Eddie Barnes: Unionists and Nationalists can take comfort from support for Holyrood

THE ball that began rolling when Scotland's unionist parties agreed to look again at the devolution settlement is still going strong.

The stand-out finding from the survey on attitudes to the constitution is the clear support among the population for what has become known as "devo-max".

Asked whether they would like the Scottish Parliament to take control of welfare and tax, six out of ten Scots said they would. While some people may well have said yes so as not to appear anti-Scottish, the trend is now clear: ten years after it was created, most people appear ready to hand Holyrood vast extra influence over their lives.

For the political parties, the survey offers something for everybody. For Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories, it will offer comfort that most people in Scotland still don't want full independence. The figure in support has now hovered around the high 20 per cents since the advent of devolution, suggesting that a ceiling has been hit (although the final verdict must wait until the Conservatives are in power at Westminster).

Tellingly, while 60 per cent of people back Holyrood running welfare and tax, the same number believe Westminster should retain hold of defence and foreign affairs. All the efforts made by Alex Salmond over recent years to persuade the country to break away from the UK are not working.

However, that is not to say that the survey is bad for the SNP. Indeed, the party's gradualists will probably take more from this survey than their opponents.

True, people may not be ready to go the whole hog to separation, but the survey demonstrates that they now seem instinctively drawn to Holyrood as the place where most of the key decisions on domestic policy should be made (it would be interesting to know whether Westminster's expenses scandal, and the consequent loss of trust in MPs, has had an impact on this).

The upshot of this is that it allows the SNP to argue convincingly that Labour's Calman proposals – which involve cautious changes to the devolution settlement – are not ambitious enough. And that ensures that the Nationalist movement under Salmond can do what it needs to do – carry on moving.

Of course, the destination of independence is as distant as ever. But many in the SNP will not care too much about that, especially if devo-max, or "independence-lite" as it could also be called, becomes a reality. It was once said famously that devolution would kill independence stone dead. Many in the SNP camp would declare that if this is the form of devolution that's going to do the killing, then bring on the axe.