DURING a briefing to Scottish political journalists in London, the Labour leader Keir Starmer claimed that the party review of the British constitution he has set up which is headed by former Prime Minister Gordon Brown could deliver Scotland everything except independence.

However, as my late grandmother used to say whenever someone made an unrealistic promise or commitment, you could plant a feather and think it was going to grow a chicken. That's essentially what the Labour Party is doing with Scotland and the constitutional question. Starmer has planted a feather in the infertile grounds of a Gordon Brown-led review of the British constitution and is insisting that it's going to produce not just a chicken, but the entire menu of a deep-fried-chicken franchise, and in addition a lifetime's supply of eggs.

The National:

Starmer's remarks came when he was asked whether he was open to the proposal of former Labour MEP David Martin who in May had called on Labour to devolve every government ­responsibility to Holyrood, apart from defence and foreign affairs. This is essentially the Home Rule that the Labour Party promised Scotland when it was founded more than 100 years ago, and like the abolition of the House of Lords, which the founders of the Labour Party also promised, we're still waiting.

However, Starmer refused to commit himself to the original concept of Home Rule envisaged by the early Labour Party and instead told us to wait for all the chickens that are going to be promised by Gordon Brown's commission when it makes its recommendations later this year. 

Starmer didn't mention, and most certainly hopes that Scotland has forgotten, that Gordon Brown already promised an entire battery farm's worth of constitutional chickens when he made his infamous vow in 2014. He also promised that he personally was going to guarantee that those promises were kept. Yet here we are, seven years later, and we are distinctly short on the federalist and home rule poultry. But this time Keir and Gordie really, really mean it. They'd even make a wish on a wishbone if they had any chickens.

We already know what's going to happen. Brown's commission will report, making recommendations which fall far short of full-fat federalism or the original Labour concept of Home Rule. These recommendations will be trumpeted by the British media in Scotland as though they actually had any chances of becoming a reality, despite the fact that Labour is languishing in the polls and has no chance of forming a majority government in Westminster any time soon.

The recommendations will then be heavily watered down by the Labour Party in an attempt to make them palatable to an English electorate which has no interest in constitutional reform, and which resents what it sees as special favours being granted to Scotland. If by some miracle the Labour Party does manage to form a Westminster government within the coming decade, the surviving proposals will be watered down even further in Commons committees and by amendments made by Labour and Conservative MPs. Then eventually, a bill will be passed which gives the Scottish Parliament control over road signs and speed limits and Keir Starmer will proclaim: "Winner winner, chicken dinner."

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