Eddie Barnes

Nothing works anymore. If there is a mantra for modern Britain, including Scotland, this is it. If Westminster’s shame is the farce around HS2, Scotland’s is the two unlaunched ferries on the Clyde, spiralling inexorably in cost with a launch date disappearing into the future. They are emblems for so much else: after 16 years in power, the litter of the SNP's unmet promises – from reform of education, to the closing of health inequalities, to the missed targets on net zero – continues to rise. Today, the sixth white paper on independence has been published. And its publication exposes the problem: the constitutional question has meant other serious policy-making has ground to a halt. Policy implementation has suffered because there hasn't been an electoral price to pay for it.

Are Scotland and England drifting inexorably apart? To find out if that's true, at Our Scottish Future, we carried out extensive polling of people across Scotland, Wales and England, asking if they feel negatively or positively about our governing system. Did they feel invisible to people in Westminster? Two thirds of those polled in Scotland said yes. Polling in Wales, and both the north west and north east of England, has produced similar figures. We pressed Scots further: did they feel common bonds with people across the UK? When it came to Geordies, Liverpudlians and the Welsh, the answer was very frequently yes. It was only when it came to Londoners that this frayed – only 17 per cent of Scots say they feel common bonds with the capital.