First Minister, thank you for these 20 propositions on reforming the union, which make interesting reading, much as Luther's 95 theses nailed to the door of that church in Wittenberg did all those years ago. Many of the implicit or explicit criticisms of the union we would agree with; we agree on much of the diagnosis. We differ, of course, on the solution. Now, as Martin Luther even eventually concluded, we believe the dysfunction that is laid bare, actually, in the pages of this document is so deeply embedded that the subject of the propositions, really, is simply beyond reform. We have to start afresh.

Now, you quote, I think, in your foreword to the document that famous line from Lampedusa's The Leopard:

'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.'

That line is actually spoken by Tancredi, an impoverished young aristocrat who joins the radical republican Garibaldi—possibly the Jeremy Corbyn of his day—in his uprising against the Bourbon kings who ruled Sicily in the lead-up to the unification of Italy. The problem that the novel hints at is, yet again, on the cusp of that externally driven change—the external rulers of Sicily change but, actually, nothing really changes at all for the people of Sicily. The leopard never changes its spots. 'Meet the old boss, same as the new boss', to quote an entirely different literary genre.