‘English Parliament’ or would the English prefer the real thing, and; should England be offered that choice?
5. What powers would a First Minister have, and; would he/she have a cabinet and could those cabinet ministers also be ministers in the UK cabinet? In addition, would there be enough MPs in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to form a cabinet from politicians of one party?
6. Would UKIP's proposals improve governance and scrutiny of legislation and post-legislative executive action.

In 2005 Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Scotland, James Gray MP, suggested the same policy of dual-mandate governance as UKIP. So conscious were the Conservatives of Scottish public opinion on the matter that he was forced to resign shortly afterwards.

UKIP differ from the Conservatives in the fact that they are highly unlikely to form the next UK Government. Given that fact it is possible that UKIP have devised a policy that is superficially equitable but unachievable (because at least one of the English, Scottish, Welsh or Northen Irish public will not consent to it) and, if implemented, unworkable in practice, possibly leading to constitutional chaos.

What do you think of UKIP’s proposals?

They are both workable and achievable

They are unachievable but workable

They are achievable but unworkable

They are neither achievable nor (in theory) workable

Don't Know

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I have yet to meet a single Minister who actively and positively wants devolution at all. Instead a variety of justifications or explanations is produced; that the alternative is the complete loss of Scotland to the Labour Party, even to Britain; that it is useless to argue with the inevitable; that the Party entered into a rash commitment which cannot now be escaped; that events acquire their own momentum. — Alan Watkins, Observer, 27 October 1976

The maps below were printed in The Economist Magazine in the early 60s (reproduced here from The Devolution of Power: local democracy, regionalism and nationalism by J. P. Mackintosh, 1968).

The Economist's regional templates do not respect the national integrity of Scotland and Wales, and they do not observe the national boundaries between England its neighbours.

If devolution had instead been offered to those Economist regions on a "where there is demand" basis, do you think the United Kingdom would be more stable as a result today?

Yes

No

Don't know

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Let me state at the outset that this evening I want to put my view that constitutional change - and I mean that in the broadest sense - is at the heart of the debate about the future for our country. Not incidental but integral to our future as a community.

All over Europe, in response to environmental as well as economic and social challenges, there is a growing recognition of the need for a change in the relationship between individuals, community and the state.

And I believe that in Britain constitutional change is essential for two quite fundamental reasons. It is vital because it is our responsibility to ensure the individual is protected against what can be called the vested interests of the state. And it is vital too because constitutional change is also a necessary means of advancing the potential of the individual in our community. In other words we have twin responsibilities to individual citizens as democrats: we must never fail to attack the evil wherever the individual is at risk from the encroachment of the state, and we must never lose sight of the good whenever the individual is empowered by the community.

I want to argue that what in truth we require is an entirely new settlement between the individual, community and government. Indeed, in my view a modern view of socialism must retrieve the broad idea of community from the narrow notion of the state and ensure that the community becomes a means by which individuals can realise their potential, not at the expense of individual liberty but in advancing it.

In other words I will be making the case this evening for constitutional change from Labour values, for I have always believed it is the historic role of the Labour Party to stand up for individual citizens against all vested interests that frustrate their potential. After thirteen years of a Conservative erosion of liberties we now need guaranteed rights: the right to know, the right to be consulted, the right to participate, the right of communities to run their own affairs.

I will argue not just for acts of Parliament enshrining in statute the long held demand for a Bill of Rights, but also that we must now take seriously the case for a European Bill of Rights so that we can protect the citizen from the potential abuse of power by any major public institution that touches our lives.

I will argue not just for immediate implementation of a Freedom of Information Act to ensure the flow of information from government to citizen and the right to know - and I believe we could do so in months - but argue also that there should be precise duties guaranteeing the right of individuals to information where it is in the public interest to do so, in the dark and secret corners of the private sector.

I will argue not just for reform of the judiciary but for reform of the security services and for a reformed second chamber in place of the anachronism which is the House of Lords.

And I will argue the case not just for home rule for Scotland within the United Kingdom and for the importance of the fresh look now taking place into electoral reform, but also for the principle of devolution applied all round throughout the country.

This lecture comes shortly before an election. Originally it was planned to come shortly after an election when calmer seas prevailed. My purpose is not to catch the next day's morning headlines but to reflect on questions that are rather more enduring. I will not list a set of constitutional changes, but will propose what I believe a constitutional agenda must include, not as detailed policy but as parameters for a debate that will continue long after the election.

My main purpose is to set a course for constitutional change. To make it more than just a shopping list of attractive ideas. To place it within a framework of belief about Britain as a community that can reach and touch all our people. To make constitutional change central, to make it popular and thus to make it attainable.

Let me start from Scotland to demonstrate what I mean. Scotland has just seen a unique all-party Constitutional Convention in which I have had the privilege to play a part: a Convention that has included not just one but a number of political parties and also enjoyed broad representation from the churches, local authorities, voluntary organisations, trades unions, and others throughout Scottish society from what might be called civil society.

The Convention rightly demands a Scottish parliament with entrenched powers. An aspiration first developed in its modern form a century ago, a widely held demand for change which has occasioned 20 Home Rule bills throughout this century already. An insistent demand for change which has brought administrative devolution as an inadequate substitute for legislative devolution. And now a popular demand that is so pressing and urgent that I believe that in the coming years we shall see the creation of a parliament which will not just be an inspiration to those seeking fundamental democratic change for the constitution in Scotland but throughout the United Kingdom as well.

For against old fashioned and unacceptable ideas of Crown sovereignty, the Convention asserts the sovereignty of the people, with legitimacy and authority flowing upwards and not downwards. It demands, and I believe will secure, the entrenchment of rights including a right to know. It demands more equal representation for women, rightly beginning to tackle the unacceptable under- representation of women at all levels of our political system. It demands a reformed electoral system, reflecting the widespread concern about the current system.

In Scotland the status quo is now so discredited that it is no longer an option. And it is because the Scottish parliament is the precursor for one in Wales and regional devolution throughout Britain that the West Lothian question - essentially that different M.P.s will have differing roles at Westminster - is not a genuine problem in proceeding with change.

Now I understand that the Prime Minister's view of the best solution is that instead of 7,000 civil servants running Scotland immune from Scottish democratic control, we should have 7,000 civil servants running Scotland immune from Scottish democratic control but wearing name tags.

But the Convention is in fact a response to two deep and widely felt concerns neither of which I feel he understands. First, that individual rights have been ignored because of the remoteness and the insensitivity of centralised government and, second, that the exercise of power has been separated from the democratic control.

But it is more than that. The demand for change is not just because London is far away but because Scotland is nearer ... indeed home, because the Scottish nation sees itself as a community whose interests cannot be properly advanced by the British state alone without the participation of the Scottish community through its own democratic parliament.

Indeed Scotland is a community that, in recognition of its interdependence, has a sense of what must be done by government to ensure individuals can achieve their potential. So there is a demand not just for accountable government but for government used effectively on behalf of the community.

And in transforming the government of Scotland I would argue that instead of retreating towards the old nineteenth century idea and trappings of an exclusive nation state with army, navy and defence forces and a separate currency - a nation state defined in relation to other nations and mainly in antithesis to its largest neighbour - what Scotland is demanding is a modern national identity, with autonomy on vital social and many economic matters within Britain and Europe. Recognising we are interdependent communities we want to link up across nations, not turn our backs on each other. Achieving, in short, the dream of Home Rule without the retreat into separation.

But the tumultuous events in Scotland are not the only calls for a new settlement in the United Kingdom. From Clive Ponting to GCHQ, from judicial error to excessive secrecy, we have become more centralised, less sensitive to individual rights and less free than we were.

And I have to say that the Citizen's Charters are no compensation for the failure of government and no substitute for the essential reform of government. The problem is much deeper than this. It is about the relationship between individual, community and the state, and I want to put the problem in a historical context.

There have been two attempts at a new settlement of the relationship between individuals, the community and the state in recent years. The boldest was the post-1945 settlement.

In 1945 individual freedom was to be guaranteed by social security rather than charity, with the state as provider ensuring for each citizen welfare, health care, education, social security and work. At the time, and for the time, it was the most ambitious programme of social and economic reform, one utterly necessary for many of the improvements we now take for granted today, not least our National Health Service.

Individual well-being was to be advanced by the active state delivering entitlements for the individual. But inevitably, as time passed and aspirations grew, individuals saw themselves less as passive recipients of benefits delivered by government and more as active participants seeking to shape their destiny. And the settlement did not in the end stand the test of time because it often seemed to many that the state and the community were one and the same thing.

Nationalised industries acted without the direct involvement of workforce or community. Scotland, Wales and the regions were granted benevolent administration without democratic rights to run their own affairs.

So, despite all the great achievements in health care, social security and education, there was not just an underdeveloped sense of community, but often an assumption that state and community interests were synonymous. Instead of government being an extension of community, it often looked to many like a substitute for it.

The response came in 1979 when Mrs Thatcher encouraged popular resentment against taxation, collectivism, bureaucracy and the local and national state, and attempted a new settlement between individual, community and government. The problem was identified by the new right Thatcherites as too much government and too little individual freedom. Individual well-being was to be guaranteed by less government even at the expense of social security.

But the new right did not recognise the individual as part of an interdependent community, quite the opposite. The individual was to make his or her own way in the marketplace unaided by government and set apart from any idea of society or community. There was - in Mrs Thatcher's own words - no such thing as society.

The result was that responsibilities conventionally accepted by the community that most of us had assumed would be discharged by government were abandoned or at least substantially eroded and reduced. Not just in social affairs (the responsibilities for public services of reasonable quality and the duty of the community to those in poverty) but also in the responsibility previously accepted by governments of all parties to stabilise the economy. Hence the extremes of boom and bust in the stop-go economics of the 1980's and 1990's. Hence the inability to improve research and innovation and training and education. Hence the now widening training and education gap.

The 1979 settlement abandoned responsibilities for individual well-being that government had discharged on behalf of the community, because it was now assumed that these could be left to the individual in the marketplace. The debate was wrongly identified as one between government and no government, when the real issue was better government. The result is that thirteen wasted years for the British constitution have directly contributed to thirteen wasted years for the British economy and for Britain as a community.

