The Scottish White Paper

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): It's hard to find the Scotland White Paper. The link to the page where you can download a pdf version of Chosing Scotland's Future is here. The link to 'A National Conversation' is here. Towards the the end of the day on which the white paper was published it has the first 200 comments. The way that Salmond now dominates the debate can witnessed by watching Newsnight. If you just want more fiscal powers for the Holyrood parliament, as David Steel argues, then Salmond's response is let there be a referendum about that too! Just as Neal Ascherson predicted here in OK, the opposition parties are making themselves unpopular by ganging up against a referendum. Even though a majority at the moment wish to vote against independence - they still want their say. Kirsty Walk  reports in her blog that Newsnight invited  on the Tory peer Michael Forsyth, who was once his party's secretary of state for Scotland, to urge the Conservatives "to back the referendum in order to shoot Alex Salmond's fox for once and for all". As if there is a magic bullet that will kill the national question (but then Kirsty is part of the Scottish-British political class too). Forsyth dominated the studio discussion telling Labour, Lib-Dems and presumably his own Scottish party that by refusing to trust the people they looked "frit" and are playing Salmond's game.