SNP Westminster leader Angus Robertson described Mr Darling's speech as "poor and panicky".
Mr Darling's speech, likely to be his government's last set-piece statement on the economy, offered a sad pastiche of that hybrid ambition.
Then he listed a few of the Yes Campaign's Utopian claims; "Why don't you do more to repudiate them?" he said, to more murmured approval than Mr Darling's speech received.
Darling's speech comes after the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, speaking to an audience of Labour-supporting students and trade unionists in London on Thursday, made his case for staying in the European Union in his first major speech on the subject.
Darling's speech, in which he downgraded his growth forecasts, raised taxes and admitted the UK economy faced its biggest slowdown since Labour came to power, was effectively blown out of the water.
After Darling's speech on Wednesday, the Tories will try to deflect charges that they favour the rich by attacking Labour's latest tax-and-spend measures as political window-dressing that fail to address the need for a convincing plan to put the public finances in order.
Darling's speeches were left unwritten until the last moment; a grid wasn't set up to organise media activity; and there seemed little appetite to hone the messages sent out to an electorate soaked with the yes campaign's propaganda.
As Peter Riddell reports in today's Times, Alistair Darling, in a speech to the Royal Society of Arts yesterday, chose, rather encouragingly I thought, to speak on the role of the Treasury in the 21st century.
Alistair Darling delivered a speech this morning in Edinburgh, in which he said no spending review was carried out in the past year because areas like unemployment and debt interest were expected to be higher than they have turned out to be.
PATRICK McGEEHAN KEEP ON BLOGGING When Arianna Huffington won a Webby Award last year for her blog, The Huffington Post, she was limited to a five-word acceptance speech: "Darlings, make blogs, not war".
3 44pm: Andrew Love, Labour, asks Darling about David Cameron's speech yesterday, in which he said that Darling's plans to put up borrowing would prolong the recession.
