Scottish

In all the media coverage of the release of the Libyan bomber, it is very clear that the Americans do not take the Scottish "government" seriously. All attempts to deflect attention to Edinburgh are met with irritation by American politicians and commentators, as if they are being given the runaround. Most of the Americans (interviewed on Newsnight, Today, The World at One etc) sound as if they are unsure where Scotland is, or whether it might be a marketing concept for whisky and biscuits, or a brigadoon fairy story starring Gene Kelly and Maureen O'Sullivan.

A measure of Scotland's unimportance came on election night when Emily Maitlis produced a digital map of the constituencies in the United Kingdom with each constituency given the same size blob. Scotland looked tiny. Completely insignificant.

To understand why Scotland attained political significance in recent years you have to look at the collapse of the Labour Party in the 1980s. Following the 1983 election Labour was greatly reduced in the House of Commons and over-reliant on Scottish contituences (where it did relatively well). Thus Scottish MPs filled a large number of Shadow government posts, and when the electoral tide turned these Scottish MPs became government ministers, giving the impression that we had a Scottish government with a few English and Welsh tokan appointments.

This is unlikely to happen a second time. The balkanisation of the United Kingdom, resulting from the policy of devolution, is leading to reduced Scottish representation in the House of Commons. The banking crisis and subsequent recession has reduced Scottish economic importance (there can be no government significance without economic significance).

The Scottish population is expected to decline to below five million by 2025. Thirty percent of the Scottish workforce is employed in the public sector. The much-vaunted "arc of prosperity" has completely evaporated.