The Herald. August 27, 2014.

Televised political debates might not have much effect on the voting public, but their impact on those who comment on TV debates is fascinating. Grisly and predictable, but fascinating.

What did we learn after the first Salmond and Darling contest? That the Guardian/ICM “just a bit of fun” snap poll had no resemblance to what proper surveys call reality. In three of those, the Yes vote went up. The alleged drubbing that left the First Minister bruised, bloodied, on the ropes – fill in the rest – in that “crucial contest” did not produce the proclaimed result. Quite the reverse.

Yet what did we hear, endlessly, before Monday's fight night? Now it was “make-or-break” for Mr Salmond. He was in desperate need of a comeback, of – that word waiting to be banned – a “game-changer”. Never mind those polls: once again, everything was hanging on a weird symbolic contest conjured for TV. The inconvenient facts of public opinion were simply ignored.

On Monday, the First Minister delivered: by now, that much should go without saying. The ICM scorecard was unambiguous: 71 per cent to 29 per cent of a group of 505 decided that the triumph in this bit of politics-by-proxy went to Mr Salmond. But had it altered voting intentions? A thoroughly unrepresentative sample, one who's views turned out to be irrelevant after the first contest, said that it had not.

Funnily enough, most professional witnesses to the latest TV show also managed to decide that the humbling of Mr Darling had not changed anything. When the First Minister was judged to have lost things were said to be grim for the Yes campaign. When the Better Together chairman took his hiding it was, instantly, “too early to say” whether a floundering, evasive performance mattered.

Double standards are nothing new in this campaign. Strange twists of logic have become commonplace. In other circumstances, both sides have been keen to say that “it's not about personalities”. Turn on the TV cameras, roll out the sports metaphors and wheel in that carefully-selected audience: suddenly all that matters is one man in a suit against another.

Has the Yes campaign said endlessly that this referendum is not about Mr Salmond? It happens to be true, a fundamental fact, but that was ignored on Monday night. Talking about “him” has been the tactic of Mr Darling and his Unionist friends for months. As two over-rehearsed politicians went at it, independence campaigners cheered their man regardless.

Have the Labour folk in Better Together been desperate, meanwhile, to avoid the charge that the former Chancellor is just a human shield for a Tory-led coalition? More than desperate. It would be very wrong, they reckon, to “personalise” their cause. On Monday, nevertheless, they bet the house – Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and various strange bedfellows – on one man.

He lost. But if the poll findings after the first debate are the reliable guide, it shouldn't matter. If anything, we should be ridding ourselves of a taste for gaudy spectacle and asking if these TV debates have any point at all. They don't fit the facts. Why bother with them unless we're determined to satisfy political hacks who've watched the West Wing too often?

The first proper polls will be interesting, then. If No has been damaged by Mr Darling's performance it will tell us something about the nature of the two campaigns, given that Yes prospered after Mr Salmond's setback. Either these TV debates are worse than useless, or one side in this contest is more resilient, more deeply-rooted and better connected to the public mind, than the other. We'll see.

My partisan belief is that Better Together can guess the truth. That fabled campaign software is probably delivering its doleful tidings even now. This is less because TV debates win hearts and minds than because too many Unionist hearts were not in it, so it seems, to begin with.

Monday's debate was Mr Darling's last chance to articulate the positive case for Union that he has been promising for months and years. He didn't even bother to try. The things that could be said for and about Britain, the things David Cameron has now and then attempted to state, formed no part of the charge of the lightweight brigade into the valley of prime-time death. There was not a word. Even for this Yes voter, it was faintly shocking.

Three hundred and seven years of Union. An “irrevocable” (as Mr Darling has it) vote almost upon us. Three centuries of amity, argument and allegedly common endeavour. All that culture, all those bonds, all those presiding spirits of the Labour Party hovering beyond the lights. Surely there would be something? All the former Chancellor had to hand was another querulous attack on the relative merits of currency arrangements. The audience groaned.

