Changing England’s borders
One of the main reasons there are so many people in favour of separate parliaments for Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland is that England is dominating the UK so heavily.
Just look at the pie chart on the right – England constituted 84% of the UK’s population in 2001.
I therefore decided to investigate some ways of fixing the English problem by changing England’s borders. I’ve mainly used the English Regions for the following maps and figures.
My first idea was to extend Scotland (adding Cumbria and the North-East) and Wales (adding Cornwall and the rest of the South-West), bringing both up to about eight million inhabitants.
It’s nowhere near enough, though – England is still more than big enough to run the show undisturbed.
To make this approach work, I guess Scotland would have to be extended all the way down to the Humber, and Wales would have to encompass the West Midlands, but that would completely undermine the Scottishness of Scotland and the Welshness of Wales.
My second idea was to split England into East and West along a line extending down from the Pennines, but that isn’t enough, either: East England would be able to run the show on their own (but only just – moving a few counties such as Hampshire from East to West would take the East down under 50%).
One might also argue that Cumbria is much more similar to Northumberland than to Somerset, so it might not be a very natural split.
I also wonder whether London would dominate the East so strongly that the genuine needs of the peripheral areas would be completely overlooked.
Another option would be to create a Greater London by merging London with the East and South East of England. This would actually work fairly well – although Greater London would be a lot less populous than the Rest of England, it would probably be able to hold its own given the way London dominates the whole of the UK.
This might also be a very good way for the remainder of England to build up a identity separate from London, perhaps centred around Manchester or Birmingham.
Finally, I tried to recreate the Danelaw. This would actually balance the two halves of England very neatly and would from a mathematical point of view be the best solution. However, it would place London on the border (just south of it, to be precise), and I’m not sure whether that’d be a good or a bad thing.
From the point of view of Danelaw, its economy would be hugely influenced by London (and many people would be commuting from Danelaw into London), but it wouldn’t have any influence on over it.
From the point of view of non-Danelaw England (Wessex?), it would completely dominated by London, although it would be in periphery.
The effect of the new government in Scotland
If I haven’t blogged very much about the new UK government, it’s mainly because it’s so hard to blog about from a Scottish perspective.
Most of the interesting things they do don’t apply to Scotland, and you can only blog so much about their deficit reduction plan.
I’ve found two good articles about this.
The first one is by Iain Macwhirter:
[F]rom a Scottish perspective it’s hard to pass much of a judgment on the performance of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition so far because, in terms of domestic policy at least, it’s almost completely passed Scotland by. Of the many initiatives that have been launched by the coalition in its first 100 days, very few actually apply here, apart from the deficit reduction programme and that hasn’t been implemented yet.
The second one appeared in the Caledonian Mercury, and it describes well how radical the new government is in England:
England is embracing the free market, a smaller state and weaker local authorities and Scotland is sticking with what it’s got – comprehensive education, a totally state-run health service and powerful councils.
…
So, if all this is happening in England, where does this leave Scotland? The blunt answer is: in a mess. Scotland is going to get the cuts but without the reforms. It is going to see swathes of public servants thrown out of work but without anything new structurally to take their place.
Although it might not have been the coalition’s intention, I think it’s becoming abundantly clear why Scotland needs full independence, or at the very least full economic autonomy. The alternative is the abolishment of Scottish devolution, and that wouldn’t go down very well north of the border!
Nobody will stand up for Scotland abroad
Joan McAlpine has an important point about the al-Megrahi affair (hat-tip: SNP Tactical Voting), namely that both the UK and the US are saying Scotland’s government were wrong to release him, but there’s nobody on the international stage to fight Scotland’s corner:
Since foreign affairs are not devolved to Edinburgh, David Cameron officially speaks for us. On this occasion he trashed us in front of the world. Where were we? We should have had a right to reply at least. After all, Scottish troops are fighting and dying in Afghanistan, as they did in Iraq, to support America. Would Obama and Cameron have condemned a friendly, independent sovereign nation like this?
Even those who disagreed with the decision to free al-Megrahi should agree that this situation is untenable – the US government should be discussing this issue with Alex Salmond, not with David Cameron, and only independence will resolve this issue.
Bad news aplenty
The economy is still producing plenty of bad news.
For instance, the day before yesterday it was reported that the UK recession was even deeper than first thought (at 6.4% rather than 6.2%), which means it was definitely the worst one since the 1930s.
The same day we got news of a Chinese rating agency which claims that its Western competitors are biased towards the West, and it duly placed the UK at AA-, compared to AA+ for China and Germany. This doesn’t change anything at the moment, but if banks start taking these ratings into account, it could lead to debt repayment getting much more costly for the UK and other Western countries.
Finally, the ONS has now counted the total indebtedness of the UK, and it adds up to about £4 trillion, compared to the standard national debt, which currently stands at just £903bn.