Team GB: is it game over for Scottish independence?

   And there is scarcely a dry eye in the house as Sir Chris Hoy, laden with medals, says goodbye to the fans who have followed him so ecstatically through these games. A final victory lap, wearing the Saltire of Scotland,  a true national hero retires to take his place in the pantheon of sporting fame. Promising to dedicate himself to promoting Scottish cycling as patron of the Sir Chris Hoy velodrome in Glasgow...And here comes Alex Salmond now, jogging alongside Sir Chris, weeping openly, as the crowd goes wild at these Commonwealth Games, which many are saying have ignited a new and positive sense of Scottish national identity, a New Patriotism...

Well, in your dreams, Alex. Such are the sentiments that Scottish National Party romantics hope to hear from the commentary box at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. They want the “friendly games” to deliver a sporting boost to Scottish nationalism in 2014, just as the London Olympics are being credited with giving birth in 2012 to a “New Patriotism” in Britain, as the New Statesman put it last week. “A soft and benign patriotism,” said the left wing journal, “quite different from the hard, defensive patriotism of the Eurosceptic right or any number of Little Englanders or some Scottish nationalists.” Mo Farah, an asylum seeker from Somalia, winning the 10,000 metres and wearing the union flag is the multicultural pin up for the New Britain.  B

Same sex marriage. We've been here before.

 The First Minister is in a dither about it; the cabinet is split over it; church figures call for a referendum as gay rights activists take to the streets. No, not Tuesday's aborted cabinet decision on same-sex marriage, but the Labour-Liberal Democrat cabinet in 2000 during the row over the abolition of Section 2A on the teaching of homosexuality in schools. It is remarkable that the first real split faced by the SNP First Minister, Alex Salmond, is over homosexual equality, just as it was for the late Donald Dewar.

I recall that episode very well, not least because I was close, perhaps too close, to the ministers, led by the former Communities Minister, Wendy Alexander, who were leading the campaign to abolish Section 2A. The ferocity of the response took them by surprise. They thought Scotland was a tolerant nation and that abolishing the clause would be a foregone conclusion. Then came Brian Souter, Cardinal Winning and Keep the Clause. Donald Dewar, a conservative liberal, if that isn't a contradiction in terms, found it an almost impossible conundrum.

And so, it appears, does Alex Salmond. Roll on 12 years and the SNP First Minister is caught between liberals in the cabinet led by the Health Secretary, Nicola Sturgeon who believe that homosexuals should have equal rights, and Catholic ministers like Roseanna Cunningham, who think that gay marriage might be an equality too far. Salmond clearly hasn't made up his mind and since nothing happens without his say so, the government seems paralysed.

Catalonia. Bankrupt. Scotland next?

    Scottish nationalists could be forgiven for cursing fate this week. Both Ireland and the autonomous Spanish region of Catalonia, the two most admired constitutional role models for a post-union Scotland, are sinking under the weight of their debts. Today, Ireland's voters are expected to vote reluctantly for an EU financial austerity package that could condemn them to economic depression for a decade or more. Meanwhile, the Catalonian President, Artur Mas, says Catalonia may “not be able to pay its bills at the end of the month”. The region has already restored prescription charges, introduced tourism and fuel taxes and cut spending on infrastructure projects.

There but for the grace of god goes Scotland say unionists. What price independence if it means going cap in hand either to Madrid or the ECB for bailouts? Scotland's much safer in the UK which is big enough to withstand these economic shocks. Well, maybe. The troubles in these once prosperous corners of Europe are undoubtedly a problem for Alex Salmond, who has just launched the SNP's Yes Campaign for the 2014 independence referendum. The negative headlines from Dublin and Barcelona will discourage many Scottish voters from signing the pledge.

