It seems to this reader from his argument that what John Redwood really wants to see emerging from the former UK is the re-establishment of Alfred's Wessex (including the Danegeld). Such a nation would as he says be among the richest in the world per capita and have a greater historic pedigree than, say, Wales.

It is a noble dream fit for a true reactionary!

The SNP are relatively clean, and the Labour party is riddled with scandal just now.

Add to the fact that the SNP is (generally) more intelligent than the current crop of Scottish Labour, and they're running rings about them.

I bit. Here is what i hope the moderators post on John Redwood's blog too:

John,

Sorry to query your analysis, if not conclusion were you to include all our countries of the state we presently are in. The centrifugal forces of centralisation, of what was and is a union rather than the unitary state some might wish, created the disparity between the areas which appear to be net contributors to our bank at the treasury and those who appear to be net beneficiaries. Without us all everywhere, there would be no net anything. Capiche?

Centripetal forces spun off those who were not drawn in, either by their own or Hobson's choice. Deportation accounted for the rest, starting i hazard with the original border reivers who got asbo'd out to Ulster rather than be allowed to disturb the then peace there, until a certain English king set about a crusade at home when he recognised Jerusalem could never be subdued, but those closer to home were better placed for enduring aggrandisement. His monument still stands isolated near where his leitmotif departed on his last attempt, gazing across the Solway Firth even as the tides of time undermine it. Daft that his eventual successors signed Palestine over to some of the people there rather than all. But hey, that's the business of those with vested interests in lands they acquired but never belonged to them, the inheritors of Pax Rome, and Constantinople too had he truly got the messages from both prophets. And in Ulster too, now in the peace of our giving much so that we can all move on, in marriage and birth rates no longer held back by unleavened tribalism as in Africa.

Moving on, i suggest that the motors of our economy are slowed by only having one which dominates the others which you acknowledge. It is the one which sets interests rates against a target of 2% inflation from an index which does not include house prices!!?? And the downfall was what? Repeat after me in self flagellation every morning until you need a blood transfusion: sub-prime financing led by sub-prime mortgages ignored by sub-prime so called governments of both rapidly declining voter persuasions.

Along with declining membership both here and elsewhere in Europe, no party got more than 20% of the total registered electorate's votes in the 2005 General Election for the UK parliament at Westminster: that mother of all which Whitehall hides behind in taking its flak and which both major parties have sorely abused to our displeasure in your combined patronising arrogance. That was not a mandate for anything the major parties could muster between them, let alone the present half-hearted mafiosi deserting their sinking ship in the wake of their dear, ducking-out, departed leader and now anointed but yet to be and, i for one hope, never to be appointed to anything other than a doctor.

John mate, give up tackling the symptoms. Join us in deliberating and determining the resolution to the problem of the this the most centralised state in the West, and increasingly so since the 2nd World War ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall as both major parties exacerbated matters fighting a battle already won by we the people no longer waiting patiently for you to join us. The demos has never been absent. Our cratus is alive and swelling. Join it before you are swept aside. You would be welcome as one, i suspect, who already and always was one of us. I knew it when you tried to sing the Welsh anthem in seeming sudden recognition of our belonging together.

Sovereignty and Confederacy: the antidote to Unions' Blues. Not Unions v Independence. Not Devolution v Evolution. Not Home Rule v Self Rule. But rearrangement v a renewed arrangement. Top-down power retained to divide and in self-serving antagonistic fuelled, shakily ruled Federation v its antithesis in bottom-up truly decentralised equality of Confederation which uniquely accommodates pro-Union and pro-Independence preferences here and elsewhere.

As to here, look up British-Irish Council, aka Council of the Isles, in Wikipedia. Get it? Envisage how it might evolve? A reunion of all since the the last semi-detached departure only some 80 years ago.

As to there, in an EU of nation states, get it too? All in the Europe of the EU need referenda on this Treaty before us. I suspect we would be satisfied if Westminster did ratify it - subject to a Referendum here as Holyrood recommended when Labour MSPs abstained rather than commit hari-kari ! There is plenty of time to bring in a new Confederate Constitutional Treaty before the 2009 EU Brussels/Strasbourg 'parliament' elections: what is sacrosanct about the date anyway if the body is so illegitimate that neither it nor the treaty would pass the Council of Europe's tests of either?

I really do not care that what you are fitfully and irrelevantly debating - no thanks to Hoon's machinations - that has something in it for you all in leaving the federalists sans symbols to fight another day, and GB of GB to leave the dirty work of sole competence in trojan-horsed fisheries management to the arguably extra-territorial grasping hands of the EU for all marine resources lest Moscow switch mainland Europes lights off, and your mob makes what political capital you might harvest in staying together for a victory to come which at best will be pyrrhic. But i do care that your party postures as he flounders to sink in the sea of his economic mismanagement when we might go down with the ship only to your party's advantage in picking up the pieces. If you do, your party will find itself sadly dissappointed in us not voting for it in 2009/2010 whenever GB risks his first election as the last first past the post PM of the present UK that DC too covets if it indulges such like self-serving cynicism as cherry-picked pickers disenfranchised cherry picked devolution.

The Home Rule of Keir Hardie that Wendy Alexander reavowed in the fail-safe hope of inheriting John Smith's and Donald Dewar's hearts and heads aspirations when GB fails at his first hurdle was the one to a degree for England which recognised the elephant in the room could never have its own parliament. Those days are long gone. Time we shared our wealth in Confederation. Time for a true family of nations in our nations of families. Kith and kin reunited with our diaspora everywhere in this interdependent, globalised world.

Would you like a ticket to Murrayfield to join in singing our anthems? No matter the score then, Confederation with its prerequisite Independence and shared sovereignty - not least in Defence & Security - is a win win all round.

Regards, Keith