Politics: Whitehall’s own Scottish nationalist

The notion of Scotland being reoriented as a ‘Scandinavian’ country, at the expense of links with England, the Commonwealth and Europe, is odd enough; but stranger still is the revelation this week that the plan — part of a massive ‘Prospectus for Independence’ — is being put together by a branch of the UK civil service. These servants of the Crown have been tasked by Alex Salmond with selling separatism to the electorate, in advance of an independence referendum. For Scots it was a shock, but not a surprise. This is only the latest demonstration of how what ought to be part of the British government machine has been made an instrument of separatist propaganda.

This subversive scenario was never supposed to happen. The architects of devolution designed it on the premise of a seamless United Kingdom administrative structure, with the head of the Scottish Executive’s civil service reporting to the Cabinet Secretary in Whitehall.