Tom Griffin (London, OK): The credit crunch has shaken the political kaleidoscope at Holyrood as well as at Westminster. In both cases, somewhat counter-intuitively perhaps, Labour has been the initial beneficiary.
The shotgun merger between HBOS and Lloyds may have seemed like an open goal for Alex Salmond, but many feel he overplayed his hand, not least with his suggestion that an independent Scotland could have bailed out HBOS.
Former Scottish Lib Dem leader Jim Wallace argues that the episode has highlighted unanswered questions about monetary policy and financial regulation in an independent Scotland.
These issues are not the small change of the independence debate - they are fundamental. Yet you will look in vain to find them addressed at all, let alone seriously, in the national conversation. And that takes us to the nub of the debate over a referendum. The question proposed by Salmond's government is not about the terms of independence but solely about a mandate to negotiate. The SNP government is opposed to a subsequent referendum on the negotiated terms.
So when referendum protagonists argue that Scotland has a right to decide on its future, what they really mean is that Scotland can decide whether to give Alex Salmond a blank cheque.
In the Sunday Herald, Iain MacWhirter acknowledges that the issue is the SNP Government's most serious test yet. He concludes, however, that the tide of what David Marquand would call democratic republicanism is too strong to be halted in Scotland.
Scottish Labour hope to sit out this crisis calling for jobs to be defended in Scotland against SNP cuts in social provision. The local income tax will be held up as a Nat Tax job-killer which might even derail the HBOS rescue.
Will this work? Fear is always a strong card to play in times of economic uncertainty. This is going to be a difficult period for the SNP. But my impression is that Scotland has changed a great deal over the past couple of years and may not be ready to leap back into fearful dependency quite yet.
