It already happens, Brett. Every month the Health Committee in the Scottish Parliament rubber stamps a thing called a “statutory instrument” proposed by an agriculture minister to ban scallop fishing off areas of the west coast of Scotland. This is because the EU has the power to ban fishing under health and safety regulations concerning something called “amnesic shellfish poisoning”, a disease which causes memory loss that can in theory be caught from scallops (though no-one can remember that ever happening). The minister has the job of making sure this happens. The MSPs on the Committee can, as elected representatives, refuse to rubber-stamp these regulations but, as the minister is always at pains to point out, they would be immediately overruled by a bureaucrat in Brussels.

To impart the truly Kafkaesque spin, the sampling of scallops is considered on all sides (including Brussels) to be deeply flawed, and the Irish use a different system altogether, which the EU finds acceptable. So we’re left to conclude that the EU issues regulations for one reason only: because it can.

Good points, Red. The Poms want to be careful not to let Brussels sneek in via Edinborough.

North Sea oil revenues are of very secondary importance when compared with the scale of the wealth created by the City of London. Every year the government conducts a survey into where the money’s gone in Scotland called GERS which pretty well always comes out with the result that Scotland’s a net recipient of public expenditure.

Devolution was originally shemed up by Labour to dish the Nationalists, who were commanding about a third of the Scottish vote in the 70s - more or less their natural vote when they’re doing well. Scotland - and its army of Labour-voting public sector workers - would be spared the ravages any future Condervative government in Westminster. Labour would get to keep its battalion of MPs at Westminster as well, and the English would pay for the whole scheme.

As a deal it was predicated on the idea that the Scots would carry on seeing it as being in their interest to keep voting Labour. For a variety of reasons - Iraq obviously, but also the natural boredom after all this time with Blair in London, and also a simple curiosity about what could happen under proportional reperesentation - this assumption no longer holds good. (My own theory is that Scotland it too small a country to produce 200 decent full-time politicians, particularly when the people who run business in Scotland have more or less boycotted the place.)

This research will probably give the Nats a bit of a lift, but in the longer term might work in favour of the Union. Discussion of independence has always been cast in the same emotional language as a wife telling her husband that unless he treats her better she’s packing up and going. (Yes, I know, but emotion’s always been more important to Nationalists than policy.) As a gesture, flouncing out of the Union will carry rather less weight, and be a good deal less satisfying, if the English have shown themselves to be not too bothered either way.

In the long term, of course, both Scotland and England are increasingly under threat from the crazed bureaucracy in Brussles that’s expanding particularly quickly in Scotland. If we don’t get that sorted out we in Scotland could have all the oil in Alberta and still decline into a picturesque but ignorant and violently clannish xenophobia - Saudi Arabia with kilts.

I can’t see Wales making a go of independence. The silliest thing is that, as the survey notes, the Scottish Parliament can vote on English laws but not vice versa. Perhaps if that was canned, there would be less interest in Scottish independence on the English side.

Ha! Hahhahhhahahahahahahaha! Or I could cry I guess….