Rumours say Gordon Brown contemplated putting his head in the gas oven on reading the ‘Calman Report’

LORD CALMAN REPUDIATES THE FUNDAMENTALS OF THE LABOUR & LIB-DEM PERSPECTIVE ON ENGLAND.

“ England is a nation with a single political identity”. With those words Sir Kenneth Calman in his Commission report has undermined and rejected the way both the Labour Party and the Lib-Dem Party have regarded England since the devolution legislation of 1998. Both parties have always opposed any constitutional and political measures which would treat England as what it has been for well over a thousand years: a distinct nation. Both parties have supported the balkanization of England into regions. But, says Calman, England must be recognized for what it is, a nation, “with a political identity at least as old as Scotland’s”.

He goes even further. ‘The regions of England do not have the same sort of political identity as Scotland. This fundamental aspect of the Union will always remain, and must not be ignored in its territorial constitution’. The Union set up in 1707 was a union of nations, nothing else. That is in every line of the 1707 declaration and Calman has reiterated that basic fact about it.

These assertions of the Calman Commission are the very last thing Gordon Brown wanted to hear it make. He set up the commission to undermine Alec Salmon’s ‘conversation for Scotland ’. Brown has constantly described the UK as “a union of nations and regions’, with Wales and his own Scotland as the nations and the regions being the very artificial ‘regions’ of England constructed by Brussels. Brown being that sort of Scot has no feeling for England’s distinct history and culture

The CEP has warmly welcomed this statement of the Commission. As the devolution debate takes the Union into new constitutional territory, it is pleased that a Government Commission has formally acknowledged the distinct national identity of England. “A single political identity” is the first and most essential requirement for one's own institution of government.

Michael Knowles CEP Media Unit

We must not forget that it is the British that are denying England its political recognition, the British MPs we have sent to parliament to represent England, it is these who are to blame. Until we have our own English MPs not British MPs representing England nothing is going to change.

No written constitution or any other major constitutional changes should be seriously discussed until the people of the United Kingdom have been given a chance by referendum to decide whether they want to stay in or come out of the European Union because that is fundamental to any decisions we have to make, and it effects the very existence of the nation state.