Nigel's Big Day Out

Nigel is a passionate Highlander. He likes current affairs. He follows politics. He cares deeply about the outcome of the referendum. As good luck would have it, he discovers that Britain's flagship current affairs show is coming to his home town.  Now's the moment, he thinks, to take my case for independence to the British people. Here's the ideal stage, to make my heartfelt case for the United Kingdom to change utterly.

Sitting quietly in the draughty hall as the first few questions are asked and answered, he waggles his hand with increasing urgency, bursting to speak, desperate to catch Dimblebumble's wandering gaze. At last, the ancient compère's eye alights upon him. "You sir," he says. Nigel's gorge rises. His heart pumps, eyes dazzle. At last, he finds his voice, uncertain at first, but then growing in vigour and conviction. He speaks:

"I am born in Inverness. I am a passionate Highlander. And I love Scotland. And I will take a stand to break up this United Kingdom. I will give my life for my country as my grandfather did in the First World War, and his brother Charlie. Highland Regiment! Scottish Army! I am Scottish forever. We will never, never change. We will end this Union, in the name of Jesus. I will break - if it's my own life - I will break up this country with my blood."

Afterwards, he feels cleansed, like he's got something off his chest. The volcanic energies which had been building up in him - temporarily released. Resolving to carry on with his struggle for independence tomorrow, he says a prayer for the departed souls of his grandfather and his brother. That night, he sleeps soundly. "The sleep of the just," he thinks to himself, as he stirs, cheerful and refreshed the next day. A wan sun shines early that morning. A sign that the man upstairs is not displeased, he thinks fondly, as he deposits the kettle on the aga and waits for it to bubble with a welcome peal.

The first sign that all was not well was the incessant ringing of the land line. It starts after breakfast. Usually, the phone's grating trill only disturbed the peace one or twice a week. Now that terrible grating sound bounced endlessly through his cottage. When he gingerly plucked up the receiver, it was little better. Hectoring voices - journalists' voices - at the end of the line. "Are you prepared to answer some questions, Nigel?" "Would you care to comment on your hateful outburst, Nigel?" "Nigel, would you say you are a blood and soil nationalist?" "Where do you hope to be martyred for Scotland, Nigel?" "Does Jesus tell you to do anything else, Nigel?" "Do you use twitter or facebook, Nigel?"

He never lets them beyond the first or second question, planting the receiver down firmly, double-pressing the button at the back to make sure he'd cut off the call. But he couldn't disconnect the line entirely, or just let the phone ring out. His sister might call, or a neighbour, needing something urgently. So he sits, answering each time, each time reluctantly cutting short the ringing. It was around this time that the men arrive outside of his cottage. They seem to be carrying some sort of camera equipment. They skirt the house. He ignores them. Tourists probably, he thinks, on a walking holiday. Nervous he sits in his kitchen, answering the phone, bemusement mounting, drinking cup and after cup of tea. The milk runs out. He can't take tea without milk. He's been taking milk in his tea since his schooldays down in the big city.

A run to the shop, he thinks. Just what I need to clear my head and get me away from this confounded phone. A paper too, perhaps. Yes, definitely a paper. To keep abreast of the affairs of the day, he thinks, as his old father used to say when cracking his morning eggs and reading the financial section of the Times with a judicious merchant's eye. Donning gilet and tie, spruce, he steps out into the sunshine. A burst of photography. Flash, flash, flash. Brighter than the sun.

The tourists, he thinks, shielding his eyes, hurrying into his clapped out old landrover. Just an eagle. Or a deer. The keys won't fit in the ignition - just too much tea, the trembling hands, he thinks - more milk, more milk. With a scoosh of relief, the key sinks home and turns. The engine coughs into life. He pulls out of the driveway and scuds down the single-track road, the gravel thrumming of the ancient engine somehow reassuring.

He didn't expect to see his own face - his image - burning out of the front pages. "NATIONALIST ACTIVIST IN BLOOD AND SOIL ROW" "HATEFUL CYBERNAT INVADES BELOVED BRITISH TV INSTITUTION WITH SEPARATIST THREATS" "I'LL DIE FOR SCOTLAND, SNP LUNATIC WARNS" "JESUS: HE'S NOT THE MESSIAH, HE'S A VERY BLOODY SEPARATIST."