However they are not necessarily arguments against independence as such. Catalonia and Ireland have been plunged into crisis, not by their constitutions, but by their banks and by Europe's relentless sovereign debt crisis, now morphing into an economic depression. Neither Catalonia nor Ireland see relinquishing independence as a solution to their financial difficulties - though they are beginning to see Europe as part of the problem

Five years since Northern Rock - and no end yet to financial crisis

  Five years ago this week, on the 9^th of August 2007, the world changed. That was day the banks suddenly stopped lending to each other, causing the collapse of Northern Rock and plunging the world economy into a slump from which it has yet to recover. Indeed, last week's manufacturing figures suggest that we are heading into a new worldwide manufacturing recession, though you could be forgiven for not having noticed that we had come out of the previous one.

So what have we learned in the past five years? Well, not a lot, as the latest revelations about the behaviour of loss-making Royal Bank of Scotland confirm. The global financial crisis has simply become worse in precisely the way that many foresaw. Since 2008, governments have thrown ever greater sums of public money at delinquent financial institutions in the hope that they would mend their ways and become what banks should be: engines of credit that allow industry to expand rather than vehicles for personal self-enrichment.

The economic living dead: misery of the middle earners.

Where is the anger?  Where is the resistance? Five years into the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and earnings – apart from those of the top ten percent - have fallen year on year. A raft of studies has shown that ordinary families in Britain are suffering the longest squeeze in living memory, yet the streets are quiet, there are no barricades, no factory occupations. People have been voting, if they vote at all, for the established political parties. The Left and even the far Right have never been more marginal, at least in Britain..

Ed Miliband isn't offering any radical alternative to austerity, just slightly slower cuts. Francois Hollande, the new socialist President in France, who calls himself “Mr Normal”, is actually promising greater austerity. He says he will legislate for a balanced budget in France by 2017, in a country that hasn't had a balanced budget since the 1960s. Here in Scotland, the Scottish National Party is promising oil-fuelled growth and better public services but its leader, Alex Salmond, is behaving increasingly like an economic conservative.

As for popular resistance, all we have seen so far are token stoppages like the rather damp demonstration by civil service workers in defence of their pensions – pensions which of course are denied to the vast majority of workers in the private sector. But closing a few libraries and museums isn't exactly a red revolution. Last year, the Occupy movement, inspired by the Arab Spring, seemed to be building some kind of international movement against global capitalism, but the tented communities that sprang up in Wall Street, St Paul's and in Edinburgh's financial district have moved on.

But the inequalities of wealth that motivated Occupy – the 99% as they called themselves - are as real as ever. According to the Sunday Times Rich List, published last week, the top 1,000 wealthiest people in Britain now own a combined £414 billion, equal to a third of the National Debt. The top 1% of earners in Britain syphon 15% of national income, a figure that has doubled in 30 years thanks to lower income tax. Down at the other end of the salary scale, the bottom ten percent 10% saw their real earnings fall by 4.1% last year, according to an analysis last week by the TUC. This is because inflation is worse for those on the margins. The rate of inflation in essentials like foods and fuel is around 6%, whereas if you're buying flat screen televisions, computers or air travel prices are actually falling. Whoopee!

Pound, euro, groat - what currency for Scotland?

Whatever happened to Braveheart?  Time was when the debate about Scottish independence was all about heroic issues like freedom, national destiny, culture. Even the mild-mannered former leader of the SNP, Gordon Wilson, used to talk of it being a “revolutionary” party.  Not any more. Nowadays the independence debate seems to be all about the small change, literally, of national liberation - the currency.

   Right now, the biggest issue in the referendum campaign is whether or not Scotland should keep the pound.. Arguments about  North Sea Oil,  the armed forces, Trident etc have  been eclipsed by a row over whether or not Scotland could, or should remain in monetary union with England, as the SNP wish.    The former Labour Chancellor, Alistair Darling, who will be launching the anti-independence Better Together campaign on Monday, claims that Scotland would suffer “economic serfdom” if it retained sterling after independence. And anyway, he says, England wouldn’t allow an independent Scotland to keep the pound. 

