Labour’s Great Britain: Remodeling Westminster © Peter Weber
Page 3
Dec 20, 1999
Regionalism in England ?
A solution could be the creation of regional assemblies and governments even in England, but this would be another rupture of political tradition in a central state that has known over centuries only the central government and local administrations (counties, shires and towns). In observation of the European Union's principle of subsidiarity, Blair's Labour has already decided that local administration should have a bigger role and therefore they have reestablished the London council abolished by Mrs. Thatcher in 1986. The candidates for the election of the new London mayor early next year are already warming their muscles .
Government levels are multiplying anyway. Beyond London, Edinburgh, Cardiff and the local administrations there is especially the new supra-national center in Brussels which is interfering more and more into British life. Moreover, the structures of the European Union's program for the development of depressed areas have already put the need for some kind of regional administrations. Recently eight English Regional Development Agencies (RDAS) have taken up their work on April 1st 1999. Together with Greater London they form nine macro-regions which could one day become the nucleus of some kind of regionalism in England, a significant contribute to the concept of a "Europe of regions".
The Irish question
One of Europe's most troubled regions is Northern Ireland, according to the 19th-century prime minister William E. Gladstone "the one and only conspicuous failure of the political genius of our race". After a long and sanguinary history of conquests and rebellions, Ireland had been annexed to the United Kingdom through a parliamentary act in 1800, but after a bloodstained independence war in the years 1919-1921, the three southern provinces of Ireland (Leinster, Munster and Connaught) were granted home rule. During World War II Ireland stayed already aside and after the war it became completely independent and a Republic, still with the exception of the mainly protestant northern province of Ulster. In the early 70s the conflict between catholic "Republicans" and protestant "Unionists" escalated and the partial home rule of the Belfast Stormont was abolished.
After the "Good Friday Agreement" of April 1998 the peace process in Ulster, though still fragile, has grown new hopes. In a definite settlement the Irish of the Ulster province can hope to reach at least an autonomy similar to Scotland. If working, the Scottish example could even have some positive effect on the peace process in Ulster. To get the former enemies in Ulster around a table, London has agreed to form two inter-parliamentary commissions, a North-South council of the two Irish parliaments in Dublin and Belfast and a British-Irish council of all parliaments of the British Isles.
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