How Not to Save the Union

There is a good deal of good sense in the magazine’s main leader this week. By which I mean of course that a good deal of it is unconvincing and some of it dangerously so. That is, if David Cameron listens to the Spectator he risks assisting the very forces – Alex Salmond and the SNP – the magazine’s editors (and the Prime Minister himself) wish to defeat.

Of course Alex Salmond is beatable and of course support for UN-member independence is a minority enthusiasm. This is one reason why a referendum seems to scare Scots less than it does politicians and pundits based in London. (Most of those pundits and politicians, incidentally, seem only to care about Scotland’s constitutional question; the actual governance of the country is, at best, most often an afterthought.)

Be that as it may, the Spectator argues:

The battle for Scotland simply requires a little organisation, and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom ought to provide it.