ABSTRACT
The only parts of England which were truly separate from the rest were the regions bordering on Wales and Scotland, the two lay palatinates of Chester and Lancaster and the ecclesiastical one of Durham. Although parts of Scotland and Wales became heavily industrialised, fewer people there were actively involved than in England. The validity of the historically-based arguments in the case of England’s predilection for a centralised as opposed to a regionalist solution is partly affirmed from what may at first sight may seem an unlikely quarter, that of the transnational regions which are emerging as part of the European Union process of regionalisation. The spread of the common law through the agency of the Norman law courts also played an important part in the re-emergence of the submerged English identity. Some subsidiarity aims were fulfilled by the creation of metropolitan councils in several of the main English urban concentrations.
