Scottish questions simmer nicely

Philip Johnson reports that the Tories are renaming the West Lothian Question as The English Question. This may be politically astute, since the expression "West Lothian Question" won't have immediate resonance with most English voters.

The Tories are reportedly shying away from the David Davis proposal of an English parliament sitting in the Commons. Instead, the committee stage would be for English MPs only.

When the Bill came back to the Commons for its report stage and third reading, all MPs would again have a vote. But the Government would be bound to accept amendments agreed by the committee, or risk losing the legislation.

The political problem for Labour in objecting to this is that it sounds boring rather than radical, so it would be politically difficult for Labour to work up indignation that would strike a chord.

The devil would be in the detail. If the House as a whole could guillotine the Committee stage, the sanction could be neutralised. And suppose a Labour dominated Lords reversed Committee stage amendments and re-instated Labour government proposals overturned in Committee?

Probably a Labour government could circumvent the proposal easily enough, though, by making sure that every Bill contained a measure which didn't apply only to England, so that it wasn't an exclusively English Bill.

Alex Salmond has told the SNP he wants to make make Westminster "dance to a Scottish jig", by winning more than a third of Scotland's seats at the next general election. Commentators seem to consider this unlikely - after all the SNP only just scraped home in the Scottish local election.

And it seems Gordon Brown is losing control of Scottish Labour as Wendy Alexander faces "increasingly strident demands" from inside the Labour movement for independence to be considered by the flagship commission that is reviewing the devolution settlement.

Scotland's no longer a political backwater.