The keys fell with a dull clatter from his numb, trembling hands. His temples throb. Back in Nigel's cottage, the phone rings incessantly. Another dazing burst of photography erupts from nowhere. Nigel shields his rheumy eyes, barely able to focus. Milk, he thinks, milk, trying to keep hold of something tangible - to keep the thread - as he lollops into the local shop, pulling his wax hat down low over his brow.

Miles south, in Glasgow, Rob Shorthouse puts the finishing touches to his press release in the Better Together HQ, crackling with unveiled glee."The Yes campaign has hit a new low. This kind of language is completely unacceptable but all too common from those trying to break up Britain. The mask has slipped. The true face of the separatist movement is revealed. Salmond must act. We will consider referring these hateful and sinister comments to the proper authorities." In Hope Street, a nervous Yes Scotland official reassures the skeptical reporter on the other end of the line that Nigel is a lone eccentric and not really part of the campaign at all.

In newspaper offices across the land, in a fug of instant coffee and perspiration, time-taxed hacks squabble over whether "Cybernat" should be capitalised and put in inverted commas in their copy. Bored journalists phone around old work colleagues and neighbours for choice anecdotes about how Nigel always seemed like a nutter liable to leak his bodily fluids in pursuit of independence.

Peals of laughter rise from Scottish political staff in the Telegraph, Daily Mail and the Express as they gleefully put the boot in with thundering editorials about the evil spirits unleashed by this referendum and the "dark heart" of the case for separation. Labour press officers ponder creative ways to link a lone Highland weirdo to the First Minister's office. "Have they ever met? Can we find out?" Paul Sinclair rubs his hand, as he sits down to write Johann Lamont's script for FMQs. "This'll be an easy week," he thinks, gratefully.

And Nigel sits in his cottage, with the lights off, curtains pulled, phone tolling a constant judgment. He never did buy a paper that morning. Or the next.

Feart

Back in 2011, the Flying Rodent composed this majestic diatribe, detailing a doer's guide to Concern Trolling. The target of the Rodent's ire was a rash of reports and articles in the UK media, which represented its authors as embattled truth-tellers, "shouted down" by the PC mob and silenced by illiberal liberal elites, inimically hostile to the unsayable, plain, old-fashioned common sense which the hacks and politicians imagine they espouse. 

Nigel Farage has become a past-master of this dual strategy, assuming the mantle of both the Plain Fellow and the Victim. I marvel every time I hear an earnest right-wing gob-jobber on Question Time insisting that "we can't talk about immigration in this country," having spent half of the BBC's flagship politics show, speculating on the extent to which Romanians are lifting the colostomy bags of British grannies, or offering up distorting and racist accounts of crime statistics. 

Whatever pinko censor is responsible for keeping this stuff off the British airwaves is either grossly incompetent, or the forces of reaction's most effective third columnist. As suppression-tactics go, the liberal tyranny which rules us needs sent to Pyongyang for retraining. We seem to hear and see a remarkable quantity of the "unsayable" in the popular media, yet its free availability does nothing to diminish its proponents' sense of themselves as gallant counter-cultural warriors, embattled but determined to make the truth heard, as they see it.  

The lesson? Bullshit fantasies of victimisation have their compensations and pleasures. And the frisson of ressentiment is all the more enjoyable, if you don't actually have to suffer or forgo anything to enjoy your sense of being hard done by. Being "shouted down" is far more satisfactory, it seems, while having your views projected, unchallenged, on the front pages of the national press. Surveying a range of articles cast in these terms, the Rodent concluded:

"I notice the single common factor to each piece (I'll paraphrase, since the Times is paywalled) in that almost every one - report, leader, opinion piece - starts with the premise that the topic is taboo; that discussing it in racial/religious terms opens the speaker up to malicious attacks from the Politically Correct mob; that, in short, the Times isn't allowed to discuss this stuff in these terms. Wait a minute, I think.  You're the nation's paper of record, and you're telling your readership that you're not allowed to report on the things which you are in fact reporting on, in the specific terms in which you're reporting upon them? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

Roused from my slumber at dawn on Friday, I agreed to go on Kaye Adams' Morning Call programme on BBC Radio Scotland, to discuss President Obama's faltering endorsement of a "united" Britain. As it transpired, I spent much of my speaking time, responding to a couple of callers claiming that the Yes side of the argument was "shouting down" those committed to continuing Union. 