What became of solidarity? What became of the universal rights of working people? Mr Darling instead turned out to be ill-briefed on child poverty, evasive on Labour's embrace of welfare spending caps, obdurate in his refusal to condemn the futility of Trident, and a poor gambler with currency, his own chosen sport. Which currency plan – A, B or beyond – would he recommend for a country recovering its independence? Mr Darling is another of those proud Scots who's too proud to say.

In terms of the campaign, the tactic of “going” with the currency issue yet again was the most fascinating item of the evening. After the first debate those legitimate polls had shown the tactic to be, at best, ineffective. On Monday, even the No-supporting part of the Glasgow audience seemed less than enthused by Mr Darling's return to the attack. This time, Mr Salmond was ready with a menu of choices that have worked well enough around the world. Still the former Chancellor ploughed on.

It made sense only if you are wedded to the playbook from the last Quebec referendum. This holds that fear works in the end. Keep nagging away at any hint of unease, it suggests, and you will herd the sheep back to the paddock in the last weeks of the contest. The Better Together case might sound technical. It might sound abstruse. All that matters is the ominous hint of impending doom. Then you call that “the positive case”.

We were supposed to believe, meanwhile, that the NHS is safe because health is devolved entirely to Holyrood. The same cannot be said of all budgets. The Westminster parties each surrendered to privatisation years ago. Have their Scottish branch offices now renounced that ideology? Does Mr Darling find it as despicable as Andy Burnham, shadow health minister, the man with a whole privatised hospital to his name who now, too late, warns England against the great sell-off?

It might not matter in the polls or in the vote. Perhaps the First Minister's unfortunate habit of emerging from behind his lectern like a timeshare salesman will prove another of those “blows to Salmond” on September 18. Somehow, I doubt it. Better Together is a Potemkin village of a campaign. The only important things to stand revealed in Monday night's entertainment were the deep cracks in the facade.

Sunday Herald. August 24, 2014.

It all sounded ominous. “English backlash”; “Scots will pay a heavy price”; “English reject”: no matter the ending, the independence referendum would be tear-stained. Salty tears, too, familiar to those greetin'-faced Jocks.

In headline patois, the proposition was this: vote Yes and you'll be sorry; vote No and it's sorrow all the way. Affirm independence and you can forget a shared currency or a helping hand internationally. Reject independence and the bribes will stop. We'll have you by the Barnett consequentials. Westminster over-representation no more. West Lothian Question no more.

G.K. Chesterton's people of England, the ones who've “never spoken yet”, appeared to suffer a change of heart. That they spoke through a sociological survey didn't add much to the poetry. That they were talking through researchers in Edinburgh and Cardiff was a small contribution to the irony stockpile. The crack of backlash, predicted so long and so eagerly by some, was loud.

Well, yes and no (so to speak). The latest instalment of the Future of England survey of 3,695 adults, conducted by YouGov as part of research by the universities of Cardiff and Edinburgh, had a discord in the battle hymn. When they were done backlashing, the (surveyed) people of England expressed a wish – 59% to 19% – for the United Kingdom to continue. There was a nuance to their alleged exasperation.

It was as much as to say: stick around, and welcome, but we're changing the terms of the lease. Stick around – for we like having you around – but once you've done trashing the place you'll pay your whack, or lose the privileges we granted. No more hush money. No more hogging the parliamentary conversation. And if you must flounce off, don't come running to us for a sub or a reference. But, Scotland, please don't go.

Otherwise, the stats spoke. So 56% to 12% were reported as believing that levels of public spending in Scotland should be cut to levels – notional and in practical terms fictitious – called the UK average. So the claim on a post-independence currency union was rejected by 53% and supported by just 23%. So 62% said Scots MPs should be banned from voting on “England-only” laws. Yon Malcolm Rifkind (member for Kensington) is presumably intolerable.

In one question, the largest number (36%) thought the residual UK should have no truck with supporting Scotland's membership of the EU and Nato. Elsewhere, fully 37% (against 21%) agreed that England and Scotland are drifting apart regardless. A big number – 53% against 10% – denied the claim promoted by Alex Salmond that it will be happy families after independence.

