England might yet review the state of the Union

In both parts of Ireland March 17 is a public holiday, as is November 30 in Scotland. But April 23 passes unmarked in England. While their Celtic neighbours celebrate St Patrick’s Day and St Andrew’s Day out of national pride, the English have almost forgotten St George. A few red-on-white flags will be flown and roses worn but otherwise it is business as usual.

Such self-effacement might have been understandable when it went with self-confidence. For a thousand years the British Isles were dominated politically, militarily and economically by the English; Celtic nationalism has been founded on resentment of that fact. But today the English have reason of their own for bitterness. Devolution is a gross injustice towards them – they make up, after all, four-fifths of the British population. English vexation is stimulated further by the preponderance of Scots in the present government and has been given a final twist by a financial implosion that looks almost like a Caledonian conspiracy.

Until the 20th century, the Celtic fringes paid more into the Union than they got out. But that changed with the growth of the welfare state. For most of the past century Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have been generously subsidised by the English taxpayer, while Scotland in particular remained heavily over-represented at the Westminster parliament in terms of population. It was illogical and inequitable but it was a working compromise.

The compromise is now broken. Devolution is sometimes described as a success but that can only mean a success for Scotland, which has achieved not so much a favourable deal as an outright imposture. Domestic legislation in Scotland is now the preserve of the Edinburgh assembly and not the Commons at Westminster. Meanwhile, Scottish MPs remain at Westminster in numbers that have been slightly reduced but are still excessive. There, while they cannot vote on domestic questions affecting their own country, they can and do vote on those of England. This was once largely a grievance of the Conservatives, who have had no MPs in Scotland since 1997, and Labour gloated over their discomfiture.

But then it dawned on English Labour MPs that the outcome might be an injustice for them too. If it was wrong in theory that Scottish MPs could vote on English legislation, there was something even worse in practice. Scotland serves as one big rotten borough, an inert bloc of MPs voting dutifully for the government. As a result, even when a majority of English MPs voted against legislation on such contentious matters as foundation hospitals and university fees – for England, that is – these were imposed thanks to the votes of Scottish and Welsh MPs.

And who is leading this government? Why, none other than the Members for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath and for Edinburgh South West, Gordon Brown, and Alistair Darling. A hundred years ago, it was accepted that the prime minister could be H.H. Asquith, who sat in parliament for East Fife, with his chancellor David Lloyd George, who represented Carnarvon Boroughs in north Wales, while the young President of the Board of Trade was the Member for Dundee, Winston Churchill (no more a Scotsman than Asquith, as it happens). But devolution changed all that. It is now constitutionally absurd to have a Scottish MP as home secretary, which John Reid was for a time, and politically dubious to have a Scot as chancellor, which has been the case for 12 years: when Mr Brown succeeded Tony Blair as premier he made Mr Darling his own successor at the Treasury.

Perhaps the two men thought they would share the repute Scotland supposedly enjoyed for financial prudence and fiduciary rectitude. Today, the names of the Royal Bank of Scotland and Sir Fred Goodwin make that a painful joke. Mr Brown’s own reputation as a political economist, meanwhile, is almost in tatters.

Most economic commentators agree that the credit crisis is worse in the UK than in other advanced countries and that this is the responsibility of Mr Brown. After the carnage of the Somme and Passchendaele, the sour joke in the British army went that Sir Douglas Haig was the greatest of all Scottish generals because he had killed the most Englishmen. Can Mr Brown claim to be the greatest of Scottish politicians because he has inflicted the most economic harm on England?

Not long ago it was Scottish nationalists who demanded separation from England. On this St George’s Day, it is the English who might wonder whether they really want the Union any more.

The writer’s books include Yo Blair! and The Strange Death of Tory England