We’re now in the last-gasp days of the election campaign so the parties are mainly telling us to vote for them to stop something terrible. The SNP says a vote for them would stop Nigel Farage. The Tories say a vote for them would stop plans for another referendum. And the Greens say a vote for them would stop primary school pupils having to do homework, so if you’re nine-years-old, my advice is you should totally vote for the Greens.

However, amidst all the calls to stop the other guy, there are one or two encouraging signs that the parties are starting to think about an issue that’s been central to the success or failure of devolution and how Scottish politics does or doesn’t work. The issue hasn’t received much attention until now really which has arguably led to an economic deficit for some communities and a widening of the gap between how the system works in England and how it works in Scotland. We’re falling behind, frankly.

The issue in question is how power is distributed in Scotland, specifically how it has ended up in all the wrong places, by which I mean places where it isn’t being wielded as effectively at it could be or at all, and the explanation goes back to the roots of Scottish devolution in the 90s. In many ways, the creation of the Scottish Parliament was a genuinely surprising act in the highly centralised state such as Britain, but like a little spider plant propagated from a big spider plant, the genome of the British regime carried over into the new Scottish system. Scotland is still highly centralised except that it’s centralised in Edinburgh now instead of London.

The other problem with how devolution has worked is the SNP themselves who, like all nationalists, don’t actually like devolution very much. The SNP is always denouncing UK governments for allegedly centralising power to Westminster – with Brexit for example or direct UK investment in Scottish projects........

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