The survey found some English pragmatism to suit the Scottish majority taste. There were 42% (to 25%) prepared to say that Holyrood should control “most” of domestic taxation, given the removal of what's called a subsidy, in the event of a No vote. There was a better than two-thirds showing that border controls would be a nonsense in the event of Yes. Still, it all made the “Scotland, don't go” idea seem anomalous.

Personally, I've always thought it the easiest arguments for independence. If you happen to be English, and if you happen to be fed up with what you call Anglophobia, and griping subsidy junkies, and the denial of English democracy, and appeasement of the northern neighbours, and Scots who refuse to see what's glorious about Britain, put your back into Yes. It can all be solved in a few weeks.

That pat solution would not answer all of England's questions, however. For one thing, the survey findings seem (to me) to have far less to do with a backlash, or with an animosity towards Scotland, than with Chesterton's ordinary folk speaking up, finally, to say “What about us?” Those ordinary people are less interested in withdrawing public spending or the chance of democracy from Scots than in asking why they can't have the same. A very good question.

A truly representative parliament? An NHS still holding out against private sector zombies? Free, mostly free, personal care for the elderly? So on and ever on. If you happen to be in Liverpool or Newcastle and contending with a government that, as usual, you didn't vote for, what might you say? You might say Scots are subsidised while you struggle. You might notice one set of numbers and ignore another to show the first isn't true. But you will find a reason to speak, finally.

The singer Billy Bragg and a few others have pursued this line for a while. They treat a Yes vote in Scotland as an opportunity, even an inducement, for England. They see profound imbalances and inequalities in that country, especially in the relationship between overbearing London and the rest, and they accept that it might not be Scotland's job to make up the numbers should progressive England falter. It is an idea of solidarity by inspiration and emulation.

Pick the bits out of the survey stew and you find some sense. If Scotland can say it is not well-served by the nexus of Westminster, City and media, much of England can say the same. If public spending is supposed to reflect wealth transfers within the UK – redistribution, by the honest word – the draining of treasure into the English south-east bleeds that country's north. Keeping the UK intact for the sake of a few dozen Scottish Labour parliamentary votes alters nothing.

Ken Livingstone used to like to remind Scots that some boroughs in his London were as poor as any districts in the islands. This was, and is, absolutely true. It was also beside the point. Part of the reason why England's democracy needs to be broken apart on the wheel of devolution is to prove that you needn't point a finger at others to get justice for yourself. All the habit achieves is cheap entertainment for the Tory back benches.

An English majority for a continuing UK would suggest that animosities, where they exist, do not run deep. The desperate search for demented Scottish phobias has meanwhile not been well-rewarded. The cheering-for-all during the Commonwealth Games turns out to have been more typical than the Daily Mail's internet whack-a-mole cybernat hunts. True hatred between Scotland and England is as hard to come by as truly irrational people.

The sole reason to worry comes from those behind the headline trench warfare. Did they want that English backlash so badly? Did they reason that Scots would react, for we have form, to old-fashioned provocation and show our colours as – what's the formula? - ethnic separatists with weird notions about our neighbours? It didn't work. It won't work. There's a detail to explain that, available to anyone with a clipboard. It's not true.

Just before the First World War, G.K. Chesterton published a novel containing a few poems. One of those has to do with St George. The writer called it “The Englishman”. I always think the last lines would suit those who sit in London offices and yearn for a resentful England.

But though he is jolly company

And very pleased to dine,

It isn't safe to give him nuts

Unless you give him wine.

The Herald. August 20, 2014.

You wouldn't think it from their studied silence, but the weekend's opinion polls must have induced some puzzlement among those on the No side in the independence argument. Something went wrong with the script.

After all, the first of the great and allegedly decisive TV debates between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling was judged on the night to have done the First Minister no end of harm. He lost, said the scorecards and snap surveys. If an increase in support for Yes is the price he has to pay, Mr Salmond can probably live with that.

You can bet he can also cope with another conclusion available from the latest polls. His failure to address the currency question to the satisfaction of Unionists does not seem to have caused too many ordinary voters to recoil in fear, outrage and contempt. It was Better Together, though still with a commanding lead, that lost ground.

