Scotland referendum: We need a poetry of the Union to defeat Salmond's freedom shtick OK, he won an election. But someone always does, and the Earth still turns; he's not invincible. His economic policy is amateurish at best, with no visible strategy to end the disgrace of Scotland's pockets of extreme poverty - as dire now, after more than a decade of Left-wing, devolved "governance," as they ever were when Mrs Thatcher was PM. The stunted life expectancy in parts of Glasgow is actually worsening, but since it's got damn all to do with the constitutional settlement, SNP politicians don't speak much about it: shame on them. A man in Glasgow can expect to live just over 71 years, the same as if he were an Albanian. So taking Alex Salmond's politics apart should be child's play for any reasonably articulate Tory, and it is therefore all the more depressing that Unionists seem unable to find a language to diminish him. Not that Labour's role in the campaign won't be vital - I'll come back to this, because it's related to those shocking deprivation figures in Glasgow - but Tories are the natural romantics of the Union, and should develop and articulate a poetry about Britain, to counteract Salmond's "freedom" shtick. Not a poetry of impenetrable metaphor that speaks solely to the past. Our common wartime endeavour is moving to recall, and the global reach of the Scots in the empire was astonishing. But it's not enough to look back. Proponents of Union should speak of the quotidian benefits of being Scottish-and-British or English-and-British. People who are proud to work for the benefit of both nations, because the two are also one, regardless of whether they were born in Leith or in Leicester. People who instinctively - not intellectually - recoil from the prospect of becoming a foreigner to the friends and family who live on the other side of the border. Quietly happy unionists, whose very existence acts as an implied rebuke to the language of the SNP - whose supporters talk a lot about "birthright" - should speak up, and ram home this point: for the sake of his single-issue mania, Mr Salmond seeks to destroy the true birthright of all Britons, who are born citizens of a United Kingdom. People like my dad, born in Norfolk but who lived, worked and died on the west coast of Scotland, and who produced his Scottish son there, who now, symmetrically, has made his home in England. Tories can supply the passion about nation, attachment to which is largely emotional, given the randomness which governs our birthplace. Labour's role is as important, but of a different focus: it should emphasise the commonality of effort required to defeat Scotland's ingrained poverty. Of course I don't agree with that party's prescriptions (municipal socialism carries part of the blame for those life outcome statistics), but the entire point of its existence is that working-class solidarity is necessary in order to improve the condition of the people. Both Maryhill and Hackney suffer from extreme poverty; Labour politicians should be asking, loudly, how the poor in one British town will be helped through being assigned a separate nationality to those in another. A romantic Tory/urban Labour coalition might feel odd, but it's necessary. All the quibbling about Trident submarines, and oil, and bra factories, and EU membership, and sterling - all important stuff - misses those key points, birthright and solidarity, which should define the campaign for Britain. I will not be recast as a foreigner to my father: we are both British. No politician should be allowed to unpick that, certainly not a linguistic bully like Salmond.