Uk politics

The Economist has some fun with Scotland this week, running a cover suggesting my motherland would go bust if it was independent. The map has lots of gags: the Outer Hebrides is renamed ‘Outer Cash’, ‘Edinborrow’ twinned with Athens etc. But it suffers from one central defect: the thesis is nonsense. Saying that Scotland would go bust without English subsidy is the clichéd unionist attack line, which has lost force over the decades because it is demonstrably untrue. The emergence of new nation states, many much smaller than Scotland, has shown it that small is viable (something that wasn’t as evident in the 1970s) and even the Economists’ own story

It took the Tory party 15 years to recover from the bad blood created by Margaret Thatcher’s forced resignation. So it is, perhaps, unsurprising that five years on, the bitterness from Tony Blair’s being pushed out of office has not yet subsided. Phil Collins, who was a speechwriter to Blair, has today written a scathing piece about Tom Watson, the leader of the so-called curry house coup against Blair. Collins accuses Watson of putting the ‘occupation of internal power’ in the party by his faction above the interests of the Labour party. Watson, who is Labour’s election campaigns coordinator, exerts a huge influence over Labour’s internal processes and candidate selection,

In his cover piece for this week’s magazine, Neil O’Brien describes the great divide between London and the rest of the UK. One of the main differences he highlights is in their economies. He says: ‘In inner west London, economic output per head is £110,000 a year. In an important sense, these people are not living in the same country as the inhabitants of Gwent or the Wirral, whose output is just a tenth of this.’ In fact, London is set apart not just from those two poorest areas, but every other area in the country. You see, the second richest area — Edinburgh — has an output per head

The big question in British politics right now is what happens when the voters are dissatisfied with all the three main parties and their leaders. According to a recent opinion poll, David Cameron’s approval rating is now down to minus 27. According to the invaluable Anthony Wells, this is the lowest it has been since Cameron became Tory leader. But the PM’s numbers look positively healthy compared to Miliband’s (minus 41) and Clegg’s (minus 53). Dissatisfaction with political leaders isn’t the only indicator that people aren’t happy. As I report in the column this week, senior Downing Street aides have been much struck by polling showing that more than 40