Devolution has damaged Union (so let's have a vote on independence)

Dods have found that 80% of peers believe that devolution has damaged the Union.

A decade on from the Scotland and Wales Acts and the Good Friday agreement, designed in part to see off the threat of separatism, the poll of members of the House of Lords found a vast majority believe the opposite to be true.

Three-fifths of peers (60 per cent) said that establishing the Holyrood parliament and Stormont and Welsh assemblies had boosted nationalism slightly, while 20 per cent said it had done so greatly.

Three quarters of Labour peers (75 per cent) and half of Liberal Democrats (50 per cent), the two pro-Union parties who pushed through the legislation, also agreed.

In contrast, just 11 per cent of peers said the process had strengthened or slightly strengthened the Union.

My own poll on this discovered that 90% of you thought that devolution hadn't strengthened the Union.

But fear not, Wendy Alexander has a cunning plan to save the Union, and it's a plan so cunning that even a fox who was professor of cunning at Cunning University could not have conceived of it: Give the Scots a referendum on independence:

It is understood that Ms Alexander wants the SNP leader's proposals, for a Bill in 2010, to be brought forward so they do not coincide with Mr Brown being defeated in a general election (my bold).

In a further sign that his authority is waning, she was given the overwhelming backing of Labour's MSPs who claimed it was a choice for her and not the Prime Minister.

Horrified Westminster Labour sources last night labelled her strategy, which she hopes will "neuter" the Nats, a "freelance operation".

Bwaaahaha....Another plan conceived in Scotland to kill Scottish nationalism stone dead. I wonder if consideration has been given to the effects of a Scottish referendum on the rest of the UK? I wonder if they even give a shit? It appears that, yet again, we have to sit around twiddling our thumbs while the Scots deliver their verdict on the Union of which we are all part. And to think that they object to the use of the phrase 'Scottish Raj'.