The unintended consequences of a Hung Parliament that could change the UK forever

Among the speculation about who the Lib Dems will or won’t cuddle up with after the Election if we end up with a Parliament with no overall majority after the General Election next week, there is another issue that could arise out of the Coalitions on offer that could lead to a full blown constitutional crisis and calls for an English Parliament, an issue that has been bubbling away since we in Wales and Scotland voted for a Parliament and Assembly back in 1998, but like the West Lothian Question has largely been ignored and dimmssed by the mainstream media and politicians.

The reason according to Guy Lodge writing on the Our Kingdom website is to do with which parts of the UK the Coalition would represent, a minority Tory Government would have most support in England where as a Labour and Liberal Democrat Coalition would have most support in Scotland and Wales.

He writes ‘But what no one seems to have spotted – this is the second part of the argument - is that because of the polarizing territorial power bases of the main parties, crudely Tory England versus a Labour Celtic fringe, both a Tory minority government and a Lib-Lab alliance would open up an unpredictable and potentially destabilizing territorial dimension in British politics. The polls may be volatile, creating wide-spread uncertainty, but one thing they have consistently predicted, had anyone bothered to look, is that the Tories will win a majority of English seats. This means that a Tory minority government could be held to ransom by MPs from outside of England. More problematically, a Lib-Lab alliance would lack a majority in England meaning it would have to use its non-English MPs to govern England.

A Tory minority government won’t be a minority government in England. Most recent polls suggest that the Tories will get around 290 seats, almost all of which will be won in England. This would give them a working majority within England, but they would be 30-40 odd short of an overall UK majority (they will still be short even if you include the electoral pact they’ve signed with the Ulster Unionists and any hypothetical deals with the nationalist parties).

This fact radically changes the dynamics of minority government politics. The Tories can expect to haggle with the other parties to get UK-wide policy through the Commons but what happens if the other parties use their non-English MPs to veto policy that only applies in England? Labour and the Lib Dems could use their non-English MPs to block Tory policies they oppose such as elected police commissioners or their proposals to allow parents to set up their own schools, even though they would only apply in England, where the Tories would control a majority of the seats.

The Tories would be up-in-arms and left as frustrated as Harold Wilson was during his 1964-66 government, which had a majority of just four seats, and which was endlessly sabotaged by the action of MPs from Ulster who ganged up with the Conservatives to stall his plans for steel nationalisation, even though the policy did not apply in Northern Ireland.

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