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Friday 23 December 2016

Answers to the “England is too big” to have its own Parliament argument

Answers to the “England is too big” to have its own Parliament argument


I have recently been hearing of several Tory MPs who have been doing the rounds making arguments against an English Parliament.


One of those is Sir Oliver Heald MP, who recently spoke at a meeting of Oxfordshire Conservatives, in which he claimed the reason why England could not have its Parliament and Government like the Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish ones was because England is too big at 85% of the population of the United Kingdom. According to him the provision of an English Parliament would apparently lead to the breakup of the Union because Federal States cannot survive where one part of the State is 85% of the Federation.


On hearing this I immediately responded that first of all one of the things that Federal States always do is have measures in place to balance out the dominance of their larger States. So for example in the United States, California is by far the most heavily populated US State and also the richest. However it only has two Senators, just like Oklahoma in the Federal Congress.


It is also the case that Oliver Heald’s argument does not hold water in terms of history.


The reason the Soviet Union collapsed was not because Russia was “too big”. The USSR collapsed because the Soviet system had become economically bankrupt, partly as a result of the Soviet defeat in war in Afghanistan, but also partly because of the attempt to match American defence spending with regard to Reagan’s “star wars”.


Equally Austro-Hungary did not collapse because Austria was “too big”, it collapsed because Austro-Hungary was defeated in war (also because of the idiocy of Woodrow Wilson’s refusal to negotiate with multi-national states!).


As Oliver Heald’s suggestion as to how to cope with England being “too big” is to split up England into “Regions” of one sort or another (the latest being “City Regions”), my response to him, and any of his ilk, is that any question to which the answer is to split England up is the wrong question.


If the choice is between splitting England up or splitting up the United Kingdom, I have no hesitation in demanding that the split is that of the vastly overrated, expensive, grandiose and laughably decadent United Kingdom.


When it was suggested, before the First World War, that Ireland should have Home Rule and the then Liberal Government forced through Home Rule legislation, Tory troublemakers stirred up Ulster with cries of “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”. How much more justification would we English have to fight if the cry was to split England up? Perhaps we should have a cry that “England will fight and England will be right”?


I mention the bloody history of Irish Independence intentionally because unthinking Tory unionists like Oliver Heald MP need to remember that it was Tory intransigence and the refusal to grant the reasonable request for a devolved Irish Parliament and instead the call for Ireland to be split which led not only to the bloodshed of the struggle for Independence but the still worse Civil War. This has stained Irish politics with blood ever since.


The idea that patriotic Englishmen and Englishwomen will not only indefinitely allow England not to have its own proper voice of political expression but also quietly sit by whilst over a thousand years of English history is discarded and England is broken up, is simply crazy. In fact it is not only crazy but it is utterly irresponsible!




3 comments:

  1. If it came to a choice between abolishing England for the sake of "Britain" or abolishing "Britain" for the sake of England I have no hesitation in saying - bye bye "Britain", but it's time for an independent England once again.

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  2. Perhaps people like Mr Heald should remember that England was once split up into "regions" or separate kingdoms that were at constant war with one another. I wonder if this is the future that he has in mind? It was united under Athelstan, largely as a way of coping with Viking incursions and those from Wales and Scotland; and it remained that way thereafter. We are under equal threats from those hostile to the English today. United we stand, divided we fall. Interestingly, the German Federal System has done nothing to help them unite against the terror threat. Indeed, states like Bavaria are talking of acting independently and closing their borders. I have just looked up the German Federal System and see that Bavaria has more than 12m people whereas Hamburg and Saarland have just over a million each. That means that Bavaria has 12 times as many people as Saarland which would equate to a ration of 5m to 60m for Scotland and England. I have not checked out how the system works but no doubt there are checks and balances as in the United States.

    Turning to another point, the election of President Trump and his determination to work together with Russia, led me to hope that at last we would have peace in the world and that those who continue to profit from mass bloodshed would be brought to heel. However, two appointments that he has made have set the alarm bells ringing. The first is the ultra-Zionist Friedman who does not believe in a two state solution to the Palestine problem - and I recently heard somebody say that this is the key to achieving peace in the Middle East. And the second is somebody who views China as a potential threat to South-east Asia and the United States. China is arming itself; no surprise when - as Russia - she feels herself to be surrounded by potentially hostile American military power. The West talks of Russian aggression but Putin has just said that Russia is now sufficiently well armed to cope with aggression from outside. This has always been Russia's major concern after the bloody invasions of Napoleon and Hitler.

    My one hope as we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace is that Russia, which sits in the middle of the Eurasian-African landmass where around 6b of the world's 7b people live, will steer Trump in the right direction. If Russia is a friend to the United States and China then she can serve as the honest broker. And Putin, an ally of Iran, has been talking to the Israelis.

    As for the United States, no wonder that the bulk of people in the world view her as the greatest threat to world peace. The country is populated by paranoics who since its inception has viewed any other people as a threat to be removed. This is how she still sees the world and like all paraoics is ultra-controlling whilst in its isolation being totally unable to view the world from anybody else's point of view, knowing nothing of other countries, peoples and cultures and believing that it is the exceptional nation. My great prayer is that Russia is able to educate them before they bring about more mayhem and destruction.

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    Replies
    1. My guess is Trump will use Zionists to thwart Iran. OK Russia is allies with Iran, but Trump knows that the Zionists in the USA fear Iran. Putin knows that Iran could stab Russia in the back in an instant, and Trump knows this. So Trump is helping Putin by using Zionists to thwart Iranian ambitions.

      My guess is the Zionists know that they have gone too far and that their plans of world domination have disastrous side effects as evidenced by the rise of ISIS and Iran. Now ISIS attacks Israel, yes and Israel helped create a monster to engulf themselves.

      If muslims would just stop their jihad and Zionists stop their diabolical plans the two tribes could learn to live side by side and leave us alone, but if course neither side will let go. I regard Zionists and Islamists as one and the same, both are vehemently anti white European and anti Christian. Putin and Trump are astute enough to play those tribes against each other.

      Trump is no Zionist and neither is Putin.

      Francis

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