England's California dreaming

I hate the heat. With the temperature around 33 celsius Southern England is hotter than West Coast California today. We also have a water shortage, urban sprawl, unrelenting development, a political make-up of conservative suburbs and rural area with multi-cultural liberal metropolis at their heart. If London is LA, Brighton, I guess takes role of the San Francisco. In the heat haze, even the local semis with England flags still stubbornly on display weeks after the World Cup and SUVs parked on paved over front gardens look weirdly like US homesteads

The contest for the Mayor of London provides a hint of populist politics with Ken Livingstone a sort of English Schwarzennegger –although maverick party politicians not a celeb – and the Tories have thrown their selection contest open with US style primaries in the offing. On the other hand, we notably lack the mechanism for US citizen initiatives to trigger referenda and decent air conditioning.

Add to this the revival of the English Question and one can see that politics in London and the South East, that most English of English regions, is indeed realigning in unpredictable ways, the Tories under David Cameron having finally worked out that the break-up of the United Kingdom along loosely confederal lines is both to their advantage and can easily be achieved by excluding Scottish MPs at Westminster from votes on home policy issues, which affect only England and Wales because of the devolution of power on most domestic policy in Scotland matters to the Scottish Parliament. The same logic could exclude Northern Irish MPs especially if and when the Northern Ireland Assembly restarts – a little boosting of the Welsh Assembly’s powers and the Westminster parliament becomes on most issues a de facto English Assembly.

As several journalists on the left such as the Guardian's Jackie Ashley have noted the effect of separating out England as a political unit would, of course, be to shift the political balance to the Tories. So, they argue, although the ‘West Lothian’ question – the democratic deficit implied about Scottish MPs voting on policies than can only affect England and Wales, but not their own constituents – is pretty much irrefutable, why both to open a constitutional whole can of worms simply to hand political cards to the Tories? As readers’ noted in responses, this is a weak argument. Labour can win in England and outpolled the Tories in England in 1997 and 2001 and in 2005 polled only 58, 000 less and still gained a majority of English seats: 286 to 194 for the Tories, 47 Lib Dems and 2 independents. As Channel 4 research shows, in terms of parliamentary votes too the West Lothian effect is totally overstated

A more likely effect of England-only politics then would be to kill off kill of traditional British Social Democracy and entrench some form of New Labour politics able to pitch a cross-class centrist appeal including suburban middle class voters - the famed Mondeo Man encountered by Blair in 1992, who didn’t vote Labour then but did in 1997. This would add to the Californication of the South East, where even now New Labour is patchily organized force outside London, more part of a loose non-Tory bloc vaguely equivalent to the US Democratic Party including liberals and occasionally Greens.

Playing the English card would, of course be a risky move for the Tories. In itself it wouldn’t guarantee power and would also probably lead to the break-up of the United Kingdom – the logic of all (con)federations not held together by authoritarian means with one over-dominant partner. David Cameron might set England, the underrepresented heartland of a defunct Empire, on course towards national autonomy, rather as Boris Yeltsin did with Russia in 1990-1 and still not find himself in hung parliament having to negotiate with the Lib Dems over electoral reform or negotiate some Czech style minority government with no hint of a restored Tory ascendancy even in a rump UK probably consisting - given the anxieties of Ulster Unionists - of England and Northern Ireland - a sort of Serbia and Montenegro of Western Europe