Do we need an English Parliament?
That is the question that Henderson and Wyn Jones, professors at Edinburgh and Cardiff, seek to answer using the tools of survey research. In response to an earlier survey, one angry interviewee expressed the hope that Scotland would bloody well hurry up and become independent so that everyone would shut up and people would stop doing all this stupid research about bloody national identity. The work of Henderson and Wyn Jones, however, is far from stupid. They have been carrying out sophisticated research on English attitudes since 2011. Their resulting book  full of insight, and with a clarity not always present in the work of social scientists  leaves the reader in no doubt as to the growing strength of English identity as a factor in British politics. The most popular option for the English, they discover, is English votes for English laws, introduced by Cameron in 2015. This device gives English MPs a veto on English legislation on such matters as health and education, even if such legislation enjoys the support of a majority of MPs in the Commons as a whole. The effect has been to create a kind of English Parliament within Westminster, parallel to the legislatures in Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont. But such a rejigging of the legislative furniture was always likely to prove, in the authors words, a political slogan rather than a solution to the English problem. The arrangements have proved incomprehensible to most MPs, let alone the wider public, and the discussion on English bills has been perfunctory, most lasting for around two minutes. So this device has not remedied the sense of powerlessness felt by the English; and Boris Johnson proposes, rightly in my view, to repeal it. Henderson and Wyn Jones find only minority support for this, even among those identifying most strongly with Englishness. An English Parliament would be just as remote from voters as Westminster, and there is little enthusiasm for a new layer of politicians and officials interposed between Whitehall and local government. If the answer is more politicians, as John Major once said, you are asking the wrong question. Even less popular an option is regional devolution, dividing England into seven or eight regional authorities. When, in 2004, Tony Blair called a referendum in the North East, the region thought to be the most sympathetic to devolution, it was rejected by a crushing majority of four to one. In England, the regions are ghosts. Few of those living in Canterbury or Bristol, say, feel they belong to a region. Federalism does not suit the English, and they have always resisted it.