I envy the Scots. If only we English could also shake up our democracy

With its independence vote Scotland is able to ask big questions about its destiny. I have no idea what that feels like

• 
• • Suzanne Moore
  • theguardian.com, Monday 25 August 2014 12.41 BST

'I do not know what it is to be Scottish and feel utterly disconnected from Westminster politics. I only know what it is to be English and feel like that.' Photograph: Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

Imagine having a say, an actual say, in how your country is run. You might even consider big questions, like the distribution of wealth, the dividing up of resources, your tiny country’s place in the big bad world. You may go down the pub and argue with your friends about what your identity actually means, you may be already certain and slag off those who think differently on Twitter, you may be wavering on several issues. You may be just 16 and able to vote for the fist time in your life.

This may or may not be my business, depending of course which way Scotland votes in a few weeks time, but as this referendum hoves into view with another televised debate tonight, my main emotion is perhaps pathetically English. It is one of envy.

This conversation, this questioning about who you are, how you are to live and who is to be in charge, shows the essential internal organs of a political system being openly tested and examined. Here in Albion, there appears to be only stubbornly undiagnosed organ failure. I do not know what it is to be Scottish and feel utterly disconnected from Westminster politics. I only know what it is to be English and feel like that.

Every time I voice that, inevitably, I am told that somehow I should vote more. When and where exactly? Instead I see that power clusters in ever closer elites at the top of society. These closed shops hug themselves tighter than David Cameron’s wetsuit. The problem, we are told, is that Cameron surrounds himself with yes men. And the trouble with Ed Miliband is that he surrounds himself with people who are very similar to him, and so it goes on until the only real alternatives on offer are Nigel Farage or Boris Johnson. Some choice.

As I see it the Scots are always patronised by talking about independence in terms ofmarriage, divorce, and breaking up the CD collection. Yet I wonder what kind of relationship ever existed in the first place. It has long been apparent that what has gone on in the south-east, and in the City of London in particular, has clearly not been faithful to any of the values of a fairly basic social democracy. It has been about strident privatisation and the dismantling of the welfare state. Scotland at least gets the chance to reject this, English people don’t.

Because many of us have never lived in a United Kingdom. These words mean nothing to me.

Whatever the Scots decide, England will shake. And it needs shaking. If England is actually a Tory land and needs Scotland as a Labour colony, then England should face up to itself, and its demons.

Independence is also often framed in terms of maturity. Is Scotland ready for independence? Surely it is the other way round. Is England grown-up enough to see itself the way it actually is? For that, we would have to be seen and heard, reconnected to the democratic processes, and be far more honest with ourselves than we are often prepared to be.

The best debates about Scottish independence have asked big questions and often there are no easy answers. There is a truthfulness in that. Imagine if England could ask the same questions of itself instead of assuming that all was settled long ago. Imagine if we could do this without ceding to Ukip-style regression.

Scotland will do whatever it does. As I watch from afar, I cant help thinking for us English, chance would be a fine thing.

10 funniest jokes from the Edinburgh festival fringe 2014

Courtesy The Guardian

1. "I've decided to sell my Hoover… well, it was just collecting dust." – Tim Vine

2. "I've written a joke about a fat badger, but I couldn't fit it into my set." – Masai Graham

3. "Always leave them wanting more, my uncle used to say to me. Which is why he lost his job in disaster relief." – Mark Watson

4. "I was given some sudoku toilet paper. It didn't work. You could only fill it in with number 1s and number 2s." – Bec Hill

5. "I wanted to do a show about feminism. But my husband wouldn't let me." – Ria Lina

6. "Money can't buy you happiness? Well, check this out, I bought myself a Happy Meal." – Paul F Taylor

7. "Scotland had oil, but it's running out thanks to all that deep frying." – Scott Capurro

8. "I forgot my inflatable Michael Gove, which is a shame 'cause halfway through he disappears up his own arsehole." – Kevin Day

