to think that Labour should not support Scottish MPs voting on things that only affect the English?

[ghostland]

I think Labour are being very hyprocritical and self-serving. Obviously the Tories left them in a pickle by dropping this on them but I think it is pretty outrageous that Labour think it is ok for the Scots to have devolution but not ok for the English to have something similar (to stop Scottish Labour MPs from voting on things that only affect the English). Obviously they are worried about losing the power that their Scottish Labour MPs give them but this just makes them look confused, corrupt and hypocritical, not to mention it's completely unfair to English voters.

I agree that only English representatives (whether that's MPs or something else) should be able to vote on issues which only affect them.

But I'm pissed off that Cameron is tying this issue into the promised devo-max that (may or may not have) swayed Scottish voters in the Referendum.

This way he has the choice to -

1. Steamroller through some legislation which works in his favour

Or 2. Blame the Labour party for the delay, and/or for watering down the promised changes because of the complications inherent in changing the system in England.

So Scotland won't get what was clearly and unambiguously promised, and Cameron will duck the blame. Then the Scots will get pissed off again because they were suckered. And the English will get more pissed off at the Scots for having more autonomy than them, and we'll be so busy getting narky at each other that MPs will quietly change the system to suit themselves while we don't spot it.

I agree the West Lothian Question needs to be addressed. But that's been needed since devolution started (and even before), so why not have a proper think about what to do to fix that, separately from coming through on what people were promised up here?

mum I can think the two can be implemented concurrently provided they are enacted independently. Indeed I think it must be done that way to avoid the situation SDT refers to upthread.

SDT hard to get too excited about that then. Problem is that UKIP won't publicise that distinction to their cult followers.

Majestic I think it would nice if people stuck to the original purpose of thread but I'm not optimistic given my experiences on other threads!

Thing is, this is not that simple, and whilst I disagee with Miliband, he does have a point. Devo max includes taxation amongst other things. If you then devolve that power to England and English MP's only, where does that leave the Treasury if the revenue collected from English residents is not enough to allow the budgets for the areas that Devo max does not apply too.

For once Cameron has been a bit sharp, but this cannot be knee jerk and rushed through at the same time. There were promises to the Scots which must be upheld before we go into points scoring between the UK parties.

Despite the perception of many that this is a tory government, it isn't. It's a coalition with the Lib-Dems and they are against rushing it through too, whilst the principle is clearly right, the timing is hasty even though it was in the Tory manifesto at the last election.

Bobywash is so right. The relationship between HOC and national or local government is very complicated. It is just Not constitutionally nor legally possible however reasonable it may sound.

The more I think about this, the more I think it's an absolute minefield. Should we stop MPs with rural constituencies voting on heavy industry issues? Stop MPs with inland constituencies voting on fisheries policy? Stop MPs whose constituencies are no-where near the route voting on HS2? I don't envy the person who gets to sort this one out!

We shouldn't shy away from this because it is too difficult. It is anti-democratic and just plain wrong. Scottish MPs have control over their education and health policy, but they can vote on things which don't affect them. This actually happened, so it not a moot point. 46 Scottish Labour MPs voted for the introduction of tuition fees in England, even though this vote did not affect Scottish students, whose tuition remained free.

I read a great article in the FT on this which pointed out that by opposing this or avoiding it Labour are admitting that they don't believe they can win in England. But they can, they did before, they just have to be a bit more centre left than communism where they are now

And the government passed their legislation by just 5 votes.

sorry x-post. I'll shut up now.

There's some Labour spin doctor messages being quoted on here with the ridiculous devolution to various areas of the Uk and the only MPs who have certain characteristics can vote for legislation that affects them nonsense.

I would have more respect for the Labour Party if it just admitted that Scottish Labour MPs should not be voting on laws that do not affect their own constituents.

It's a no brainer and just makes the deniers look sleazy and untrustworthy,

the VoteforEngland petition that was launched last night already has almost 8000 signatures.

WetAugust do you know the link for the petition?

I can't post a link but it's called VoiceforEngland and it now has 8000 signatures

I am confused as to why there is such an uproar about a few scottish mps being able to vote on English issues but its seen as completely acceptable that the millions of people living in Scotland Wales and N Ireland have no means of choosing which party governs them.

Eh?

Well, you'd have to pinpoint exactly which issues affect England only. And then be sure that those issues will not, at any stage, have an effect on Scotland (or the rest of the UK, not sue why there's an issue with Scottish MPs voting on English-only issues and not Welsh/N. Irish). I think that would be very hard to do.
And then I suppose they would have to justify things affecting only Scotland which are ultimately decreed by Westminster. I don't think it's as straight-forward as it looks, but I do support the idea of devolved powers within England and the rest of the UK.

I think the idea is that they will introduce a 'complicated' voting system to rectify the situation. I think I would probably prefer that than yet another Parliament. We did have Regional Assemblies at one time, SW, NW, SE etc based on EU boundaries but they were a complete waste of time and money and didn't do much so were abolished. Yes it's true that Labour will lose a lot of 'blocking government' power in England - so the only answer is they will just have to up their game in England and get more English constituency MPs.

It may be worth looking across the water ... the US seems to manage to accommodate huge states like California (with over 10% of the entire population) alongside tiddlers like Wyoming. Of course that's a federal system, where each state is sovereign in all matters except those where it isn't (it makes more sense if you read the constitution). It's in effect a similar setup to the relationship between the UK and the EU.

Except it's democratic.

Personally I've always felt an electoral system based on proportional representation where the winners go to the lower house (cf HoC) and the runners up go to an upper house (cf HoL) which has less power, but can examine and amend legislation. That way government would be made up of the majority of views, so become more inclusive.

Sadly, revolutionary changes to constitutions tend to require ... well ... revolutions.

As soon as we voted for a new Scottish Parliament way back in 1998 this should have been addressed.
Its absolutely not fair that political parties could possibly use MPs who's constituents won't be affected one way or an other to change things for those who will.
Who knows how to sort it, probably the fairest way would be to become properly federal with only things like defense left to the national government. However, we're not going to see that because as has become more and more clear to me over the past few years, politicians aren't in it to serve to population, they only care about preserving their own power base.