Charles Kennedy: Lecture to the Scottish Council Foundation

There is, according to the old joke, no equivalent in Gaelic to the word mañana - nothing, as the crofter is supposed to have said to the tourist, "expressing quite that degree of urgency". By the same token, there is as far as I am aware no equivalent in Gaelic, or for that matter in English, to the word schadenfreude, a useful German expression meaning to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others. But it is not an emotion exclusive to the Germans.

Do I detect a certain schadenfreude among Scots at the apparent current turmoil among the English over their sense of national identity? If so, it is given extra savour because that crisis of identity is provoked at least in part by the creation of the Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales. Suddenly it is Scotland which is forging ahead in a grand constitutional experiment, and England which is poring over its national navel and asking: who are we ... and why?

Many in England once used the terms 'English' and 'British' interchangeably. Yet, in the wake of our constitutional revolution, the nature of Britain itself has changed. We no longer live in a unitary state, with a single common identity - representative bodies in Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland, and growing interest in regional government in England are focusing attention on the different ways we see ourselves. Britain is now more diverse than ever, with diverse identities: to be British today is more to accept values of tolerance and decency, and a spirit of innovation, rather than being about ethnic origin, religion or even language.

We are increasingly celebrating diversity, and this has implications for several policy areas. In particular, Britain needs much clearer rules for regulating relations between the constituent parts of the Union. Liberal Democrats have long argued for a written constitution for the UK. Now, more than ever before, this is an urgent need, if we are successfully to cope with the tensions that will inevitably arise from the existence of powerful bodies in Cardiff, Belfast, Edinburgh and London.

Supporting diversity also means that we should be taking action through a coherent race relations policy when harmony in this area is undermined, and providing refuge for genuine asylum seekers. We should be proud of the heritage of our isles, but we are an innovative and resourceful people who are not restrained by tradition. The idea of Britain now encompasses the Londoner whose grandparents came to Britain from the Indian sub-continent, and the Welsh man or woman whose family has tended the same farmland for generations. And we will all feel at different times that we belong to different groups - as someone who feels himself to be a Highlander, a Scot, a Briton, and a European, I am more comfortable in the new diverse Britain than I ever have been. The Britishness of the modern United Kingdom is a picture painted with a broad brush, but it is no less a work of art for that.

Yes - these are indeed remarkable times in the relationships between the nations of our isles. For a significant part of the twentieth century, and indeed during the latter years of the nineteenth, British politics has been beset with the problem of how to govern the non-English nations of the Union. First, we had the Irish Question, which exercised Westminster politicians for well over forty years until it was 'settled' in the early 1920s, only to re-emerge nearly fifty years on. By that time, of course, we also had Scottish and Welsh Questions to answer. It was many years until those of us asking those questions received a satisfactory answer.

Yet today, the Scottish and Welsh Questions have been answered basically to the satisfaction of all but the nationalists. We may even be on the verge of an answer to the Irish Question.

So the most remarkable feature of British politics today, is not that politicians are finally dealing with 'Questions' about Britain's non-English lands. It is that there is a new question - and it deals with England. The English Question, put simply, asks how England should be governed in the light of Britain's constitutional revolution. South of the border, people have suddenly realised that England has no democratic structure of its own, and that its affairs are dealt with through a British Parliament in which MPs from outside England sit. Some, most notably Teresa Gorman, have said that a separate English Parliament is the answer to the English Question.

I do not want to rule out an English Parliament, but there are problems with that approach. First, it is simply not true that an English Parliament would entirely solve the English problem, for the situation is not as simple as advocates of an English Parliament suggest. Under the current devolved framework, the Scottish Parliament has more powers than the Welsh Assembly, and they both have different powers to the Northern Ireland Assembly. This means that there are certain areas where Westminster legislates for England alone, but others where it legislates for combinations of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. To tackle this problem we might not need just one extra Parliament, but, conceivably, several - dealing with English, English and Welsh, English/Welsh/Northern Irish, and conceivably English/Northern Irish matters. Would this really make sense to the British people? Would it in any way reflect the identities of communities within the Union?

The second problem is that an English Parliament would do nothing to give voice to the serious regional differences within England. The population of England is vast compared with other parts of the Union. A national Parliament within the UK is all very well for the Scots with a population of five million, but will the forty-six million people of England really get something much more accountable than Westminster if an English Parliament is established? And, if an English Parliament was established in Westminster, as it surely would be, would the people of Newcastle, or Cornwall really feel that it is any less remote than the current UK Parliament? Within England, there are serious concerns in areas such as the North-East and the South-West, that the current Westminster Parliament treats these areas as peripheral. The regions of England are not bothered about Scots and others voting on English matters - they are far more concerned about decisions being taken in a far away place which seems to know nothing of huge swathes of England. An English Parliament would do little to meet these regional concerns.

The third problem with the idea of an English Parliament is that the English Question is itself misphrased. Surely we should instead be focusing far more on a new British Question - how do we create fluid structures which allow new relationships to develop between the different nations and regions of the Union? Instead of assuming that cities such as Bristol, Leeds and Newcastle want to look towards London all the time for their next level of government, we could be much more imaginative. If you live in Bristol, it is, by and large, far more easy to reach Cardiff than London. If you live in Newcastle or Sunderland, your nearest capital city is Edinburgh, not London. And if you live in Leeds, you are probably far more likely to think of that thriving city as the centre of a bustling region with international strengths, than you are to feel like a junior partner to London.

We need in other words, to rethink the idea of Unionism, so that it is no longer associated with the Conservative Party, or one community in Northern Ireland. A new Unionism in Britain should not be about treaties between capitals and crowns. It should be about relations between the regions of England, and the other nations of the UK, in which the North-East works with the Scots, and the South-West works with the Welsh, and both work with Europe, just has much as they feel subject to London. The new Council of Isles to be established as part of the Good Friday Agreement already offers exciting opportunities for liaison between the various UK capitals and Dublin. The English Regions should be added to this equation.

There was much wrong with the old Britain. It was the most centralised democratic state in Europe; it assumed that there was little regional diversity within England; and it gave the non-English nations of the Union with a profound sense of being ignored. In the past three years, the sweeping away of that old structure has been truly a sight to behold.

Yet we must not throw the idea of Britain itself out with the proverbial bathwater. The diversity of the Union gives us many strengths. Centuries of success and innovation have shown the British together to be a resourceful, tolerant and open-minded people, with much to learn from each other, and much to give to the wider world. Michael Ignatieff recently argued that "there is something intrinsically good about multi-ethnicity", and that this applied to the nations of the UK as much as anywhere else. "Let us remain together" he said, "so that we can continue our argument together". There are certainly great arguments to be had within our own nations in the United Kingdom. Yes, this means tackling the English Question. But, just as importantly, it means rethinking the way Britain as a whole is governed, and giving it new meanings in the next century.

Charles Kennedy: Lecture to the Scottish Council Foundation by Charles Kennedy MP, 30 June, 1999