Earlier in the show, I'd suggested that Obama had lost the redemptive veneer of his first election. No JFK (and the ghastly JFK was no JFK either), the President is now a figure tarnished by the challenges and compromises of office. Not all of this is the President's fault. But whatever his views on Scottish independence, and whatever his assessment of the best outcome from the perspective of American security interests, Obama now cuts a diminished figure. I doubt very much whether his remarks will weigh with many of us on the 18th of September, as we puzzle over which way to cast our ballots, one way or the other. 

Despite the First Minister's pitch-perfect response to Obama's comments, (and my own concerted attempt to be reasonable), Kaye's No callers proved conspicuously attached to the idea that folk of my constitutional persuasion were somehow bullying or unjustly muting dissenters. Despite. You know. Their own opportunity to express their sentiments on national radio. And. Um. The fact that the President of the United States' comments appeared on just about every front page in the country. And. Er. The daily grind of independence-hostile front-pages, news content, reportage and opinion columns. Clearly, opposition to independence is the one political cause in this country which dare not speak its name for fear and trembling. We can only conclude that the pinko censor, charged with keeping immigration off-topic in the UK press, has been transferred to the Yes Scotland office.

Just this weekend, a series of articles in the press harp on the same string. The Times has a piece on unionist artists being bullied mute by thuggee nationalist sculptors and the unevidenced threats and menaces from secessionist choreographers. That notoriously thin-skinned band, stand-up comics, are apparently feart of broaching referendum controversy at this year's festival in Edinburgh.  My heart bleeds.  I suppose they'll be forced into retelling their "edgy" rape jokes instead.  You know: something less controversial. Just the latest, tragic victims of our bilious and bile-spattered referendum campaign.

Hardly a week goes by, without some new tale of a No voter having their misplaced anxieties - and I'm afraid, their cowardice - indulged by sympathetic media outfits, doing their darnedest to convince us that this poll - this model of participative democracy, this civil, invigorating campaign - is something dark and terrible, rending the country apart. In its worst excesses, this construction of the referendum betrays an unseemly relish for the wildly remote prospect of blood on the tiles. 

The underlying message of this commentary is hardly subtle: to hold a referendum represents an irresponsible, civility-curdling outrage: no reasonable soul could honourably agitate for separation. This control-freakery is fundamentally hostile to the democratic spirit in which this referendum is being conducted, sprouting from the bottom up, drafting a new generation of active citizens to crack open and blow a gust of fresh air through the dusty, reverent halls of politics as usual. 

Participative democracy is scrappy, untidy, and frequently impolite. Social media transforms anyone with a keyboard and an opinion into a publisher and commentator. You can, if the mood takes you, fire up Twitter and pour a vial of wrath over leading politicians you disagree with. It won't always be edifying or even instructive, but the opportunity to do so challenges the old stultifying deferences, separating the communicators and those communicated to, and the division of power and roles which this implies. 

Too often, we lack empathy with our opponents. It would be a better country, if more folk could see and understand where those who take a different tack on the constitution are coming from, not least because empathy is the best weapon. But let's keep a sense of proportion, and remember the value of an open society. Uncritically reporting baseless fears is innuendo, plain and simple, even if the anxieties are sincerely felt.

I know a number of folk on both sides, who have been reluctant to participate publicly in the constitutional debate for a range of reasons. Some are protecting their public standing and reputation. Others are trying to ride the two horses at once, anxious not to find themselves getting too publicly embroiled with the loser. Still more are determined in their constitutional views, but pretty lukewarm in them, and reluctant to become the face of one campaign, or the other. We each of us must make our own judgements on this score. But how we understand and construct that reticence is critically important.