  Nonsense, say the Nationalists.  Wha’s to stop us keeping the bonny pound?   Scotland will prosper in a new Britain as Scots and English share a common monetary destiny.  At least for the time being.  Not everyone thinks this is plausible.   Professor John Kay, a former member of Alex Salmond’s council of economic advisers, suggested this week that Scotland might have to consider setting up its own currency, like Norway or Denmark, rather than remain under the heel of the Bank of England    Nobody seems to talk about joining the euro any more, for obvious reasons, which is unfortunate because there is an argument that, if EMU survives, Scotland could benefit from being in it.

Lost in London during Boris's games.

   Driving back from Dover from holiday, we decided to let the satnav do the job of getting us round London. Yes, I know – you just head north on the M25, but we'd heard it was jammed because of the Olympics. Anyway, the satnav lady, in her digital wisdom, decided to take us straight into central London on the A2 and, before we knew it, we were in the middle of the Olympic Games complex and panicking in case we never got out again. But we did. In fact, we sailed through central London with uncanny speed because there was practically nothing on the roads. I have never seen London so quiet. It was like the sequel to 28 Days.

What has this got to do with the political prospects of Boris Johnson, who added to his buffoonish reputation yesterday by being left dangling from a zip wire during a photo-opportunity in London's Victoria park? Well, the success of London's traffic management during the Games is being seen as both another feather in the cap of the London Mayor and another nail in the coffin of David Cameron. The lack ot traffic congestion in central London, though an administrative achievement, is apparently helping to plunge Britain into what is being called a “triple dip recession”, presumably because economic activity has been damaged by people staying at home and watching British athletes failing to win anything. And Cameron will get the blame. 

British debt is much worse than Spain's. And more is on the way.

  Can it really be that, only seven years ago this month, a quarter of a million people, all dressed in white, encircled Edinburgh in the campaign to Drop the Debt of developing nations? It seems like a different world, now that countries like Britain are drowning in their own debts - which make the debts of African countries look like small change.

While Bob Geldoff was hurling expletives at the G8, Britain was indulging on the greatest borrowing binge in history. This wasn't just government borrowing, which rose to an unsustainable £155bn per annum in 2010. The real big spenders were you and me, the households of Britain, who embraced debt as no generation has ever done before. Household debt in Britain is now off the scale, at 150% of GDP – heading towards £2 trillion. There is no precedent for this in British economic history.

If you add in the debts of British banks, unfunded public sector pensions and PFI deals the debt mountain rises to 507% of GDP, according to analysts McKinsey and this has actually risen since 2008. Spain's total debt by the same measure is only 385% of GDP.  But here's the really scary thing: many economists say the only way to get out from under this massive debt burden is by spending more in the hope that this will revive the economy. And they are probably right.

Epitaph for the Age of Irresponsibility

     “An epitaph for an age of irresponsibility”, is how the Chancellor, George Osborne, described the Barclay's Libor-fixing scandal in the Commons last week. It was, he went on: “symptomatic of a financial system that elevated greed above all other concerns and brought our economy to its knees”. If even a Tory Chancellor has finally got it, can we expect real action to sort out Britain's banks? Don't hold your breath.

The manipulation of Libor – the London Inter-Bank Offered Rate - has been common knowledge in financial circles for years. The Economist has been writing about it at least since 2008. The idea that the British Bankers Association didn't know what has been going on is laughable. Every barrow-boy in the City knew the banks had been fiddling their borrowing costs in order to disguise their distress after Lehman Brother's crashed in 2008 and interbank lending almost froze. By manipulating their borrowing costs, banks like Barclays were able to convey the impression that they were in less financial stress than they actually were.

Lords reform could be the missing link to devolution max

The SNP said this year's rebellion by Tory MPs on reform of the House of Lords was confirmation that “Westminster cannot be trusted on constitutional reform”. The only way Scots can ensure that the unelected Upper House has no say on Scottish affairs, they say, is to vote Yes to independence in 2014. Oh, and don't listen to all those promises from David Cameron and Alistair Darling that, if Scots are good boys and girls and vote No, Holyrood will be given more tax raising powers and many other goodies. Like Lords reform, this is destined for the long grass of legislative oblivion.

