Mr Salmond’s idea of independence is less brave heart, more weak knees. He wants to go cap in hand to the EU and the Bank of England to seek dependence. It always struck me as an odd vision. If you want independence, why not have your own currency and be your own boss? It was amusing to see the EU in the person of Mr Barroso upset the Scottish nationalists, after the EU has done so much to help “regional identities” like Scotland through their active promotion of a Europe of the regions.

Mr Barroso in a way was just stating the obvious. If Scotland becomes “independent” in the very dependent way Mr Salmond has in mind, they will need to apply to the EU to regain their continued dependence on the EU. Of course Scotland would cease to be a member of the EU by virtue of being part of the UK. Of course it will require the consent of all the other member states to Scotland’s admission in her own right.

Mr Barroso may be wrong in thinking other member states would want to block Scotland. The rest of the UK would have no wish to stop Scotland joining. Mr Barroso thinks Spain might wish to do so. It would be best to ask Spain that question so we can all know the definitive answer.

But what we do all know is that any Scottish membership will require negotiating. Scotland will have no automatic right to the special terms the UK currently has. Why should Scotland be let off joining the Euro, a requirement on other new members? Would Scotland have different arrangements on borders and Home affairs as the UK currently does? Why should Scotland enjoy any contributions rebate in the way the UK does? Scotland will have to negotiate how many votes she would enjoy in Council meetings, what her budget contribution would have to be, and how many seats she would retain in the European Parliament. This would all take time and may not give Scotland the deal she wants.

The rest of the UK would also need to negotiate a new membership, unless we have already voted to leave. Whilst the rest of the UK “inherits” the UK membership I presume the EU would want to use the excuse to seek to renegotiate our membership from their point of view. The number of MEPs would have to be reduced. The number of votes in Council would presumably be subject to a reduction. The rest of the UK would want a lower financial contribution, and would need to see off moves to reduce the rebate further. Eurosceptics want a new relationship anyway, so Scotland leaving might just be an added complication to a negotiation that is underway or going to happen.

PS I disagree with the notion that if Scotland votes for Out of the UK they might not be able to negotiate out. I think we should very clearly honour the intention of the Scottish people in their referendum. We should respect and implement the result either way, however narrow the margin.

Labour did well in the by election. The top line score is a convincing Labour win on an 11% swing from the Conservatives. The Lib Dems suffered the biggest drop in their vote, followed by the Conservatives. UKIP picked up votes but ended a very poor second to Labour who were 37.4% of the votes cast clear of them, and who won an overall majority of the votes cast.

The losing parties can point out that turnout was well down on the General Election at just 28,17%. They can also compliment Labour on having a much better organised postal votes campaign than the other parties. Labour won the seat on being able to get its core vote to send in a postal ballot, just as the Lib Dems did in Eastleigh where the margin over UKIP was much narrower. They can remind people that governing parties often lose by elections on big swings, but also can go on to win the succeeding General Election.

So can we deduce anything about a future General Election from this? Not a lot. It reminds us that Labour are polling much better than in 2010. It underlines how the Eurosceptic side of the argument remains very split.

This message is reinforced by the latest poll for the European elections. That shows Labour top at just 35%, the Conservatives in second at 25% and UKIP third on 20%. This illustrates that there are quite enough Eurosceptic votes to win an election, but not all the time they remain split between two contenders. To those UKIP supporters who will now write in to deny that the Conservatives are Eurosceptic I would remind you I disagree. I would also point out if the Conservatives are not Eurosceptic then you have a lost cause, with only 20% of the voters wanting a Eurosceptic option.

For the General election the polls continue to show Labour ahead, with the Conservatives as the challengers. As we approach the election people will have to make a simple choice. Would they rather have Mr Miliband or Mr Cameron leading the country. Those who say neither can vote as they choose, but it does not look as if they will get their way.

I asked the government this question earlier in this Parliament. There was no clear answer. It is becoming a more important question, as the Scottish government challenges the Union from within, and the European Union challenges it from without. It is especially important given the wish of the EU and its supporters to deny the very existence of England, as they seek to balkanise into regions with no resonance.