Perhaps the lesson of Cleggmania has not been learned, or perhaps it is being quietly ignored. The fact remains that a flurry of “approval” for the Liberal Democrat leader during televised debates in the 2010 United Kingdom elections did not transform his party's fortunes. Their vote increased marginally, but they lost five seats. These TV rituals, beloved of journalists, are not conclusive.

So is the currency issue irrelevant to Scotland's discussion? Not exactly. If No remains in the lead, as the pollsters say, then you can presume that a majority haven't bought Mr Salmond's arguments. Equally, the movement in opinion towards Yes reveals a growing group who are not fixated on the First Minister's failure to alphabetise the numerous available choices for organising a currency. With independence at stake, they're not that fussed.

There must also be a good, alternative possibility that such voters have said, in effect, that currency matters, but not that much. The more they hear of the varieties of choices made by countries around the world, the more they're liable to wonder what Unionist intransigence really means. George Osborne's “intervention” cost Better Together support. If polls and pundits can both be believed, Mr Darling won an argument, yet lost – or failed to convince – potential supporters.

Currency was supposed to be the killer blow for the No camp. At the first attempt, the Westminster parties, united in obduracy, were supposed to scare us into compliance when they ruled out any possibility of a sterling union. Then Mr Darling and his allies were supposed to expose Mr Salmond as a man who had not bothered to think things through, who had no answers when confronted with political and economic realities. As things stand, neither tactic has done the trick.

Was that ever likely? Part of an answer can be had in the straightforward disagreement between Crawford Beveridge and Jack Perry, both previous heads of Scottish Enterprise. The former says that a currency union would be in the best interests of Scotland and the residual UK; the latter asserts that it just wouldn't work. Both men come to the argument with knowledge and expertise. Both ought to have a fair idea of what they are talking about. Yet their opinions are diametrically opposed.

Perhaps that's because the issue of currency is, like so much else in the independence debate, a matter of opinion. It might be opinion supported by evidence and intellectual rigour; it might be bluster. But amid the persistent demand for “facts”, the one simple fact is that Mr Beveridge and Mr Perry personify the problem for anyone who wants those vaunted cast-iron guarantees.

When he analysed the currency union hypothesis, Mark Carney, Governor of the Bank of England, set out the difficulties as he saw them – but he certainly did not say that the thing could never work. He noted specifically that there would have to be a loss of sovereignty for Scotland. Mr Salmond did not demur seriously, but argued – as he still argues – that the gains for all concerned outweighed that objection.

Some voters find this sort of thing infuriating, and you can hardly blame them. Better Together wants to tell these people that such “uncertainty” would be eradicated with a simple No vote. But for that to be true the future policies of the Westminster parties would have to be set in stone, by some magic, and their fortunes decreed for good and all. If that can't be done, there's plenty of uncertainty ahead thanks to the Unionist parties.

For the moment, the polls say the currency is not the deal-breaker Better Together would have us believe. The Yes vote is increasing, even if the No side retains a lead. Yet in the aftermath of the TV debate Mr Darling was acclaimed precisely because of his attack on the sterling union proposal. We should judge that gambit by results.

We should also be a little more sceptical about these set-piece TV debates. Viewers might enjoy a good scrap. They might, possibly, be given pause for thought. But their real thinking isn't done while they're confusing two politicians with a pair of boxers. It is patronising to believe otherwise. “Perceptions” are not the beginning and end of politics.

Interviewed on Radio Scotland, meanwhile, Mr Salmond appears to have yielded a little ground by declaring that Scotland could retain the pound without a formal currency union for a “transitional” period. He has said that option was “viable”, but not preferable. Better Together are happy to hear that sort of talk. What does the First Minister mean? Membership of the eurozone? An independent currency?

Mr Salmond has said this sort of thing before, of course, while outlining the conclusions of the Fiscal Commission. He has also stated his preference repeatedly. But “transitional” might be a more interesting word than Better Together have yet understood. Sterlingisation, as it is called, could as well apply only until a Westminster government saw sense, or until an independent parliament was elected to make a choice free of the referendum ferment. Likely or unlikely, these are not impossible ideas.