However, it's not entirely true to say that Westminster can't be trusted to deliver constitutional reform – it delivered the Scottish Parliament after all, and has recently passed the Scotland Bill giving Holyrood a share of income taxes, though few economists seem to think this scheme is workable. And with a bit of imagination in Westminster about the Lords, and its place in the shifting sands of the Union, they might be able to kill two constitutional birds with one stone: salvage the UK and give the Upper House a real role in life as an elected Senate.

Better Together or living apart together. The NO campaign begins.

It's the campaign that just can't say no. “Better Together”, the unionist campaign for the independence referendum, finally gets underway tomorrow trying to avoid the word “no”, because of its negative connotations. This may cause some voter confusion because if you google “Better Together”, you discover that it is the NHS patient experience campaign. We knew that Scotland wasn't in the best of health, but we didn't realise she was actually in intensive care.

Better Together brings to an end a curious phase in Scottish politics where unionism has been almost completely out of the picture. Labour has been so anxious not to be allied a “Tory union” led by David Cameron, that it has allowed the case for sticking with Britain to go by default.. Until now - as the former Chancellor, Alastair Darling, unveils the campaign at Edinburgh's Napier University. This was the venue used by Alex Salmond to launch the National Conversation five years ago and it's taken that long to reply.

 It's the biggest poker game in history. On one side of the table, the dowdy, conservative German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, on the other, youthful, radical Alexis Tsipras, leader of the Greek left wing coalition, Syriza, which is expected to win increased support in today's Greek elections. Could ever a financial crisis have thrown up an odder couple? Eyeballing each other over the future of the eurozone. Waiting for the other to blink. 

   The stakes? Around four trillion – that's the likely cost of bailing out all of Europe's busted banks if there isn't a resolution to the eurozone debt crisis. And right now, there isn't one.

Who are the English? Ask Ed Miliband.

   The shadow of Jeremy Clarkson loomed large over Scotland this week as Ed Miliband launched his latest bid to save the union. The Top Gear motormouth has said that if Scots vote for independence it would be like losing “a somewhat violent but much loved family pet”. Ed said wanted to persuade England that, on the contrary, Scotland's departure would be a “disaster for Britain”, though he never explained exactly why. Instead he promised that Labour would embrace English nationalism “We have been too nervous to talk of English pride and English character”, he said.

Questioned on Channel 4 News as to what these distinctively English characteristics actually are, Miliband answered, rather hesitantly, that it was things like “mustn't grumble” stoicism that has made England great, and also what he called the “English NHS”. Now, I would have to concede that Scots do their share of grumbling and moaning – the difference between a ray of sunshine and all that. But I fail to see how the NHS can be declared a uniquely English institution. Last time I looked, the National Health Service was being dismantled under the privatisation policies of the Westminster Coalition. In Scotland, the NHS has been preserved intact as a wholly funded public service. What Miliband meant to say, I think,  is that the NHS is one of those great institutions that kept the Union together in the decades after the Second World War. But by posing it as an answer to the question: what is it to be English? , he missed the point entirely.

But why stray into this territory in the first place? Why not let sleeping bulldogs lie. Well, English Labour MPs, like the former deputy leadership challenger Jon Cruddas, have been arguing that Labour needs to combat the appeal of the British National Party, that has been making inroads into Labour's council vote, by showing that English nationalism isn't simply the property of the far right. Why shouldn't Labour be patriotic too? Miliband also feels he needs to assuage English suspicion that moaning Scots get favourable treatment from Westminster.  However, Ed is not prepared to contemplate any English parliament or any reforms to the West Lothian Question. He still needs that cohort of Scottish Labour MPs if Labour is ever to win a majority..

Spanish debt crisis is a crisis for all of us.

     Capital Flight may sound like the name of a new budget airline – in fact it's what happens when a country loses trust in itself. In the first three months of the year, Spaniards exported a total of e100 billion to London, Frankfurt, Paris - anywhere. The biggest flight of funds since records began. Citizens, firms and banks are hedging against the likelihood that Spain will depart the eurozone, crushed by the burden of its sovereign debts. The respected former Spanish premier Felipe Gonzales said last week that “Spain is in a situation of total emergency, the worst crisis we have ever lived through”.

