The Union needs balance

Today’s Guardian long-read on the Scottish referendum is a great piece of journalism. Both Alistair Darling and Danny Alexander argue in it that when David Cameron stepped out of Downing Street and announced his support for English votes for English laws he allowed the SNP to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, to argue that Scottish voters had been hoodwinked.

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Now, to be sure, Alex Salmond make much of Cameron’s announcement. In his Spectator interview he says that it showed that Cameron thinks Scots ‘heads zipped up the back’ and that he didn’t get the enormity of what had just happened. But the idea that Cameron’s announcement alone, not the dire state of Scottish Labour or the fact that the Unionist vote is split three ways while the Nationalist one is not, is what has allowed the SNP back into the game is bizarre.