Well butter my butt and call me a biscuit–reading BBC on all the fireworks, I just learned that England does not have a Parliament.
Huh? THE Parliament, that we Yanks know and love, must be then (by my ratiocination), the U.K. one, and Scotland has one, with some sort of secondary power or prescribed limits. I know it’s not US Federalism, but that’s all I got.
How is that explained to the English English?/Has it been challenged before?–or has that never been much of an issue until the current crisis?, which leads to
It is being bruited about (isn’t that a great word) that Scotland and Northern Ireland, the “Leave” territories, will put their foot down within the next decade or so, leaving a United Kingdom of England and Wales (the London “Leave” territory I presume will have to grin and bear it).
So much of the future after Brexit is “who knows,” but some necessary organizational/political/bureaucratic steps in that event are already known and will be attended to in due order. Similarly, anything on the books for the Untied Kingdom? (That joke was actually written by Apple Autocorrect.)
IF/when the UK is no longer, what will it be called? Will Parliament have to reinvent this oldnew country called England+Wales? What, most likely, will be the first legal acts required? I presume these questions and semi-answers came up in the recent Scottish referendum.
The reason is historical. Traditionally, since the Union, the United Kingdom has been thought of as a unitary state, meaning there is only one level of statehood. Consequently, there was only one Parliament, that of the UK. In the 20th century, regionalism developed, most strongly in Scotland, but also in Wales and Northerm Ireland. This regionalism took the form of anti-centralism, directed against the principle that all of legislation would emanate from the Parliament at Westminster. Now it is a simple fact that the UK Parliament is in London, and that in terms of history, population, economy and all other important metrics, England is by far the dominant of the four countries that make up the UK, being far bigger than all the others combined; that’s why the regionalism also tended to go along with an anti-English attitude. When, in the 1990s, it was decided to give Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland their own Parliaments, England was not given one, simply because there was, for the reasons explained, no comparable regional movement in England. The UK Parliament is considered to be eheavily dominated by England anyway.
Are there people who are dissatisfied with tbhis set-up? Sure, but so far there has not been reform. Those issues that are governed, for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, by the regional Parliaments, are governed for England by the UK Parliament, including the members from the other countries.
It is also important to realise that, in a conceptual sense, the regional assemblies in the UK are very different from state legislatures in the U.S. In the U.S., the idea is that states, conceptually, pre-exist the federal level, because the country as such is made up of states. The states have their sovereign statehood powers out of their own right, merely by being states; the federal government has only the powers explicitly granted to it by the Constitution, everything else remains with the states. In tha UK, on the other hand, the regional assemblies were set up by the UK Pariament, and derive their law-making powers from a delegation of powers to them by the UK Parliament, which could also revoke that delegation and assume those powers itself.
The fancy word for this is devolution, which is very different from the federal model of statehood in the US.
As a more familiar example, the local government of Washington, DC is a devolved government, which was created by and exists solely at the pleasure of Congress. Same with territorial governments like Puerto Rico or the former mainland territories (all of which have since become states.)
And while state governments in the US are sovereign, municipal governments within states are all devolved from the state government.