9. "I've been married for 10 years, I haven't made a decision for seven." – Jason Cook

10. "This show is about perception and perspective. But it depends how you look at it." –Felicity Ward

For Scotland, the independence debate is about more than the economy, stupid

Salmond and Darling will batter viewers with data in Tuesday’s TV debate, but in the end the heart will outweigh the wallet

• 
• • Chris Huhne
  • The Guardian, Sunday 3 August 2014 19.19 BST

A report from the Scottish government suggested Scots would be £1,000 a year better with independence, but a UK Treasury report suggested the opposite. Photograph: Ken Jack/Demotix/Corbis

In Scotland, if you doubted the stakes, wait for Tuesday’s ­televised independence debate between Alistair Darling and Alex ­Salmond. The race remains close, and is likely to get closer. This weekend’s Survation poll put “no” ahead by just 6%. That is uncannily close to the polls six weeks before the Quebec referendum in 1995, which the Canadian federalists won by a nail-biting 1.2%.

The downside of these two TV champions for their cause is that they are both so economic: the former UK chancellor of the exchequer against the former Royal Bank of Scotland oil economist (and a good one). The danger, as a non-economist Treasury minister once said after a mandarin’s briefing, is that the viewers will be just as confused at the end – but at a higher level.

I have been reading the Scotsman – an excellent paper – and the Glasgow Herald day after day, which has given me a sympathy for Scottish voters who must be punch-drunk from rival, largely economic claims about the future. The two campaigns recently excelled themselves by producing on the same day apparently authoritative assessments that diametrically contradicted each other.

For the unionists, a UK Treasury-sponsored report suggested that each Scot would be £1,400 a year better off in the union. For the nationalists, another report from the Scottish government suggested that Scots would be £1,000 a year better off outside it. This is bemusing enough for anyone with a background in ­economics, let alone anyone without one. It is also largely irrelevant. Both sides are deploying spurious precision for economic issues that are largely unknowable in the current state of economics.

In one of my past lives, I used to assess the strength and risks of different economies for potential international investors. “Sovereign risk”, as it is called, is an art, not a science. Politics matters as much as economics, and big or small size has both advantages and disadvantages. Scotland’s population, at 5.5 million, is similar to the 5.6 million in Denmark – a perfectly respectably sized nation that has proved to be a rich success for years. The upside of being the size of Denmark, as opposed to the size of the UK or France, is that you can be nimble in reaction to global economic shocks and opportunities. The state can help businesses adjust and respond. All the key players can meet up and reach consensus in a reasonably sized room.

This helps. Of the 10 most prosperous nations on Earth, measured in the most effective manner by the World Bank’s national income per head allowing for purchasing power, only the US is big. The next biggest countries are Sweden (9.5 million people), Switzerland (8 million), Denmark and Norway (5 million). Germany comes in at 13th, France 18th and the UK 21st.

If we take culturally similar countries that share a language, small usually trumps big. Irish income per head is now 0.5% higher than the UK’s, even after profits have been paid to foreign investors. Austria is 0.3% ahead of Germany, and Belgium is 8.7% ahead of France. One exception is that Canada is slightly poorer than the big US.

The major disadvantage of small size is that you can be buffeted by global shocks if you specialise in particular industries. Finland was hit by the collapse of the Soviet Union, because it exported so much there. Iceland and ­Ireland were particularly badly hit by the banking crisis. Big countries are naturally more diversified, and therefore less vulnerable to shocks.

If the Scots vote for independence, there may be some transitional costs where there are economies of scale with the UK – embassies and so forth. I cannot see how the Bank of England could be lender of last resort to Scottish banks after independence, so there may be losses as financial services companies prefer a London regulator and backer. This was the experience with Quebec, where the fear of independence drove Montreal-based insurers to Toronto. But the big picture suggests that these will be small and short-term effects.