The Cabinet contains the nucleus of an English government. The Secretaries of State for Education, Health, the Environment, Communities and local government, and Transport are English Ministers, not Ministers of the Union. Their functions outside England are the responsibility of devolved governments. Parts of Culture Media and Sport are also devolved. It would be helpful if the word English was more commonly used to describe their remits and duties.

The UK Parliament contains a majority of English MPs. Many of us would like to see the proposal enforced that only English MPs should in future vote on English matters. Some nationalist MPs agree and usually absent themselves from votes on English education or health, seeing that they have no interest or constituency knowledge in these matters.

I see the Westminster Parliament as both the Parliament of the Union and the Parliament of England. I do not wish to see another expensive group of politicians elected to some new expensive building for a different English Parliament. I do want our Cabinet Ministers to be explicitly English in their words and work, and do want English MPs to stand up for England , with us debating and voting on these matters within the Westminster building.

The Prime Minister rightly reassured people experiencing floods that the costs of helping them during the crisis will not be subject to some arbitrary cash limit.The government does not wish to ration sandbags or fail to help rescue people stranded and in distress.

Much of the cost of responding to the floods is already catered for in current budgets. It is a case of switching Environment Agency staff, police, fire and military personnel from other duties to flood work. They will be paid the salaries that have been in budgets for sometime. Of course the government will need to raid the contingency fund or the underspends against the 2013-14 budget to pay for some additional costs. These include the extra sandbags, the purchase or hiring of extra pumps and barriers, the private sector contractors who may be used to assist the emergency services, any extra pay for overtime for public sector employees and the additional expenses some staff will incur as they try to work in difficult conditions away from their normal base.

The question of who pays for the repairs once the waters have subsided is a different one. Most of the damage will be to homes. These are mainly insured by their owners. The government has offered to work alongside the insurance companies to help ensure fair and speedy settlement of claims to get the work done and people back to normal as soon as it is possible to do so. Business premises too will usually be insured.

Businesses and farms will also have suffered loss of income which may well not be an insured risk. The government has made some more money available for farmers immediately, and will doubtless look at what help could be offered to other businesses brought low by the inability to trade for a period. It has asked the banks to be helpful to businesses, and has announced favourable tax payment terms for affected businesses.

The bigger financial question will be which schemes should be brought forward or developed for the future to give more parts of the country more protection against future floods. A fundamental rethink of the Environment Agency’s large £1200 million budget would be a good place to start. There may need to be some additional financial provision from government capital budgets in future years, which can be achieved by altering current priorities. This should be allied to new thinking on either preventing more new building on floodplain or requiring works to handle the additional water that leave the position better, not worse, than before the development.Some of the recent anti flood investments have paid off and have protected homes. We need to find more schemes which can protect those places which have suffered badly this time.

I fully support Mr Osborne’s stance that a single currency between the rest of the UK and an “independent” Scotland would not work. It is bizarre that Mr Salmond calls this “bullying”. Mr Salmond has to accept that if he succeeds in winning a vote to leave, it is then a matter for the rest of the UK and not for him how we negotiate the final settlement from our side.

Indeed, warning Scotland not to opt to be part of the pound is right for Scotland as well as for the rest of the UK. What part of the sorry experiences of Cyprus, Greece, Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy has Mr Salmond not understood? We have before our eyes the results of currency union without fiscal union, without discipline over borrowings, and without proper levels of transfers from rich to poor in the Euro area. Why would anyone want to recommend to the Scots being in a currency union where they had no influence over the monetary policy and where there was no common fiscal policy?

Mr Salmond now retaliates by the most unpleasant threat that Scotland would walk away from the Union without taking its share of the debt. British fair play and commonsense argues that of course Scotland has to take its share of the debt, as it enjoyed helping us spend the money. Scotland should remember that if they try that tactic, there are plenty of ways the rest of the UK can also negotiate forcefully.

How much of the oil belongs to the rest of the UK rather than Scotland? How do you draw the border out from the coast into the North Sea? Why shouldn’t Scotland assume full responsibility for the debts of RBS? What charges would the rest of the UK levy for Scots using rest of the Uk facilities?

