Have you ever wondered why no politician talks about rebuilding England? Why, when their housebuilding policies apply only to England, is it framed as ‘Rebuilding Britain’? Why are commitments to build English new towns, ripping up England’s planning laws and building on English grey belt framed as fulfilling the priorities of ‘the British people’? How is a pledge to build 1.5M new homes in England the answer to Britain’s housing crisis?
Reforms to planning apply to England, not Britain. Housing is devolved, planning is devolved, New Towns is an England-only policy, the New Homes Accelerator programme and National Planning Policy Framework are also England-only, and the pledge to build 1.5M new homes applies to England. Yet we only ever hear about these policies framed in a British context.
Simon Lee explains:
Despite their manifold differences over Brexit, the one thing which has continued to unite the leaderships of the UK’s three major political parties is their overt British nationalism. They share the conviction that political narratives of national renewal must mean British renewal, delivered via the institutions of the centralised British state.
Most recently, this has been manifested in May’s Plan for Britain. This policy purports to be aimed at building a “stronger, fairer” country, even though devolution to the administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland means that it can only really be a “Plan for England”.
May, Jeremy Corbyn, Tim Farron and others therefore have been observing one of the unwritten laws of British nationalism. This states that no party shall publish a manifesto for England during a UK general election campaign, because it might challenge the authority of the British state. It might jeopardise Westminster’s capacity to continue to govern England in the centralised, top-down fashion to which the British party political power elite have become accustomed.
Only once has this unwritten law been challenged. During the 2015 general election campaign, David Cameron and William Hague launched the Conservative Party’s first ever English manifesto. It was the first such manifesto by any major political party.
However, even then Cameron began his launch speech on the defensive, stating: “Let me be clear: we do not support English nationalists … we do not want an English parliament … we are the Conservative and Unionist Party through and through and through.”
That English manifesto can be read here. I’ve uploaded it and made it available because it has disappeared from the web, forgotten about, an embarrassing episode in the history of the Conservative and Unionist Party. But that shouldn’t be the case. All Westminster parties should be producing a manifesto for England There is nothing intrinsically nationalistic about an English manifesto, just as there is nothing intrinsically nationalistic about a UK, Scottish or Welsh manifesto. England has become a polity through subtraction rather than design. As legislative competence has been hived off to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, Westminster has become England-only for health, education, housing, social care, etc. An English manifesto merely recognises that reality and informs the English electorate of how politicians plan to fulfil the priorities of the English people. For it is the English people and England that these policies apply to, not Britain, and not ‘the country’.
Even the Tories’ English manifesto ended with the line ‘this is our detailed plan for Britain’. The vision and ambition was still British, and the branding was British, even though the document itself conceded that much of their policy platform was England-only.
English Commonwealth implores the parties of Westminster to draw up manifestos for England. It is time you stopped conflating England and Britain and time you stopped basing your British vision for change on England-only policy. Not only is it confusing for an electorate that does not necessarily know what is reserved and what is devolved, but it is also unfair to England and disrespectful to the other nations of the UK.
English Commonwealth 