He’s running! Or at least jogging. So perhaps we should remind ourselves of Andy Burnham’s views on England.
One of Burnham’s arguments against an English parliament is that his heritage isn’t 100% English. Seriously!
No I wouldn’t have an English parliament. I’m born in Liverpool of Irish ancestry, Scottish links in the past, and close to Wales. I consider myself British.
This is a terrible, terrible argument. It’s an argument against a democratic, civic Englishness.
In the New Statesman, Anthony Barnett makes the contrary argument.
“imagine there actually is an English parliament, or an assembly selected by fair sortition. Or look at England’s football team. We, in our diversity, are the English. People can only disagree while we are deprived of any English assembly which actually represents us. People can go around saying the English are white, but it’s a nonsense. It’s not an expression of reality. It only thrives when there is no manifestation of reality.”
Burnham campaigned for English regional assemblies and, like Gordon Brown, would like the House of Lords to be reformed into a ‘Senate of the Regions and Nations’ in which Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are the nations and England is ‘the regions’. The House of Lords as presently constituted – full of cronies, party donors, bishops – is indefensible but reform should not be used to usher in the regionalisation that England has already rejected. And certainly not by a man who has no mandate. At the very least England deserves a constitutional convention to decide how she is governed.
And Burnham, on the off chance you are reading this, the UK Prime Minister (and therefore de facto fist minister of England) should know when St George’s Day is.
English Commonwealth 