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So we have our date with destiny. Scotland will march to the polls nine days after the 501st anniversary of the Battle of Flodden. September, 18th 2014. There are fewer than 600 days to go. And already the spin is starting. Stephen Noon, that smart nationalist strategist, is first out the blocks with a post asking who would stand to benefit from a No vote? His answer should not surprise you. Noon thinks David Cameron’s own re-election campaign will be boosted if Scotland says no to independence: Labour and Tories may share a platform and campaign together before the vote, but as soon as the votes are counted there would

Sometimes I wish Conservative cabinet ministers would couch their arguments in favour of the Union in terms of principle, not process or drab accountancy. Philip Hammond, the unimpressive Secretary of State for Defence, is the latest minister to warn that some of the perfectly solvable problems that are an inescapable feature of unwinding the United Kingdom are in fact so intractable that it’s a fool’s mission to even think about resolving them. Mr Hammond’s interview with the Daily Telegraph today is but the latest example of this question-begging. He appears to believe that Scottish independence is an idea so obviously ridiculous that it effectively refutes itself without the need for

Nicola Sturgeon, arguably the SNP’s most effective asset at present, went to Brussels today to deliver a speech about Scotland’s future relationship with the EU. Most of it was as bland and unobjectionable as you might expect. Move along, not very much to see here. And with some reason. I think it is all but inconceivable that the EU would make it difficult for an independent Scotland to join the club. I also think Spanish (and perhaps Belgian) fears that letting Scotland join would set a dangerous precedent are, for the most part, exaggerated. At the very least I doubt that the threat of a Spanish veto is a good

Mario Cuomo, former governor of New York state (and father of the present governor) is perhaps these days most famous for his quip that politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Sometimes, anyway. Scotland’s independence referendum campaign, at present, doesn’t even rise to the level of William McGonagle’s execrable verse. Most of the prose is stale and hackneyed guff too. This is the subject of my Think Scotland column this week. An argument that should, in theory, be mildly exciting is instead – at least for now – failing to deliver: My sense is that many of the people paying most attention to this campaign are the people most

So we have a question and it is a simple one. Should Scotland be an independent country? There, that wasn’t so difficult was it? It is, after all, the nub of the matter. Granted, one might agree that Scotland should be an independent country but still conclude that being so is a different matter. That might be a metaphysical matter beyond the Electoral Commission’s ken. Nevertheless, it is not an unreasonable question. Some reports seemed keen to spin this as some kind of ‘setback’ for Alex Salmond. Apparently dropping the preamble ‘Do you agree’ – included in the SNP’s favoured wording – is yet another indication the nationalists are on the ropes.

There are only 600 or so days to go until Scotland has its referendum on independence. The excitement is almost palpable. Fortunately The Smiths back catalogue is all you need peruse to have a keen grip on the defining stramash de nos jours. Morrissey has always fancied himself, I think, as a kind of prophet. Johnny Marr wrote the tunes. Astonishing as it may seem, all sides in this rammy are, essentially, taking their cues from The Smiths. A Scottish independence playlist-dialogue might run something like this: Nationalist: Is It Really So Strange? Unionist: Barbarism Begins At Home. Nationalist:  London. Unionist:  Paint A Vulgar Picture. Nationalist: I Know It’s Over.

Ruth Davidson became leader of the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party in large part because she was the candidate favoured by the party establishment. Where Murdo Fraser suggested – rather too boldly as it turned out – the party should fold its tent and start again under a new banner, Davidson preferred a more cautious approach. Moreover, she said it was time to “draw a line in the sand” on the matter of transferring further powers to the Scottish parliament. A little more than a year later it seems as though that line has been washed away by the tide. Perhaps it was a mistake to draw it in the

This week’s Think Scotland column takes a gander, just for once, at the Scottish Green party. Patrick Harvie’s party is in favour of Scottish independence for reasons that, frankly, seem pretty damn unconvincing. I suspect that the Greens, like those parts of the far-left that also favour independence, are liable to be desperately disappointed by life in an independent Scotland and that they will come to realise that it is not much better than their present miserable existence within the United Kingdom. Harvie, of course, rejects the label “nationalist”. He is, he insists, no such thing and you don’t need to be a nationalist to favour independence. Well, maybe not.

