Bernard Ingham: Another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, politicians

Instead, it is the entire United Kingdom bawling them first at Tony Blair for naively thinking devolution would head off nationalism. Then at Alex Salmond for his big-fish-in a-little-socialist-pond nastiness in search of Scottish independence.

We move on shouting at Gordon Brown for hijacking the campaign against independence to beat the defecting Labour vote with his great clunking fist while dishing out promises of powers for north of the border on a ridiculously tight timetable.

Then it is at David Cameron, Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg for meekly signing up to Brown’s excesses only for Miliband to renege on its timetable, if not entirely the substance.

I think we can safely say Miliband did nothing in his speech at the Labour Party conference yesterday to lighten our darkness.

Seldom have so many politicians looked so shabby, panicky and inept. God save us when we come to the EU referendum in 2017.

Back here and now, let us take stock. Nothing but outright independence will satisfy hard-line Scottish Nationalists who hate the English, though they fall well short of the 45 per cenr minority who voted to break away.

Already Salmond is canvassing the idea of a unilateral declaration of independence once it is effectively achieved through devolution. He is a thoroughly bad lot – with the mentality of a tiny-minded tartan Trot.

The referendum has raised ambitions in Wales and Northern Ireland. It has also brought to a head the discontent in England over the way the UK is financed and the very idea that Scottish MPs should shape English life and laws when English influence is largely barred in Holyrood.

This is feeding calls for a revised Westminster Parliament. At the same time it has set off what must be a wholly synthetic English devolution fever, given that the North has rejected a regional assembly and most cities the idea of elected mayors. Beware political activists bearing gifts of self-government. They are never cheap.

There are also fears that if English devolution is taken to its logical conclusion, it might be difficult for a Scotsman, Irishman or Welshman with a Westminster seat in his own country to become Prime Minister or Chancellor of the UK. Would it then be the United Kingdom?

In the end it will come down to money and politics. What the English object to is the Scots’ individual £1,623 premium in public spending over the English citizen that is spent on socially featherbedding Scots while at the same time milking English university students of fees their own don’t pay.

Like its author, a lot of politicians want to scrap the “unfair” Barnett funding formula governing public spending across the UK. But how is Cameron going to deal with Barnett when it also lavishes £443 extra each on the Welsh and £2,347 on the Northern Irish? This is a timebomb waiting to explode.

So what should our reviled politicians do? For Blair it is simple: shut up and go away.

It is no more complicated for Salmond: put a sock in it. You lost.

For Cameron, it is to discover unsuspected depths of ingenuity in searching for a fairer system of funding and representation.

For Gordon Brown it is to admit publicly his timetable of draft laws by January was a desperate, loopy bribe.

For Miliband it is to stop playing politics to protect his gross over-representation in Parliament in Scotland and Wales by chucking the entire problem into the long grass until he has a chance, he hopes, to legislate the Tories forever out of government through proportional representation.

For Clegg, it is to confess he is part of the problem by his refusal out of pique to end the electoral anomaly under which more votes are required to elect a Tory than a Labour MP.

For all of them (apart from Salmond and Blair) it is to set out their stall by next May’s general election. That is at best a tight timetable for dealing with issues as complex as those affecting the constitution.

But we have to turn slurry into gold by then. The people have to be given a chance to choose the way forward. We have wasted enough energy and treasure on Scottish independence. In a dangerous world, we need to look outwards, not inwards.