The more Mr Salmond hits out, the more he needs to understand that the rest of the UK will harden its attitude to the negotiation. Many people in the rest of the UK are with the Prime Minister in wanting the Scots to remain, keeping our country united. If the Scots vote for Out, the mood will change. Then the rest of the UK, rejected by the Scots, will want their politicians to do a great deal for those of us who remain in the union.

Most people in the rest of the UK do not see the union as a simple commercial transaction. We are not constantly adding up how much we pay in tax and comparing it with what we get back. There are other parts of the UK who get a worse financial deal than Scotland, who accept that is part of belonging to union with others.

If quangos are not really independent and do have in the end to accept some accountability to people and Parliament, how should the relationship between Ministers and quangos be conducted?

When I was a  Minister with quangos reporting to me I defined my roles as:

1. Establishing aims and requirements for the Agency in accordance with their Statute

2.  Settling budgets with the Agency

3. Reviewing and influencing their policies to achieve their aims

4. Monitoring and reviewing their performance

5. Acting as the customer and taxpayer voice as they were usually monopolies

To do this I established a pattern of review meetings with Chairmen and Chief Executives. The minimum annual requirement was a budget meeting to discuss the following year’s total spending and sources of income, and a Corporate Plan Review meeting to discuss aims, achievements  and performance.

I would conduct my own review of their requests of increases in fees and charges, as often a quango that thought the grant settlement was too mean would simply carry on spending and aim to send the bill to the captive customers. I was there to represent them to the Treasury if there was a good case for them to receive more grant in aid. I usually found that they had generous budgets and what was needed was better financial management to achieve higher value for money.

I found that where I had some professional expertise based on past employment and training I was more likely to be more involved in the detail of  the quango in our private exchanges. I was responsible  for a period for the financial regulators of all the non banks, where it was possible as Minister to have productive discussions about what we were trying to do and how you could best achieve it. Where a quango dealt with something like food science where I have no qualifications I had to take the professional judgements on trust, though could and did still ask questions to expose any inconsisencies, poor performance or areas where professional judgements were divided.

The truth is quangos spend a lot of public money. They have a surrogate tax power in the case of the monopoly regulators. Their independence is subject to Parliament and Ministers telling them their aims and deciding how much they can spend. Ministers therefore need to review them closely, demand improvements, and change managements if they start to fail.

I have been asked to debate the flooding problems with George Monbiot on Sky tv (10.20am). I thought I would look up some of his views.

In 2006 he wrote a book called “Heat: How to stop the planet burning”. This stated that “our rivers are starting to run  dry.” He forecast global warming, which in turn would lead to more “drought events”.

His book of course was about the world as a whole. It was not confined to the UK. It was about a longer time horizon than a few years.  Clearly it has little relevance to today’s big issue in the UK of the floods. Our rivers are bursting their banks. We are told that it was the middle of the eighteenth century when we last had this much rain. The Environment Agency reminds us that in 1919 more of the Somerset levels were drowned than today. We must assume  that the eighteenth century was not a time of man made global warming and 1919 was well before the big global  build up of CO2. I understand that recent cold snow filled winters in the UK or this year in the USA do not  disprove the global warming theory, but nor do they help give people confidence in its shorter term predictive abiliites.

More recently, in November,  the Met Office told us  there might be “drier than normal conditions across the country” December to February. “The weakening of the prevailing westerly flow means that the normally wetter western or north western parts of the country may see a significant reduction in precipitation compared to average…”  They did preface this by telling us they had low confidence in their forecast, as it is very difficult  to do. It serves to remind us all how difficult it is to forecast weather for a month of two’s time, let alone over a period of decades, even with very powerful computers and plenty of instruments to read conditions.

I hope tomorrow that Mr Monbiot will grasp that many members of the public do not wish people to be ideological about all this. Every sensible person accepts two things. Firstly the climate is often changing. Secondly it is extremely difficult for man to predict and control how it will change, as it is subject to many differing forces. Man has no power over the sun, volcanic activity, the jet stream  or the pattern of water vapour in the atmosphere. It is equally difficult for people in rich countries to tell poorer countries with much larger populations to avoid burning the larger amounts of energy we did to grow richer.

