Wings Over Scotland

Not for the first time, the Scotsman is today apparently guest-edited by Douglas Alexander. The paper offers blanket coverage – including a secondary article, analysis, leader column and a personal profile, as well as the front-page lead story itself – to the shadow foreign secretary's latest speech to a Labour audience, in which he urges the Scottish party to back greater devolution rather than campaign alongside the Tories and Lib Dems for the status quo. (The Herald doesn't mention the speech at all.)

The story barely justifies such excitable trumpeting. Alexander has already made public his concerns about how Labour should approach its policy on the constitution, in a speech which was heavily-featured across the Scottish media just a month ago. The latest one puts no meat on the bones of his earlier effort – Alexander makes no specific proposals as to what further devolution the party should support, and maintains Labour's position of opposing a devo-max question on the referendum paper.

Alexander is not an MSP, and therefore has no control over the Scottish party's decisions. (If, that is, Scottish Labour is an entity as autonomous as its supporters frequently insist.) So basically what we have is an outsider with no official influence suggesting that Scottish Labour should slightly change its pronouncements about devolution, but not its actual policies or actions. In other words there is, in essence, no actual news to report here at all.

The Scottish electorate still overwhelmingly supports greatly-extended powers for the Scottish Parliament, albeit with roughly half of the backers of devo-max also supporting independence. Scottish Labour is desperate to tap into this support and create clear Saltire-blue water between itself and the UK coalition, but has painted itself into a difficult corner by  opposing a devo-max option in the referendum.

It's a circle that the party is going to find very difficult (perhaps impossible) to square – it would, in effect, be campaigning on a position of "Vote No to independence and we might give Scotland some (unspecified) extra powers, at some unspecified point in the future, probably after yet another Calman Commission, if we win a Westminster majority under Ed Miliband, and if we keep our promises (unlike with electoral reform and tuition fees), and if we haven't changed our minds again by then".

At present, all Alexander is really achieving is drawing attention to that fact.