I read Alistair Darling’s essay for Scotland on Sunday on the benefits of the Union early yesterday morning and key passages gnawed away at me all day.

The final part of a very good series of essays, three for independence and three against, it gave a wearily familiar view of why Scotland should stay in the UK, one we’ve heard quite a lot of from Labour protagonists.  And no matter how well they turn a phrase, their argument amounts to little more than Scotland being too wee and too poor to go it alone.

But worst of all, it is an argument predicated on the past which offers nothing but warm words and vacuous reassurances for the future.

Darling argues that the financial crisis that faced the UK in 2008 was only resolved because we were all in the UK.  And he claims that this crisis – or at least…