Natural resources such as oil and gas matter much less than both Salmond and Darling will pretend. The truth is that rich countries do well because of their human skills and ingenuity, not their resource windfalls. Look at Switzerland. On education, Scotland’s performance in the OECD international tests of student achievement is a little better than England for reading and maths, and a little worse for science.

If Scotland goes, it will be in everyone’s interest to have a “velvet divorce”, as the separation of the Czech Republic and Slovakia was described. A nasty and messy separation would damage both sides. London will want early certainty, and for Scotland to be an EU member alongside the rest of the UK. The result on 18 September may rewrite history, but not geography. We will all still share the same island. Their mess will be ours, both sides of the border. So we will all have an interest not to make a mess.

If Scotland stays, as I hope it will, the UK will never be the same again. More fiscal powers – including the power to borrow – will provide a new impetus to decentralisation, not just to Edinburgh but to Cardiff, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle. We will need a new constitutional settlement, and new ways, as all federal states enjoy, of legally settling differences between levels of government. These are challenges already met and mastered in Canada, Australia and elsewhere.

The main motive, if Scots opt for independence, will be their desire to shake off the incubus of English conservatism. The natural centre of gravity of Scottish politics will be more leftwing than that of the UK. Scotland could be a successful, liberal-minded and social democratic nation on the Scandinavian model. Nothing wrong with that, except for English progressives who will have to contend with a centre of gravity that has moved to the right. For England and Wales, politics will adjust. The Labour party would become more rightwing to ensure a competitive system.

In the end, it seems to me offensive on the part of both sides in the debate to concentrate so slavishly on the economics, when realistically the economic outlook cannot and should not be decisive. It is as if they have both leased their campaigns, in the old adage, to people who know the price of everything and the value of nothing. It is the heart that will decide the future of our island, not the pocketbook. That is surely right.

The difference between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair

Gordon Brown is back, and may be the man to save the union

He was reviled after he lost the 2010 election, but the former PM is now reframing the Scottish independence debate

• 
• • Jonathan Freedland
  • Follow @Freedland Follow @guardian
  • The Guardian, Friday 27 June 2014 19.23 BST

‘Gordon Brown retains a standing in Scotland which he never really had in England. He is seen as a national heavyweight.' Photograph: David Moir/Reuters

Tony Blair was on the front page of the Financial Times this week, as the paper brought word of the former prime minister's plan to open an office in "the increasingly assertive oil-rich emirate" of Abu Dhabi. The FT explained that Blair is expanding his portfolio of business and other interests in the Middle East, which already includes a contract to advise Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi's mighty sovereign wealth funds.

A few hours later, Blair's successor, Gordon Brown, came to London to advance some business of his own. Brown was in the capital to attend a series of unpaid meetings in cramped rooms, pressing the case for Scotland to remain part of the UK. He was rewarded with a cup of canteen coffee.

The contrast between Britain's last two prime ministers could hardly be sharper. They were always unalike, but now they inhabit different worlds. Blair has morphed into Adam Lang, the permatanned, globetrotting ex-statesman-for-hire at the centre of Robert Harris's novel The Ghost. Brown refuses the pension owed to him as a former prime minister. The jacket of his latest book, My Scotland, Our Britain, discloses that any profits will be given to charity. When he wrote recently for the Guardian, he declined the (admittedly modest) fee. As far as anyone can tell, he lives with his family at home in North Queensferry on his MP's salary. By his actions, he declares himself the unBlair – a man determined not to profit from his public position.

So while Blair has the sleek glow of the expensively dressed elite, Brown pitches up in a suit whose years of heavy-duty service are visible: there's a tiny hole in his sleeve. But the difference goes deeper. While Blair is unembarrassed, eager to sound off about the future of the Middle East – when others might have held back, given how things turned out in Iraq – Brown has proved more reticent. After his defeat in 2010, he allowed the coalition and its allies to trash his reputation, to pretend it was Brown's profligacy, rather than a global financial crash, that had ballooned the deficit. Privately, he told friends there was no point trying to defend himself, as people were in no mood to listen. Defeated leaders like him have to "go through a period when they're reviled, that's just the way it is".

