David Cameron and Nick Clegg Antagonise the English

As Tim Montgomerie points out, David Cameron has avoided antagonising the Scots (personally I would have inserted the word 'unnecessarily' before antagonising):

If Cameron enjoyed Miliband's discomfort at the collapse of Scottish Labour, he won't relish the prospect of going down in history as the prime minister who presided over the end of the Union. Despite pressure from some quarters in the Conservative camp, the Tory leader has carefully avoided antagonising the Scots. He has opposed the idea of an English parliament and any review of the Barnett formula, which determines the funding allocated to the devolved administrations.

But in doing so Cameron has antagonised the English, as the Sun's YouGov poll on Scottish independence illustrates (see attached). More people in England and Wales (41%) support Scottish independence than oppose it (40%), and 54% think Scotland benefits more than England and Wales from the Union (£4.5billion is a lot of money).

My earlier suggestion that the referendum on Scottish independence would in itself be the transformational event (rather than the result) looks like it needs revising. The mere prospect of a referendum in 2014 (on the anniversary of Bannockburn and timed to coincide with Glasgow's Commonwealth Games) appears to have focussed minds on the left and the right. About time too.

We can only hope that the cross-party "Stronger United" group, trailed by Marcus Booth, takes on board these views, and isn't just a Gordon Brown-esque "Britishness" campaign that extols the tired old trope of Westminster sovereignty - power devolved is power retained - in an era 'whose leitmotif is the sovereignty of the people' [Bogdanor].

Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, defended the principle of Scottish popular sovereignty in Parliament yesterday, when he rejected demands that the English should have a referendum on the future of the Union:

"I think it is right to say that any nation within the UK, in a sense, if it seeks to express a view about its own future, that that is primarily their prerogative to do so.

"It's equally right to say that that debate and the outcome of that debate has a knock-on effect on the rest of the UK. But do I think that, therefore, this parliament should somehow try to pre-empt that debate in Scotland? That's a separate debate.

Clegg also informed the constitutional reform select committee that he had delayed plans for a commission into the West Lothian question.