Scrapping English votes for English laws could spell trouble

It has been almost 45 years since Tam Dalyell first asked the West Lothian Question. It is a damning indictment of devolutionary unionists that they are still flailing for an answer.

Dalyell, a Scottish Labour MP with the uncommon foresight and courage to oppose his party’s embrace of devolution, first posed it during the parliamentary debates that teed up the first referendums in 1979:

‘For how long will English constituencies and English Honourable members tolerate … at least 119 Honourable Members from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland exercising an important, and probably often decisive, effect on English politics while they themselves have no say in the same matters in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland?’

He asked it so often that Enoch Powell proposed the ‘West Lothian Question’ as a shorthand, naming it for Dalyell’s constituency.

Labour’s answer, which typified the high-handed and short-sighted approach to constitutional reform adopted by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and Donald Dewar, was ‘stop asking it’.