He still holds to that vow of silence, more or less, on UK-wide politics, letting Labour's new generation have the battlefield to themselves. But in recent months he has broken his own golden rule and stormed back into the public square, to play his part in a contest he says differs from normal politics because its outcome could be irreversible. His fellow Scots are about to vote on independence, and he wants them to say no.

He is campaigning vigorously, speaking in Aberdeen today on the contested question of North Sea oil, packing out halls and addressing rallies day after day. "He's now a key part of the conversation," reports the Guardian's Scotland correspondent Severin Carrell. So omnipresent has Brown become that observers describe him as the most prominent, commanding Labour figure in the campaign, stirring the faithful in a way that Alistair Darling – who leads the cross-party Better Together group – cannot.

Much of this is down to the well-worn observation that Brown retains a standing in Scotland he never really had in England. North of the border he is seen as a national heavyweight, the last of a leadership class that included the late Donald Dewar, John Smith and Robin Cook, and is therefore automatically granted a hearing. But there's more to it than that.

Whatever Brown's flaws – and even his closest friends cannot pretend he was temperamentally suited to the top job – few doubt his analytical gifts. The reason he remained in command of Labour strategy for so long was his knack for understanding and framing a political argument. With the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, he understands that every battle is won before it's fought. It's won by choosing the ground on which it will be fought. And this is the key contribution Brown is making to the no campaign.

He diagnosed a key error in the way the argument had been framed. It had become Scotland v Britain, with Alex Salmond and the Scottish National party arguing for Scotland and everyone else championing Britain. That, says Brown, might be fine if the entire UK electorate had a vote on 18 September. But they don't. Only Scots vote in this referendum, which means this has to be framed as a choice for Scots: which Scotland will flourish, one that retains its political ties to the other three nations of these islands or one that severs those links?

It's such a simple point, it seems extraordinary anyone had to make it. But Brown is right. When David Cameron delivered his big speech on the topic in February, not only did he do it in London, he rested his case on why the union had been good for Britain. That answered the wrong question. Given the electorate involved, the only question that matters is: is the union good for Scotland? Framed like this, every issue looks different. Take the vexed business of currency. Brown reckons George Osborne walked straight into a nationalist trap when he declared that an independent Scotland would not be allowed to keep the pound: it was London at war with Edinburgh, Britain bullying Scotland.

The right way to argue it, says Brown, is to ask what's best for Scotland: to use the currency of a country you've just left and whose rules you no longer have any say over or to retain your seat at the table, with some control over your own money. The former would be a "semi-colonial relationship", says Brown, Scotland using a currency shaped by officials in faraway London. Framed like that, it's suddenly Brown who's putting Scottish interests first and, oddly, Salmond who's left defending a supine relationship to London.

The way Brown describes it, the union is no longer an imperial hangover that represses Scotland but a neat set-up for distinct and proud nations to club together, sharing resources and pooling risks. That arrangement has served Scotland rather well: why on earth would you throw it all away?

The nationalists have an answer, of course they do. But Brown's version makes it a much harder question. Now other no campaigners are following his lead, adopting the frame he constructed. On the ground, among Labour's core vote, it seems to be working; some detect a stalling in momentum for Yes. They all laughed when Brown accidentally claimed to have saved the world. But, who knows, he might just save the union.

I'd vote yes to rid Scotland of its feudal landowners

The scoured, scorched Highlands could be brought to life – maybe an independent nation will have the courage to act

• 
• • George Monbiot
  • The Guardian, Monday 19 May 2014 20.43 BST

‘It is astonishing, in the 21st century, that people are still allowed to burn mountainsides for any purpose, let alone blasting highland chickens out of the air.' Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty

Power's ability to resist change: this is the story of our times. Morally bankrupt, discredited, widely loathed? No problem: whether it's neoliberal economics, tax avoidance, coal burning, farm subsidies or the House of Lords, somehow the crooked system creeps along.

