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Introduction
In March 2009, there were 334 parties registered with the Electoral Commission, 11 of which included in their title the word 'Scotland' or 'Scottish', two included the word 'Wales' and 12 included the word 'England' or 'English'. Some of those registered are not parties by any classical definitions, such as Scotland Against Crooked Lawyers, or the True English Poetry Party (Ostrogorski, 1902; Michels, 1915; Sartori, 1976). Indeed, if notions of party relevance remain unreformed, the overwhelming majority of the 334 organisations on the Electoral Commission's register cannot be seen as relevant and effective political parties (Sartori, 1976). At the same time that the Scottish National Party was taking power at Holyrood, in the 2007 English council elections, English national parties were securing only 21 000 votes, and did not add a single council seat to the five already held.
The development of nationalist parties has been held to rest on the centre-periphery tension: that is the tension between a 'state' and its constituent nations or ethnicities (Urwin, 1983; Coakley, 1992; Hooghe, 1992 and De Winter and Türsan, 1998). In the context of the United Kingdom, the centre-periphery tension has been valuable for the development of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, but will it now pay dividends for English national parties and lead to the emergence of a pre-dominant English party? Indeed, by omitting England from devolution to the nations of the United Kingdom, has a spur been provided to the growth of English national party politics?
The introduction of devolved political institutions to Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales created a two-fold asymmetrical constitutional arrangement across the United Kingdom. First, there is an imbalance of powers and responsibilities between the three chambers; second, England, by far the largest of the nations of the United Kingdom, was excluded from these constitutional arrangements and offered only the prospect of being broken into regional pieces, rather than given a representative chamber and government of its own - an offer derailed by the decisive rejection, in a referendum held in November 2004, of a chamber for the North East of England. The exclusion of England from nation-based devolution in the United Kingdom rests on the fact that the three British unionist parties (Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat) made their...