It would make little sense to put any Scottish minister in charge, say, of the Health Service, or any of those areas of national life that are already largely devolved to Scotland and Wales. Besides, the very arguments used by Labour to keep Scotland in the union - that Scotland receives a greater share of British taxpayers' money than England - are precisely the ones that can now be used against Labour to stir up English nationalism.For this reason the Leader of the House, Margaret Beckett, immediately called the Hague proposals "extremely dangerous". "Mr Hague," she said, "has rushed into something which he presumably knows will give him short- term political advantage without thinking through the long-term consequences. Although he claims to support the Union of the United Kingdom he is in danger of fermenting exactly the kind of debate and discussion which will lead to its breaking up into its several countries."But such a debate is inevitable All Mr Hague has done is to speed it up. And there was, on that same extraordinary day of the Hague speech and the Northern Ireland farce, a third news story that pointed more optimistically to the kind of new Britain in which we all live.

A British Sikh living near Glasgow, Mr Sirdar Iqbal Singh, has designed his own tartan. Mr Singh, a lover of the poetry of Robert Burns, has registered the Singh tartan with the Scottish Tartans Society.The debate engaged by Mr Hague is going to be difficult, and there are potential dangers. But a United Kingdom that is inclusive enough to welcome a Singh tartan should not find it beyond our common wits to embrace new, reasonable relationships between England, Scotland and Wales and maybe - though I admit this is a stretch of the imagination - common sense in Northern Ireland too Goodbye, Hugh Grant Hello, Mr Singh.The writer is a presenter on BBC News 24. THIRTY YEARS ago this weekend, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were on their way to the Moon. Suddenly, the explorations of Captain Cook and Vasco da Gama, let alone the exploits of a Hillary or a Shackleton, were reduced to tiny dimensions Space travel was the stuff of the gods.

Our ancestors had worshipped the Moon, and its personifications in figures such as Astarte and Diana. Now Neil Armstrong was about to put his boots on this sacred soil, and it seemed as if the whole world was watching the fuzzy black-and-white images of that magic moment in human history. Only now can we start to assess the meaning of this epic adventure. It is now clear that science wasn't in it; this trip was about human pride. The Americans had been humiliated by the Russians being first to launch a satellite and to put a man into orbit; now they were going to win a much bigger space race. And, as with so much that was to follow, the hype masked the reality. Certainly, that landing of the lunar module changed mankind. It may not, as so many people believe, have given us Teflon and Velcro, but it did give us a new sense of perspective.

It helped us to understand how small we were in the scheme of things, banishing for ever the age-old views of the supremacy of man and leading to the birth of the modern environmental movement. There were also material spin-offs, such as the satellite communications that helped to speed globalisation and enable us to talk to each other on our mobile phones.But beyond that? Today, it seems a strangely historical event, an empty imperial adventure not so far removed from the those of the sailors and navigators of hundreds of years ago And, in a curious way, it has left us diminished. The futility of the whole business can be seen in the fact that one trip was all it took to dispel the illusory importance of the event. The subsequent explorations aroused little interest, and there are no plans to return in the foreseeable future.And what of the Moon itself? It has been touched, explored, conquered - and now it is ignored.