Legally, feudalism in Scotland ended in 2004. In itself, this is an arresting fact. But almost nothing has changed. After 15 years of devolution the nation with the rich world's greatest concentration of land ownership remains as inequitable as ever.

The culture of deference that afflicts the British countryside is nowhere stronger than in the Highlands. Hardly anyone dares challenge the aristocrats, oligarchs, bankers and sheikhs who own so much of this nation, for fear of consequences real or imagined. The Scottish government makes grand statements about land reform, then kisses the baronial boot. The huge estates remain untaxed and scarcely regulated.

You begin to grasp the problem when you try to discover who owns them. Fifty per cent of the private land in Scotland is in the hands of 432 people – but who are they? Many large estates are registered in the names of made-up companies in the Caribbean. When the Scottish minister Fergus Ewing was challenged on this issue, he claimed that obliging landowners to register their estates in countries that aren't tax havens would risk "a negative effect on investment". William Wallace rides again.

Scotland's deer-stalking estates and grouse moors, though they are not agricultural land, benefit from the outrageous advantages that farmers enjoy. They are exempt from capital gains tax, inheritance tax and business rates. Landowners seek to justify their grip on the UK by rebranding themselves as business owners. The Country Landowners' Association has renamed itself the Country Land and Business Association. So why do they not pay business rates on their land? As Andy Wightman, author of The Poor Had No Lawyers, argues, these tax exemptions inflate the cost of land, making it impossible for communities to buy.

Though the estates pay next to nothing to the exchequer, and though they practise little that resembles farming, they receive millions in farm subsidies. The new basic payments system the Scottish government is introducing could worsen this injustice. Wightman calculates that the ruler of Dubai could receive £439,000 for the estate in Wester Ross he owns; the Duke of Westminster could find himself enriched by £764,000 a year; and the Duke of Roxburgh by £950,000.

With the help of legislators and taxpayers, the owners of the big estates are ripping apart the fabric of the nation. The hills in many parts look as if they have been camouflaged against military attack, as they have been burned in patches for grouse shooting. It is astonishing, in the 21st century, that people are still allowed to burn mountainsides – destroying their vegetation, roasting their wildlife, vaporising their carbon, creating a telluric eczema of sepia and grey blotches – for any purpose, let alone blasting highland chickens out of the air. Where the hills aren't burnt for grouse they are grazed to the roots by overstocked deer, maintained at vast densities to give the bankers waddling over the moors in tweed pantaloons a chance of shooting one.

Hanging over the nation is the shadow of Balmoral, whose extreme and destructive management – clearing, burning, overgrazing – overseen by Prince Philip, president emeritus of the World Wide Fund for Nature, is mimicked by the other landowners. Little has changed there since Victoria and Albert adopted an ersatz version of the clothes and customs of the people who had just been cleared from the land. This balmorality is equivalent to Marie Antoinette dressing up as a milkmaid while the people of France starved; but such is Britain's culture of deference that we fail to see it. Today they mix the tartans with the fancy dress of Edwardian squires, harking back to the last time Britain was this unequal.

But despite this lockdown, there is, if not quite a Highland spring, the beginnings of something different: on one side of me, here in Boat of Garten, is the bare, black misery of the Monadhliath mountains; on the other, the great rewilding that is quickly but quietly spreading through the north-west of the Cairngorms national park. Across 100,000 hectares, the RSPB, the Forestry Commission, the National Trust and Wildland Ltd (owned by the Danish textiles billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen) are seeking to reverse the destruction, reduce the deer to reasonable numbers, and get trees back on the braes. On Povlson's estates the area of woodland has doubled (to 1,400 hectares, or 3,450 acres) since 2006, solely through the control of deer. It's not land reform, but it's the best that can be done with the current, dire model of Scottish ownership.

