Edward Pearce

How does it happen that Scottish Nationalism walks and talks as if it’s able to call terms over an independence referendum which opinion polls suggest it would lose? A major reason for the SNP’s sweep to absolute majority last May was the inadequacy of the Scottish Labour Party. At Devolution, such was Westminster complacency, only one first-rank Labour politician went to Holyrood: Donald Dewar. Since his death in 2000, the party has been led by what Scots call numpties, five of them over eleven years, remembered for the impact they didn't have.

There is no inherent harm in the opposition defence spokesman accepting ministerial defence cuts. From a party committed to Trident replacement, it might be a faint, late virtue. There is every possible objection to coupling it with talk of rejecting populism (whatever that means here) and hinting at readier general acquiesence.

The late Philip Gould was a man of conviction, but he personified a fundamental political error: insisting on the fighting the last war during the next. The Labour Party lost all its radicalism in the 1990s because influential people like Gould were still armed for battle with Arthur Scargill, the Militant Tendency and Michael Foot's unsuitable overcoat. New Labour moved absurdly far to the right to show that they weren't like that any more. Partly in consequence, we are picking ourselves up from the debris left by Peter Mandelson's ‘filthy rich’.

Is there a more self-serving verbal alibi than ‘Eurosceptic’? A sceptical person has doubts, is unsure, ponders an issue. The people seeking a referendum on membership of the EU have none of that hesitancy. They stand in the enraged tradition of the men who fought the Reform Act and Irish Home Rule. They talked in the 1990s of ‘a German ramp’ and ‘the Fourth Reich' (they're still at it). They also made prescriptions. Europe, if it had to happen, should be as big as possible to mitigate enemy domination. There must also be no central tax-and-spending power over the eurozone. And now Greece falls and others totter.

The late Bernard Weatherill told me that between 1964, when he entered the House of Commons, and the late 1980s, his constituency duties increased twentyfold. It's one of the reasons backbenchers spend less time arguing and being difficult in the chamber than they once did. When Tony Blair had a large majority he put Labour members on a rota for extra constituency duties. Reducing the number of MPs will only make the situation worse: David Cameron's Commons-slighting venture cringes to populist prejudice. Yet as the recent Murdoch-grilling showed, a committee of backbench MPs can still make creditable difficulties.