And he should rescind it, even though the National Farmers' Union, playing politics of its own, also seems to favour uniformity over devolved propriety. We learn that, for all their rhetoric of change, and the measures which they have brought in apparently to bring change about, ministers, in the arena where raw power is collected and dispensed, have an addiction to no-change. They like things to be neat and tidy, under their control. Above all they want the Scots, on whom, in a new parliamentary configuration, their whole fate could depend, to be fed no precedents that might make them restless. Changing a governmental culture is, admittedly, big work.
Nothing happens quickly.
Look at the impatience Mr Blair is having to show, in order to get anywhere with his urgent belief that the civil service itself needs to modernise. Freighted on his back are 150 years of a British governing machine whose momentum has never been centrifugal, and arguably an eternity of power-hungry leadership by everyone who ever filled his post. But it was he who talked about being different, and pacified Scotland with a promise. The beef of England seems an exquisitely inappropriate way to break it.