England for the English

Austerity will affect the whole of the UK, but most of its blows are landing on England. In Scotland, if you go to your GP – who will not be commissioning services under the lansley plan because it doesn’t apply there – and he gives you a prescription, it does not cost you the £7.40 it costs you in England; it’s free.

Your forests are not for sale, because Westminster does not have the power to sell them. Your libraries, schools and sports centres cannot be closed by the coalition either.

If a Scottish student goes to university in Edinburgh, it’s free, and the state pays for the courses. English students pay through the nose. This looks achingly unfair.

But it has happened for a reason. The reason is that the Scottish have their own government, which acts as a buffer against decisions made in Westminster. Why do the Scots have this? Because of decades of campaigning by a population determined to assert its sovereignty.

A similar situation applies in Wales. Is it fair that Scottish and Welsh MPs can make our laws while we can’t make theirs? That the devolution settlement has given the people of three of the four British nations a vote on their national destiny but denied it to the largest?

That Scottish citizens get more money from the Treasury per head than the English? That we are the only nation in Europe without our own government or parliament? None of it is fair. But if we want it to change we have to do something, In the name of our historic freedoms, we could call for English home rule – for the return of the English parliament, lost like that of the Scots to the Act of Union.

This would give us a national narrative a million miles away from the establishment tale of royal weddings and military interventions. At heart, this is an issue of sovereignty.

When the Scottish reclaimed their nationhood from Westminster, they asserted the sovereignty of their citizens. The English case is the same. Who owns the English NHS, English forests, English libraries? Not David Cameron. Not the British state: It’s the English people that owns them.

I hear lots of people moaning about all the above, but what are we the English prepared to do about it? It's time to stand up and be counted! We need and English parliament now.

David Miller, Rotherham Road, Maltby.