Let me say therefore where the heart of the difference in this debate lies. The new right believe individuals fulfil themselves best with no need for society and less need for government. I believe that in a modern interdependent society individual well-being is best advanced by a strong community backed up by active and accountable government.

And even those who now try to rescue the Conservative Party from the mistakes of crude free-market individualism have a similar problem. Unable to come to terms with a modern view of the constitution or society, their social market economy - dependent on the idea at best of compassion rather than rights - merely heralds a return to nineteenth-century paternalism.

But neither nineteenth-century paternalism nor eighteenth-century free market liberalism can answer questions of the relationship between individual community and government that now require a modern twentieth-century democratic settlement. A settlement that recognises first that the state may become a vested interest and that the individual needs the proper and guaranteed protection of a modern constitution so that government is accountable. And second, a settlement that recognises that individual potential is best developed in a community and that the community need not be a threat to individual liberty but can assist the fulfilment of it.

It is important for everyone, but particularly important for democratic socialists, that we recognise the need for individuals to be protected against any possible vested interests within the state.

Let me explain why democratic socialists more than anyone should be concerned in this way. Conservatives seek few if any additional responsibilities for government, and many suggest much less. They see well-being advanced primarily by the individual acting unaided on his or her own; while when I talk of individuals flourishing as part of a community where common needs are met through sharing responsibility, I assume an active role for government. But where I invoke the need for government I have a special responsibility to ensure its accountability. Indeed, those who argue for us to take seriously the responsibilities of government must always be more vigilant in arguing that in the exercise of these responsibilities there must be the maximum openness and accountability.

Holding the state accountable to the citizen is important for another reason. Socialists have long recognised that all societies tend to produce accumulated reservoirs of power. They entrench themselves, threatening to become vested interests - either in the private or public sector - hostile to any kind of reform or change. We have always identified such vested interests as our fundamental target.

Nineteenth-century socialism developed as a protest against the power of the main vested interests that then denied opportunity - the power of private capital. Twentieth-century socialists often were slow to realise that vested interests can operate throughout society. Indeed when socialism began as an attack on the vested interests of private wealth it used the state as the instrument of that attack. Yet the state was capable of becoming a vested interest in itself, capable of denying individuals opportunity and frustrating their potential to fulfil themselves.

I see the historic role of the Labour Party as nothing less than to stand up for the individual against any and every concentration of power that denies opportunity to individuals in British society whether cartels or cliques, whether in the public or private sector. And that is why socialists must demand that individuals have entrenched rights to protect them from the modern state.

But in our concern about the encroachment of the state on the individual we must never forget that community is still necessary as a means for individuals fulfilling themselves. Indeed I believe that the greatest failure of the last decade - and a loss that diminishes us all - has been the denial of the importance of community. Libertarians have been so afraid of the power that society can exercise over the individual they have sought to detach the individual from the very society of which he or she is part. Yet community is vital for the safety, health and development of individuals. Individuals on their own cannot make the streets safe at night. When disease strikes there is no such thing as a one- man health service. And almost all of us here today owe much that we have to the opportunities that have come from the collective provision of education. And take the environment today. Not only is it the case that individuals, no matter how rich, cannot buy themselves out of countryside pollution or urban decay - it is also true that private affluence loses its savour amidst public squalor, a recognition that we are dependent each upon one another.

So no-one can be in any doubt that there is a public interest in the community not just protecting the individual against pollution but positively acting to demand and ensure the highest standards: a common interest, not only in any one nation but also across the world.

So individuals need community and individuals depend on each other in a community. It is as wrong to see ourselves merely as Robinson Crusoes with no concerns beyond the immediate family, no bonds beyond the front door, no responsibilities beyond the garden gate, as it is to see ourselves as merely the repositories of society's values, somehow subsumed in the social order.

Etzioni has written that individuals stick to each other if they get too close but freeze if they get too far apart. It is time to see the crude dichotomy between community and individuals, that has frustrated political discussion in recent years, as both unrealistic and damaging. People do not live in isolation. People do not live in markets. People live in communities.

I think of Britain as a community of citizens with common needs, mutual interests, shared objectives, related goals and most of all linked destinies. A Britain not of strangers who only compete but a Britain of neighbours who recognise each other and recognise we depend upon each other. A Britain that is a society of individuals whose interactions are determined not by the invisible hand of the free market beloved of right wing economists, but a society where individuals depend freely and willingly upon what Dr James Stockinger has described as the hands of others. It is, he says, the hands of others who grow the food we eat, sew the clothes we wear, and build the homes we inhabit. It is the hands of others who tend us when we are sick, and who raise us up when we fall. And it is the hands of others who lift us first into the cradle and lower us finally into the grave.

We must rescue and restore the idea of community and do more than that, assert how individuals benefit from strong communities, not as a threat to their individual liberties but as an assistance to their fulfilment.

Community is not merely the aggregate of individuals joined together temporarily out of convenience - the community, in Bentham's words, as a fictitious body. Nor is it merely the source of authority seeking, in the name of duty, to impose standards of behaviour on warring individuals, because anarchy is seen as a greater danger than authoritarianism.

We must break away from the extreme views of the individual struggling for advantage against a community holding him back and that of the community struggling to hold the anti-social individual down. So I neither support Locke when he says rights are vested in individuals who do nothing more than delegate these rights to a community and I reject Hobbes when he argues for individuals subordinating all their rights for security. Community arises because we depend on each other.

It is said that the pressure for citizenship in Britain comes from the compassion of the fortunate towards the least fortunate. But modern citizenship is built on the recognition of interdependence. It is distinct from individualism including such paternalism. It recognises the citizen as part of a wider and interdependent community.

Indeed I believe that democratic socialism was founded on this belief in the value of community and society; that its main inspiration is the ethic of community rather than a theory of economy; and that the idea that individuals realise their potential to the full as part of the society in which they live leads us to embrace the idea that the community should stand up on behalf of individuals against the vested interests that hold them back. It is, let us be clear, community assisting the individual not the individual subsumed in community or subordinated to it.

But it is partly because the community has succeeded in the past in creating new opportunities that people have become more assertive, with a broader view of what they can achieve, less inclined to be passive recipients of welfare, more inclined to demand the right to realise their diversity of talents, interests and desires to the full. It is significant that all constitutions that have stood the test of time have had an implicit if not explicit view of society and human nature that recognises such aspirations.

The French constitution says that: 'The community shall be based on the equality and the solidarity of the peoples composing it'. The Italian constitution 'recognises and guarantees the inviolable rights of man both as an individual and as a member of the social groups in which his personality finds expression...' The American constitution starts with the words 'We the people...'

But anyone studying our unwritten British constitution will find implicit in it the idea of leaders and led, the Hobbesian view that the role of government is to empower leaders, unbounded by any limitations, to deal with the threat to security posed by those who must be led.

It is time to escape from that bleak Hobbesian view. A view which, if I may say so, now seems after 300 years and the experience of many other nations to be: nasty, poor, British and short. It is now time to think about the liberation of potential and the empowerment of the citizen.

We can see it reflected every day in the permanent influence of the women's movement demanding genuine liberation in place of what has invariably been second class citizenship. When women say - for example - that they should not be faced with the unfair choice between the jobs they need and the children they love they are expressing the legitimate desire to have the right to fulfil their potential.

When we think of the rights of children, we think of them growing, through parental support, child care, nursery education, a stimulating environment, the love of friends and neighbours: developing their potential to the full. But the argument for the fulfilment of potential does not apply only to children. Adults too should enjoy the right that we should become the best that we have it in us to become, and not just the best that other people have decided we may be allowed to be.

So the growing demand of individuals is that they should be in a position to realise their potential, to bridge the gap between what they are and what they have it in them to become. And the aspirations of the individual within the community and the means whereby the community responds become a central question to be addressed when we look at how we are to be governed.

Rightly any programme for a modern society and modern economy and the policies that arise from it must encompass a debate about how markets can work in the public interest, how individuals at work - employees and managers - can cooperate effectively to use capital in the public interest, how we can ensure the highest quality public services that are both accountable and open, and how poverty can be tackled not just in the interests of advancing social and economic opportunities and rights of individuals themselves but in securing social cohesion.

But a modern constitution is essential to protect individuals against the state and to empower them within an interdependent community. In this way the agenda for constitutional change becomes essential to the task of establishing a modern view of society and in my view a modern view of democratic socialism. That agenda will be familiar to supporters of Charter 88 but I want briefly and in conclusion to address certain aspects of it.

First, from the belief that socialism must take on the vested interests of government as well as those of capital and wealth, springs the clear need for the rights of the individual to be protected in law in the constitution and to be exercisable against executive power.

The method of achieving this can be debated. It could of course be done through an entrenched Bill of Rights possibly through incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights. Alternatively individual rights could be defined through specific items of legislation which are then made subject to a special legislative procedure which in effect entrenches them. On this basis then, this debate can continue but a Bill of Rights in one form or another there will be.

And this must be accompanied by the affirmative action essential not just to outlaw sexual, racial and other discrimination - for example by genuinely achieving equal access to the law - but also to positively promote greater equality ensuring that in a modern society, as I have indicated, civil rights are matched by economic and social opportunities in the workplace and elsewhere.

And as the power of European institutions threatens to grow, especially that of the Commission, so does the need for accountability and protection for individual rights. For that reason the European Commission too must be subject to the European Convention of Human Rights. In the longer term I have no doubt we will have to consider a new European Bill of Rights, protecting the rights of European citizens from any abuse of power by European institutions.

We must make freedom of information a priority and in my view there is now an opportunity as well as the demand to act rapidly. It is clear that to make our community more efficient and to protect individual liberty we should have a free flow of information between government and governed. That is why, as Roy Hattersley has outlined, we need a Freedom of Information Act that ensures not only a presumption in favour of disclosure, but also that public interest defence must be available where there is a question-mark over the illegitimate disclosure of information by civil servants.

But because of what I say about vested interests as a whole I want to extend this concept in two ways. First, freedom of information should apply not just to the apparatus of the state but to those dark and secret corners of private power. There should be specific obligations on companies to inform employees, shareholders and the public where it is in the public interest to do so or where it is clearly legitimate for individuals to require such information.

