Three main parties offer Scotland major bribe to vote No

The three leaders of the main British political parties have jointly signed an agreement to give Scotland more powers, so long as the country votes No on Thursday.

The incredible thing about this is that we are in the period of the campaign known as purdah, when no new polices should be introduced. Not only that, but almost twenty percent of the voters have postal ballots and most of them have already been cast. In other words a sizeable chunk of the electorate have voted on the basis of policies from the Unionist parties; policies that have now been torn up!

I suspect that Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg will be able to get their respective parties to agree to this memorandum, but there must be some considerable doubt if the Tory backbenches will be quite so compliant. Just looking at the wording of the agreement, especially the bit that entrenches the Barnett Formula that allocates resources from the centre to the regions, and we can see trouble on the horizon from Tory backwoodsmen who will be worried about the suburban English vote switching to UKIP.

Had this come in a month ago, with time to fine tune it, then it might have proved a winner. As it is, it relies too much on Cameron being able to keep his knuckle-dragging backbenchers in line. To say nothing of the average loathsome Tory voter.