Politics

Journalistically speaking, it’s been a good year to be Scottish and Jewish. Had I been a Welsh Zoroastrian, say, I doubt I’d have had nearly so much to say. In recent months, obviously, it’s been the Scottish thing that has really taken off. I used to be marginally Scottish, irrelevantly Scottish; never realising that a period of being helpfully Scottish was just around the corner. I suppose it’s a bit like the presumptions that some bilingual people have, that other people must, must be able to speak other languages really. I think I just assumed that the rest of London’s media knew plenty about Scotland, but tended not to talk

Anyone listening to Alex Salmond’s final pro-independence rally tonight in Perth might have been forgiven for thinking the ‘Yes’ campaign was in the lead in the polls. He used most of it to congratulate his side for running such a successful campaign and for changing Scotland before the final result had even been declared. There was much less of a pitch for any undecided voters watching, unless the First Minister had concluded that anyone who was still wavering would be swayed by the idea that his guys had already won. listen to ‘Salmond: The referendum is ‘our opportunity of a lifetime’’ on Audioboo He told the audience that ‘what has emerged

I’ve just spent a couple of hours on the Burnhill estate in Rutherglen watching a group of Labour ‘No’ campaigners knock on the doors of voters to find out how they’ll be voting on Thursday. Burnhill is a tidy estate of mostly social housing and a Labour council ward. The local Labour MP Tom Greatrex and his colleague Graham Jones, visiting from Hyndburn, were part of the group. I was surprised by the number of ‘No’ posters on display in the windows. I was expecting a plethora of ‘Yes’ placards, but fewer indications of the households whose inhabitants plan to reject independence, but on this estate at least, it’s not

The point of being British is not banging on about being British. But when your country is three days away from being dissolved – in part because the emotional case for the UK has not been made properly – then people do start to say what their national identity means to them. The long list of Spectator readers’ letters was one example, and we were delighted to welcome a bunch of them for tea in the garden of at 22 Old Queen Street this afternoon. As you can see, we had four younger readers – this kind of captured the spirit of the rally. It was about family, in every way: people like me, who quite

Yes, Britain is on the point of breaking up – but there are more ill winds blowing in Europe right now. The National Front is polling so strongly in France that Marine Le Pen would be president if an election was held tomorrow. And as I write, the populist Sweden Democrats seem to be the only real winners of the general election held there today. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t been picked up by the English-language media yet – they’re focusing on the power transfer to the Social Democrats (this isn’t the same as a victory: a victory means you actually win more voters). What follows is from the Swedish