Scottish referendum: will we wake to a hangover on Friday?

The genie of nationalism is out of the bottle and politicians will struggle to meet the expectations that have been stirred

Live blog: Wednesday's developments in the campaign

On Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday, Better Together's dour leader, ex-chancellor Alistair Darling said that his fellow Scots had emerged as " a more self-confident country" than it was a generation ago, partly thanks to devolution, and should nurture that confidence within the British union. Half an hour later, Yes's irrepressible chieftain, Alex Salmond, agreed, but draws the opposite conclusion.

Is it an under-remarked fact that radical change often happens when things are getting better, the "revolution of rising expectation", as I was once taught to regard events in France in the 1780s? More recently I remember John Smith, briefly a self-confident Scottish leader of the Labour party before his death in 1994, saying that he'd expected Neil Kinnock to lose the 1992 election, despite the recession, because people play safe in hard times.

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