The trouble with UKIP is that they are so focussed on the EU that they ignore the fact that the pressure to regionalise is now coming from constitutional imbalance within the UK.
Here's an extract from Robert Hazell's
new paper that illustrates my point:
Quote:
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But it is one thing to create such a federation, quite another to make it work. The fundamental difficulty is the sheer size of England by comparison with the rest of the United Kingdom. England, with four-fifths of the population, would be hugely dominant. On most domestic matters the English parliament would be more important than the Westminster parliament. No federation has operated successfully where one of the units is so dominant. Examples are the West Indies federation, in which Jamaica had more than half the population, and the first Nigerian federation and early Pakistan, where in both cases one of the states had more than half the population. In the postwar German federal constitution of 1949, Prussia was deliberately broken up INTO phpbb_five or six different states to prevent it being disproportionately large and dominating the new Germany. Although all federations have some units much larger than others, as a general rule among existing federations no unit is greater than around one-third of the whole, to avoid it dominating the rest. If this logic were accepted, England would need to be broken up INTO phpbb_smaller units for a federal solution to work--something that is anathema to the Campaign for an English Parliament.
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UKIP see English nationalists as the enemy and in doing so they play straight INTO phpbb_Blair's hands. UKIP should be joining with the Campaign for an English Parliament to counter regionalism.