“We need to have an arrangement whereby the regions, and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland, are better represented in the House of Lords” – Lord Falconer

Since New Labour came to power a new meme has taken hold in the corridors of power of the United Kingdom. That meme is The English Regions or, more simply put, The Regions.

What they are actually referring to when they use this insulting terminology is the nation of England, a nation to which New Labour has refused to afford the same level of distinct political representation that it has given to the other parts of the United Kingdom. Parts like Scotland, Wales and the soon to follow Northern Ireland have all received a good measure of devolution resulting in their own national parliaments and assemblies. Not so for England, which New Labour wishes to see represented only on a regional level by unelected regional assemblies, effectively breaking England up politically into nine distinct regional parts with no national political voice each with less power than the political institutions given to other British nations.

England is, they imagine, too big for its own parliament. It would be, they imagine, too expensive to bring equality to the people of England. It is, they imagine, too dangerous to the British Union for England to be treated as a nation in its own right on a par with other Union members.

“It’s entirely our fault. We didn’t really know what we were doing” – New Labour member closely associated with the devolution project

Since devolution New Labour decided to use the regional name for England in the hope that it takes hold as an accepted term. They have no real answer to the inequalities that unequal devolution has unleashed upon England and their regional agenda, unpopular as it is, is all that they have to offer. They hope that we will get used to their insulting terminology, in much the same way that many of us have grown used to using centigrade instead of Fahrenheit or grams instead of ounces. Well, nations don’t work like that. We are the people of England and we know what you are up to.

There are a growing band of people who will never accept The English Regions as a legitimate term for our nation. We find it insulting. We know who we are and what we are and we know that we live in a place called England.