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| England supporter - FAISAL ZAIN |
The choice they make will clearly determine who is in power after the next election, as the first party who realises that actions - not just words - are required to regain English affection will be the easy electoral victor.
What is more, the first party leader who faces up to the reality that the UK is in a constitutional mess will win the prize of leading the biggest country in an emerging federal UK. That brave and thoughtful leader will watch the others follow in envy as he or she determines England's future.
Currently the Campaign for an English Parliament (the CEP) is holding its constitutional breath, as it has noticed one of the main parties starting to pull itself out of its decade of English cultural denial. It looks as if the Labour party or more precisely, a blossoming part of Labour called blue Labour is starting to express the fact that England needs a political voice.
The struggling class in England can only hope that this growing powerbase instils courage back into Labour’s culturally weak heart. For this change of thinking to be successful it has to come from within the Labour Party - it has to be an organic process.
If Labour returns to the roots of its history then it will know that its growth came first amongst the people of England, not within the British political elite. The English flocked towards the Labour Party because it was able to express their mounting protestation and fears.
Labour spoke their language of struggle and inequality; Labour had a radical tradition. England once again is struggling for equality - this time democratic equality. The CEP asks: will Labour express those concerns as blue Labour hopes, or will it allow another party to emerge as England’s saviour?
England has a significant history of working class uprising when official suppression becomes too intense. The Peasant’s Revolt should warn the Coalition that a breaking point can be quickly and unrepentantly reached if people’s livelihoods are damaged.
But that breaking point will not be direct taxation this time: it is likely to be suppression of English identity and the unfair Barnett formula. Labour would also do well to remember what the Tolpuddle Martyrs accomplished when the English stood together.
If Labour is to find its way back into the fabric of English life then it needs to look back at those examples and examine why the English created and embraced the Labour movement in the 19th century. Once it realises that ‘England’ and ‘English’ are not dirty words, but the very midwives of its birth, then the Labour Party will outflank the Conservatives be swept back as the natural party of England.
Although this is early days, blue Labour might be able to map the route away from the pain of losing Labour’s Scottish bastion to the joy of regaining England. The time is fertile as the English nation has grown tired of being leaderless.
Its communities are fragmenting, becoming dysfunctional and the struggling class is worried! The glue of a collective Parliamentary voice has been taken away and 13 years of unbalanced devolution has left the English in dire need of a leader that understands the unique problems they now face.
If Labour champions and embraces an inclusive and positive Englishness, expressed through an English government, they will find not only redemption. They can look forward to a generation of power.
Eddie Bone is chairman of the Campaign for an English Parliament
England has always been a culturally diverse nation based upon its ancient counties. However we all stand together as the English. That was exactly what Blair's Labour tried to destroy with its reviled regionalisation programme.
ReplyDeleteTo be brutally frank, the whole Labour movement should hang its head in shame at what it hurled at the English people. Branding Englishness as "racist" "xenophobic" and "bigoted" while simultaneously ramming Britishness, the identity of empire, down people's throats instead of building upon that English cultural diversity, was unforgiveable. Especially when Scottishness and Welshness were encouraged. The Scots were even more culpable than the English for the sins of empire, for they provided a third of the Caribbean's slave owners when comprising only 8% of the UK's population.
Denigrating all things English in England has turned many away from Labour, perhaps irreversibly.
Add to that the disadvantages people in England now endure, due to devolution compared to the rest of the UK, I fail to see how Labour politicans sleep at night.
While elderly people in England were having to sell their homes to pay for care, Labour MPs were claiming massive expenses to pay for the second homes.
I wish Blue Labour all the success in the world if it reverses some of the blatant Anglophobia implemented by the Blair/Brown period of misrule.
Just to correct you Stephen but the political Cornish autonomist movement existed long before new Labour. The first traces of it can be found at the beginning of the 19th century and Mebyon Kernow was founded in the 50's. Cornish nationalism also pre-dates English nationalism which is the real new kid on the block being but the knee jerk reaction of some in England against devolution to Scotland, Wales and NI.
ReplyDeleteTell me, before devolution why were there ZERO English nationalists campaigning for freedom for their nation?
From Michael Knowles, member of the national council of the Campaign for an English Parliament
ReplyDeleteThe fundamental error of this article, is to be found in the statement: 'the English created and embraced the Labour Movement in the 19th century' and 'were the very midwives of its birth'. The assertion is not just untrue but, what is much more significant, it misrepresents the Labour Movement at its very essence. It is untrue because the Labour Movement in England was part of the British Labour Movement and never was and never saw itself as separate from it. What this article calls 'the struggling classes' were to found in proprtionately equal measure in Glasgow and the whole of the industrial Central Belt, and in Wales. In their mines, their shipyards, their factories. There wasn't just Peterloo in Manchester, Queen's Square in Bristol and the Tolpuddle martyers of Dorset, but there was also Taff Vale. There wasn't just the East End Match Girls and the Dockers Tanner of the London docks, there was also the Clyde shipyards. There wasn't just Arch and Tillet and Hannington and the Jarrow Marchers. There was also Keir Hardie, Jenny Lee and Aneurin Bevan. The Labour Movement first and foremost represents Working Class Solidarity wherever the working class is to be found. The Labour Party has been its political representative and agent in Britain and it belongs to all of them equally and totally no matter where they live in Britain. That is its true history. The Labour Movement was founded by and represents the British Working Class. The article is wrong in this specific, but crucial, matter. The Labour Movement in England will never ever be won over to supporting an English Parliament Party for reasons of nationalism. It will only be won over, as I hope it will be, by its realisation that an English Parliament will be of benefit to the interests of the working people it was founded to represent. That is the nub of this matter.
Michael Knowles, cont'd:
ReplyDeleteThe reason why the Labour Movement in England has been opposed so far to the idea of an EP is because it is convinced that an English Parliament will inevitably be Tory; and as we have seen throughout English history, and emphatically and virulently so today, the Conservative Party has always been hostile to working class interests. However, despite that, I think the Labour Movement leadership is wrong in thinking that an English Parliament would always be Tory. 90% of the population of England is urban and what was surely a most significant outcome of the 2010 General Election was that despite 13 years of New Labour the Labour vote in England held up. Not sufficiently. Of course not. But the Labour core held up enough to deny the Conservatives an absolute majority and enough also to reduce the number of Lib Dem seats in the Commons.. Despite everything it held up. That is a foundation to build upon. An English Parliament, located well outside of London and geographically well away from the imperialistic and militaristic mentality of Westminster as examplified in Blair and Cameron, will be able to focus totally on the real concerns and the actual welfare of the English people in all their cultural, political, religious and ethnic variety. An English Parliament, located well outside of London, will bring about the greatest transfer of employment, media and cultural activity ever known in England's long history. Employment, culture and media follow power. That is a most desirable goal for the Labour Movement to aim at. At present England is trapped inside the outdated imperialist and monolithic centralised unionist concept Westminster has of the UK's role in the world. However, with Scottish and Welsh devolution the change has already started. It now needs England to take it forward in an effective manner. The success of the 1998 devolution project depends on its extension to England qua England. The whole Conservative Party ideology is based on narrow outdated unionism and economic and political imperialism and exploitation, both internal within the UK and externally to the extent it can achieve. That is the Tory raison d'etre. That can be defeated, broken and shattered by the establishment of an English Parliament which focusses England immense wealth on people's actual concerns and welfare. The Labour and Trade Union Movement must now open its eyes and its mind to these huge possibilities, to see an English Parliament as the only possible effective agent of the fundamental changes that the UK needs to make in the interests of all the people of England.