"No federalism for me please, mother, I'm British..."

I notice, via Jeff over at SNP Tactical Voting, that the Scotsman reported today that the egregious Commission of Unionist wobblebottoms, groaning under the no-doubt inspired leadership of that bastion of petty-bourgeois bumptiousness, Kenneth Calman, has bravely avoided taking an interesting stand on yet another constitutional issue, flinging "federalism" out of their contemplative pram.

According to "the mouth of Calman":

"As our remit is about strengthening devolution within the Union, it would arguably be beyond our remit to propose a move to a federal structure for the UK."

There is more than a whiff of semantics about some of this. When precisely does devolution become federation? How much has to slip? What are the essential differences? What is being alluded to, of course, and noble eschewed, is the thornier question of how any new settlement respecting Holyrood might play out in an English and Welsh context, and how the political implications of amending the Scotland Act 1998 might be managed.

I have waxed lyrical about the dubious qualities of this chubby, honour-seeking phalanx of Commissioners elsewhere. I reiterate many of the more lurid sentiments here. The intellectually palsied, power-hungry, grey-eyed, whey-faced approach which this round table of untheatrical clowns have been dragooned towards advocating never really threatened to be radical.

From today's headlines, it seems that their pinstriped commitment to blandness may be the hallmark of this costly fraud.