What people do expect in an advanced country like the UK is that their governments and Environment Agency should do all they can to handle surplus water when it does rain too much, and to store enough water for use when it does not rain enough. As our population keeps growing we need to do  more on flood defence, as more people and homes can cause more water problems. We also need to put in more clean water capacity. We have to adjust to the climate as it changes, and to the extra requirements imposed by a rising population.

If Mr Monbiot is right with his theory, he has to persuade China to use less energy and tell Germany to stop burning all that lignite, amongst the larger problems. I somehow do not see him succeeding with that difficult task.  Meanwhile, there are more practical things we in the UK can do to protect homes and farms from flooding.

In 2012-13 the EA spent £1207.4m compared to £1166.6m the year  before. It ended the year with £95.8m cash in the bank. We are told the “cuts” stopped it doing a good job on flooding. How big an increase in spending would it take to qualify as no cut?

The EU has shown its contempt for democracy yet again by its unpleasant response to the vote in Switzerland. They are now threatening Swiitzerland’s access to the single market!

Don’t these bureaucrats understand that there is a higher international law on trade and tariffs which the EU as well as Switzerland has to obey? The EUcannot just unilaterally impose tariffs against international rules.

Don’t they understand that some of the EU member states may like Switzerland and wish to carry on exporting to Switzerland without new trade impediments?

The EU is constantly trying to bully people who disagree with some of its ways. They seem to think the  trade between member states and with states outside the EU is for them  to allow or remove. I want the UK to champion Switzerland’s cause. It is high time the EU bent to the democratic will of the European peoples, instead of amassing more and more power to itself.

In recent years there has been a strange vogue for give more government decisions and executive action to so called independent bodies. Apparently this has polled well. Why not trust the experts, instead of asking an amateur Minister to preside over the policy area and sift the professional advice in the Ministry and from outside?  Surely, people have argued, the experts acting in a non political manner in a quango will do a much better job?

It is high time more people questioned the logic of this. The truth of course is that in a democracy no area of policy or government action can be given permanently to an independent body. A free Parliament and Ministers always have the right to intervene, to demand a change of policy from the body, to change who is on it, to change the law it enforces, or even to wind it up. Leaving aside the vexed issue of the EU and its powers, no quango in the UK is sovereign. All know that Parliament and the elected government has many ways of influencing them or changing their personnel and powers. The EU of course presumes to direct both quangos and Ministers, but that is a different subject we have often discussed here.

It is also true, however, that all the time the main political parties are agreed that a given area should be run independently, it can be. This independence can continue for quite a long period. It is only interrupted if there is a serious crisis brought on by the way the quango acts, or if there is political change which requires the elected Ministers to intervene or change the way the quango operates.  Public opinion may be the catalyst for forcing change to the Agency, because the public may get fed up with the consequences of the actions of the independent body. Parliament is then the public’s safety valve, able to intervene and change things.

Two of the biggest examples of so called independent bodies in recent years have been the Bank of England and the Environment Agency. I have often commented before on how the Bank was overruled at the height of the banking crisis it and the FSA had managed to preside over and exacerbate. The elected officials intervened to get interest rates down when the Bank was not going to lower them quickly enough. The Labour government changed the powers and duties of the Bank, and so did the incoming Coalition government, reflecting the public disquiet about the conduct of policy. It was during the period of maximum independence for the Bank between 2001 and 2008 that we had the worst banking and boom/bust crisis of the modern era. The Bank, far from being able to manage and dampen the cycle, made it worse.

Now we see a similar problem with the Environment Agency. It turns out that it has been following a policy of allowing flooding to occur in parts of the country where elected politicians wish there to be a policy of managing and controlling the water. Recent Ministerial intervention is seeking to secure the change of policy many members of the public want. Far from taking politics out of water management, the Environment Agency seems to have put them in with a ferocity we rarely see about this topic.

The Environment Agency should have more technical expertise than Ministers on how to manage water and the environment. Ministers are still needed to tell them what the priorities are, and how big the  budget is. Allowing them to be independent for too long has produced an Agency following priorities that are not the priorities of all those with drowned homes, roads, schools and farms.