Let me nail my colours to the mast.  I’m firmly in support of the Union; breaking up a 300-year-old state and fracturing a common history, seems unnecessarily divisive. 

But whichever outcome you want to see at the forthcoming Scottish Independence referendum, what happens on September 18th really matters. 

Which is why it’s been so disappointing that the ‘battle for ideas’, from both Yes and No camps, has comprised endless nit-picking about economic technicalities, shrill name-calling and overblown bluster rather than substantive discussions about the principles of Unionism versus Nationalism.

Refreshing then that the newly published Commission on Strengthening Local Democracy lays out ‘fundamental principles that we believe must underpin Scotland’s democratic future…whatever the Referendum decides’.  I disagree with many of these but at least ‘principles’ are an antidote to a narrow managerialism.