Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State at the Department of Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, has decided to merge Sport England and UK Sport to reduce costs. He is also looking at the status of Visit England and English Heritage. Arts Council England is to be spared but it will be required to take on the work of the MLA, who are presently in charge of the Museums, Libraries and Archives of England.
Jeremy Hunt has no power to axe the equivalent organisations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, though I expect that the governments of those countries will have to cut their cloth accordingly once the spending cuts in England impact upon their budgets. But importantly they will have a choice. The Scottish Government will decide whether Scotland requires a national stand alone Arts Council; Wales will decide whether Wales, as a nation in its own right, is best served by its own stand alone Sports Council; and Northern Ireland will decide whether its culture is unique and important enough to warrant a distinct Hertitage body (as a point of interest the Northern Irish Heritage body is less distinct than the equivalents in the rest of the UK because the Northern Irish choose to consider natural and built heritage together under the auspices of the Northern Ireland Environment Agency).
England doesn't get a choice. The UK Government can decide at a whim to abolish the non-departmental English bodies that - in the absence of English government - provide the only tangible institutional recognition of English nationhood. And because the England-only non-departmental bodies fall exclusively under the command of Jeremy Hunt at the DCMS, England at a governmental level exists only at the discretion of Jeremy Hunt. Hunt will take his decisions purely on the grounds of cost, the issues of nationhood and cultural distinctness do not come into play as they do in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. No account will be taken on what is best for the governance of England; our sense of place, nationhood and identity will play second fiddle to the need to drive down the administrative costs of UK PLC.
Under Blair and Brown it was no different, England was adminstered as the rump of the UK rather than governed as a national community with its own distinct needs and policies. Administrative functions were devolved within England to 'regions' that ignored any sense of community, so that regional quangos could deliver UK Government policy in England under the guise of localism or regionalism, dictated to by the centre but without the sort of devolved autonomy provided to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. England was administered under the 'constrained discretion' of the Treasury, with policy dictated on the basis of cost and best delivery of services. For England there is no populism or nationalism, purely marketisation in 'consultation with stakeholders'.
Labour went back on their 2004 decision to abolish the English Tourism Council, recreating Visit England as a stand-alone English body in 2009. There was no national discussion about how England might like to market itself domestically and internationally, nor any public discussion about how England might like to structure its tourism council, this was a purely top-down bureaucratic exercise. Under the Tories English Tourism will hopefully have its regional structure swept away, but I suspect that it may find itself being incorporated back into Visit Britain on the basis of cost rather than what is best for England. A nice option for the cost-cutters in the British Government, but less good for England, and extremely bad for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland who presumably do not have the option of consolidating with Visit Britain and must find savings elsewhere.