Where did this come from? It was supposed to be Greece that was on the point of departure. Only last week we were all worrying about contagion from a “Grexit” spreading to other Mediterrannean countries. But the contagion seems to be happening before the disease. In fact, there's a possibility the patient may die even before it is infected, because the collapse of Spain – an economy four times the size of Greece – would be curtains for Europe, and probably for the world economy. It's not just too big to fail; it's too big to bail.

What is happening to Spain is similar to what happened to Lehman Brothers in autumn 2008, except on an epic scale. That was just a run on a Wall Street investment bank; this is a run on a trillion euro economy, the fourth largest in Europe. When entire countries go bust the reverberations are felt across the planet.. If Spain restores the peseta – and this is actually being talked about – then it would default on the huge debts owed by its private sector to international banks. They would go bust as a result, causing credit to cease overnight and international trade grind to a halt. There would be runs on nearly all European banks, not just the Spanish ones. Cash machines would close. It's as serious as that.

Time for a Unionists For Independence campaign?

    It was an bright spring day as well-kent faces from a variety of political backgrounds came together in Edinburgh to sign a declaration affirming Scotland's right to make its own decisions in its own way. No, not the SNP's Yes to Independence campaign on Friday, but the Claim of Right Declaration of Sovereignty in 1989. I've been knocking around Scottish politics longer than is good for me, and I couldn't help comparing the text of the SNP's declaration with the one I saw signed back in the day.

Friday's Declaration of Independence, signed by nationalist celebrities like Alan Cumming and Brian Cox, as well as political figures like the former Labour MP, Denis Canavan, read as follows: “I believe that it is fundamentally better for us all if decisions about Scotland's future are taken by the people who care most about Scotland, that is by the people of Scotland”.

Roll back nearly a quarter of a century and the Claim of Right affirmed “the sovereign right of the Scottish people to determine the form of government best suited to their needs and [the undersigned] do hereby declare and pledge that in all our actions their interests shall be paramount”.

No, they're not identical - the language is different, but the spirit is very much the same. They are both assertions of the sovereign right of a people to determine their future. And it is quite difficult to disagree with either proposition. Though of course the SNP did boycott the Claim of Right, which was signed by all of Labour's Scottish MPs except for Tam Dalyell.

Grexit is exit for euro.

The European single currency and the Sunday Herald are the same age. Both entered the world on January 1999, a coincidence our first editorial thought highly auspicious. To be honest, while most observers thought the euro was here to stay, they weren't so confident about the fate of the first new Scottish quality sunday paper in over twenty years. Well, the Sunday Herald is still here, but incredibly there are now serious doubts about how much longer the single currency will survive. The great liberal project that was supposed to bind the nations of Europe together in economic harmony seems to have hit the rocks.

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, isn't exactly renowned for telling it like it is, but he hit the mark last week when he expressed his dismay at the European Union “tearing itself apart without any obvious solution”. It's as if Europe's political leaders no longer possess the will to make it stop. There is a fatalism seeping through the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg about the hitherto unthinkable prospect of Greece actually leaving the eurozone. The euro, like diamonds, is supposed to be forever, but last week the German finance minister, numerous central bankers and even the head of the IMF were openly speculating about Greece restoring the drachma. There is talk of a “Grexit” - an “orderly” departure.

It is likely to be anything but. Make no mistake, the Greek people, who go to the polls again on June 17^th, are holding a gun to the head of the entire European financial system.

Prondzynski Report: the Principals Fight Back.