Secondly, freedom of information should be seen not just as a brake upon the natural tendency towards secrecy of powerful institutions. It should be an attempt to actively provide information to the community that needs it.

For example, how can we debate seriously the environment, the economy, unemployment, or the state of our public services if we are denied the vital information - the true, not politically doctored facts and figures - which must necessarily form the basis for such a debate? I believe, for example, that what we call official statistics should come from a central statistical office; not subject to government interference as it is at the moment but independent of government.

In this way the constitutional debate is about content as well as about form, about how to make rights effective in practice as well as in theory.

Thus, there is a duty in the modern constitution to ensure the best possible consultation throughout our society. Public consultation is a mark of a mature democracy, not only when government seeks to make major legislative changes - for example over local taxation - but also at a smaller scale where new developments are planned. We must also ensure the fullest democratic participation in decisions.

Crucial, obviously, to any debate about the rules governing our society is the method of deciding its government. The debate about electoral reform is now proceeding apace and I welcome it. In Scotland we have already adopted the principles for change in a Scottish parliament reflecting a growing recognition that the present system is outdated. Indeed I believe there is now a majority in the Labour Party for an open and comprehensive debate on electoral reform.

It should proceed on the basis of fairness not electoral advantage. It should be because of its intrinsic worth - not as an alternative to winning elections under the present system. Then, in the detail of different systems of voting, the crucial questions arise. Systems are widely varied and have had quite different consequences when they have been tried. The debate, in other words, must concentrate on mechanisms as well as ideals. In particular, I and many others would want to ensure whatever system is adopted maintains the close link between the constituency as a community and its representative.

We must also widen our notion of what we mean by participation. Throughout the community encouragement should be given to individuals to participate in the major decisions that affect their lives.

There must also be proper accountability for all those who exercise power in the public's name. I favour certain public appointments made subject to the scrutiny of a House of Commons committee, so reducing the prime ministerial power of patronage. But I also favour placing the security services under public scrutiny through Parliament, a reform that is long overdue.

We must ensure that those who exercise power, whether in the executive or judiciary as well as the legislature, are able to reflect the public interest. Measures have been spelt out for increasing the representation of women but it will also be equally important that those who administer the law themselves be more representative. What is fascinating now is that real and profound concern about our legal system can no longer be dismissed as confined to fringe or minority groups. Recent cases have seriously undermined public confidence in our legal system. There must be a thorough reform of judicial appointment.

I believe that there must be a wholesale devolution of power. I have made the case for a Scottish parliament now and for the reform of government in Wales and the regions pointing towards a written constitution. In replacing the indefensible House of Lords on a democratic basis, consideration should be given to introducing a regional element to the second chamber. But the devolution of power that I favour is far more widespread. I believe that more generally communities should be in a position to take more control over their own decisions.

That is why we must begin a radical discussion of how the community can work to organise its affairs, breaking out of the one-dimensional view of government that has dominated too much of our thinking. Where there is a public interest there need not be a centralised public-sector bureaucracy always directly involved in provision. Sometimes the best role for government is merely to enable or encourage, or to act as a catalyst or coordinator. At other times government can be partner or simply financier, helping communities to organise themselves.

Indeed the constitution fit for the 21st century should be one of the servant state, the state serving the community and the individual, placed beneath a sovereign people and not above it.

And finally, part of a new settlement between individual community and government is to reinvigorate the notion of public service. For thirteen years we have heard much about the evils of the public sector, as it has been denigrated. It is time to talk about the value of our public services as a reflection of the shared concerns of a British society that educates the young, cares for its sick and disabled, shares responsibilities for the elderly and frail. Teachers and all those who work in the education service, doctors, nurses, orderlies, assistants and all those who work in the health service, the police service and of course the civil service itself.

With young people it is time to harness idealism and energy in the meeting of needs by public service. In the 1960's, from America, there was launched the Peace Corps, an international commitment to harness the idealism of young people to break out of the impotence many felt in the face of the threat to world peace. Now in the 1990's, from Britain, it may be that we should be considering a new corps, a world environment corps, to harness the idealism of young people to break out of the impotence many feel in the face of the threat to the world environment.

We need a British initiated but world-wide organisation through which young people can be trained to meet the environmental challenges of our time: whether helping environmental improvement in Britain, or tackling reclamation or pollution in other parts of the world. This is one of many proposals that we could discuss that will over time reinvigorate the idea, central to the notion of community, that public service is a noble aspiration.

In conclusion, the current movement for constitutional reform is of historic importance. It signals the demand for a decisive shift in the balance of power in Britain, a long overdue transfer of sovereignty from those who govern to those who are governed, from an ancient and indefensible Crown sovereignty to a modern popular sovereignty, not just tidying up our constitution but transforming it.

What I have tried to do is to set the movement for constitutional change within the framework of democratic socialism and I make no apology for doing that.

I have put forward the idea of a new settlement, based on two requirements: the first, that the individual is protected against the state, and the second, that the individual is empowered to develop his or her potential as part of our community. I believe that the Labour Party is the natural party of reform in government and that when I argue that the historic role is to stand up for the individual citizen against vested interests I also mean that the community should open doors for the individual, break down barriers that frustrate choice and chances, empower people with new opportunities, using the power of all to advance the good of each.

I have said that central to this is the notion that Britain needs a new view of community, and that this requires in turn a modern constitution to give it effect. I believe that we can break out of the discredited alternatives of old style state power and new style individualism. Instead I believe that the challenge of the 1990's is to create, as we move towards a new century, a new settlement between individual and community. One that recognises both our rights and aspirations as individuals and our needs and shared values as a community. Not so much the end of history, as one academic put it, but the opening of a new chapter.

Wales United: Partnership for Progress by Peter Hain and Rhodri Morgan (September 2007)

Devolution in Wales has been an unquestionable success. Whatever the fears that voters had in Wales at the time of the referendum ten years ago, our economy has been transformed, with employment at record levels. Education standards have risen while crime levels have fallen, Wales is a more self-confident and outward looking nation, and power rests more firmly in the hands of the people.

We have proved our critics wrong. Devolution opponents in the 1997 referendum cried that devolution would lead to the break-up of Britain, but instead the settlement has modernised the constitution to make it fit for the 21st century. The over-centralised nature of government in the 1980s and 1990s has been replaced by a system that reflects the diverse nature of the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, with models of devolution that represent the specific needs and aspirations of the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish people.

Ten years on since the referendum in Wales, we can rightly celebrate both the successes of devolution and the economic, social, cultural and political ties that bind together the countries of the UK – which are stronger than ever before. But we also need to champion, defend and reassert the principle on which Labour’s vision for devolution rests: that, while respecting the different nations and identities within the United Kingdom, we must preserve the advantages enjoyed from being united. Labour supports devolution within the Union, cherishing and strengthening both the diversity found within the nations and regions of the UK and our shared values and interests.

This message is now more pertinent than ever. The Tories’ renewed commitment to ‘English votes for English laws’ threatens the unity and equality of the House of Commons – and therefore of the United Kingdom itself – while Plaid Cymru’s new role in the Welsh Assembly Government has not at all dented their separatist aspirations.

Labour is unashamedly a party both of devolution and of partnership. The path we offer is one which builds on the early success of devolution and aims to go on creating a new Welsh self-confidence and modern identity by deepening the devolution settlements. We have delivered devolution and devolution has delivered for Wales. The Tories’ plans would serve as direct encouragement for those who want to see the United Kingdom broken up into its separate parts. That is why they must be rejected emphatically.

We are crystal clear that devolution within the Union is the only serious answer to effective and successful self-governance for Wales. We now need actively to communicate the reciprocal, two-way nature of Wales’ role in the Union – how we benefit and how we contribute. That Welsh identity is flourishing as never before in a United Kingdom based on shared values of equal opportunities, toleration and social justice. That the historic bonds between the countries of the UK are deepening to an extent that makes separation irrelevant to the daily lives of thousands of Welsh residents.

This argument has been made powerfully for Scotland by Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander and we believe that the same principles apply to Wales.

The devolution settlements are among our Labour Government’s proudest achievements, and go to the heart of what Labour should always aim to achieve: putting power back into the hands of those it serves. By devolving power we shape democratic institutions around the values of the electorate, and by giving people a greater say over the decisions that affect their lives we strengthen representative democracy.

And for Welsh Labour the devolution settlement carries forward a tradition begun by those that created our party.

Keir Hardie, a founder of our party a hundred years ago, our first Welsh Labour MP, our first leader, and a passionate supporter of devolution – or “home rule all round” to use the language of the era – was a Scot who first represented the East London seat of West Ham South before becoming MP for Merthyr Tydfil and Aberdare in Wales at the time the Labour Party was founded. He embodied the Welsh labour movement’s British dimension from its earliest days, and the values Keir Hardie and his fellow Labour pioneers held dear remain so for Welsh Labour today.

Half a century after Keir Hardie’s death, it was Labour that first created the Cabinet post of Secretary of State for Wales in 1964 and established the Welsh Office as a separate Department of State. It was Labour that was elected in 1997 on a manifesto commitment to give the people of Wales an opportunity to vote for a new democratic Assembly. It was Labour that led the Yes campaign to victory in the 1997 referendum. It was Labour that legislated for a Welsh Assembly to be established in 1999. And it was Labour that steered the 2006 Government of Wales Act onto the statute book, giving the Assembly enhanced legislative powers and settling the constitutional argument in Wales for a generation or more by putting into place a process for attaining primary powers.

And so, as Britain’s leading pro-devolution and pro-Union Party, it can only be Labour who makes the case that, alongside a national minimum wage, record levels of employment and record economic growth and prosperity, the devolution settlements must be considered our finest achievements.

Partnership for Prosperity
As citizens of the United Kingdom we enjoy great prosperity thanks to the historic economic partnerships between the UK’s constituent nations; partnerships which helped to turn us into a world power. The economic integration of the United Kingdom has been and will continue to be central to the economic growth of both the individual nations and the UK as a whole.

The contribution of Wales to the industrial revolution, for example, was enormous. Two hundred and more years ago, it was Merthyr Tydfil where the most productive ironworks in the world were found, and the where the world’s first railway steam locomotive was developed. A century ago, Cardiff was the world’s largest coal-exporting port, handling the production from the massive South Wales coalfields, and the city where the world price of coal was set.

