What's next after English votes for English laws

Once, Alistair Campbell would have spotted and filled the news vacuum which sucks away at the papers this weekend. Instead it the Tories have scored a spin coup. They have grabbed headlines by re-announcing their longstanding “English votes for English laws” policy which (as Jonathan Freedland said in July) is “not new but in their 2001 and 2005 manifestos”.
 
No one cared about the policy then: now, it hits a nerve because there’s much agitation about Scotland’s subsidy. I’ve just been doing the papers on Sky News with Dawn Butler who said this policy was anti-Scottish. Wrongly: it was originally proposed by The Scotsman many years ago. Polls show that Scots, too, consider the current system unfair. It is only backed by Labour, which would otherwise have lost the foundation hospitals and top-up fees votes.
 
To my mind, the more important story today is Cameron’s interview with Simon Walters of the Mail on Sunday where he says “it is a question we ask ourselves… is the Barnett formula right for the year 2007 and beyond?” I have blogged how, in private, Tories are warming to Alex Salmond’s idea of fiscal autonomy. Could this be what’s coming down the Tory pipeline?