    It didn't take the University Principals long to mobilise against the reforms to Scottish higher education governance recommended by the report last month chaired by the principal of Robert Gordon University, Ferdinand von Prondzynski.   Universities Scotland - the principals' trades union - has condemned attempts to rein in principals' pay - Prondzynski said bonuses should be frozen until further notice - as an invasion of academic freedom.  They are appalled by the suggestion that staff and students should be involved in the selection and remuneration committees for principals.  They don't want trades unionists on university governing bodies and they hate the idea of elected chairs, even though the four oldest Scottish Universities already have elected Rectors chairing courts.

   So, we must have got something right.

The status quo isn't what it used to be.

 The status quo isn't what it used to be. In the old days, you knew where you stood when you voted No to constitutional change. You would be voting for things as they are - whatever arrangement happens to apply at the time of voting. Not any more. This weekend it is impossible to say what the current state of play is on the constitution because all the unionist parties are proposing radical changes to it.

The status quo is now a process not an event, to paraphrase Donald Dewar. There was David Cameron last month, after his meeting with Alex Salmond, announcing that there could be “more powers” for the Scottish parliament. A week later, Alistair Darling – no enthusiast for fiscal autonomy - caught the bug and announced that to be responsible a parliament “should raise the money it spends”. Last week, leading figures in all three unionist parties got together to promote “devoluton plus” under which Scotland would acquire powers to raise income tax, corporation tax and oil revenue, while leaving VAT and National Insurance with Westminster.

Now, this weekend, the new leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Johann Lamont, has announced that she will lead a new commission on devolution, a kind of Calman plus, to look at new fiscal powers. This parallels the commission already set up by the Scottish Liberal Democrats under their former leader, Sir Menzies Campbell, to look at a federal option. And there is the Future of Scotland initiative – an umbrella of various “civic Scotland” groupings like churches, charities and trades unions, who met last week looking at form devolution max .

Suddenly you can't move for commissions on fiscal devolution. It makes the unionist demands for an early referendum on independence look oddly premature. If there were an early ballot, what on earth would Scots be voting for? Independence is clear – sort of. Alex Salmond at least seems to know what he is talking about. But on the other side there is now a shifting kaleidoscope of constitutional formulas occupying the unionist space.

The unionists' priority of course is come up with a something, anything, to block the march of the SNP, following its election landslide victory in  May. Figures like Douglas Alexander, the Shadow Foreign Secretary, have been urging the Scottish Labour party up to understand the extent and significance of its defeat and start thinking constructively about more powers for Holyrood. But Lamont, who says she will be leading the No campaign with Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown in support, is still grudging about what she calls the “virility” test of more powers. She is even hinting about powers being taken away from the Scottish parliament – not so much devolution plus as devolution minus. Right now, bizarrely, the UK Labour party seems more radical on the constitution than its Scottish counterpart.

So, where does all this leave the state of the union? Do we have any clear idea where the status quo is going? Well, they haven't said it explicitly, but the parties are clearly heading very rapidly towards a consensus on devolution plus, if only because there really is nowhere else to go. The Scottish parliament, to satisfy voter opinion, simply has to have a new funding arrangement more radical than that offered in the current Scotland Bill. The idea of splitting income tax between Holyrood and Westminster, proposed by Calman in 2009, was always a difficult sell and it is now well past it. Devolution max is a bit too like independence, since it involves Scotland raising all taxes and sending a contribution south for common services like defence.

Devolution plus is the only credible unionist destination short of independence. It is the unionist Maginot Line – the line beyond which Alex Salmond shall not past. It is also almost certainly what the Scottish voters would vote for – if the unionist parties would only let them. Perversely, all three unionist leaders are still insisting that there should be no opportunity for Scots to have a say. But how else are the voters to have any confidence that this better devolution will actually happen? Unionists can't simply offer promises of what might be if the Scots are good boys and girls and reject nasty Mr Salmond. Everyone knows that if the referendum returns a No to independence in 2014, then the unionist parties' enthusiasm for more devolution would rapidly evaporate. If they refuse a second question or a second ballot, then the only alternative would be to move a new Scotland bill, replacing the one limping through the House of Lords. But come the referendum, if all the unionists offer is jam tomorrow, I wouldn't put it past the Scottish voters to back independence in order to be sure that they get a better devolution.