Today, Wales’ economy is making great strides and recent economic growth and development has been dramatic. With 72.3 per cent of the population employed, there are approximately 146,000 more jobs in Wales now in 2007 than there were in 1999 - a faster growth-rate than the UK average and above any one of the nine regions of England. Coming from a period during the 1980s when the aftermath of the pit and steel closures left the Welsh economy reeling and many believed that neither Wales nor Britain would ever see anything approaching full employment again, the last decade has seen a remarkably well-sustained turnaround.

There remains a long way to go to put right the social damage inflicted by the mass unemployment era of the 1980s – numbers of incapacity benefit claimant households are disproportionately high in Wales, for example – but progress has been admirable. Labour’s unsurpassed record of macroeconomic stability, with the longest run of continuous noninflationary economic growth since records began, record inward investment, low interest rates and low inflation, has resulted in Gross Domestic Product increasing to £41 billion in 2005 – compared to £28 billion in the last year of Tory government – while the proportion of Welsh families in ‘workless households’ has fallen to a record low.

Including the block grant from UK Treasury Welsh public spending amounts to almost £1,000 per head (or 14 per cent) higher than in England, which reflects our historically-high levels of ill-health and economic deprivation, in part a function of our industrial legacy. With our Labour Government, the budget of the National Assembly has doubled over the past eight years, from £7 billion to £14 billion. And as a result of the decisions made by the Welsh Labour-led Assembly Government, we now have 500 extra doctors, 8,000 extra nurses, 1,700 extra teachers and 5,700 new teaching assistants in Wales, as well as record investment in school buildings and new hospitals to raise the standards of public service delivery across Wales.

The close economic relationship between Wales and Britain is due to our Governments’ shared social and economic objectives: to reactivate the labour market, reduce social and economic deprivation, combat social exclusion, strengthen social cohesion and to reduce poverty, in particular child poverty. Partnership between the UK Government and the Assembly Government is essential to delivering the policy answers to meet these objectives. Wales benefits from playing a part in UK Government programmes to combat unemployment, child poverty and pensioner poverty - the New Deal, child tax credits and the statutory national minimum wage have had a huge impact on Wales and have raised the standard of living for thousands of low-paid Welsh workers and residents.

The New Deal has helped over 46,000 unemployed young people in Wales back to work, as well as thousands of older long-term unemployed people and lone parents. The programme was financed by a British-wide levy on the windfall profits of the privatised British utilities, and is continuing to develop through a combination of British-wide incentives and opportunities linked to Wales-specific and local initiatives. This reciprocal relationship is at the heart of our Union’s strength.

A further illustration of the advantages for Wales of inter-linking Labour governments in both Westminster and Cardiff can be seen in the UK Miners’ Compensation Scheme for emphysema and Vibration White Finger, which has paid out well over £600 million in compensation to ex-miners or their dependants in Wales. Another would be the pension credit; Wales has a higher than average number of pensioner households and the pension credit benefits over 160,000.

Wales plays its full part in UK-wide, British policies, because co-ordinated action between the UK Government and the Welsh Assembly Government is the only way of meeting some of our more ambitious targets. We have set, for example, the goal to eradicate child poverty in the UK by 2020. Already, 50,000 children in Wales have been helped out of poverty, and it is only through schemes led by administrations both in Wales and at Westminster – whether free school breakfasts, or increases in child benefit – that we will be able to build on this.

In many instances Wales is better placed to meet its social and economic demands and objectives acting within the collective Union. To take a recent example, the extra one-penny increase in National Insurance introduced by Gordon Brown in 2003 to provide further funds for the NHS has been delivering hundreds of millions of pounds of extra public investment for Wales each year. Through National Insurance we each contribute to a system of social protection against sickness, incapacity and bereavement for any insured family or citizen in every part of the UK. This is only made possible by sharing risks across a UK population of 60 million and is a far more effective way of combating poverty and securing social justice than sharing risks among just three million people in Wales. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was a Welshman, Jim Griffiths, who laid the foundations for our modern system with the National Insurance Act of 1948. Drawing on his experiences of the deprivation suffered by South Wales miners and their families in the 1930s, he noted that “a unified and comprehensive scheme covering the whole nation” would be most effective at tackling the poverty he had witnessed. The same remains true today.

Such a unified approach was apparent in the effective negotiations by the UK Labour Government in Europe that brought Objective One funding for the two-thirds of Wales that lies in West Wales and the Valleys. This has been and continues to be of huge significance in helping the large swathes of Wales for so long behind in economic prosperity to catch up with the more prosperous areas of East Wales, the UK and the European average. Funding in the 2000-2007 period was £1.3 billion, with total project value well over £3 billion, boosting investment and job creation.

This hugely beneficial deal for West Wales and the Valleys was first made at the EU Summit meeting in early 2000 and then repeated in December 2005. Had the UK failed to find an agreement here the West Wales and the Valleys region would have missed out drastically. There may be no more crucial an illustration of how an effective partnership between the Labour Government in Westminster and the Labour administration in Wales can and will deliver for Wales and the less well-off two-thirds of Wales in particular.

Economic development in Wales will further progress by Labour continuing to implement a dispersal policy for civil service jobs out of London and the South East of England to Wales, with the assistance of the Assembly Government in co-ordinating the process.

Following the precedents set by the Labour Government in the 1964-1970 era, when Jim Callaghan determined to relocate the Royal Mint to Llantrisant, and Barbara Castle set up the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Centre in Swansea, the relocation of the headquarters of the Office of National Statistics from Central London to Newport, the Shared Service Centres of the Department for Transport in Swansea and of the Prison Service to Newport have brought thousands more jobs to Wales. The Lyons Review will lead to further public sector jobs being relocated in Wales as a direct consequence of Government policy to spread such employment from the South East of England across the United Kingdom.

The Government’s recent announcement of its largest ever investment in Wales, the £16 billion Defence Training Academy at St Athan, is perhaps the best example of this. This is a 25-year contract with the Metrix consortium and when completed late in the next decade will bring 5,000 jobs to South Wales, with great benefits to the local and regional economy. The Westminster Government and the Assembly Government are working jointly to make this project succeed; the Ministry of Defence is the customer who is in the process of awarding the contract to the Metrix consortium and the Assembly Government is the landowner and the key partner in the scheme.

Projects based on UK partnership of this nature and scale are central to Wales’ economic development and highlight how Wales’ economy is playing an increasingly important role in that of the UK as a whole. Airbus’s plant at Broughton in Flintshire, for example, is at one and the same time Wales’ and the UK’s largest factory. The plant draws its huge workforce from a staggeringly wide catchment area from Colwyn Bay to Manchester - of the 6,000 employees in Broughton, 62% live in Wales and 38% in England. It is the jewel in the crown of the Flintshire economy, the Welsh economy, is highly important to the UK as a technological base, and is critical to the European economy, reinforcing the economic reality that the Welsh economy is part of a wider British and international economy.

Wales’ economy is increasingly global by nature - in 2006-07 Wales attracted projects from overseas that will create nearly 3,400 jobs, although it remains firmly inter-linked with the UK – over 3,100 jobs will be created in the same period by investment projects from within the UK. Wales’ largest trading partner has long been England, and we should all be clear that Wales’ economic future lies within the UK. Wales now hosts world-class high technology business operations like GE Healthcare, General Dynamics, Logica CMG and EADS, developing intellectual property in Wales to make Wales fully engaged in the knowledge economy. The foundation of this success is the stable macro-economic climate resulting from decisions made by the UK Government since 1997. Independence to the Bank of England and maintaining fiscal discipline have given rise to 10 years of continued economic growth, providing the right climate for sustained investment in technology and machinery as well as in skills and people.

If Wales is to have a truly international role, competing with the likes of China and India in a globalised economy, we must do so together, through partnership between the UK Government and the Welsh Assembly Government, as we have been doing successfully up to now. As demonstrated, Wales derives significant advantages from being part of a Member State which plays a full and positive role in the European Union and international economic community. Wales was in at the beginning of globalisation and as this process deepens and intensifies Wales should have full confidence in its ability to compete in the globalised 21st century economy.

A recent survey found that Swansea University has attracted more public and private sector funding for collaborative research with industry than any other university in the UK, forging links with companies such as IBM and Motorola. It is as a member of a collective union of nations that Wales is progressing fast and is best placed to gain the world class investment so vital for future prosperity and success, and so necessary to address the challenges of the 21st century. Through this partnership Wales is progressively developing expertise in research and development, and in high-tech manufacturing such as biotechnology and aerospace, contributing increasingly to the overall success of the UK economy.

The Welsh higher education sector will have a vital role to play in developing our knowledge economy in this new global environment. Recent figures show that in 2005-06 nearly 29,000 students came from other parts of the UK to study in Wales, and that nearly 21,000 Welsh students sought university education in other parts of the UK in the same period. Such crossborder exchange of information, skills and experience irrevocably deepens cultural, economic and social ties throughout the UK. Current and future generations will live in greater prosperity thanks to Wales’ role in the UK, and will have their formative years shaped by the opportunities provided by the Union, rendering separatists’ arguments increasingly eccentric and disconnected from the realities of people’s daily lives and experiences.

Welshness and Britishness – A Sharing of Values
Partnership within the United Kingdom is far more than an economic arrangement; it rests on the shared values of social justice and equality.

The sharing of these values throughout the UK means that today personal and family ties are stronger than ever before. In the decade to 2003, for example, 85 per cent of people migrating into Wales were from the rest of the UK, and over the same period 87 per cent of those migrating out of Wales went to another part of the UK. Around 600,000 people born in England are now living in Wales – more than one in five of the entire Welsh population – and there are almost the same number of people born in Wales living in England.

Wales’ history of migration, coupled with our strong trade union tradition, demonstrate the roots of the common identity and solidarity which run through the United Kingdom. Welsh trade unionists joined their fellow union members in England and Scotland to fight for rights at the workplace, realising workers needed decent pay and conditions whichever side of Offa’s Dyke they resided. Through cross border solidarity and, over the past ten years, partnership with our UK Labour Government, Welsh workers have secured major improvements in employment rights; entitlements which apply right across Britain and are therefore more entrenched as a result.

