This is how to save the Union

Devolution has failed in Scotland. Nothing that follows will be of use to you if you remain in denial of this fact. 

Facing up to a quarter-century of needless, self-inflicted constitutional harm is the admission price to any credible conversation about how to go about fixing the problem. Devolution, sold with the assurance that ‘the Union will be strengthened and the threat of separatism removed’, has weakened the Union and armed the separatists.

All historic errors have their guilty men and devolution has an unholy trinity. Labour loves legends, especially those felled on the cusp of greatness, and Donald Dewar — MP at 28, architect of devolution, inaugural First Minister, dead at 63 — ticks all the boxes. The devolution industry mythologised the ‘Father of the Nation’: true enough he had great vision, wit and debating nous, but he was also a wrecker, a constitutional vandal, and an arrogant empire-builder who did more to advance the cause of Scottish nationalism than any leader of the SNP.