ONE of Scotland's leading academics has said the "union needs to be saved from the unionists" if Great Britain is to survive as he claimed Labour's position towards the SNP before the general election was "almost inviting people to vote for independence".

Professor Michael Keating, chair in Scottish Politics at the University of Aberdeen, said the Tories and Labour had failed to solve a conundrum of how to operate within an increasingly fragmented post-devolution political system and that the union was being placed under "enormous strain" as a result.

Professor Keating, a director of the Centre on Constitutional Change, described Ed Miliband's declaration in the run-up to the general election that he would rather not become Prime Minister than enter number 10 with SNP backing as "very strange" and criticised Tory posturing over English votes for English laws in the aftermath of the referendum campaign.

Speaking at a two day Royal Society of Edinburgh conference on constitutional change in the UK and Canada, he said: "There are British parties, there is no British party system in the sense of parties competing on equal terms throughout Great Britain... Not only that, the unionist parties are talking themselves out of that role.

"At the last election, when the leader of the Labour Party was asked would you be prepared to do some kind of deal with the SNP, he said 'I would rather not become Prime Minister than make any kind of accommodation with the SNP', which then went on to win 56 of the 59 seats.

"I would argue that's a very strange thing for a unionist party to do. To say 50 per cent of the Scottish electorate are out of the UK brokerage game... it's almost inviting people to vote for independence.

"The Conservative Party's reaction to the referendum was to say we want English votes for English laws now. I personally there is a good argument for that but the way it was set out was highly criticised because it seemed to be saying now let's make a separation between English affairs and Scottish affairs, lets have an English political arena.

"The UK parties themselves seem to be doing things that are very ununionist. In some senses the union needs to be saved from the unionists because they're playing this very strange game."

He added that the SNP had succeeded in taking over the traditional ground of Labour, which it had exploited since the 1950s, by presenting itself as a left of centre party that would go to Westminster and stand up for Scotland.

Unionists were no longer treading a fine line of accepting Scotland as a nation with its own institutions while separating that from political decentralisation, he said, as they had done successfully in previous decades.

Professor Keating added: "They've forgotten how to play the card of Scottish recognition and diversity with a story about the union. They've started to think that the union is something that sits above the constituent nationalities."