A speech to a Conservative Party lunch on 20th September 2002, at the County Hotel, Bramhall, Greater Manchester.

To read the text please click on the link to the “Nationism” page of Britain Watch.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 27th November 1998.

Tom Utley suggests that English Conservatives should forsake the establishment of an English parliament in order to “fight shoulder to shoulder with Donald Dewar” to preserve the Union of England and Scotland (article, Nov. 20th).

There is a persistent belief among the well-to-do English political class that if only we, the long-suffering English people, would appease and subsidise a bit more, the beneficiaries will be deflected from their settled purpose.  As in Europe, Northern Ireland and now Scotland, such appeasement merely whets the appetite for more.

There has been little sentimental attachment to the Union in Scotland for years.  If in due course people in Scotland vote to break the Union with England, it will be because the sentimental attachment to a separate Scots state will have taken precedence over a hard-headed calculation of the disadvantages which separation will bring.  These include the loss of career opportunities – in the Armed Forces, science, corporate business, media – which would follow the Scots’ transfer of citizenship from a major to a minor state.  The cost of the offsetting jobs – all those new embassies for instance – would be borne 100 per cent by the Scottish taxpayer.

While probably a majority of English people today would prefer the Union with Scotland to continue, this could change rapidly once the manifest unfairness of the new constitutional arrangements becomes full visible.  England does not need the Union to support it.  It is a powerful nation of 50 million people, the sixth largest economy in the world, and contains all but two of the strategic industrial and military installations of the United Kingdom.

The re-establishment of the English parliament, while indispensable for democratic fairness to the English people, will also give status to Scotland as a partner in a proper federal United Kingdom.  It should therefore receive the support, not disapproval, of those people such as Mr Utley who support the Union.

A speech given to the Society of St George, at their annual dinner to celebrate St George’s Day, at the Mere Golf Club in Cheshire, on 24th April 1998.

To read the text please click on the link to the “Nationism” page on the Britain Watch website.

A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 19th March 1998.

Lord Alderdice, leader of the Northern Ireland Alliance Party, manages to discuss devolution and what he calls the “totality of relationships among these islands” (article, March 17th) without once mentioning England.

Likewise, Robert Jackson, the Conservative MP, managed to write a long letter about national identities (March 14th) without once mentioning the English people, although there was plenty about Scots, Welsh and Irish.

Judging by these and many similar writings, a visitor from outer space would never realise that the English not only exist, but constitute by far the great majority of the population of the United Kingdom.

Lord Alderdice, Mr Jackson and others evidently take for granted the English people’s continue acquiesence in their virtual obliteration by the media.

It is also assumed that the English will always subsidise parliaments, assemblies, language support systems and endless arrays of quangos in parts of the British Isles that are forever proclaiming their differences.

With a Socttish parliament only a matter of months away, the time is now long overdue to settle the “West Lothian” question once and for all.  The English people do not want their country broken up into artificial “regions” as part of a devolution fudge to help keep the Labour Party in power.

There is now no stopping point between a unitary state and a proper federal constitution that is remotely democratic.

Only the restoration of a Parliament for England will do.

A letter to the Times which was published on 28th March 1992.

You play down Tam Dalyell’s posing of the “West Lothian question” by asserting that the Scots have had to put up with “unrepresentative government” since 1707.

It is true that in the last 13 years of Conservative government Scotland has returned a majority of Labour MPs, but so what?  In 1974-9 England, with an electorate nine times that of Scotland’s, was subject to a Labour government whose majority derived not just from Scottish Labour MPs, but from the over-representation of Scotland at Westminster which still persists.

On an electorate basis Scotland was entitled to 59 seats instead of 72 in the 1987 parliament and Wales 32 instead of 38.  In any case Scotland has not always been a Labour fiefdom.  As recently as the 1950s a majority of Scots seats were Conservative.

The fact is that if there are to be assemblies or parliaments in any or all of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, there will have to be a parliament responsible to the people of England.  The simplest (and cheapest) way of achieving this is for MPs representing English constituencies to constitute themselves, for devolved affairs, as an English parliament, which is after all what they originally were.