I have of recent been standing more and more for this and getting more vocal as you might have seen from the posts I have been posting.
In this country – England, there is an increasing call for an English Parliament to correct the wrongs created by the devolution that has occurred at the hands of this Labour government which for some reason wants to destroy what England is and it stands for.
I have said before and many others are increasingly seeing it the same, we English are tired of funding the Scots having it all. Why should they benefit so much from the Barnett Formula
Which gives them so much more than we English get, and for no good reason. And to top it off, their MPs in the UK parliament can have a say on the education and health system of the English, but no English MP can do the same for the Scottish, and even the local MP for the Scottish constituency can’t have a say on those matters.
It comes under the West Lothian question
Got to say it is great that Wikipedia has answers for this, so if you are unsure about it, this describes it in very basic terms.
Current situation
The question is twofold:
How can it be right that MPs elected to Westminster from Scottish constituencies have no ability to affect the issues of their constituents which have been devolved to the Scottish Parliament and
If power over Scottish affairs is devolved to a Scottish Parliament, how can it be right that MPs representing Scottish constituencies in the UK Parliament will have the power to vote on issues affecting England (including those that don't affect Scotland), but English MPs will not have the power to vote on Scottish issues
It creates the following.
Borrowed from the CEP website
If the Commission will set up a Commission to investigate the way in which a member state is discriminating against its citizens on the basis of their nationality: namely the UK Government denying, for example, the English equal rights with the Scots and the Welsh in that the English suffering from bone cancer are denied the drug Velcade whereas the Scots receive it free; the English suffering from Alzheimer’s are refused the drugs Aricept, Reminyl and Exelon whereas the Scots are prescribed them free; the English have to pay University tuition fees but the Scots do not; the English who are elderly must pay for residential care yet the Scots do not; and the English pay for NHS prescriptions whereas from April the Welsh will not.
English Rights
There was even a petition to the Number 10 e-petition site, and the response was typical of this government
English Parliament epetition reply
Then there is an Early Day Motion, EDM670 - English Parliament , which I then asked my local MP to support given that the increasing number of people want an English Parliament.
Here was his response
Dear Mr.X
Early Day Motion 670
Thank you for your recent email.
I do not support the above EDM at all - all MPs are elected as UK MPs, not from separate countries or regions, and to represent their constituency interest in the UK Parliament. I sat on the Greater London Act committee, a matter of arguably no concern to non-London MPs, but on the logic of the EDM, all MPs not sitting for London seats should have been excluded from voting on the important principle of who governs our capital city
I do not accept that the UK Parliament should be balkanised in this way
Thank you for contacting on this issue
Yours Sincerely
Tony McNulty MP
As someone else said to me, balkanised!!
If he doesn't want balkanisation, then why balkanise the funding??! What a weak response. Plus what concern of it was to those outside of London, how London should be run. It explains why London has been continually screwed by this government, and why London is continually bled dry. And they deny that London has 3 of the poorest boroughs in the UK
So where do we stand now. No closer to what we deserve, which is to be treated as an equal partner in this union, as well as the same basic rights given to the other countries in this union of UK. Also bear in mind, England is the only country in the EU that doesn’t have its own parliament, and that is 50 million people without fair representation.
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4 comments:
London getting screwed? You're having a laugh, mate! Here's a breakdown from the Treasury of 'identified' spending in each part of the UK, from which you'll see that London is actually the best funded part of England:
NORTHERN IRELAND - £9,084.
SCOTLAND - £8,265.
LONDON - £8,037.
WALES - £7,666.
North East - £7,689.
North West - £7,368.
Yorks & Humber - £6,829.
East Midlands - £6,248.
West Midlands - £6,676.
Eastern - £5,864.
South East - £5,959.
South West - £6,634.
Of course, these figures don't include the £74bn of 'unidentified' expenditure, most of which goes to London and the South, the dripping roast of the 2012 Olympics, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, Docklands, the benefits of having most of the government apparatus etc ad nauseum...
Scotland has 1/12 of the UK population spread over 1/3 of the landmass, so it should not come as a surprise that Scottish ‘identifiable’ spending is above the UK average. What's London's excuse?
There's a strong case for an English Parliament, but it's got nothing to do with funding arrangements. If that's what you want, get on with making the democratic argument and stop hiding behind a meaningless 'English' figure to plead poverty in London.
The English obviously need all the help they can get, I'm in for a fiver if you need it.... but first, reinstate Wales on the flag.... no don't bother, we don't want the associations it entails !
If London is so well funded, then why does it still have 3 of the 5 poorest boroughs in the UK, not just England, but the UK.
London is chronically underfunded, this is shown by the fact that London makes much more money for the treasury and in return London doesn’t get that much back in return.
You should ask Londoners if they wanted the Olympics, most would now say not, especially as we are going to be funding the gap between the original estimation which had Londoners paying some of the money, and the new estimate, which goes up daily. Londoners know it would have been better just spending the money directly in the location it is being spent, as it would have produced much more, as the area chosen for the Olympics was already in dire need of regeneration.
Docklands, you are having a laugh. That so called regeneration cost a lot of Londoners affordable housing, and to top it off, we got a white elephant called the Dome, which if I recall, none of us actually wanted, so now we are saddled with another costly project from this government which was never needed.
If I recall, London doesn’t have most of the government apparatus anymore, for the past 20/30 years, they have shipped most of it out to the regions, to save money
Unlike in Scotland, we Londoners never got the local assembly we wanted; we got a neutered assembly, which doesn’t have any of the powers we expected. Then to top it off we were forced PPP for the tube, and many other PFI projects which are costing Londoners a lot of money which it shouldn’t. Admittedly this is the same for any PFI project in the country, but PPP for the tube was just an excuse for the friends of the government to make money out of Londoners. So we now have the most expensive metro system and the most unreliable.
With a population of over 8 million squeezed into a small area, this government ensures that London loses out.
I am glad at least you agree that the English need and deserve their own parliament to at least match the Scots if nothing else. But once you do that, you can be sure that the English will not be handing the Scots the subsidy that we currently do, that allows the Scots free university education, free healthcare that we English can’t get.
Treasury of 'identified' spending
- that exactly what it is - indentifiable, nothing about the rest of the invisible money that goes out of london such as the 20bn a year. not to mention the meaningless scottish spending figure presided over by a scottish mp.
best funded is not judged by the fiscal amount, but rather by the amount vs the need, the budget.
scotland does well and can afford the benefits(education etc) that we all pay for and rightly so. london has greater needs such as regeneration which the govt has chosen pfi,ppp and olympic projects as a vehicle rather than direct injection. when was the last time you heard of an olympic project breaking even or including to provide so called affordable housing. scotland will benefit from the toursim that olympic 'fever' will bring,
the channel tunnel rail link will boost house prices maybe, but make areas unaffordable and channel tunnel company is in financial trouble, docklands! - have you been there ?! - its souless and vastly over priced. so much for the so called dripping roast, withered up leather more like.
Edinburgh would be more of a dripping roast. funding arrangements is the side effect of a uneven voting arrangment that the scotish MPs are part of. hence the desire for a seperate english assembly that takes back fiscal control.
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