So the leaders Dave, Ed, & Clegg have signed a personal pledge on more devolution powers. That’s the last of the Better Together’s credibility down the flush given the track record of personal pledges in UK politics.
The economic case for independence is fiction, but that counts for little when leadership credibility is gone. Seeing all these last-minute promises being thrown around in a panic does not make me feel confident about any of Westminister’s leadership, and the Scots could be forgiven for wanting to get shot of the lot of them. At the moment I think that is exactly what will happen.
Of course in all this there is the slight issue of the English and Welsh having no say in the settlement, and rightly or wrongly they will view it with the suspicion that they are paying for the Scots to be buttered up. Any English MP who has UKIP snapping at its feet will be nervous, so getting these extra powers past parliament would be acrimonious. Given how centralised the UK (i.e. England) is, there is the moral hazard of the regions trying their luck.
The real problem is that Devo-Max without any corresponding English federalism is constitutionally unstable. When the current devolution came about the West Lothian question was never properly addressed, and with Devo-Max the corpus of reserved business will be so small that a repeats of the 2004 Tuition Fees vote (affected only English students by carried by Scottish MPs) is inevitabe.
However, England-only votes is a non-starter. Such votes would cover most of Westminister’s business, which would make a complete joke of having Scottish MPs. It is not unrealistic for the next government to be a Labour one where the majority is less than the number of Scottish Labour MPs, so US-style deadlock would be inevitable from the supposed solution.
The reason why federalism is disliked in England, as shown by the widespread rejection of elected mayors, is because power is being passed upwards rather than downwards. It is the purse strings that matter, and conflict is inevitable when the english regions (circa 75% of funding from central government) see a Scotland with its own tax-collecting autonomy.