MARIA FYFE At last. Holyrood Unionists have come together to defend the Union, take a fresh look at devolution and show they are not waiting around for Alex Salmond to run a referendum on Scotland's future whenever it suits him. His tactic is obvious. He hopes to maximise support after three years of keeping council taxes frozen. Any loss of service, any redundancies, any broken promises - not his fault. He will try to keep a straight face and blame it all on recalcitrant local authorities or Westminster.

Meanwhile, to Salmond's joy, people in England will continue to be fed dubious statistics by Tories who have given up hope of regaining seats in Scotland, designed to make them resentful they don't get equivalent spending to Scotland, and so further stitches in the Union will become unpicked.

Now we can remind the rest of Britain that the Nationalists are running a minority government. Only about one-fifth of us want to break up the UK. Now the majority can make our voices heard, and stop letting the SNP get away with its absurd accusations and distortions and its claim to be the voice of Scotland. It will not be good enough to leave the battle in the hands of leading lights in Holyrood and Westminster. This is no time to shrug the shoulders and say separation is going to happen. It will only happen if we let it happen. Of course the Unionist parties are right to say the constitutional commission is for those who want devolution to work to best advantage, not those who would use it as a tool to break up Britain. There is nothing to prevent Canon Kenyon Wright and others continuing their consideration of all the constitutional options, which will no doubt help some to make up their minds, but let us be clear: there is confrontation between those who would break up the Union and those who want to keep it.

The new commission will deal with the financial settlement, which alone will require a great deal of work. It should also consider, not just what powers the Scottish Parliament should acquire in addition to those it has now, but whether any should be returned to Westminster or devolved to local authorities. The criterion should be what serves the people's interests best: the workload of elected members is a secondary consideration that should follow on from a reasoned debate on what works to fullest advantage where. If the context was simply a case of reviewing devolution there would be no need for a referendum unless the proposed changes were recognised as both far-reaching and controversial. We all know that is not the context. The Nationalists hope to have a referendum when it suits their agenda, and therefore Unionists need to show that what they are working on is how best to run Scotland, not how best to tear it away from the rest of Britain. So we don't sit waiting for the Nationalists to call a referendum. What we ought to do is have a vote on the commission's findings, if only to demonstrate in a formal poll that most of us do not want to break up Britain.

The commission will not be a body for considering the actions of an unrepresentative body of lawmakers 300 years ago, but I hope it will turn its attention to making Holyrood more representative of today's Scottish population. The Scottish Parliament we have today, thanks to extensions of the franchise since 1707, the Labour Party's determination to achieve equal representation of women at Holyrood, the STUC's 50:50 Campaign and the hard work of the Constitutional Convention - in which, let us not forget, the Nationalists refused to play any part - comes quite close to being a representative body.

It would be unrecognisable to the lofty lords who had all the say in 1707. The extent to which it is less representative than a mere eight years ago is due to the Nationalists. When first elected, our Scottish Parliament had 37% women MSPs and at the following election it rose to 39%. Now it is down to 33%. Of the total of 129 MSPs, only 9% are Nationalist women. At a grand total of 12, they form only one-quarter of the Nationalist group of 47. In an age when progressive politics the world over brings in more women, the SNP has unblushingly managed to reduce further its pathetic former total of 15 women in Holyrood. Can I dare to hope the commission will also address itself to the ambition of making the Scottish Parliament fully representative of the people who elect it?

Another reason to welcome the commission is that it answers the SNP's accusation that the rest of us have no faith in the people of Scotland. The "cringe" is a favourite Nationalist myth, and it's high time it was debunked. In the week when the Nationalist government would rather subvert the democratic process to give in to Donald Trump than accept the view of the local authority on what is best for its people, this charge seems particularly amusing. Maria Fyfe is a former Labour MP.