Scotland

Shockingly, it is possible some of you did not see my appearance on BBC News this afternoon. Thanks to the wonders of Youtube and the baffling enthusiasm some people have for clipping and sharing these things, you can catch up with it now. As is always the case, I forgot half the things I wanted to say. Jon Sopel asked if it was really plausible for David Cameron to "do nothing". Well, of course it is. Indeed when you cannot offer anything useful it is best to offer nothing at all. The time - as a few of us argued back then - for Conservatives to back a referendum came and went in the last parliament. The Tories could have (nay, should have) supported Alex Salmond's referendum bill then.

There is a good deal of good sense in the magazine's main leader this week. By which I mean of course that a good deal of it is unconvincing and some of it dangerously so. That is, if David Cameron listens to the Spectator he risks assisting the very forces - Alex Salmond and the SNP - the magazine's editors (and the Prime Minister himself) wish to defeat. Of course Alex Salmond is beatable and of course support for UN-member independence is a minority enthusiasm. This is one reason why a referendum seems to scare Scots less than it does politicians and pundits based in London. (Most of those pundits and politicians, incidentally, seem only to care about Scotland's constitutional question; the actual governance of the country is, at best, most often an afterthought.

STOP PRESS: LONDON MANDARIN RECOGNISES SNP WON ELECTION, INTEND TO CALL REFERENDUM. FUTURE OF UNITED KINGDOM UNSURE. ASTONISHING SCENES. Lord knows what the Telegraph paid Sir Gus O'Donnell, heid neep at the civil service, for the valedictory piece published in today's paper but if the news summary of the thing is at all accurate they've been had. The Telegraph's newshounds do their best to dress it up but, really, there's a limit to what even skilled practitioners can do with such unpromising material. They report: Britain's most senior civil servant Sir Gus O'Donnell has publicly questioned whether the United Kingdom will still exist in a few years' time.

A reader asks: What do you think about Johann Lamont winning the Scottish Labour leadership contest? Well, jings, far be it for me to intrude into these matters but it bears noticing that Lamont, doughty as she may be, relied upon the tame votes of Trades Union affiliates to secure her victory. Ken McIntosh - remember him, Mr Miliband? - actually won the most votes from individual party members. All Scottish Labour types now admit the party's "arrogant" belief Scotland would always be there for Labour; all claim to have learned from the chastening experience of this May's election. All say they must be "about" more than just Nat-bashing. All of which is all very well and good but I'll believe the Scottish Labour party has changed when it actually changes its attitudes.

This is a question that meets the classic definition of John Rentoul's famous-to-them-that-ken series of Questions To Which The Answer Is No. That is, the people asking the question think the answer is Yes when in fact it is No. This question, like many of the SNP's other witticisms, is the brainchild of Angus Robertson, the MP for Moray who might be thought Alex Salmond's answer to Karl Rove. Like Rove, Angus sometimes gets carried away and this suggestion that Scotland is some long-lost Nordic appendage is one of those occasions. Not that he's alone in wishing Scotland could be redefined in this fashion. Lesley Riddoch had a piece in the Guardian recently making just this argument.

Meanwhile, in more examples of sloppy Labour arguments here's a tweet Jim Murphy sent this afternoon: Oh dear. Murphy is usually better than this. I know and everyone else who pays any attention to Scottish politics (this includes Jim Murphy) knows that Alex Salmond has long admired the Republic of Ireland's low corporation taxes; he has almost never bothered talking about personal or consumption taxes. Furthermore, few sensible people think Ireland's boom and bust was fuelled by or made significantly worse by its low rates of corporation tax. To hint otherwise, as Murphy seems to here, is either foolish or dishonest. It is possible to think low business taxes a good thing while also supposing it might be a good idea to avoid the mistakes and excesses that led Ireland to bankruptcy.

In the midst of a futile* call for partisans on either side of Scotland's great constitutional debate to avoid twisting history for their own ends, Professor Richard Finlay and Dr Alison Cathcart write: One feature of a mature democracy is the respect it accords to its past, which means accepting it in its entirety, warts and all. There are good points and bad points in all national histories and accepting both is vital to avoiding the pitfalls of narrow, triumphalist chauvinism or debilitating defeatism. Neither of which is healthy. One of the problems of using history to make the case for or against the Union is that it tends to polarise the debate towards these extremes. What often happens is that we throw our political prejudices back into the past where they do not belong.