Establishment hostility [to devolution] reached its sordid peak with the orgy of corruption that was the 1979 referendum.
It would have killed Labour’s pretence to have “given” Scotland home rule, to say nothing of its election chances for both Holyrood and Westminster. It was an acute embarrassment for the Labour leadership, a tale of how they had been outmanoeuvred, outgunned and outsmarted by a group of nationalist amateurs.
More recently, however, when English Attorney General Dominic Grieve again banned any disclosure of the background to devolution, on 9 February 2012, the situation had become even more acute.
It was obvious that blocking this information had become a major factor in preventing Scottish opinion from drifting any more strongly towards independence. That is the stage we are at for the moment.
Open government, freedom of information, democracy and the rule of law are scraps of paper that may be composted for the sake of expediency.
Until these facts are made known, however, there can be no balanced judgement on the independence issue. For that is exactly what the unionists fear.