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David Cameron, the Prime Minister, visited New York for talks at the United Nations; he said Britain supported the American air strikes on the Islamic State. ‘These people want to kill us,’ Mr Cameron said on NBC news. Mr Cameron met President Hassan Rouhani of Iran in New York, the first such meeting since the Iranian revolution in 1979. Mr Cameron was caught by cameras in New York saying to Michael Bloomberg, its former mayor, that when he rang the Queen with the Scottish referendum result, ‘She purred down the line.’
Alex Salmond resigned as First Minister of Scotland and leader of the Scottish National Party, with effect from November. This followed the referendum for Scottish residences, which rejected independence by 2,001,926 votes (55.3 per cent) to 1,617,989. The turnout was 84.59 per cent of those registered, who were 97 per cent of those eligible. David Cameron acted quickly to placate Conservative MPs angry at the promises made to Scottish voters. He said reforms for England would come ‘in tandem’ with those for Scotland, and he challenged Labour to support them. He invited 20 backbenchers to Chequers to talk to William Hague, who has the job of steering constitutional changes to a timetable devised by Gordon Brown. The former Labour prime minster promised a draft Scotland Bill by Burns Night (or the Conversion of St Paul, 25 January), to become law after the election. Mr Cameron, Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, and Nick Clegg, the Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader, had published a ‘Vow’ in the Daily Record, which offered ‘extensive new powers’ to the Scottish Parliament and ‘the continuation of the Barnett allocation for resources’. Lord Barnett said of the formula he had invented in 1978: ‘It is unfair and should be stopped… it is a national embarrassment.’
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