Key to modern Welsh political identity is that the indissolubility of these links within the labour movement, in business and in the labour market, lies comfortably alongside a deepening recognition of the value of a Welsh political institution, the Assembly, elected by and democratically accountable to the people of Wales.

Today, a common British identity is very much a reality, and is expressed by institutions such as the NHS, and the BBC. These show us what we have achieved together, how deeply Britishness is ingrained in our shared values, and how Wales has helped define a modern British identity.

The NHS embodies the essential values of solidarity, care and community, expressing a progressive sense of Britishness probably better than any other institution. The NHS came out of Wales, defined by Welsh experience of ill health for the many under private care. Its architect, a Welshman Nye Bevan, as a UK Cabinet Minister drew on his experiences growing up in Tredegar to establish arguably Britain’s most progressive institution; one which remains a model for the world.

The BBC embodies the values of inclusion and fairness, with Welsh produced success stories like the BBC’s Doctor Who and Torchwood showing not just what Wales is contributing to Britain but how Britishness contributes to Welsh success and helps elevate that success globally. This would not have happened without a deliberate decision of the BBC to outsource these programme productions to Wales, with Welsh multimedia talent benefiting UK television, and the BBC’s UK and global reach benefiting Welsh talent. Again this highlights the reciprocal benefits to both Wales and the UK that result from the shared values that lie at the heart of Britishness and Welshness.

The BBC also provides output for S4C, the Welsh-language public broadcaster. Both the Welsh language and the Welsh economy have benefited from the work of S4C, which is supported through an annual grant from the UK Government. S4C broadcasts a majority of Welsh language programmes, but also Channel 4 content which is shown across the UK.

The Wales of today is a Wales which, far from shrinking into isolation, is stronger because it is partly British, European and internationalist too. For example, whilst people in Wales are passionate about our rugby and football teams, they have found no contradiction in travelling the world to support the British and Irish Lions to cheer all their players, not just Welsh internationals like Scott Gibbs, Martyn Williams and Gareth Thomas. They have stood in the heat of the Australian summer or the damp of an English summer, with Welsh flags and cheered the “England” cricket team, not just Simon Jones. They urged on every member of the European Ryder Cup golf team, captained by Welshman Ian Woosnam, to their magnificent victory over the United States in 2006. And a recent survey has shown that support for the 2012 London Olympics is higher in Wales than in any other part of Britain.

The cultural boundaries between England and Wales have long been porous. People watch the same television programmes, read the same books, watch the same films, read the same national newspapers, all the time remaining loyal to the cultures of their home nations and towns. There is in many ways a strengthening common culture in which British and Welsh identities are shared and cross over on a daily basis.

The vast majority of people in Wales feel part of their local community, and they feel Welsh, British and increasingly European too. Loyalty to one should not mean denial of the other.

Comparing Scotland’s relationship to the rest of the UK ‘south of the border’ and Wales’ relationship with the rest of the UK is instructive, partially because the equivalent phrase of ‘east of the border’ is virtually unknown in Wales. That is not to say that there is no such thing as clear Welsh identity – there obviously is. It is just different. Modern Wales combines a deep respect for its ancient language, literature, eisteddfodic traditions and heritage, with strong pride in its early industrialisation and absorption of globalised trade and cultures.

What makes the Welsh national identity special is its diversity. For example, the degree of integration of the eastern half of Wales with adjoining regions of England is very high indeed, especially North East Wales with North West England, where the Airbus plant is a notable example of practical day-to-day integration of the labour market. Conversely it is arguable that, linguistically and culturally at the very least, the western half of Wales is more distinct from the homogeneity of Britishness than most other parts of the UK. The Welsh identity spans both of those widely differing degrees of integration, and this divide leads to distinct political identities between the east-facing and the west-facing halves of Wales, as was very evident during the devolution referendum 10 years ago.

But when Wales enjoys success – for example beating another nation at rugby or football – we all share in the sense of exhilaration. There is nothing wrong in celebrating national achievement, a common national culture and a sense of national pride and identity. There is nothing intrinsically wrong in identifying with your common culture of nationhood. We should all be proud to be Welsh - and proud to be Welsh patriots. Our Welshness is self confident and secure.

Patriotism is a noble value. But true patriots are also internationalists because they respect others’ patriotism too. And whereas patriotism cannot be confused with jingoism and national chauvinism, separatism can. Whilst we welcome and encourage the increasing sense of Welsh identity in the post-devolution climate, our new sense of Welsh citizenship is not based upon a sense of inferiority or superiority but upon the inclusive, egalitarian principles that define twenty-first century multiracial, multi-cultural Britain.

These principles that define Britishness have always been a hallmark of Welsh society. Wales has one of the UK’s oldest multi-ethnic communities in Cardiff, where Somali, Yemeni, Chinese and Indian seamen were drawn from the mid 19th century onwards to work in the thriving docks or as merchant seamen.

So let us celebrate our cultural differences and the fact that modern Wales is made up of so many different cultural strands that together richly enhance the life of the community. But let us never fall into the trap of claiming superiority over others, based on where you live or where you are born, what language you speak, what if any faith you hold, what your skin colour or sexuality is, or whether you have a disability. Socialists have a progressive vision based on our common humanity as citizens of the world which defines us; separatists a regressive and reactionary vision of nationality.

The essence of a progressive Union is a democratic, devolved framework in which we can express our diversity, take decisions for ourselves, and at the same time work together for the common good, recognising we are stronger together within the UK than isolated and alone.

A Political Union
Labour delivered devolution to Scotland and Wales in settlements designed to reflect the individual and specific circumstances of each country, implemented in 1999 after successful 1997 referenda. As a result of the devolved administrations’ increased political freedom to innovate we have since seen political cultures and identities flourish and in turn renew political integration across the UK, which had been severely jeopardised by the centralised English dominance of Tory government in the 1980s and 1990s. The truth is that our political union is stronger than ever before, and today no-one – not even erstwhile Tory opponents of devolution – credibly suggests that we should go back on these historic settlements.

The devolved administrations’ freedom over policy has seen the emergence of distinct cross-border policy differences coupled with more active UK-wide exchanges of ideas. Policy ideas that arise in constituent UK nations are now often borrowed and developed elsewhere - if Bill Clinton’s America had ‘fifty living laboratories’ the UK, perhaps, now has four. This process enables different administrations to learn from each others’ experiences to the ultimate benefit of individual UK countries, at the same time as strengthening the sense of political partnership across the UK. The Labour-led Welsh Assembly Government pioneered, for example, the creation of a Children’s Commissioner and free bus travel for the over 60s which were soon copied in England, whilst Wales has learnt from experience in England of how to reduce waiting-times for hospital treatment. This flow of political innovation across the UK has also led to new channels of political interaction and dialogue opening up, like the regular Finance Ministers Quadrilateral Meetings, and we must continue to strengthen the links between MPs, AMs, MSPs and MEPs.

Wales’ diverse, modern culture impels us to look outward and play our part on the international stage. Wales has a strong internationalist tradition, influenced by the outlook of the labour and trade union movement. In the 1930s, poor mining communities across Wales raised huge sums of money to support the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War, and volunteers from the Welsh Labour movement fought with distinction against Franco’s fascism. In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s Welsh activists were prominent in the fight against the apartheid regime in South Africa. The best way to further our desire to see justice and human rights upheld across the globe is as a partner to the UK on the international stage. It is as the UK Labour Government that we have more than doubled Britain’s overseas aid and led the international drive for debt relief and trade justice.

Today the UK sits on the UN Security Council, the top tables of the European Union, Nato, the World Bank and the Commonwealth. Wales alone would be without such influence. This point was aptly illustrated recently when the Foreign Office Minister and MP for Pontypridd, Kim Howells, chaired a meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Middle East peace process. He was supported by Sir Emyr Jones Parry, then the UK’s Ambassador to the UN. Both men were brought up in the same South Wales valley, both are fiercely Welsh yet equally internationalist.

Devolution within the Union has allowed Welsh Assembly Members to utilise the levers in place to exercise their political will and design Welsh specific policy, alongside Welsh MPs shaping policy around Welsh interests in Westminster. It is critical that hand-in-hand with increasing the legislative scope and freedom of the National Assembly of Wales we weaken in no way at all the key linkages between Wales and the UK Government at Westminster.

Wales’ representation in Cabinet by the Secretary of State for Wales ensures that Welsh interests are fully taken into account in Government. 40 Welsh MPs give Wales a strong voice in Parliament. Responsibility for Home Affairs and the Justice system resides with Parliament and is not devolved in Wales unlike the Scottish model. There is no case at all for reducing the total number of Welsh MPs.

Strong representation for Wales at Westminster is vital to safeguarding and promoting the interests of the people of Wales, in particular in relation to the legislative programme and the Welsh budget. Calls to reduce Welsh representation in Parliament would jeopardise Welsh influence over key decisions over finance, defence, energy, foreign policy, pensions and welfare so vital to Welsh citizens.

Welsh political influence and representation has come under assault from another and constitutionally even more dangerous direction, with David Cameron the latest Tory leader to advocate dividing up MPs’ voting rights according to the territorial impact of legislation. Essentially Cameron wants to place a limit on Welsh and Scottish MPs’ voting rights with his badly judged and opportunistic proposal to introduce so-called “English votes for English laws”. His blatant opportunism is underlined by his refusal to place Northern Ireland MPs under the same strictures, possibly because the majority of them are unionists and have historically sided with the Tories. It is up to us to take this argument head-on. ‘English votes’ is a deceptively seductive idea for many, and in a recent poll for Newsnight 61 per cent of English voters questioned said they were in favour of establishing an English Parliament’. In a campaign initiated and led by Jack Straw, Secretary of State for Justice and Lord Chancellor, our Government plans to expose the myths surrounding this proposal and underline its potentially disastrous impact on our Union.

The Tories’ idea is neither new nor innovative, and whenever explored in depth has without exception been declared complex to the point of being completely impractical. It was first introduced in the Government of Ireland Bill in 1893, and it was Gladstone who remarked that devising an ‘in and out’ solution for MPs “passes the wit of man”. The 1973 Royal Commission on the Constitution declared the idea “unworkable”, but, despite this, a commitment to ‘English votes’ formed part of William Hague’s 2001 manifesto, which remained official party policy under Michael Howard, and is now being pursued by David Cameron.

