England needs to take on the coalition as rest of Britain has

On this as on so many issues, people in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are still permitted to live in a recognisably British country.

Given the option, so would people in England.

What is happening to our health service was not in the Conservative or the Liberal Democrat manifesto in 2010. Had it been in the Conservative one, then there would have been a Labour overall majority.

Therefore, Labour ought to demand an England-wide, England-only referendum on the coalition's plans for the NHS. Not in 2017, but this year, and as early as possible this year.

This is, in point of fact, about the constitutional status and the fundamental identity of England as a British country.

The easily predictable result would properly banish once and for all the presently ubiquitous loony right.

With its immediate access to both parts of the present government. And with its highly favoured access to Any Questions, Question Time, Newsnight, the Today programme, The Daily Politics, and so on.

Those might then have to give space to some authentically British voices of one nation politics, with an equal emphasis on the "one" and on the "nation," and which not only understood that the two were inseparable (the loony right fully understands that, just as the loony left did 30 years ago), but which celebrated each precisely by reference to its inseparability from the other.

David Lindsay

Lanchester