The forests at the moment are bright with birdsong. In some places, looking down on lochans surrounded by marshes and regenerating pines, you almost expect to see a moose emerging from the trees. Trees are racing up the denuded hillsides: in Glenmore I've come across young pines, birch and rowan growing at 800 metres. Already people are talking about reintroducing lynx here within 20 years.

As the return of the ospreys to the lakes and forests in this part of the park shows, the potential for ecotourism, which spreads income and employment through the economy, is vast. The contrast with the scorched and scoured grouse moors of the east side of the national park, which employ hardly anyone, concentrate wealth in tax havens and are unmysteriously devoid of most birds of prey, could not be greater.

It doesn't reverse the other injustices, but it begins to undo the centuries of physical destruction. I would vote yes in September if I lived here, on the grounds that it presents an opportunity to do something new, and I furiously hope, despite the evidence, that an independent Scottish government will take it.

It should list all the beneficial owners of the land; impose the taxes Westminster refuses to levy; ensure that only farmers get subsidies and cap them at £30,000 a head; ban burning; control deer numbers; and turn Scotland into a land where you can actually see green shoots of recovery. On Friday the Land Reform Review Group, set up by the government at Holyrood, will publish its report, and it's likely to be devastating. Will Scotland get off its knees at last?

Stop lecturing the Scots. They want freedom, not wealth

Westminster's arrogance has played straight into the SNP's hands: next year's Scottish referendum could deliver the shock of the century

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 26 November 2013 20.45 GMT

No nation seeks independence to get rich. It seeks independence to get free. The Scottish leader, Alex Salmond, today published a 670-page account of the political economy of an independent Scotland prior to next year's referendum. Little of it really matters. Some 30 countries have separated from dominant neighbours in the last half-century, and few stopped to count the cost. They left details of flags, borders, taxes and currencies to their negotiators. They simply wanted to govern themselves as they saw fit. That was enough.

That Scotland should come even near the brink of secession after three centuries of union with England is historically astounding. A mere 50 years ago, it was inconceivable. The reason is specific. There seems no limit to the insensitivity of Westminster's political class to the aspirations of the subordinate tribes of the British Isles. Edmund Burke remarked that London ruled even its American colonies more considerately than it did Ireland. In Scotland's case, from the poll tax and delayed devolution to the contempt for Edinburgh of London's "tartan mafia", every move has played into the nationalists' hands.

Supporters of the old British empire assumed it would last for ever. They were wrong. It disappeared because the mood of the age was against it, abetted by inept colonial administrators. Only in the white commonwealth was retreat dusted with some dignity. Meanwhile Britain's earlier empire, that of the English over the so-called Celtic half of the British Isles, has also been crumbling. Most of Ireland is gone. Salmond's white paper is a blueprint for dismantling the rest.

The white paper recycles a familiar agenda, largely included in last year's document on an independent economy. It is a confusing mix of real constitutionalism and a rag-bag of old SNP policies tossed in to give independence voter appeal. The latter tarnishes the former.

The constitution proposals are clearly a negotiating hand. We learn that the Queen can remain monarch, borders can remain open, citizenship can be shared and national debts divided. If the Scots want Faslane's nuclear submarines to go, go they must. Or perhaps Faslane could become Scotland's Guantánamo Bay.

Salmond has more trouble over his twin economic pillars, of European Union membership and the retention of sterling. He and his deputy, Nicola Sturgeon, must know that their economic model is heavy on optimism, if not fantasy. It portrays a Scotland surging forward on the cutting edge of capitalist innovation. Tax breaks galore would do for Scotland what they have done, up to a point, for Ireland. Scottish Widows would ride down silicon glen.

