If youre an American and bored with the UK/Scotland thing already, then move on. Im plenty bored with American politics. If youre curious, stick around. Watching the reaction to the Scotland decision, I suspect a great many Americans are not aware of the West Lothian Problem (even without worrying about knowing its name). The problem is that Scotland has its own regional parliament, and has for years, while England does not. The parliament of the United Kingdom doubles as the parliament for England. Which means that, although the Scots independence movement has been grumpy about English MPs voting on Scottish money and matters, at least _some_ Scottish matters are voted on by the Scots-only parliament, while England-specific matters are always voted on by the parliament of the whole UK -- including Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales MPs. Given that England is already statistically more right-wing and xenophobic ... erm, I mean, eurosceptic and anti-immigration ... than Scotland, and given that the three major parties of the UK parliament have all bent over backwards to promise Scotland all sorts of concessions if it remained in the UK, I suspect English politicians are now going to start to get rabid about the need for England to have its own regional parliament and have its internal affairs controlled only by English people. One commenter from Devon (part of the deep South of England -- in more ways than one) says on the BBC website: Following this mornings news we are now faced with pouring increased funding to Scotland at our expense with the knowledge that 45% of the recipients [sic] dont want anything to do with us. When do the remainder of the UK vote for whether we want Scotland as part of the UK? So! If the Tories fail to do their (promised) part for Scottish empowerment, they will lose what little support they have up there; if they do too much without also providing federalism to empower England, many of their right-wing fringe will likely run into the eager arms of UKIP. Labour and the LibDems are more complicated to analyze, but in fine, I suspect the only tenable outcome for this is full blown federalism, with an exclusively English regional parliament -- and once England disentangles itself from the other three regions that thoroughly, itll be a much easier process for any of the four parties to leave the Union. All of the financial skepticism the No campaign threw around this time around wont be applicable, because the four economies will be much more separate anyhow. TLDR: I suspect Camerons statement that this is now settled for a lifetime is hopelessly naive, and I suspect he knows it.
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:43:46 +0000
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