This may be more to do with Tory marginalisation in Scotland and Wales than any high-minded sense of English parliamentary nicety, but it has very serious implications for the future constitutional stability of the Union.

Because we stand as both a party and a government for the Union, Labour must remain unreservedly committed to a United Kingdom Parliament: the UK is a single state and its Parliament must remain sovereign on all matters, representative of the nation as a whole.

It can only be so if each MP is equal, whether from Wales, Scotland or England. If at any point Welsh or Scottish MPs became second class within Parliament, Wales and Scotland would become second class nations within the Union; a virtual incitement to separatism.

There is a clear assumption by Conservatives that legislation can be simply carved up into purely English, Welsh or Scottish categories. In an interview for the Western Mail in July 2007 David Cameron said: “I don’t think it is complicated... it’s relatively straightforward to look at a piece of legislation and ask if it only affects English constituencies, or which bits of it only affect English constituencies.”

This highlights once again David Cameron’s reliance on unplanned statements of intent and the disregard for detail that questions his fitness for government. Proper examination of the practicalities of allocating voting rights on specific areas within a Bill to the MPs whose constituencies are affected reveals hugely problematic and complex technical issues and significant unanswered questions.

The Education and Inspections Act 2006, for example, shows how flawed Cameron’s judgement is, and his casual disregard for the disruptive damage to the parliamentary process.

The Act contains 116 Sections that are England-only, 57 that apply to England and Wales, 6 that are Wales-only, and 10 that are UK-wide. How, then, would the Public Bill Committee process work, when specific clauses of a Bill are considered in detail? On average 18 members sit on a Bill Committee, their numbers broadly reflecting the party composition of the House. How would the Cameron proposal reflect the territorial impact of this Bill? Would there be separate Committees for the separate Sections of the Bill – in this case four separate Committees to look at different Sections?

In the case of England-only clauses, would the Committee reflect the party balance amongst England MPs only? And would Report stage – where the House considers fresh amendments – be confined to only those MPs whose constituencies were affected by the Section under discussion at any one time?

To carve up the Committee process in this way would be hideously complicated to the point of generating parliamentary gridlock. Although there may be practical ways to overcome this, such as changing drafting practice to more strictly define territorial coverage, this would likely result in more bills, more time and resources, more votes in an already packed parliamentary schedule and less time for proper legislative scrutiny on the floor of the House.

Dividing legislation in this way is virtually impossible to do in the case of the Welsh devolution settlement. The Government of Wales Act 2006 retained powers to pass primary legislation for Wales in both devolved and reserved areas at Westminster, and in general England and Wales have a common statute book which means that often legislation designed to apply exclusively to Wales commonly also extends to England. The result of this intricate cross-over is that you often have elements within a single Section of a bill which relate to one country but not another. In this case, who would be eligible to debate the subsections? Do you create separate Committees to debate subsections of a bill, of which there can be hundreds?

Shaping the process of parliamentary debate and scrutiny according to the territorial extent of legislation results in what has been described as “legislative hokey-cokey”. We prefer John Major’s assessment of it as causing “constitutional chaos”.

But this just scratches the surface of the troublesome issues posed. For example, there are numerous cases where Welsh MPs representing constituencies close to the border will have constituents using public services in England. NHS foundation trusts based in England, for example, already provide health care to Welsh citizens living in border areas. Would the Welsh MPs whose constituents were users of this service be able to participate in deciding over this policy area? Could Welsh MPs whose constituents are affected continue to table Early Day Motions or ask Questions; the Cameron logic suggests not, in which case those constituents would be disenfranchised. What about the position in reverse where Welsh provided public services are used by English residents?

The duty that would be placed on the Speaker to identify whether or not a Bill can be considered national, or who would appropriately vote on it and who not, would inevitably weaken the independence of the role and risk the politicisation of the Office.

Furthermore, if the principle underpinning ‘English votes’ is that only the MPs representative of constituencies directly affected by proposed legislation should be entitled to vote, would we suggest that in future only London MPs should participate in votes such as that on the Greater London Authority Act 1999? Surely MPs from the rest of the UK have a right to determine what powers are ceded to London? And at what point does all this stop?

Presumably in a completely balkanised Parliament. Advocates of ‘English votes’ have not thought through the detail or consequences of their dogma.

They have also overlooked the system of funding for the devolved administrations, which again highlights fundamental flaws in their arguments.

Due to the Barnett formula, which allocates devolved administrations a proportion of planned UK Government spending according to population size, any legislation that impacts on the expenditure of UK Government Departments in England proportionately impacts also on expenditure available to the Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish administrations. In essence this means that virtually all legislation passed in Parliament must be considered UK wide. Even if a policy applies, for example, only to schools or hospitals based in England – seemingly making it a piece of ‘England-only’ legislation – there will be a cross-border impacts on funding and taxation.

Good examples are the bills on foundation hospitals in 2002-03 and higher education in 2003-04, both of which have been used by the Tories as examples of English and Welsh-only legislation that Scottish MPs should be excluded from voting upon. Both, however, had funding implications for Scotland, making them UK-wide, and it was right, therefore, that they were treated as such, with all MPs in the national Parliament in Westminster given the opportunity to vote.

‘English votes for English laws’ would fundamentally reform how our parliamentary democracy functions and would have potentially fatal implications for the Union of the United Kingdom. English MPs would be elevated in status and power compared with their Scots or Welsh counterparts. To introduce a system that gave Members varying functions and limitations would be to fundamentally undermine the principle of equality that should run through Parliament.

The result would be Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish legislatures, an English Parliament, and essentially an overarching federal parliament in charge of national issues such as defence and the economy. What would happen when a government had a parliamentary majority including Scotland and Wales but not in England? A UK Government which could not carry English legislation could not effectively govern since without a majority in the House Prime Ministers may well be forced into unstable, minority coalitions dependent on where their majority was held. This would profoundly alter the whole basis of our constitution, potentially sidelining Welsh and Scots from being able to influence the composition of the Government whilst at the same time leaving what would be tantamount to an ‘English Government’ without a majority across the whole House.

Representing about 85 per cent of the population the resultant ‘English Parliament’ would not just be numerically dominant as English MPs have obviously always been, but all-powerful. Our Parliament would no longer be truly ‘national’, but fractured and forced to follow where the newly created English Parliament led. Instead of a partnership between nations of the Union, there would be a two-tier parliamentary system which would irreparably damage the unity of the United Kingdom. Playing to the populist gallery of English nationalism opens up a constitutional Pandora’s Box.

What future would people from the Celtic nations see in the United Kingdom if they were barred from full citizenship? Denying the people of Wales full representation in Parliament would hardly be helpful or healthy for the future of the United Kingdom and would prove a constitutional disaster.

Revealingly, when the Ulster Unionist parties supported the Conservatives in 1964-1967 in opposing the nationalisation of the steel industry, although the measure would not affect Northern Ireland, there were no protests. The then Shadow Attorney General, Peter Thorneycroft, said of an ‘in and out’ solution: “every Member of the House of Commons is equal with every other Member of the House of Commons, and that all of us will speak on all subjects”. Conservative outrage at the current constitutional set-up can perhaps best be understood as a partisan response to their limited appeal to the electors of Scotland and Wales.

Our Union is strongest when based on devolution and decentralisation, with policies to bring decision-making close to people in England too, and not just Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Gordon Brown has launched a wide-ranging programme of constitutional reform to reinvigorate our representative democracy. This includes, critically, creating Ministers and Committees of MPs for the English regions, and initiating a national debate on developing a British statement of values in modernising our constitution.

Labour’s commitment to regional government across England must be part of our answer to the ‘West Lothian Question’. Most English regions are larger than Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and indeed deserve more powers than the government offered in the North East referendum in 2004.

It was apparent then that the strongest negative was the cost of more politicians in a regional structure that had insufficient powers – nothing like London’s, still less Wales’ and certainly not Scotland’s. Without a structure of universal unitary local government, like in Wales, it was also hard to dispute the charge of adding an ‘extra layer of bureaucracy’. Labour needs to remain committed to English regional government with more resources and powers, though it would be sensible for this to evolve organically and not necessarily either uniformly or on the same boundaries.

Decision-making on issues such as skills, transport, planning and housing can be decentralised to regions and local authorities, which need to adopt flexible, innovative and incremental approaches to strengthening democratic accountability.

The devolution discussion currently revolves around power between the nations of the United Kingdom. By giving executive roles to Regional Ministers, increasing the responsibilities of Regional Development Agencies and by setting up fully functional Regional Select Committees to oversee their work, we can bring together local and national government to form a sub-national tier of devolved governance which will give English voters a stronger voice in Parliament. This is the alternative to the Tory proposal to balkanising Parliament, and the next natural reform in Labour’s programme of devolving power.

Conclusion
Devolution has delivered for Wales and United Kingdom. Our constitutional reforms have given newly formed national governments the freedom to tailor political solutions around the needs of their electorates while enhancing the bonds at the heart of UK partnership.

Economically Wales is flourishing, with the Assembly administration working closely with the UK Government to make the economic decisions to realise their social objectives and attracting record investment, ever-developing Wales’ role as a true partner in the international economic community. Socially, the values of solidarity and equality which underpin the pride felt in both our patriotism and our partnership are as strong as ever. And politically, the Assembly’s freedom over policy development contributes to a more diverse and innovative but equally intertwined United Kingdom.

There can be no compromise with those who propose to turn this process backwards or threaten the deepening of these ties. Our task now is to face up to the challenge of the 21st century, not to revisit the old arguments of past centuries. The challenges of climate change, of international terrorism, of poverty across Britain and abroad, require a full Welsh contribution working across different tiers of government. That will involve ever closer co-operation.

We need to concentrate on delivering the people’s priorities; increasing employment, improving our health and education services, and tackling crime.

Whatever other political parties may offer as solutions, we are clear that Wales gets the best of both worlds from devolution. Wales – as a partner in Britain – is economically fit, culturally vibrant and politically confident, increasingly global and must now be looking outwards towards the future.

