Is Labour ready to appeal unashamedly to England?

Is Labour ready to appeal unashamedly to England? Whilst many party members feel (as I do) more British than English, that actually makes it more important to answer the question. Because whilst the Labour Party has in the past decade been more than comfortable in speaking directly to Scotland (something which is obviously in focus at the moment) and Wales (somewhere that is obviously under fire from the Tories at the moment), the same can’t be said about England.

Sure, we’ve talked about “the North” and “the South”. The election, it is said, will be won in “the Midlands”. Despite living outside the North East for most of the past ten years I’ve always felt my Northern identity more keenly than my English one, but the boundaries of what is “Northern” and what is “Southern” are poorly defined. And most people in England, it’s clear, are quite unlike me. They probably don’t go out of their way to write “British” on all official forms. They’re English. They feel English. They identify as English. They’d describe themselves as English. Their Englishness is important to them.

But while Labour talks of the importance of more powers for Scotland, or the success that autonomy for Wales has brought, there’s still not much discussion of what Labour can offer England as a whole. Sometimes it’s implicit in what is being said, but that can sound to some like England is being taken for granted. We need to think about what a Labour brand of Englishness would look like. Or what Labour offers England distinct from Wales and Scotland. In six months time, that might be an even more important debate than it is now.

That’s why tomorrow on LabourList, to mark St George’s Day, we’ll be talked about Labour and Englishness on LabourList. With contributions from across the party – and kicking off with Billy Bragg’s first ever post for the site – we want to delve deep into what it means to be English, and what it means to be English and Labour.

To be fair to the party, it may be starting to get its head around the English question. Recent speeches by Ed Miliband and Jon Cruddas on devolving power allow the party to promise the people, regions and communities of England something different and new.

But whilst £20 billion is an impressive amount of resource to devolve, it’s important too for Labour to speak in terms of what powers will be held in local areas, and what role ordinary people – as opposed to Westminster politicians and local government chiefs – will have in deciding on spending priorities.

And polling released this week suggests that that the people of England do think too much power is centralised in Whitehall. Almost 2 in 3 voters (65%) agree ‘too much of England is run from London’. An even higher proportion of voters (70%) believe that ‘London receives preferential treatment over most other parts of the UK.’ 50% of voters said that more economic powers should be delivered at a local or regional level to allow local areas to develop their own economies – with 61% thinking that transport decisions should be taken locally. And it could have an electoral impact too, with 41% of voters saying that they’d be more inclined to vote for a party that put more power in their local area.

The poll was commissioned by Devolve Deliver – a campaign network of Labour supporters who want to encourage the next government to devolve economic powers to regions & local areas. They may be mining a rich seam. Our recent LabourList survey suggests that Labour members are even more enthused by the idea of devolving power down to communities than the public. If done right, this is certainly one way of developing a genuinely radical offer to England.

On St George’s Day, we’ll be trying to delve deeper into what Labour can offer – and what England wants.