Pandagate. Those independence scare stories in full.

But they will never take...our pandas! I don't know where the Mirror got the story that, because they were gifts to the UK not Scotland, we would lose Sunshine and Sweetie if Scotland voted for independence. The paper cited government sources.   But apart from being straight wrong - the pandas were lent to Edinburgh Zoo, not the UK - it only drew attention to the First Minister's quip that there are more giant pandas in Scotland than there are Tory MPs.

Pandagate provided an element of light relief among the increasingly bizarre scare stories that radiated across the media since January. The defence secretary, Philip Hammond, warned that, after independence, Scotland would have to pay “billions” for the cost of relocating Trident. This wasn't quite in the same league as losing the pandas, but was equally daft. I don't recall the Ukraine being required to build bases in Russia for the nuclear weapons it returned in 1994. Scotland never asked for weapons of mass destruction in the first place. Anyway, there's a simple enough solution: Trident nuclear warheads are moved by road convoy every year from Coulport to Aldermaston near Reading. Maybe they could just make a one way trip in 2015. Scotland could pay for the diesel.

The UK government also turned its big guns onto Alex Salmond's proposals for an independent Scottish defence force of one naval base, one aircraft base and a mobile brigade. “You can't just break off bits of the army like a bar of chocolate” said Mr Hammond. Which is curious because that is exactly what the UK government has done under its defence review, which reduces Scotland's bases to, er, one naval base, one aircraft base and a mobile brigade. This is a childish dispute because, Trident aside, it would be senseless for England and Scotland not to co-operate on defence, since we occupy one small island.

But divorce is a costly business. “An independent Scotland would be saddled with a crippling national debt of at least £140bn!” cried the Daily Mail, again citing “government sources” Shock! Horror! But, wait: this figure is arrived at by giving Scotland a 10% share of the UK national debt which is estimated to rise to £1.4 trillion by 2014. So, if Scotland is in the red, England would be even redder – and Scotland at least has the oil. I'm not sure who I'd put my money on in this particular race to the poorhouse. The truth is, as far as debt is concerned we really are in it together.

Devolution: plus, max, minus and squared.

 Readers of this column will be aware that I've been complaining about by gob being smacked on a regular basis by the twists and turns of unionist policy. Each week a new destiny is revealed for Scotland: independence light, devolution max, devolution plus, skinny devolution lite with a shot of max... You could be forgiven for thinking that the politicians are few clauses short of a full constitution. But bear with me because there could just be a happy ending here.

This week senior figures in all three unionist parties in Scotland, Conservatives, Liberal Democrats and Labour, came together behind a new constitutional settlement called devolution plus. This is essentially the formula devised by the Reform Scotland think tank, which seeks to ensure that the Scottish parliament raises the vast bulk of the money it spends. In other words, that it pays its way. In a sense this is Calman reloaded, an extension of the plan devised in 2009 by the commission set up by the unionist parties after the SNP victory in the 2007 election campaign.

Calman was widely criticised for his plan to split income tax between London and Edinburgh. This was a difficult proposal to explain, let alone to implement, and many economists believe it would be deflationary. But the worst thing about Calman, and the Scotland bill that implements it, was that it failed to live up the principles set out so cogently in the main body of the report - that a parliament should be responsible for raising its revenue in a way that it is accountable, equitable and transparent. Devolution plus puts the Calman principles into practice in a way that is fair and that people can understand.

Under devolution plus, Scotland gets income tax, corporation tax, various other taxes and a geographical share of oil revenue. The UK keeps national insurance and VAT – reasonable because these taxes need to be more or less consistent across a monetary and customs union, which is what the new Scotland would be. This may not be “full fiscal freedom”, as the SNP have described it, or even devolution max, where Scotland raises all tax and sends a contribution south for common services like defence. But it's very close to it. If this scheme were implemented, Holyrood would have the vast majority of the powers it requires to pursue an independent economic policy, to the extent that this is possible within a monetary union where a UK central bank sets interest rates.