Osborne sparks the unionists’ fightback

Edinburgh

It became clear last night why George Osborne was put in charge of the Coalition Government’s fightback against Alex Salmond and separatism: he is the only one who has the ability to really score points off the Nats. The Chancellor’s intervention on currency and bank notes – suggesting that an independent Scotland might not be able to keep the pound and that, if it did, it might be banned from producing Scottish bank notes – hit the SNP hard.

Osborne’s remarks shook one of those comfortable certainties which the SNP has been peddling for so long – that Scotland would simply keep sterling after independence and everything would progress as normal. The key point here is that the SNP has been allowed to get away with arguing its case on a whole range of issues without so much as a query from Westminster for so long that it has managed to convert assumptions into fact.