Alex Salmond is back in Bute House, refreshed and chippered by a much-needed holiday. If 2012 was a year in which the Referendum Guns were first deployed it was still, in the end, something of a phoney war. At the risk of exhausting an easily-exhausted electorate, 2013 should see more action. This week’s column at Think Scotland argues that the SNP need to broaden their vision and approach the campaign with a greater sense of generosity than is sometimes seen. At present they depend too heavily – in my view – on the idea that independence is a way to Tory-proof Scotland. That’s a negative, not a positive, case. Moreover

Today’s Think Scotland column takes a gander at the rumpus over an independent Scotland’s accession to the EU. Until recently the SNP promised that said accession would be automatic. Now it’s simply “common-sense”.  This is because Jose Manuel Barroso, the Spanish Iberian agent* at the heart of the EU Commission, has made an awkward intervention. Scotland would, he says, not be an automatic member of the club at all. Intuitively this is obvious just as Scotland would not be an automatic member of the United Nations. It would have to apply. Once it applied it’s application would most probably be accepted. There are few plausible grounds upon which to reject

In the rabid hamster-eating-hamster world of Scottish politics Nicola Sturgeon is a rarity: a politician of obvious competence who’s respected by her peers regardless of their own political allegiances. There are not so many folk at Holyrood of whom that could be said. The Deputy First Minister is not a flashy politician but she’s quietly become almost as important to the SNP as Alex Salmond. This, according to one sagacious owl, makes her one of the ten most interesting politicians in Britain. Hard though it is to imagine this, there are voters immune to the First Minister’s charms. Part of Nicola’s remit is to reach those parts of Scotland that

Even the cheapest, Poundland crystal ball will tell even a blind observer that Europe is pretty soon going to be a pretty hefty problem for almost all of Britain’s political parties. Almost all, I say, because that includes the SNP* whose europhilia is, in some respects, a product of a time that no longer exists. Anyway, the odds of manifesto pledges promising an in-or-out referendum in the next parliament seem to be shortening all the time. I have no idea what this is supposed to achieve since, as best I understand the matter, neither the Conservative nor Labour parties wish Britain to leave the European Union. Asking the question necessarily

So Alex Salmond has achieved the feat of becoming Scotland’s longest serving First Minister. This is a notable achievement. After all, he has avoided the fate of one of his predecessors – resigning in disgrace – and another: being defeated at the ballot box. Salmond has just served as Scotland’s First Minister for 2001 days, or five and half years, just eclipsing the term served by Jack McConnell between 2001 and 2007. But even he would agree that the field to contest this landmark is not a large one. Scotland has only had four first ministers since 1999. The first, Donald Dewar, lasted just a year before his death in 2000. The second,

Philip Hammond is one of those ministers who seems to be held in greater esteem by those inside the Westminster hamlet than those of us who live beyond its boundaries. Westminster’s natives may, of course, be right, but it is striking how often the Secretary of State for Defence prefers to cast his arguments in terms of economics rather than, well, defence. He’s at it again today. Mr Hammond is popping in to the nuclear submarine base at Faslane where he will “announce” that the government is splashing another £350m on the next phase of the mission to replace Britain’s Trident nuclear missiles. For reasons best known to himself, the

For years Scotland has been waiting to see when his luck would run out – well, now it has. Alex Salmond: gambler, tipster, political animal and First Minister now has another moniker: author of the country’s first scomnishambles. Yesterday marked, without doubt, the First Minister’s worst day in office. First, he lost two MSPs. Left-wingers Jean Urquhart and John Finnie announced they were leaving the SNP because of the party’s conversion to Nato. That decision, taken at SNP conference last weekend, has alienated many left-wingers in the party because they see it – rightly – as part of Salmond’s attempts to take the SNP into the moderate, centre ground of Scottish politics. But

It  has been a disastrous day for the Scottish National Party. Its majority at Holyrood has been cut to just one this morning after two MSPs – Jean Urquhart and John Finnie – quit the party in protest at its decision at its conference in Perth this weekend to end its opposition to Nato. Then Nicola Sturgeon gave a statement to the Scottish Parliament which led to her boss being branded a ‘liar’ by Labour as she admitted that the Scottish government has not yet sought legal advice on whether an independent Scotland would continue to be a member of the European Union. She said: ‘The Scottish government has previously