kenneth.scot

It is common for people from outside the United Kingdom to refer to the UK as “England”, either in English, or using the equivalent word in other languages. English people often do the same, and for many making a consistent, precise distinction between England and the UK can be a challenge - if indeed it is not viewed simply as unnecessary pedantry or “semantics”. However, if England ≡ the UK, and Englishness ≡ Britishness (≡ means “is equivalent to”), the implication is that a Scot who identifies as British can also just as well be identifying as English. That is manifestly absurd - not because there is anything wrong with being English, but because Scottishness and Englishness are clearly two different things. For Britishness to make sense for the parts of the UK that aren’t England then, Englishness must be distinct from - and not equivalent to - Britishness. (The alternative is that we accept Englishness and Britishness are effectively synonyms, and therefore that England has e...

At the end of this month, almost four years after that now infamous referendum, the United Kingdom will almost certainly leave the European Union. However, beyond the small matters of Brexit and the country’s future relationship with the EU, 2020 is likely to be a year of significant constitutional change for the UK in other respects - in particular, the moving forward with the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 , as promised by the Conservatives (and Labour) in their 2019 general election manifesto, and further trailed in the second Queen’s Speech of last year. The popular view is that the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is bad legislation - monstrous and Kafkaesque even - which should be purged from the UK statute book at the earliest opportunity. In the most simplistic version of this school of thought, we would simply return to the status quo ante, where prime ministers could call elections on a whim for naked partisan advantage - the great British traditional way (thoug...