A vote stitch-up that makes Brown the last Scots PM – and might well destroy the Union

ONLY three peopl e , Victorian statesman Lord Palmerston once drawled, had ever understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question. One of them, he added, was now dead, one had gone mad and the third – Palmerston himself – had forgotten.

The West Lothian Question is, happily, rather less involved, and, as raised ad nauseam by that constituency’s MP, Tam Dalyell, during t he first Scottish devolution proposals in the late 1970s, was one of sustained embarrassment for home rule supporters and the Callaghan Government.

Once a devolved Assembly was up and running in Edinburgh, Dalyell would drawl, why should he as a Westminster MP be able to speak about and vote on, say, health and education issues affecting folk in Blackburn, Lancashire, but have no power whatever over the same issues as they affected his constituents in Blackburn, West Lothian?

Imposition

There are no ready or logical solutions to that paradox, save for full-blown Scottish independence or the imposition of English regional assemblies which the English simply do not want. And when the first devolution scheme died a death in the spring of 1979, the West Lothian Question all but vanished from public debate.

Now it is back with a bang, albeit rebranded. The shorthand for this averred and howling injustice to our friends awa’ o’er the Border is ‘EVEL’, or ‘English votes for English laws’, the phrase David Cameron used after Alex Salmond’s independence dream collapsed.

They were only four words, but they were words the Prime Minister had conspicuously failed to use at any point in all his referendum campaigning, pleading and beseeching.

At no point had he linked the concept of ‘English votes for English laws’ to the explicit if belated promise of further powers f or Scotland. It infuriated his Westminster opponents, especially Labour.

One need not respect the Prime Minister’s sudden, distinctly sneaky play to understand it. Without such red meat to placate the less her- bivorous sort of Tory backbencher, he might struggle to pass any Commons legislation granting even more authority to the Scottish parliament.

It is worth reminding ourselves that no such legislation has been passed so far – nor will it be, until after the General Election. And nobody has a clue who will win that election, nor can anyone predict the shape of the new House of Commons or the nature of the post-election administration.

Mr Cameron, though, unslept and exalted that morning, had two other concerns in mind. One is the very real electoral threat, especially in southern, esturial England, either side of the Thames, from Ukip – now fast moving from the lunatic fringe to a credible force likely to gain an election scalp or three at the General Election.

Far more deliciously, though, with EVEL Mr Cameron can tie Ed Miliband and the Labour Party in wretched knots. If Labour can somehow pull out a win in next year’s election, despite the Tories outpolling it for economic competence and David Cameron outpolling Ed Mili band on practically everything, its Parliamentary majority will hinge on a significant block of Scottish seats.

Last time, in 2010, Labour won 41 of Scotland’s 59 constituencies. It’s a feat it is unlikely to match this time, even if the current SNP boom, as is probable, is by polling day distinctly subdued. But if Scottish MPs are forbidden to vote on English legislation, a supposed Labour Government would have no effective majority.

Labour, besides, is under pressure from Ukip, particularly in the north of England, and is likewise taunted over EVEL. The SNP, of course, is not troubled in the slightest – its MPs do not vote on Englishonly issues anyway – and the Liberal Democrats support a f ederal UK with English regional assemblies, though their priority in May is less wholesale constitutional reform than sheer electoral survival.

There i s certainly much pompous support for EVEL in grand English quarters. As one London paper editorialised this week: ‘Ever since the 1998 Scotland Act legally restored the Scottish parliament the f ol l owing y e ar, t hi s has remained a central flaw at the heart of our constitution. For various reasons, it was never tackled, despite a plethora of committees of the great and good established to find an answer…

‘Unfortunately, the Conservatives have also muddied the waters by putting up three options for debate within the party. They need to stick with one: that only English MPs will vote on English laws. That is fair and simple and can be done quickly.’

In fact, EVEL is not nearly so fair or as simple as it might appear on Canary Wharf – nor would many, surveying all the oddities of the British state, judge the West Lothian Question to be the ‘central flaw at the heart of our constitution’.

There are three blunt home truths. First, occasions when England votes one way in an election and Scotland the other are rarer than one might think. The Labour Governments returned in 1945, 1966, 1997 and 2001 all won England as well as Scotland. In any event, not since 1955 has the winning party won an absolute majority in either realm.

Rejected

Second, there have been many occasions – most notoriously under the l ong Tory administration from 1979 to 1997 – when Scotland has been governed by a party it has emphatically rejected at the polls. That government, as far as Scotland went, is remembered much more for general incompetence than outright Thatcherite malevolence – notably the imposition of the poll tax – but the iniquity of the situation, such as it was, did not then trouble any London commentators.

Third, true England-only Bills that affect English people only are exceeding rare – only eight such pieces of legislation can be identified since 2001. Most laws impact on Scots one way or another, notably through the involved workings of the Barnett f ormula, whereby expenditure on Scottish health, for instance, is in precise mathematical proportion to what is spent south of the Border.

But l et us f urther think through the implications of what is now proposed, if ferocious rules are passed precluding Scottish MPs from voting on matters devolved to the Scottish parliament. We would never again see a Scottish Prime Minister or, for that matter, a Scottish Home Secretary or Chancellor. Scottish MPs would be denied any chance of ministerial service, save perhaps in Defence or the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

It would mean Scottish MPs with no obvious or useful function, a majority that might not be a majority, and a Government that might not really be a Government.

Strengths

There is, besides, something desperately un-British about such obsessive, constitutional tidying-up. One of our strengths, as a United Kingdom, has been living happily with anomaly and paradox – under a Queen who, for instance, is an Anglican in England but a Presbyterian in Scotland.

Constitutionally, as Queen of the UK, she could declare war on Australia or, as Queen of Australia, declare war on the UK. In theory, she could make everyone a peer and appoint anyone as Prime Minister.

Things that might on paper seem inequitable are accepted in other great democracies. Americans have lived through several occasions ( most recently in 2000) when a man who won fewer votes than his opponent was nevertheless inaugurated as President.

Besides, where could all this end? Whatever the vote on September 18, we are left with the uneasy reality that we live in a shaky United Kingdom, rejected by 45 per cent of those Scots who turned out to vote. And since then the polls suggest there has been a permanent shift in our political weather.

If Westminster now blunders about, meddling with an old and tried system and effectively re-rigging its rules to create two new tiers of MP, it may still not suffice to placate the Little Englanders, but it will certainly jeopardise the Union.