The past ten years has been a period of unprecedented success, not least the huge constitutional changes in the United Kingdom, of which devolution for Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and London are among the main advances.

The United Kingdom constitution is based on shared values of tolerance and democracy, community and solidarity, of equality and diversity. Within the framework of devolution and decentralisation, we can self-govern yet work together for a common purpose – a Wales United to ensure advancement for all based on those shared values.

Charles Kennedy's speech to Scottish Liberal Democrat Conference, Dunfermline, 16th October 1999

It’s good to be home.

Coming home as the Scottish leader of a British party.

It’s a thought-provoking position to be in.

Thoughts of the great Scots who have led us and our predecessors over the century.

David Steel.

Bob Maclennan.

Jo Grimond.

Archy Sinclair.

Henry Campbell-Bannerman.

Men who made a decisive impact on the politics of their times.

It’s a privilege to follow in their footsteps.

But there’s another reason why it is thought-provoking to be a Scot leading a British party.

And that is that the relationships between the nations of the Union have changed in a revolutionary way since 1997.

Scotland has a Parliament.

Wales an Assembly.

Northern Ireland, soon I hope, a working Assembly too.

In England, regionalism is growing as never before.

Calling into question, as it happens, the idea of England itself.

In the process of devolution, we are creating throughout Britain, a new way of doing things.

Just look at what I can’t talk to you about today.

In the past, a Federal leader could come to Scottish conference and wax lyrical about all the dreadful things that were being done to our education system in Westminster.

No more.

MSPs, in a Scottish government, in a Scottish Parliament, answerable only to the people of Scotland, decide our education policy.

So you’ll not hear anything from me today on that subject.

And that’s as it should be.

Instead, what I want to talk about are federal matters.

UK-wide policy.

And there are exciting changes that we are living through.

British politics is now based on a new set of diverse relationships.

Gone are the days of the man in Whitehall knowing best.

Centralising.

Dictating.

Not listening.

And with that, we have a new rationale for Britain as an idea.

A new set of reasons for being together in the Union at all.

In the past, Unionism was a term that conjured images of monarchy, Empire, tradition.

That’s all changing.

Those of us who recognise the value in Scotland playing a full part in Britain are creating a new Unionism.

A Unionism based on diversity not uniformity.

Based on a belief that we have more to learn from each other together, whatever our differences,

than we have to gain by pulling up a drawbridge and mingling only among ourselves.

The new Unionism in Britain should not be about treaties between capitals and crowns.

The Liberal tradition is a proud one,

and a philosophical one in terms of its analysis of individuals being more important than the sate.

Communities being more important than the nation state.

So the new Unionism should be about relations between the regions of England, and the other nations of the UK.

In which the North-East of England works with Scotland, and the South-West works with the Welsh.

After all, Bristol is nearer Cardiff than London.

Newcastle is nearer Edinburgh.

And of course, all parts of England need to work with Europe, as well as being allied to London.

The new Council of Isles to be established as part of the Good Friday Agreement already offers exciting opportunities for liaison between the various UK capitals and Dublin.

The English Regions should be added to this equation.

Fluid, challenging, and exciting times indeed.

So I stand before you today as a Scot.

But also as a Highlander.

And a Briton too.

There’s no contradiction in being all three.

So I’ll be supporting the British team when our athletes next compete in the Olympics.

But before that, we have another sports fixture coming up.

I know who I’ll be supporting there too.

We’re all looking forward to that.

Won’t it be great?

But seriously,

let me say something about that match.

When Scotland beat England, and we earn our place in Euro 2000, we’ll have an almighty celebration.

It will go on for days.

But let’s be gracious in victory.

Scotland is a proud nation, proud of its own strengths.

Not for us the vitriolic anti-Englishness that we see from some of our opponents here.

That’s not an adult approach to life.

It’s certainly not the way forward as we try to build a Britain based on respect for diversity.

And it’s personally important for my leadership of our party that there is a healthy and constructive dialogue between all parts of the UK.

I want our achievements in Scotland to be a lesson for the rest of Britain about what devolution can mean.

When I was elected as the federal leader, I said that I wanted our party to be become a serious party of government throughout the whole of Britain.

The best guide to that is here and now, in Scotland.

We are in government, making a difference.

Showing that we’re winners.

Changing the lives of people in Scotland for the better.

Acting on the principles we came into politics to advance.

If we carry on as we’re doing, a successful Liberal Democrat presence in the Scottish government is the first step towards taking our party into government throughout Britain.

There’s one particular message I want to take into England and Wales from Scotland.

It’s a message about one of our long-held goals in politics.

Fair votes.

Fair votes in every election throughout the land.

And the message I want to take from Scotland is this.

Not only do fair votes deliver representative government on a national scale.

But fair votes work in local government too.

We’ve got that concession from Labour.

It’s going to happen in Scotland.

We’ve had it for many years in Northern Ireland.

And when it’s implemented in Scotland, I believe that Labour will have to concede the logic of having it in England and Wales.

It used to be said that the Tories used Scotland as a test-bed for their most unsavoury policies.

To see just how much they could get away with.

Remember the Poll Tax.

Well it’s going to be different this time round.

Changes will be made in Scotland that work so well, and are so popular, that the rest of Britain will be crying out for them.

Of course, our mission to be a serious party of government,

making a difference,

doesn’t end in these islands.

If I’m a Highlander, a Scot, and a Briton, I’m also a European.

That’s why I was delighted to give our party’s support to the launch of the Britain in Europe campaign on Wednesday.

That was quite a gathering.

The Prime Minister, the Chancellor, the Foreign Secretary, Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine.

And myself.

All on one platform.

Representing the mainstream of British politics.

What a contrast to the rag-tag bunch of yesterday’s men and women the eurosceptics will gather when we have a referendum on the euro.

Margaret Thatcher, Tony Benn, Ian Paisley, Norman Tebbit,

David Owen,

Just William – yesterday’s man before his time.

Those of there on the Britain in Europe platform,

Together with business people, trade unionists, and voluntary organisations across Britain,

Have begun an unstoppable campaign.

A campaign that will once and for all change the way that Britain thinks about Europe.

You know, for me, the name Britain in Europe says it all.

Britain can’t be anywhere else.

Britain is in Europe.

We are part of its rich culture and heritage.

We are part of its history.

The eurosceptics like to talk about 800 years of Britain’s independent history.

But we have an equally long and proud history of constructive engagement in Europe.

Go back even to the Middle Ages.

When the east coast had far closer links with the Low Countries by sea, than it did with the rest of Britain.

Those trading contacts began an 800 year long story of Britain in Europe.

Of cultural dialogue.

Of shared values.

Of common struggles.

It’s a story of music, and art, and literature.

Of blood spilt by Britain and France on Flanders fields to save the continent from tyranny.

A story of a fifty year mission, through the European Union, to ensure that Europe is never again ravaged by poverty, unemployment and war.

For the future, we have a new mission.

To explain why Britain is in Europe.

To explain that it is good for British business.

Good for British jobs.

Good for British people.

People need to know that thanks to Europe, we've got progress on paternity leave

Thanks to Europe we've got progress on equal pay for men and women,

It was thanks to Europe that the invalid care allowance was eventually given to married women.

So it is patriotic to be pro-European.

With colleagues in other parties, and people in none,

It will be a personal priority to take this message to the country.

At the same time, I want all of us here to hit the eurosceptics hard,

To put them under the spotlight.

We all know how destructive withdrawal from Europe would be for Britain.

That is why we must ensure that the British people reject the views of anti-Europeans.

There’s a clear question to put.

When you talk about renegotiating treaties, will you admit that you are advocating either British withdrawal from Europe, or at least disengagement by 90%?

That’s the reality of the case.

And it needs to be shown up for what it is.

The penalties for staying on the sidelines are too great to risk.

Not only will we lose out in Europe, but we will risk losing influence throughout the world.

On this case, I am always struck by the comment made by the former US Ambassador to Britain, Raymond Seitz:

"If Britain’s voice is less influential in Paris or Bonn, it is likely to be less influential in Washington."

To hear some eurosceptics speak you’d think that America was waiting to welcome us as an equal partner if only we would leave the EU.

That’s utter nonsense – 51st state stuff.

If we can point out the problems in the Conservative case.

we will be doing much to show the country that we are a serious party of government.

And why the Conservatives are not.

They have lost touch with the people.

They have lost touch, when we are reconnecting with the people of Britain.

We are doing that by starting to involve more of our members in decision-making.

I began my first conference speech as leader by praising the way we did that – one member, one vote.

Well I would, wouldn’t I?

I was very happy with how it worked out.

But it wasn’t just me.

All the candidates thought it worked well.

And that’s why I announced that the federal party would be looking at ways of spreading one member one vote.

More democracy for our members.

So that they can have a bigger say in the way the party is managed.

You will all be hearing more of that during the year to come.

Because I am determined that the federal party takes more notice of what you are want.

That’s the way to persuade the public that we hear their concerns.

That we will empower communities.

That we trust people to decide their own futures.

That Liberal Democrats want to win power so that we can give it away to the people.

That is what we are doing in Scotland.

Liberal Democrat MSPs.

Liberal Democrat ministers.

A Liberal Democrat Deputy First Minister.

All delivering.

All making a difference.

All showing what a Liberal Democrat government is like.

What it can do.

Scotland stands today as a shining example of the new politics.

Devolved power.

Government close to the people.

Fair votes.

Parties working together.

Recognising that people from different traditions can learn from each other.

That they can sometimes be greater than the sum of their parts.

This conference is a first for me.

My first as leader.

But it is also the first time that a federal leader has addressed the party in government.

As I lead the Liberal Democrats in Britain as a whole, I will have one eye always on Scotland.

Because you are doing so well,

and because you offer an example to our colleagues throughout Britain.

Scotland has waited long for the chance it now has.

Our party has waited too.

Now the wait is over.

Do your best for Scotland.

And show the rest of Britain how it’s done.

