Harried No More

David Cameron did not actually answer anything at PMQs today, and you have to feel sorry for the SNP's Leader at Westminster, or indeed for any other member of that party who is not Alex Salmond. The point of that party is no longer independence, it is no longer even further devolution, it is that Alex Salmond, Mr Scotland, should remain First Minister. It has become a star vehicle for, it cannot be denied, a true political star.

Almost everyone who recently voted for it did so for no other reason, and one really does have to wonder why anyone who genuinely does want independence bothers to stay in it. If there still are such people. There certainly used to be, of course. But are there still? Really? Independence would be favoured by a far higher proportion of the English than of the Scots.

Bringing us to the SNP's question about whether Cameron would accept that party's proposed amendments to the Scotland Bill. Perhaps he will. But what would he lose if he didn't? The chance of victory at Holyrood? The chance of dozens of Scottish seats at Westminster? What? Whereas his several partly overlapping right wings on his backbenches are itching for a fight over pretty much that might happen to come to hand. Not least because this would make no difference to their own constituencies, they might as well seize on it as on anything else.

How, then, should Labour react? The strange, lazy BBC notion that there is some sort of Siamese twinship between Scotland and the Labour Party was presumably blown apart by the recent election results, although, then again, do not necessarily bet on that. The media's perfect ignorance of anywhere beyond London and its immediate environs is evident from the continued fawning over Tony Blair.

They are so completely obsessed with this has-been that it is starting to raise very serious questions about whether all national newspapers should continue to be edited from London. They haven't always been, and one of this country's best-known journalists recently told me that if he ever became editor of a national newspaper, then he would move the entire editorial and printing operation to the North.

Ed Miliband, by contrast, has restored Labour's historic norm as a party far more Scottish and Welsh than the country at large, but nevertheless overwhelmingly English, like the country at large. The mysterious, almost entirely unremarked upon disappearance of the Welsh from Labour's front line under Blair will probably correct itself in the course of this Parliament and the next one, in stark contrast to David Cameron's repeatedly expressed indifference as to the very constitutional status of Wales.

For that matter, Alex Salmond has restored Scotland's historic norm, in which Labour was always considerable and sometimes predominant, but was certainly never dominant. Glasgow had a Conservative-controlled City Council into the 1970s. Durham has had a massively Labour-controlled County Council for a hundred years. (This also points to the fallacy of the ever-monolithic Labour cities and the ever-monolithic Tory countryside.)

For Labour dominance, you needed, and you need, to look to the North of England, where, pace the BBC, the Labour Party was founded. The combined population is significantly greater than that of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and there is a highly distinctive culture of economically leftish social conservatism serving and served by agriculture, manufacturing and small business, with its roots in Catholicism, Methodism and a form of High Churchmanship very different from that in the South; all three of those reach back to ancestrally Jacobite doubts about the legitimacy of the Hanoverian State and of its capitalist ideology.

We probably have to talk about the three English regions, even if we would prefer to talk about the historic counties from before an unprotesting Thatcher was in the Cabinet, and even if the difference could usefully be split by talking about the present ceremonial counties. Anyway, in each of the three Northern regions both Labour support and Labour membership were proportionately higher than in Scotland even before the recent elections, and are very dramatically so now. Labour experienced heavy losses to the SNP in Scotland and heavy gains from the Lib Dems in the North. But the Lib Dems, among other people, have not gone away. And loyalty is a two-way street.

So Miliband's price for supporting the Scotland Bill, with or without the SNP's amendments, should be two amendments of his own. One would concern each of the present or, where they have been abolished in the rush to unitary local government (don't get me started on that one), the previous city, borough and district council areas in the North, twinning it with a demographically comparable one in Scotland and with another in the South East.

Across each of the key indicators - health, education, housing, transport, and so on - both expenditure and outcomes in the Northern area would have to equal or exceed those in each of its twins, or else the relevant Ministers' salaries would be docked by the percentage in question. The other such amendment would provide that in any policy area devolved to Scotland, no legislation would apply in any of the three English regions unless supported at Third Reading by the majority of MPs from that region.

The Lib Dems might then insist on the same for the South West. Fine. After all, no one would lose under any of this. There would be no more politicians than there already are. Both expenditure and outcomes in Scotland and in the South East would have to be maintained in order for the twinning system to work. And the Conservative Party could continue to enact any legislation that it liked for its electoral base in the South, or at any rate in the more easterly parts of the South.

But without these amendments, there should be a Labour three-line whip to vote against this Bill. After all, even if it were not true, it would undeniably be consistent for the party that introduced devolution to say that the matter was settled, and that if it had believed in anything further then it would have included it in the first place. Nor do Labour, or indeed Lib Dem, MPs from Scotland exist in order to give more power to the SNP, which on past form stands absolutely no chance of unseating them no matter how well it does for Holyrood. Just ask those MPs.