Like the Prime Minister, I’m a Scotsman who has lived in England for a long time, married an Englishwoman, and is raising a young family in London.

Unlike the PM, I’m not part of a Government which brought in half-baked constitutional reforms without giving any thought to the effect on my position as a Scottish MP voting on laws which affect England, without any corresponding right being given to English MPs on Scottish matters; nor giving proper consideration to the long-term effect on the stability of the UK.

Gordon Brown’s unenviable position on Scottish devolution was brought into sharp relief last week with the extraordinary declaration by Wendy Alexander, the leader of the Scottish Labour Party, that she would support an accelerated timetable for a referendum on Scottish independence (using the phrase “bring it on”).

Downing Street immediately distanced itself from this.  What was remarkable was that No 10 genuinely appeared to have been taken by surprise by the announcement.  The fact that Wendy is the sister of Douglas Alexander, one of Brown’s closest Cabinet colleagues, makes it all the more bizarre that no discussion whatsoever had taken place between London and Edinburgh.

Leaving aside internal Labour feudal wrangling, this leaves Gordon Brown with a massive constitutional headache.  We now have the situation where:

·           the Scottish branch of his own party wants to have an early referendum on Scottish independence which he opposes;

·           if Scotland voted for independence, the UK would break up – an outcome which devolution (we were assured by Labour Ministers) was supposed to prevent;

·           if opinion polls are to be believed, it is likely that at least England will deliver a majority of Conservative MPs after the next election; and

·           even if Labour do somehow manage to win the next election on a pan-UK basis, his constitutional authority for continuing as PM with the support of Scottish MPs who would be used to force through laws on English matters with no English MP allowed a corresponding say on Scottish affairs would be an affront to both common sense and democracy.

The Government have not produced a coherent response to this.  It would be easy for those of us who opposed devolution in the 1990s to say “we told you so” when pointing out the inherent shortcomings in Labour’s solution to the Scottish constitutional question, and to do nothing else.

Unfortunately, this will not solve the problem.  In the absence of a worked-through solution, the debate will continue to be obscured by (at least partly justified) growing English resentment at the one-sided nature of the devolution arrangements, and also by misrepresentation of the “facts” (for example, about North Sea oil revenues) on both sides of the fence.

It is going to fall to the Conservatives to produce a workable solution to the current mess.  Some work has been done and valuable contributions made by, amongst others, Sir Malcolm Rifkind.  But much remains to do.  If we assume (as I think we must) that the Scottish Parliament remains in some shape or form, the decision must then be how to deal with the ongoing relationship between London and Edinburgh and answers the “West Lothian question”. 

Whether this is “English votes for English laws”, excluding Scottish MPs from certain matters at Westminster; reducing the number of Scottish MPs still further; forming an English Grand Committee; or even adopting a more federal system for the UK – the Conservatives need to flesh this out, because Labour have lost the imagination and the authority to deal with it.