For the first time since the Act of Union, England's constitutional future is coming into contention, and with it the fundamental assumptions underpinning the multinational British state.

Unless and until the English decide who they are, and rediscover the buried republican tradition of Milton and Blake, they will not be fit for self government. They will have to stagger on in their usual ‘pragmatic’, negative, utilitarian way and leave the task of building democratic political cultures in an increasingly threadbare Britain to the Scots and Welsh.

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. Sadly, this is not surprising.

What moral vision does the revived English national consciousness embody? It’s pitifully inadequate to say that England should have a devolved government because that is what the Scots and Welsh now have, and leave it at that.

There is no English national Myth comparable to the Scottish Myth of popular sovereignty or the Welsh Myth of Celtic socialism. The only English political leader who has tried to articulate an English national Myth in our time was Enoch Powell; and the Powellite Myth was self-consciously archaic and reactionary as well as profoundly anti-democratic.