Ken Clarke to propose a dog's dinner for England!

The West Lothian Question has been asked again. The Conservatives are thinking like mad, especially those in the Democracy Task Force set up by David Cameron. But I fear they've failed to make good grades. No straight A's coming from Ken Clarke.

He's implacably opposed to an English Parliament. "We've got one!", he says, meaning the Houses of Parliament at Westminster. This Victorian pile is the British Parliament, build to glorify the political embodiment of the Empire. It is not an English parliament.

So we will get, as The Daily Telegraph reports, a compromise between those who want English votes for English laws and those who would leave things be (undemocratically so, but they wouldn't mind!). Legislation affecting only England, an education Bill, for instance, would receive a second reading by the entire Commons; but its committee stage, where the measure is subjected to line-by-line scrutiny and can be amended, would be for English MPs only. When the Bill came back to the Commons for its report stage and third reading, all MPs would again have a vote. But the Government would be bound to accept amendments agreed by the committee, or risk losing the legislation.

Non-English MPs still having a say. It's the current state of affairs with a dollop of royal Tory icing on top! We would still have two types of MP, still have part-time MPs job-sharing with MSPs, but we'd have the added dimension of report stage and third reading votes becoming rigged.

It's not what I want, and it is probably not what the majority in England want either, if a Newsnight Poll is anything to go by.