Fraser Nelson

I think I’m about the only journalist to have watched Ed Miliband’s speech and think it wasn’t awful. Here in Manchester, the consensus seems to be that this was as bad as a speech could be. And, admittedly, even I was tweeting rude things about it all of the way through (since when does anyone need a 10-year plan? Britain won a world war in six years). You may not like the politics but his speech was intellectually coherent, even pugnacious in parts. Sure, it was about an hour too long and had some worrying lacunas. His decision not to mention the economy was wise because he has nothing to say.

Rachel Reeves’ interview on BBC Daily Politics may have been excruciating at times (below), but was it really the ‘car crash’ that the Tories are today claiming? Matthew Hancock is crowing that she pointed out the conditions necessary for reducing debt. She said:- 'We are planning to get the national debt down, which means you have to be running a surplus to be able to do that. If you are going to have national debt falling you have to have a surplus overall... To get debt falling you have to have a surplus on overall spending.’  Whether wittingly or not, Reeves went further than Ed Balls. She said she wants a "surplus overall," as distant from the surplus on the chunk of the budget defined as 'current spending'. This is the same as the Tory policy.

The Labour Party conference has got off to a very promising start, with The Spectator being complimented from the stage and applauded in the hall. 'Here’s a publication you don’t hear praised that often at a Labour Conference: the Spectator,' started Gloria De Piero, its equalities spokeswoman. But she did not, alas, go to quote our editorial ‘The false promise of "equality."’ She was instead praising our working with the Social Mobility Foundation for summer internships – something that a lot of publications do, including the New Statesman. Her speech is above. It's good to see both left and right agreed in the need to address declining social mobility in Britain.

Will there be another Scottish independence referendum? I went back to my hometown, Nairn, yesterday to gauge the mood after the 'no' win. Highland Region split 53/47 for 'no', tighter than I imagined. I was also interested in the younger voters (and the newly-enfranchised 16 and 17-year-olds) - because their interest (or lack of it) may determine whether the issue of secession stays with us. Canadian PM Stephen Harper told me last month that Quebec's youth got bored of the subject of secession, which is why the issue has cooled.

Alex Salmond has proved himself the most effective party leader in Europe, let alone Britain. He has just run a terrifyingly effective campaign, perhaps the best I will ever witness. I could not disagree more with his aims, but to me that makes his achievement all the more remarkable. I doubt any other politician could have sold such a bad idea to 45 per cent of Scots. He ran rings around his opponents, outsmarting them all. He was so damn infuriating because he was so damn good: able to use humour, anger, audacity and caution when each was required. I can't think of many politicians with his versatility. As a unionist, I'm delighted that the sharpest fang in the SNPs mouth is being extracted. Or is extracting himself.

Well, it's going to be a nail-biter. The voting has closed, and I've just spoken to Hamish Macdonell and James Forsyth for the podcast: both sides think that they have won. Why? The polls show it's too close to call, so each side is going on anecdote – and risks a positive feedback loop. I'm in Inverness, near my hometown of Nairn, but the joy of being back in the Highlands is tempered by the chat. In the bar I was at (Hootananny, the city's best venue for folk music) the punters were swapping stories about getting their friends and family out for 'yes'.

One of the more bizarre aspects of the Scottish independence debate is the idea that UK welfare reform somehow doesn’t fit Scotland. On the contrary, it was designed for Glasgow – the Easterhouse housing scheme, to be specific, after a visit which changed Iain Duncan Smith’s whole career. And the other point about these reforms is that they’re actually working. Today’s figures show that the number of Scots in employment is rising by almost 500 a day. A grand total of 2.62 million are now at work in Scotland – never in the country’s history has it had so many in work. And why? It's the same phenomenon that you see in England: the number of people available for work is rising far faster than the working-age population.

The point of being British is not banging on about being British. But when your country is three days away from being dissolved - in part because the emotional case for the UK has not been made properly - then people do start to say what their national identity means to them. The long list of Spectator readers' letters was one example, and we were delighted to welcome a bunch of them for tea in the garden of at 22 Old Queen Street this afternoon. [caption id="attachment_8867252" align="aligncenter" width="550"] Spectator readers (apart from ones in front of the flag: they're soon-to-be-readers)[/caption] As you can see, we had four younger readers - this kind of captured the spirit of the rally.

Yes, Britain is on the point of breaking up - but there are more ill winds blowing in Europe right now. The National Front is polling so strongly in France that Marine Le Pen would be president if an election was held tomorrow. And as I write, the populist Sweden Democrats seem to be the only real winners of the general election held there today. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been picked up by the English-language media yet - they're focusing on the power transfer to the Social Democrats (this isn't the same as a victory: a victory means you actually win more voters). What follows is from the Swedish TV and websites, so please forgive the dodgy translation. The conservative Prime Minister, Fredrik Reinfeldt, is out*: but we knew he would be.

Many voters in Scotland moan about the media: half of the country wants separation, according to the polls, but almost all newspapers are against it. So where to turn, for dispassionate analysis? As James Forsyth says in his brilliant political column this week, there’s no one left to tell the truth. That’s why private advice, issued by financial analysts to their clients, is interesting: these guys have no interest in spin, only accuracy. If they issue duff advice, their career is over. The analysis of Deutsche Bank (pdf) has been flying around Twitter, but not many are inclined to read long PDFs. So the below is an edited extract. It’s from David Folkerts-Landau, its chief economist.

Gordon Brown has spoken, and the unionist parties are in agreement: if there’s a ‘no’ vote then more powers will be given – we’re told – ‘to Scotland’. There’ll be another commission and another Scotland Act. This so-called Devo Max should have been offered six months ago; to offer it in the last few days of the campaign smacks of panic. By moving more towards Salmond’s territory, the unionists conceded the premise: that more powers to the Edinburgh political elite is somehow the same as more powers to ‘Scotland’. And who could be against more power to Scotland? Not a single party, it seems, is questioning the premise: that the more the MSPs get up to, the better for Scotland.