You won't hear such a thing said in a TV set-to, of course. That's one problem with such affairs. Had a matter of opinion been settled differently within the Labour leadership during the Blair-Brown years, Mr Darling could now be explaining why he helped to take the UK into the euro, much as Mr Salmond is questioned about his former preference for that currency.

There are plenty of good reasons why voters should care about the sterling issue, and solid reasons why they might not. Despite their manifold implications for daily life, currency arrangements can sound like an abstraction. The arguments – think only of a dire word such as sterlingisation – can seem esoteric, technical, perhaps even an irrelevance. Better Together has laboured the technicalities and too often overlooked the implications.

It's just as likely that a growing number of voters have taken Mr Salmond's point: if a currency union makes sense and is not, in fact, impossible, what does that say about those who oppose the idea? Staged adversarial combat under the TV studio lights has failed to make the question disappear. There is not a lot Unionists can do about that.

The Herald. Aug 9, 2014.

Has anyone asked Sir Bruce Forsyth for his views on sterlingisation? Has someone persuaded Simon Cowell to name the powers devolved to the Scottish Parliament? How's Sir Mick Jagger coming along with his analysis of, let's say, the relationship between NHS privatisation in England and the Scottish health budget?

As far as I know, there is no collective noun for a group of celebrities. I'm holding out for “a self-congratulation”, but that's neither here nor there. Admirers of the 200 or so notables who have put their names to the Let's Stay Together billet-doux to Scotland would probably say I'm unfair, that their stars glow only with simple affection. They don't pretend to know anything about the place. That would be presumptuous.

Ed Miliband has no such excuse. He was in Glasgow yesterday to explain why “as Prime Minister” - no, really – he could not accede to a post-independence currency union. Judging by what Labour's leader told the BBC, he fears for the working poor and for “stability”.

As Mr Miliband spoke, the Telegraph was reporting that “The soaring pound is savaging corporate Britain, with more than £1.5 billion wiped off the year-to-date profits of a string of top multi-nationals”. Obviously, this is a completely different kind of stability. It helps in such a situation, though, to have your hands on offshore revenues denominated in US dollars, especially when a gigantic new field off Orkney is due to begin producing in 2017.

Like oil pipelines, ideas connect. Mr Miliband did not address the relevance of oil to a currency union. Equally, he did not respond to the goading of Alex Neil, Scottish Health Secretary, on the question Sir Mick Jagger and his friends have, unaccountably, failed to answer. If Scotland remains within the Union, what effect will NHS privatisation in England have on the health service here?

Even by their unambitious standards, Better Together folk have offered some specious – no, make that dishonest – answers on this point. They have responded that Scotland is wonderfully devolved, in full control of the NHS on this side of the Border, and has not a thing to worry about. To hear them talk, the Barnett-Goschen formula and austerity economics have been miraculously abolished. The looting of the NHS in England doesn't matter a bit to us. Honest.

So look, first, at the NHS pillaging to which our English friends have been subjected. It is the result of a generation's worth of cross-party Westminster consensus. The parties have, turn and turn about, fetishised “marketisation”, alleged competition, and the principle (their word) that “any qualified provider” is entitled to profit from a taxpayer-funded system of universal health care. If you happen to run one of the big medical corporates, generally American, it's all going terribly well.

Last year, the bulk of new contracts for the NHS in England went to private firms. In 2013, for the first time, they collected better than £10 billion from the taxpayer. If you believe the Financial Times, a publication never knowingly confused with Socialist Worker, around £5.8 billion worth of English NHS work is being advertised, right now, to the private sector. That's a 14 per cent increase on the previous year.

The Health and Social Care Act 2012, which came properly into force in England last year, saw the Westminster coalition complete Labour's preparatory work. Primary care trusts and strategic health authorities were abolished; something of the order of £60 billion to £80 billion was transferred from the trusts to new “clinical commissioning groups” for the purchase of services; the cap on earnings from “non-NHS sources” was removed. Above all, the Secretary of State for Health was deprived of formal responsibility for the health of the people. That's a fact.

