Last week the UK underwent a surprising constitutional change, and one that seems to have gone without much comment or analysis in UK media, as pointed out to me in an email from Jonathan Portes. The Treasury’s top civil servant, Nick Macpherson, had a letter made public disclosing his advice that any future UK government not agree to a currency union with Scotland. In doing this, the Government delegated to him the task of arriving at an objective view of the matter. This was novel, since usually civil servants are there to serve, privately, politicians reserving for themselves the right to decide on the rights and wrongs of an issue, and all of us trusting to the discipline of electoral politics to produce an objective, and not a political decision.