History never repeats itself, it only stutters as the Parisian radicals of 1968 used to say. What appears to be Groundhog Day is really something different. Nevertheless, politicians cannot avoid drawing lessons from history not because history does repeat itself but because they are interested in politics not history. For example, in October 2007 Jack Straw, Justice Secretary and Lord Chancellor, argued that pursuing ‘Little England’ policies that ‘create resentment between the peoples of Britain is a sure means of destroying the union’. Defending the current ‘asymmetrical’ state of the British constitution, he couched his argument with reference to the debate on Home Rule in the late 19th century. Straw’s message was that those who criticise devolution from a Little England perspective should ‘learn from that experience and understand that it is by embracing devolution that the union has been able to survive and to thrive’ (Straw 2007). But what lesson is to be learnt from the Home Rule debate? If Straw really was pointing to a lesson from history, what were the warnings of critics like A V Dicey? I think it is worth revisiting Dicey not in the spirit of drawing a lesson but in the spirit of allowing members of the Campaign for an English Parliament perhaps to understand themselves better. I take as my text Dicey’s England’s Case against Home Rule (1886) and consider an irony – that his arguments against Home Rule for Ireland have become transformed today into England’s Case for Home Rule – at least that is how I read the strategy of the CEP.

Dicey’s objective in England’s Case against Home Rule was ‘to criticize from a purely English point of view the policy of Home Rule’ for Ireland because he believed it to be ‘at least as much opposed to the vital interests of England’ as it was a threat to the stability of the Union. Of course, by ‘England’ Dicey meant ‘Great Britain’ and he used the terms interchangeably, something that is less easy to do today. Certainly, the CEP never confuses the two. Dicey was fully aware of the objection that to consider Home Rule for Ireland from an English point of view was to consider policy from ‘the wrong side’. Surely this was a matter ‘for the people of Ireland alone’ and a question which should be subject only to an examination from an Irish point of view? Far from this objection being valid, Dicey believed that leaving such matters for the consideration of the Irish alone was an entirely misconceived policy, a claim of political convenience rather than of constitutional validity. Home Rule was ‘a plan for revolutionizing the constitution of the whole of the United Kingdom’ and so there was no English arrogance ‘in insisting that the proposed change must not take place if it be adverse to the interests of Great Britain’. The case for Irish Home Rule was a case for a new political partnership, a revision of the Union’s ‘Articles of Association’, and there was nothing imperialistic or denigrating to the principle of nationality in the argument that ‘no modification can be made which in the judgement of his associates is fatal to the prosperity of the concern’. The only scheme of Home Rule which could be acceptable to England, according to Dicey, had to satisfy three conditions:

• it should be consistent with the supremacy of the British Parliament
• it should do justice to each part of the United Kingdom
• it should promise finality.

It must, in short, be ‘a scheme which promises to England at least not greater evils than the maintenance of the Union or than Irish independence’.

In the first instance, Dicey explained that Home Rule was not Local Self-Government. The latter was compatible with the supremacy of the Westminster Parliament but the very aim of Home rule was to introduce a new relationship between the Irish people and Westminster. ‘Local Self-Government however extended means the delegation, Home Rule however curtailed means the surrender, of Parliamentary authority’. In an anticipation of one constitutional debate after 1997, Dicey noted how advocates of reform in England wished local self-government to be greatly extended there and thought that this was a sufficient principle of democratic government. But what was on offer to Ireland was a form of government designed to meet the ‘feeling of nationality’ and it was desired by Irish nationalists precisely because it would check the authority of Westminster, something which no reform of local government could do. ‘When they wish to minimize the sacrifice to England of establishing a Parliament in Ireland, they bring Home Rule down nearly to the proportions of Local Self-Government; when they wish to maximise – if the word may be allowed – the blessings to Ireland of a separate legislature, they all but identify Home Rule with National Independence’. Did not Tony Blair speak of the Scottish Parliament being a mere ‘parish council’? But did not Gordon Brown subscribe to Scotland’s Claim of Right? Dicey’s summary of the effects of this policy was that it was likely to bring not the best, but the worst, of all worlds for England: ‘Home Rule, while involving almost all the evils of Separation, will be found on examination not to hold out anything like the same hopes of compensating advantages’. And this larger point was crucial even before any detailed examination were made of the practicalities of the new constitutional arrangements.

Second, Dicey disputed the proposition that Home Rule was an equitable compromise between English interests and the legitimate claims of Irish nationality. He was not impressed by the notion that England owed anything to Irish nationality by virtue of the need to redeem past wrongs. To anyone who looks at history with philosophical calmness and not with the intent to agitate, argued Dicey, the failures of England in its relations with Ireland ‘have to a great extent flowed from causes too general to be identified with the intentional wrong-doing either of rulers or of subjects’. Though it could be shown that a majority of Irish electors supported Home Rule, and the claim be made that the will of that majority should be recognised, it could equally be shown that a majority of electors in the United Kingdom willed that the Union be maintained. The point that Dicey was making was the insufficiency, not the inadmissibility, of arguments according to popular sovereignty. Such arguments were often at odds with principles of sound government and usually at odds with the idea of the Union for they involved an assumption that the rights of the parts – nations – were greater than the sum of British interests. In this view, Home Rule was indeed unfair because whatever its ‘hypothetical benefits it threatens more than countervailing loss to England’ (286). It would dislocate the whole ‘English Constitution’; it would bring ‘large pecuniary sacrifice’ without reasonable hope of ‘creating real harmony of feeling between Great Britain and Ireland’; and it would mean that England continued to carry a burden of responsibility but had no power to ensure that solidarity was reciprocated by the Home Rule jurisdiction.

Finally, Dicey was convinced that Home Rule would lead inexorably to the break-up of the United Kingdom. Interestingly, Dicey’s case was influenced just as much, perhaps more, by the likely attitude of England as it was by the dynamic for separation he believed Irish nationalists really intended. If it were true that Home Rule could be nothing other than ‘injurious to England’ (this was a big ‘if’ but Dicey was certain of the outcome), his famous conclusion that Home Rule was ‘the half-way house to separation’ needs to be put into Dicey’s own consequential context. The sentence that follows is: ‘Grant it, and in a short time Irish independence will become the wish of England’ (my italics). This break-up of the United Kingdom would be as much the product of English discontent as it would be the product of Irish nationalist policy. At that point, ‘it will be clear that the Union must for the sake of England, no less than of Ireland, come to an end’. One could argue that Dicey’s case was misconceived in its predicted outcomes – ‘a gigantic evil’ - for the stability and well-being of the United Kingdom. Or one could argue (as does Straw) that it was Dicey’s argumentative logic which helped to bring about the very thing that he opposed - Irish separation. Underlying this argument is the old (and rather dated) liberal assumption from Gladstone through to Roy Jenkins and beyond that one of the great missed opportunities was the failure to pass Home Rule in 1886, thereby saving all the bloodshed and preserving Ireland within the Union. That is an honourable argument and it was also the argument in favour of devolution to Scotland and Wales after 1997. Home Rule is a Unionist policy.

The Union is in a different condition today, of course, from the one Dicey described. There has been a re-balancing (some would argue un-balancing) of nationality and a re-ordering of the ‘complete unity’ of Britain as Dicey understood it. However, it is possible to argue that a new Diceyean moment presents itself, one which, though drawing on his logic, now advocates a very different case for England. In short, one can argue that England’s case against Home Rule has become transmuted into England’s case for Home Rule (for itself). That, as I see it, is the way the CEP looks at the United Kingdom today. Here is how I see England’s case against Home Rule becoming the CEP’s case for English Home Rule (and England is England, not Great Britain).

Here are the seven elements of the CEP’s case reviewed in as a fulfillment of Dicey’s concerns:

1. Dicey had argued that Home Rule for Ireland could not be considered by the Irish alone because the consequences for the Union would be general, not particular. The starting point of the CEP case is that England has been ignored in, and its people excluded from, the process of constitutional change. The substance of the case is put as an issue of equity. England has been denied the same opportunity as the other nations of the United Kingdom to express any collective view about how it should be governed.
2. For Dicey, local self-government was not home rule. For the CEP, equally, the Government’s policy of regionalism cannot meet England’s case. On the contrary, it represents another way to deny England its proper recognition. Only England as a whole can be the frame of reference. Parliament first, then local self-government (if required).
3. Dicey had disputed the claim that Home Rule would be an equitable compromise, one that would create ‘real harmony of feeling’ within the Union. It is the consistent argument of the CEP that devolution has not, as Labour claimed, strengthened the Union, but weakened it. And the major reason is the constitutional asymmetry of a Scottish Parliament, Assemblies in Wales and Northern Northern Ireland but no reciprocal arrangement for England.
4. Dicey believed Home Rule would involve a ‘large pecuniary sacrifice’ for the English. His prophesy is one that the CEP asserts has now been realised – that everyone else has got the self-determination and the English have got the subsidisation. That explains the polemics against the Barnett Formula.
5. Dicey believed that Home Rule would deliver for England the disadvantages of Celtic separatism without the advantages of Union. The CEP claims that the English are now required to sacrifice their legitimate claims to nationhood in the interests of maintaining a Union which satisfies only the needs of the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish.
6. Dicey’s view of federalism – or the devolution of ever more powers to national legislatures - was that it would, ‘likely enough be in our case the first step towards a dissolution of the United Kingdom into separate States’. The CEP is more equivocal on that proposition – some are in favour others possibly less so. But this question identifies, I think, a difference of opinion within the Campaign in 7 below.
7. Dicey also feared that independence for Ireland would become the wish of the English, based on his calculation that the frustration the majority nation would experience trying to make a devolved state function. It would become intolerable to England. This is actually the conclusion of a recent book by McLean and McMillan The State of the Union (2006) - the ‘Slovak scenario’, a scenario that ‘would be driven from England’, the result of an ‘English backlash’ - a book which criticises Dicey but reaches a Diceyean conclusion.

Here Dicey perceived a tension between the lure of simple separatism as a way to address national grievances and the drudgery of fashioning intra-Union compromises based on a (possibly) diminishing sense of British solidarity. It is a tension, I believe, which partly constitutes the character of the CEP. In short, the CEP occupies a position profoundly national but not necessarily separatist. This, of course, is the division between nationalism and unionism but it is not one which the CEP needs to resolve – its only objective is to lobby for a Parliament – but it does indicate a tension in the process of lobbying.

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The Politics of Englishness and has an academic interest in the Campaign for an English Parliament.