The reality is that Britain has long clamped the "golden handcuffs" of welfare dependency on the Scots, subsidising them annually by some £1,000 a head more than the English. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, admittedly on a worst-case base, reckons Scotland will need an 9% rise in income tax to compensate for losing Britain's subvention. Salmond retorts that the Scots would be £600 a head better off.

Whatever the truth of that, Salmond was unwise to distort the vexed debate by promising crude budgetary give-aways, such as childcare grants, tax cuts, social housing subsidies, windfarm hand-outs and the traditional splurge that tends to accompany the first stage of fiscal devolution. Nor does he allow himself the transitional leeway of a separate currency, with scope for depreciation. He wants to stay linked to the pound. He wants to share the national debt, pool financial sovereignty and reach a deal on pension and other inherited liabilities.

This is a recipe for Greek-style disaster. Scotland might enjoy the spurt of investment and growth that tends to greet new states, as in Slovakia or partly autonomous Catalonia. But the most likely sequence is brief euphoria followed by budgetary crisis, retrenchment and austerity. The emergence into the sunnier uplands of small-is-beautiful independence would be slow and painful. Salmond himself would not long survive such turmoil.

With nationalism realised, new forces to left and right would appear. Slashed payrolls and fewer benefits would see disaffection and emigration. Tourists would depart a Highlands landscape blighted by Salmond's turbine industrialisation. Optimism would no longer be an option. The road from Edinburgh to Denmark remains plausible, but it would be long and rocky.

Yet all this is Scotland's business, and is beside the question of how to give political shape to a fast-emerging national identity. Britain should know all about secession. It championed Ulster's separation from Ireland. It went to war to allow Kosovo to secede from Serbia. It sponsored the breakup of Yugoslavia, Iraq and now Afghanistan. The only empire London still supports appears to be its own ragged island confederacy.

If any generalisation is relevant to the Scottish referendum, it is that nation states worldwide are losing sovereignty upwards and downwards. States must pay obeisance to supranational treaties – in Britain's case to the EU – while their domestic control is eroded by ever more assertive sub-national groups. Wise countries such as Spain concede autonomy to the Basques and Catalans in response. There are many models of confederacy from which to choose, from Belgium and Italy to the European Union and the Commonwealth.

England's political tradition rejects such pluralism, and has paid the price. An empire that reached across oceans now struggles to reach across the Irish Sea, Hadrian's Wall and Offa's Dyke. Most of Ireland broke away in 1922, due to Westminster's mishandling. Today the English would be well-advised to stop lecturing the Scots and silence the claque of Scots expatriate scaremongers clearly appalled at becoming foreigners in their adopted land. Humility all round is urgently needed.

Polls suggest that the Scots may not go the whole hog to independence – but they may still deliver London the shock of the century. The truth is that there is no full national independence these days. There are layers of sovereignty, tiers of autonomy, democratic pluralism. Most Scots clearly seek greater detachment within, if not from, the UK.

Modern Edinburgh already feels more like Dublin than London. The coalition must seriously consider offering a new Anglo-Scottish deal, somewhere between independence and the present devolution. Salmond has put on the agenda a new dispensation between London and the "national" capitals of the UK, Northern Irish and Welsh as well as Scottish. Only the arrogance of London's political community finds such a prospect intolerable. That arrogance lost one British empire. It may yet lose another.

My Weltanschhaung - 17/02/2012

I am glad to read that the Vatican has at last been forced to cough up some taxes from the income it generates. Though I was shocked that they were exempt from taxes this far.

I am surprised that David Cameron will offer Scots more devolved power if they vote No in the forthcoming referendum. I thought why not devolve more powers before the referendum and therefore give yourself a better chance to win the referendum?

It has taken the energy watchdog so long to realise that energy companies are profiteering. But what have they done - issued a warning, 'Cut prices or else...'.

It now appears that tax avoiding pay deals maybe rife in Whitehall. It appears that 4000 bureaucrats' pay deals will be reviewed.