In England, there ceased to be a duty on government to provide a National Health Service. Instead, services were to be “promoted” by a plethora of consortia who would do the commissioning. If that happened to mean a bonanza for the private sector, so be it. The Department of Health will tell you that only 6 per cent of NHS spending in England is going to the private sector, that “groups of GPs” now make most of the funding decisions. The word “liberation” is sometimes used.

What politicians like to call the direction of travel is clear enough, nevertheless. Those doughty, self-employed GPs, the ones who continued as private operators after Nye Bevan brought the NHS into being? The private operators Chilvers MacCrea these days run 40 “GP centres” in England; Virgin Care has fully 31. So it goes on.

At this juncture, elementary points don't go amiss. Why would a private health conglomerate with legal duties to shareholders do the taxpayer a favour? Is there any evidence – any – that privatisation has led to more efficiency? Do private providers ever bid for the least-profitable, or even unprofitable, health contracts? Was any of this mentioned by the Tories during the 2010 election campaign? If you answered No to each question, top marks.

A couple of weeks ago, Labour's Andy Burnham, the shadow Health Secretary, sounded the alarm. Privatisation, he said, was being “forced through at scale and pace”. Mr Burnham added that it was “indefensible for the character of the country's most valued institution to be changed in this way without the public being given a say”. He demanded that privatisation be halted until the next general election was out of the way. Subsequently he said Labour would repeal the act.

The coalition responded by pointing out that “Use of the private sector by the NHS doubled in the last four years of Labour, a far bigger increase than under this government. Andy Burnham himself signed off the privatisation of Hinchingbrooke Hospital during Labour's final year”. All of this happens to be true.

Still, isn't NHS Scotland inviolate? Isn't it the case that if we vote No in September a Scottish government – perhaps even a Scottish Labour government – will learn from Mr Burnham's lesson and shun NHS privatisation? That's not what being Better Together means. Strangely, Simon Cowell hasn't yet got around to explaining Barnett, but the facts aren't too complicated. If spending cuts follow the surrender of England's NHS to privatisation, Scotland's NHS will be pushed down the same road. Money will talk.

Besides, does anyone imagine that a Scottish alternative NHS will be tolerated for long? Why would marketisation be just the thing for England but wrong, morally, socially and economically, when all are better together? Remember, too, that the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership deal being thrashed out between the US and the European Commission will allow American conglomerates to sue any British government or health body if it tears up a privatisation contract.

Voting Yes will spare NHS Scotland these horrors, but it will not solve every problem. Scotland's health, collectively, is not great. That's no secret. Our population is ageing, meanwhile, and immigration might not, of itself, provide us with the resources to foot all the bills. These are our challenges, in short, and they have nothing to do with the madness afoot in England.

 Still, a vote for sanity wouldn't hurt. Think of it as preventative medicine.

The Herald. August 6, 2014.

If the long argument over independence has had a sub-text, it has been the demand for information. To hear it told, there's a national shortage. Nervous voters are being asked to make their leaps into the forbidding dark without so much as a few flimsy parachutes of facts.

So the No side would have it, at any rate. Yet where the future is concerned they don't stock many facts themselves because that is not, it seems, their job. Will David Cameron and Nick Clegg be offering another coalition if we vote No? Will Scotland remain in membership of the European Union beyond 2017? Which coalition deeds – which deeds specifically – will be undone if Ed Miliband wins office?

No one is asking for long-range forecasts. Next year, the year after: those would do. The inquiry under the heading “information” is simplicity itself: what happens if we vote No? A few rough guesses might be sufficient. Scottish voters are sophisticated enough to work through the permutations.

Instead, Unionist crystal balls have become a little cloudy this summer. Even the brave claim that we are better together with Britain thanks to “strength” and “stability” doesn't do well under scrutiny. Which Britain? The one that bears the stamp of Mr Cameron, or the one on which Mr Miliband would like to impress himself? Are they one and the same? Are they close copies of the Britain in which we live now? Any clues?

It amounts to a bit of an oversight. If no one should dare to vote Yes without an arsenal of facts to cover every eventuality for the next few decades – such is the customary demand – then No campaigners should be eager, not to say proud, to fight an information war. Yet each time the invitation has been extended, No Thanks has been the answer.

