A more United Kingdom

David Cameron's 'strings attached' rabbit-out-of-the-hat announcement that English laws made by English MPs would be part of the constitutional revision package has sparked impassioned debate.  Alex Salmond continues to play the media whore when Cameron made an unguarded remark to Michael Bloomberg about our 'purring' queen, unable to face up to his whole political career ending in failure; on the 'English package', he used his usual sophistry, saying 'No' voters were tricked by pledges of DevoMax, making out that people only voted 'No' because of DevoMax, a blatant abuse of the truth.  In Labour, Ben Bradshaw and others have formed 'English Labour'.
I'm all for a formal federalism in the UK, discarding the West Lothian question to the dustbin of history in one fell swoop.  The USA and its states and Germany and its länder are more united, not less because of this system and more democratic too.
In a sense, we are going back to our roots, as the late Anglo-Saxon state had significant devolved elements that built up mass support for the system and the elite who operated that system.  In the words of Geoffrey Hindley (in his A Brief History of the Anglo-Saxons, p. xliii), consider "the courts of the shire and its subdivisions, all part of a system of royal justice that was in a significant sense popular, attended by and presided over by men [a patriarchal society, natch] residing in the locality." Central authority fostering local loyalties to local units to reinforce itself, whilst also serving as a useful buttress against autocracy.  Practical advantages also accrued as Emma Mason explains regarding King Harold II's forced march north 948 years ago to rout Harald Hardrada's Norwegian opportunism: the English king "was joined on the way by contingents from the regions through which they passed, which in itself indicates both the efficiency of his courier and also the national respect for Harold's authority." [The House of Godwine, p. 149].  The centralised state worked for its people and the populace responded to defend it.  M.K. Lawson (in Cnut, p. 15) details how the Normans let the powerful institutions that had been developed decline and fall into abeyance.  If the late Anglo-Saxon state was "ahead of its time" (as surmised by Hindley), we finally may be catching up with our forefathers.