Lord Prescott has accused William Hague, the leader of the Commons, of a stitch-up, by trying to rush through reforms that will restrict the rights of non-English MPs to vote in the House on exclusively English matters.
Hague is due to present the outcome of his party consultations in a Commons statement on Tuesday and will press for a vote in the new year.
He is to put forward a range of different proposals, reflecting the inability of the parties to come to an agreement. Labour boycotted the interparty talks largely because it wanted the issue discussed at greater length and in the round, including the implications for the future of the House of Lords.
The most radical of the three options involves non-English MPs being excluded from all votes of an English-only nature, including the budget.
Other proposals suggest that only English and Welsh MPs be allowed to vote on such issues in a line-by-line scrutiny on a standing committee, but all MPs including Scottish ones be entitled to vote when a bill reaches its report stage and third reading. A third option is to give English MPs a veto over certain laws.
The technical difficulty is distinguishing between legislation that applies only to England and Wales, since some laws, although almost exclusively applicable to England, have a knock-on effect for Scotland as the junior economic partner in the union.
Hague wants a vote in the Commons in the new year that some Tories say will show the Conservatives as the only English nationalist party, while Labour hides from reform because it hopes its Scottish MPs will ensure it retains an overall Commons majority.
Speaking on the Today programme, Prescott said: “They can’t get an agreement about it. They’re rushing it before the election to make an election claim – ‘English parliament for English MPs’.
“This is such a stitch-up. They’re rushing through a major constitutional change. I support decentralisation. This is centralisation in an English parliament of 83%.”
Labour last week confirmed it backed an option proposed by the McKay commission of a committee stage made up of only English MPs.
Prescott said devolution that gave powers to England without matching decentralisation within the country would cause huge resentment in the north. He said London already had devolved powers that other cities and regions did not have.
Prescott has long been an advocate of powerful elected regional assemblies but the idea was rejected in a referendum in the north-east, the region thought most likely to accept the reform.
Since then, the continued devolution of further powers to Scotland and Wales has increased the call for matching devolution within England, and especially to elected city mayors representing not just a specific city but much of its immediate economic region.
Graham Allen, the Labour chairman of the public administration select committee, also criticised the narrow scope of the Hague reforms, saying: “The real debate is not about House of Commons procedure but about how local government can be the vehicle of devolution in England, the lessons which other nations of the union can learn from the Smith devolution package for Scotland, how each nation could be properly represented in our second chamber, how a democratic settlement could be agreed and codified intergovernmentally, and many other issues all of which Hague has ignored.”