All of a sudden, things have changed, supposedly. All of a sudden, guarantees are flying around. By sheer coincidence, by a mere fluke, leaders of the Westminster parties yesterday chose the eve of a TV debate between Alex Salmond and Alistair Darling to make a solemn promise, a pledge good for all electoral eventualities. Parties that saw no need to offer Scotland anything much until the referendum was upon them are in the words and bonds business.

There are promises, in short, of more powers. First, note the plurals. Tories, Labour and the Liberal Democrats each have something different in mind. So which would be your reward for voting No? We'll come to that.

There are several rounds to this beauty contest. First you have to reject independence. Then you have to decide that two of the three definitions of “more powers” aren't worth your attention. Then you have to vote for the party with the offer you might be looking for. Then you have to hope your tribunes can either win a general election, or maintain the grand pledge amid the horse-trading and bad faith of coalition negotiations. It really is that simple.

Well, not so simple. You also have to stop thinking from now until September 18. Your mind has to be cleansed of unworthy thoughts, thoughts such as “If Mr Cameron is now making noises akin to a devo-max deal, why did he insist, with acquiescence of the other two, that such a deal should on no account be on the ballot paper?” If the opinion polls were accurate, “more powers” was the dearest wish of the greatest number of Scots. Yet the Prime Minister wouldn't have it.

Now the Three Amigos, with Mr Cameron at their head, produce a declaration worth almost as much as the paper it is written on, stating that “We support a strong Scottish Parliament in a strong United Kingdom and we support the further strengthening of the parliament's powers”. This, it seems, means “fiscal responsibility and social security”.

They can give you no more information than that. Where your future is concerned, they're short on facts. They are short on agreement, indeed, as to what might be best for Scotland, its parliament, or relations with the rest of the United Kingdom. “Powers” has a lovely ring, even if the word points to the tiny flaw in all those polls demonstrating the popularity of devo-max.

It transpired that a fair number of those voicing support for the proposition didn't know which powers they meant, or which powers were already devolved to Edinburgh. Once, Unionists loved to point out these supposed facts. Now, given the risks posed by the straight choice Mr Cameron himself demanded, the very vagueness of devo-mmax is part of its attraction.

What's (slightly) fascinating is the way in which the Unionist camp uses the phrase “more powers”. The nature of the powers is all but irrelevant: the three men can't agree, won't agree, and have no intention of attempting to agree on that. Only the fact-free incantation counts. You will be guaranteed “more powers”, of some unspecified description, and surely that's good enough? The powers themselves needn't matter, only the fact that there will be more of them. Probably.

If any of this counts as factual information of the kind so often demanded of the Yes campaign the bar is set lower than anyone realised. Would Mr Cameron support Mr Miliband's scheme if Labour happens to win a UK general election? In an finely-balanced Westminster would Labour vote through a Tory scheme that ran counter to its own proposals? Are we supposed to just put such thoughts from our minds and take a punt on the word “more”?

There's little point in saying that all of this fails to satisfy a claim for a properly representative parliament with all the powers it might need to do the job. The men from Westminster understand that perfectly well. The idea is to render Scotland quiescent and preserve the essence of its present relationship with the UK. There is no serious joint attempt to analyse that relationship – hence the lack of agreement – or improve governance. The declaration is a gesture, a spoiler, a distraction.

You could draw conclusions from that sort of fact. “Fiscal responsibility and social security” might sound nicely vague amid a referendum campaign. How do changes in those areas – any changes – sit with Westminster's aspirations for a unified tax and benefit systems? What becomes of the universal credit abomination? What kind of devolution is it that involves chipping some bits and pieces from central government's responsibilities without a thought for the wider UK consequences?

There is little evidence of logic in any of this. The three party leaders might have asked themselves about the powers that should not be granted to Edinburgh, for example, rather than fiddling around with the measures – the unspecified measures – that might be doled out one day. Instead, they are content to rely on the supposedly hypnotic effect of the word “powers”. They might as well be waving shiny trinkets in front of the voters.

That would be the general idea, of course: trust us and we'll give you something for your trouble. After all, it's a fact, isn't it, that these are three deeply trustworthy men who never break their words?