IN WHICH DAVID CAMERON FAILS TO SEE THAT HE IS TALKING BLETHERS, LEARNS THE EXPRESSION "RED HERRING" AND OVERUSES IT

David Cameron has again ruled out a head-to-head TV debate with Alex Salmond ahead of the independence referendum.

Cameron said the idea was a ‘complete red herring’. (Why is it a red herring for the head of the UK government, which wants to keep Scotland and its vast resources for the good of the UK,  and the head of the Scottish Government which wishes to be independent of the UK and to be able to use the aforesaid resources for the good of Scotland, to debate? red herring my butt!)

He challenged Mr Salmond to debate with Scottish politicians such as former Chancellor Alistair Darling – who is leading the anti-independence Better Together campaign. (To which the answer is that the only position Mr Darling holds, other than being an ordinary back bench MP, is that of Better Together Campaign leader, and his opposite number is Blair Jenkins the head of the YES campaign. They should surely debate, otherwise  with whom would Mr Jenkins debate?)

He said: "This is a debate between people in Scotland, some of whom want to separate from the United Kingdom, but the majority of whom want to stay in the United Kingdom. The TV and radio debates should be between Scottish politicians with differing views." (Well David, if that is the case why are you giving an interview to the Scottish press on the subject? Why did it form the main part of your speech to the party conference? Why not leave that to Ruth, who is supposedly the Scottish Party leader and is certainly a Scottish politicians, therefore exactly the kind of person who, in your opinion, should be addressing it?)

"I seem to remember Alex Salmond said he wanted this referendum made in Scotland – well now that he’s made a bit of a mess of it, he wants to make it somewhere else." (Recent figures show that more people want to change the constitutional settlement than leave it alone. Support for independence, trumpeted by the No campaign only a few months ago at 23% has risen, by the same measures from the same polling company, to 35% in less than 6 months. Not my idea of a mess, Dave. You want a mess, go look at your hospitals, or trains, or schools. They ARE a mess.) 

"Let Better Together debate with Alex Salmond and the Nationalists. This is a complete red herring and I'm absolutely not falling for it." (Either you are very stupid and have failed to grasp the point [in which case, better shut up now, in fact resign now, because this is really simple compared with some stuff a first/prime minister should have to deal with], or you are being deliberately obtuse. 

Let me try to make it simple for you:

Better Together should debate with Yes Scotland.

Politicians should debate with politicians.

That might mean first ministers with first ministers; finance ministers with finance ministers; deputy first ministers with deputy first ministers; environment ministers with environment minister. By now, presumably  even you will have caught onto the system)

Please note for this exercise I have conflated "first" and "prime"... They mean approximately same thing.

It seems to me that the real reasons that David Cameron will not debate with Alex Salmond are as follows:

He feels that as Prime minister of the United Kingdom, he is better suited in the company of presidents and kings. A mere Scottish MSP is beneath his Eton and Oxford dignity.

Or, David Cameron knows that he would be a complete turn off to around 90% of the Scottish population and throw them running to the arms of the horrid separatists, because let's face it anything has to be better than this tosser.

Or finally, because he is feart (his word) of the intellectual rigour of the debate from a man who would wipe the floor with his silly arguments of "greatness" and "power" and "place in the world" and show him that Scots, by and large, care a great deal more about the fact that there are people in our country eating out of rubbish dumps and food banks, than the fact that we could blow a southern suburb of Moscow off the face of the Earth if the American gave us the co-ordinates.