Gordon Brown has done enough damage in Scotland

Gordon Brown has broken his silence again. The former prime minister told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that the Scottish Parliament had ‘failed to deliver a fairer and more prosperous Scotland’ and had instead become a ‘battering ram for constitutional warfare’. What’s that, Lassie? Timmy’s trapped down the well? And creating a Scottish parliament to run almost all of Scotland’s affairs separately from the rest of the UK helped rather than hurt the campaign for independence? Jeepers.

The battering ram that Brown laments exists only because the party and government in which he played a somewhat senior role insisted on fashioning it.

At the time of the Scottish devolution referendum in 1997, they were warned that setting up a rival parliament to Westminster would begin the unravelling of the Union. Scottish Labour did what it always did: pummelled the dissenters and pressed on regardless.