Fraser Nelson

For the first time in its 186-year history, The Spectator's cover story will be written by its readers: people from outside of Scotland, saying why they want Scotland to stay and keep our country united. Even over lunchtime, we have been deluged with people writing in to say why they want Scots to stay. Please keep these coming. If you have sent an email, ask two or three of your friends to send more: editor@spectator.co.uk. Include a picture if you don't mind our using it. Put ‘STAY!’ in the subject title, and do say where you're from. We'll run them in the cover feature of the new Spectator, certainly, but I thought I'd share a few of them now: they're better than any speech you'll hear from any politician.

Would you bet on Scotland staying in the union? Isabel Hardman asks Hamish Macdonell, my former Scotsman colleague, in a podcast she presented this morning.

[audioplayer src="http://traffic.libsyn.com/spectator/TheViewFrom22_4_Sept_2014_v4.mp3" title="Isabel Hardman, Fraser Nelson and James Forsyth discuss the Tory civil war" startat=60] Listen [/audioplayer]David Cameron is in need of advice right now and there’s plenty of it in the new Spectator – not least from Justine Greening, his International Development Secretary. Her interview with Melissa Kite makes clear that the party needs to focus more on social mobility – and tell the story which is not exactly hardly embodied by its Etonian and Pauline leadership.

“It’s part of the energy of nationalism,” sighed Jim Murphy on Newsnight. “They’re never knocked down.” He’s right, and that that is why the Scottish referendum polls show the gap between the two narrowing - YouGov has that gap at 6 points, down from 22 last month. If even Labour’s Jim Murphy accepts that the momentum is with the nationalists – and says that the momentum is with them because they are nationalists – then it’s a rather depressing state of affairs. Where is the passion and energy of the campaign to save the United Kingdom?

Where is this burning point of principle that drove Douglas Carswell into the arms of Ukip? I’ve read lots about his defection, and I’m still none the wiser. We’re told that he was talking to Farage for almost a year, which would have overlapped with the time he told me that the Tories need to unite behind Cameron because he was the only one promising an in-out referendum. What has changed? Carswell says that Cameron is not serious about Europe. The Prime Minister has become the only leader in the continent to promise an in-out referendum. I’m not sure how much more serious one can be. Should he lay out, now, what he wants in a renegotiation? Of course not – it would be rendered rapidly out of date.

Anyone who would rather not live in a Britain run by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls should be dismayed at Carswell’s defection to Ukip. He is an original, intelligent and eloquent MP who has done much to help the Prime Minister form the more radical parts of his agenda. For a while, I thought that this was his game plan: to avoid frontbench positions, and engage constructive opposition – which is democratic tugging of the party leader from the vantage point of the backbenches. I defended him against critics who said he was an attention-seeker whose ego would one day explode. Today, it's harder to defend him.

Now and again, America puts its inequality on display to the world. We saw it after Hurricane Katrina and we have seen it again in the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. A white police offer shoots dead a black man, after having stopped him for jaywalking. Britain’s police don’t have guns, so these scenes are unthinkable to us. But American-style inequality? We have plenty of that too, we’re just better at hiding it – as I say in my Telegraph column today. I came across a striking fact while researching this piece: if Britain were to somehow leave the EU and join the US we’d be the 2nd-poorest state in the union. Poorer than Missouri. Poorer than the much-maligned Kansas and Alabama.

David Cameron is back on holidays again, this time to Cornwall. He missed a trick. His economic recovery is making the pound strong and, ergo, the continent cheap for British holidaymakers. This also makes imports cheaper which has, in turn, cut UK inflation to 1.6 per cent in July – down from 1.9 per cent in June. This will be deeply annoying for Ed Miliband, as it interferes with his ‘cost of living crisis’ narrative. This had more potency when inflation was high (see the graph above) but it becomes that much harder to push the line now. Especially when inflation is expected to trot along near the target of 2 per cent until the election.

I'm in the US right now, where the national conversation is - it's safe to say - not fixed on Ed Miliband's White House trip. We now have photographic proof of this event, but what's Barack Obama saying? A prize for the best suggestion. PS some unkind souls have suggested that this picture is the unfortunate type, taken by a malicious photographer. This is the official picture released by the Labour Party. I assume there were a few worse ones rejected.

I can confirm that Liam Fox was offered Minister of State at the Foreign Office with responsibility for India, China and Latin America. He politely declined the Prime Minister's idea, even when it was later sweetened with the offer of a place in the National Security Council. Fox, a former party chairman and defence secretary, had been tipped for a comeback and foreign policy is one his great loves (he recently wrote a book, Rising Tides, about the various risks the world faces). So why turn it down? My guess is that he saw Cameron's offer as a means of plonking him on a slow boat to China in the last 12 months before an election. Fox has plenty to say - on the need for a more ambitious economic policy, the Russian threat and the need for European reform.