It's not devolution, it's divorce
It is too late for Gordon Brown to wave the Union flag, says Simon Heifer. Labour has wrecked the institution of the United Kingdom Last week the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, delivered the annual British Council lecture. His theme was Britishness: he sought to urge upon us, the people of Britain, 'a shared national purpose'. I had had a preview of this metaphysical thesis a few days beforehand, at a private lunch. I thought then, and I thought all the more when I read the text of Mr Brown's lecture, that here was a man seriously misjudging his audience.
The Chancellor's motivation for seeking this renewed national identity was described in this key paragraph: 'Britain has been damaged by the absence of agreement on economic purpose or direction: lurching for narrow political reasons from one short-term economic panacea to another, often public sector fighting private, management versus worker, state versus market in a sterile battle for territory that deprived British businesses and British workforces of confidence about the long term and held our country back.' In other words, if only we could all agree on the same aims, we would all be happy. Mr Brown sought to define what he was looking for. 'Britain's roots,' he said, 'are on the most solid foundation of all — a passion for liberty anchored in a sense of duty and an intrinsic commitment to tolerance and fair play.' He was also keen on 'a British idea of duty as the virtue that reinforces neighbourliness and enshrines the idea of a public realm and public service. A belief in the duty of one to another is an essential element of nationhood in every country. But whether it arose from religious belief, from a noblesse oblige or from a sense of solidarity, duty in Britain has been, to most people, the foundation of rights rather than their consequence.'
This is all good Tory stuff. In the course of his remarks he even quoted Burke and Professor Scruton. However, it is fundamentally preposterous; not because what he says is not right, but because what he wants now cannot be achieved in the society that the government of which he is a member has created. Fundamental to his argument is the concept of a nation; but which nation? Mr Brown takes for granted that it is Britain. As an ambitious Scot whose career path can only be happily completed in London, he would say that, wouldn't he?
Yet Britain, as anything other than a geographical description, has been deleted by Labour's policies on devolution. In these islands, our national identities are now plural and fractured. Mr Brown, of course, would not admit this. He has too much to lose, personally and politically, by doing so. The sense of national identity now so strong among the English has not been fostered purely by the game of soccer. It has been exacerbated by the deliberate sense of separateness forced upon the peoples of these islands by devolution.
The English may not be very sophisticated, but they are now well aware of several key facts in their political life. First, they were not asked whether they would like their own parliament, in which English representatives dealt with solely English issues, in the way that the Scots (and, to a lesser extent, the Welsh) were. Second, they were not asked whether they minded continuing to subsidise the Scots to the tune of around £9 billion a year. Third, they are beginning to realise that the regional assemblies some of them are being offered as a means of 'devolution' are fraudulent in their conception, since they will have few powers other than to act as a talking shop. Fourth, they are aware that the job opportunities available to Scots in England — such as a significant proportion of government posts and prominent positions in the media — are not available to the English who choose to go to Scotland. It is vital to Labour's continuance in power that the English are conned, by arguments such as Mr Brown's, into believing that they are still first and foremost British.
Despite Labour's majority in the Commons of over 160, the leadership is now so unpopular with its backbenchers that it struggles to get through its main Bills. In recent months two measures that did not affect Scotland — the Bill to set up foundation hospitals, and that to impose tuition fees — were passed only with the aid of Scottish MPs. This was quite scandalous. However, should the Conservative party win 265 of the 529 English seats at the next election, but fail to form a government, no measure that affects England could be passed without the votes of non-English members. Labour hopes that by claiming we are all again British the English won't mind. It is time to disabuse them of that self-serving and intellectually bankrupt notion.
As well as wrecking the United Kingdom by devolution, the Left has promoted the multicultural society, which in their definition of it reduced the national culture to an equal status with those of the minorities who chose to make Britain their home. They have singularly failed to enforce proper borders, which should be the essence of our nationhood. The Union flag, which Mr Brown now wishes to see restored as a symbol of our shared 'values', was branded nationalistic and the property of the far Right. First, left-wing educationists deemed our history to be something of which we should be thoroughly ashamed. Then it became something that should not be taught at all. Even before devolution put an end to any hope of a united British identity, many in Britain had been conditioned to believe that our shared past and our institutions — those things that so fundamentally inform a sense of national and cultural continuity and identity — were somehow disgraceful, and better not mentioned. Finally, for all his talk of duty and service, no one has done more than Mr Brown to build up and bloat a welfare state that has made such activities the province of the state, and has demoralised literally millions of Britons.
It is too late now for Mr Brown to say that we can all safely feel British again, and proceed as if the cultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s had never happened. Scotland has its own national identity; so too, of course, does England. The Left's vandalism of the last 40 years helped create and feed these senses of separateness. In England, we see Scotland acting as a foreign country, managing its own affairs from its own grotesquely extravagant and corrupt parliament. That is too small a stage for a big man like Mr Brown, but one with which he ought, in justice, to be content. If he and his sort wanted to be British they should never have dismantled Britain. They fear an English parliament — or, more to the point, English issues being voted on solely by English MPs — because it would soon mean that Labour would never rule in England again. They should have thought of that before they let the genie out of the bottle.
To ask the English to come to their aid, as Mr Brown, without using the 'E' word, was nakedly doing, is but the latest affront in a political strategy that has insulted the intelligence of the majority of people in this island ever since it was conceived. In rejecting Mr Brown's entreaties we should point out that we do so not from a lack of patriotism, but from an excess of it. Our patria — or patriae — is no longer his.
Simon Heifer is a columnist on the Daily Mail.
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