Snp

Since I was watching the House of Commons just now, I needed twitter to tell me that it seems as though Alex Salmond, ever the tweaker, has announced he wants to hold his referendum in the autumn of 2014. Hurrah. That's fine. No need, in my view, for Westminster to object to this. On the contrary all parties should welcome it. All that Westminster needs to do is make sure the referendum billl can survive any legal challenge. Then we can get on with the game. The most importat thing is that the principle of the thing is now agreed. The detail can be sorted out in due course. What larks, eh?

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.

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.

These days "Talking Scotland down" is both the gravest sin imaginable and the standard SNP response to any suggestion there might be even the occasional or minor drawback to independence. Thus when Philip Hammond makes the obvious point that Rump Britannia might not build warships on the Clyde he's being "anti-Scottish". Thus too when George Osborne suggests some firms might want the constitutional questions - including EU-access - clarified to assist their long-term planning he too is guilty of "talking Scotland down". It is true, as Joan McAlpine says, that we have been here before and the sky did not fall.

Paul Krugman has a good paragraph on the euro: [T]his incident exemplified something that was going on all along the march to the eurodebacle. Serious discussion of the risks and possible downsides was simply not allowed. If you were an independent economist expressing even mild concerns about the project, you were labeled as an enemy and shut out of the discussion. In a way, the remarkable thing is that it took until now for disaster to strike. This should be a warning to all political leaders. They each need someone whispering to them: What if we're wrong?