It is not sensible to pour cold water on any constructive proposals that seek to address a real and urgent problem. Still less is it sensible to pour that water when the proposals are the product of hard and sincere work by a committee chaired by one of the ablest and most broadminded former senior ministers of our time.

Ken Clarke's answer to the so-called West Lothian question - that Scottish MPs be allowed to vote only on the first and third readings of Bills that affect England may be the basis for a temporary, least bad response to the problem of having set up a subordinate Parliament in part - but only part - of a unitary state. The drawback is that the proposals constitute only part of a fig leaf to cover the problem when a party wins a majority in Westminster but not among English MPs.

Nor - though I may be doing Mr Clarke and his Democracy Task Force an injustice - do I think that they have faced up to the enormous difficulties facing the Speaker in deciding which are UK matters and which purely English. They so often impinge on each other that there is bound to be bickering.

Mr Clarke's proposals might be an answer, if there was goodwill all round. But there is not goodwill all round. On the contrary, there is maximum ill-will. Part of the Scottish population, represented by the politically adroit Scottish National Party leader Alex Salmond, does not want any Westminster-centric solution to succeed. The SNP wants - quite legitimately - something indistinguishable from a separate Scottish state.

Clearly at some stage there has to be a UK-wide referendum on devolution. I think it is unreal, as the Calman committee seemed to suggest, that the choice is only between the status quo and enhanced powers for the Scottish Parliament. The real choice is “yes” or “no” to independence.

In my view any referendum must also include a further question: “Do you wish the Scottish Parliament to remain in being?”

The truth is that every member of that Parliament and most journalists based in Scotland would affirm that they did want the Parliament to continue and to gain more powers. Why? Because it is in the nature of politicians to ask for more and more powers for the institutions in which they themselves find themselves. So it is that not only the SNP but most Labour MSPs, Liberal Democrat MSPs, and Annabelle Goldie, leader of the Conservatives, who are asking for more and more for Holyrood.

If that question is not put, we might as well reconcile ourselves to the dismantling of the British State.

Tam Dalyell is the former Labour MP for West Lothian (later Linlithgow)

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