"Shouting down" is becoming one of the referendum campaign's irregular verbs: I disagree with you. You shout me down. Alex Salmond behaves like Kim Jong-il. To explain to someone that you regard their case as unconvincing or wrong-headed is not shouting them down. To reject somebody's argument is not to "silence" them. Delusions of victimisation have their emotional compensations, but they disfigure our politics. To repackage disagreement as oppression is to do a fundamental disservice to the democratic process. People who disagree can be disagreeable. Argument can be uncomfortable. But if you feel tempted to regard that as the end of civilisation and the death of democracy, your democratic muscle needs serious toughening. 

Yes Vulnerabilities

When I was a teenager, I went through a phase of being much-taken with Stoic philosophy. We'd been exposed to Plato's Republic in school, and largely overlooked Aristotle. The Stoics I chanced across by myself: aphorisms of Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. 

One aspect of Stoic thought which particularly appealed to me was its emphasis on the power of ideas to shape our responses to life's inevitable troubles, travails and setbacks. It has become a mantra of contemporary cognitive behavioural therapy, but if you can change how you think about a problem, you are half way to enduring it well. 

I also found adolescent lessons there about being yourself. About the importance of not "staking your happiness on the souls of other men." That isn't to say that goodness, kindliness or the assessment of others are inevitably unimportant - but you shouldn't outsource your self-esteem to other people, making your happiness and equanimity contingent on their good or bad conceits of you. As a nation, the Scots could do with a good deal more of this sort of confidence, which finds its expression not in chippiness, but in generosity, empathy and open-mindedness born of a basic existential security.

I was reminded of this over the weekend, as the Sunday Herald splashed with its decision explicitly to back independence for Scotland. The editorial explaining this decision is an impeccable statement of the now-mainstream case for a Yes vote: self-government, responsibility, democracy, justice. The response from Yes bods was remarkable too. The news stands were stripped. Copies tucked away for posterity. Twitter was ababble with excitable, breathless (even, dare I say, pathetically grateful) responses to the Sunday newspaper's endorsement of independence. 

I don't mean that disrespectfully, but I do think that the enthusiasm of the response cannot be explained in terms of the likely impact of the paper's decision. A more familiar phenomenon in the public debate is independence supporters crowing about the melancholy death of the mainstream media.  How can we explain the sudden overflowing gratitude when a mainstream publishing outfit of the "dead tree press" gives independence-supporters the nod?  

"At last, we see our voices reflected in the mainstream press," a number of folk cheered. But hold up a wee moment. Why should this reflection matter? The obvious answer here is an instrumental one. The media helps set the political agenda. It is a key source of information for voters going into this poll. Sympathetic (or much more numerous unsympathetic) voices matter and have the potential to affect the result. Absolutely.  But only up to a point Lord Copper. And not, to my mind, sufficiently significantly to explain the intensity of the enthusiasm with met Alastair Gray's front page. 

As others have pointed out, the Sunday Herald has a relatively limited circulation in the country (around 24,000 copies), and has been perceived as more than characteristically Yes sympathetic for a while. That said, the paper clearly pitches for a liberal, bourgeois audience. We're talking more about the gender gap these days, but we know from recent polling that the Yes campaign also continues to struggle to make inroads and persuade middle class Scots of the virtues of independence. 

At the very least, the Sunday Herald splash may persuade persuadables who read it to give independence serious consideration.  In a campaign which may be decided on the narrowest of bases, the endorsement of a once crackpot constitutional scheme by an impeccably respectable organ of Scottish opinion is not to be sniffed at. Like the sturdy, sensible SNP government, it helps answer the once-dominant, now embattled, idea that independence is unthinkable, lending the campaign a sort of reputability.  But in terms of the overall result, which side the Sunday Herald supports is really of marginal significance. Instrumental arguments can't explain the glee.

It is tempting to look to broader psychological explanations. Glasgow SNP councillor Mhairi Hunter asked a perceptive question recently. Better Together supporters are acquiring the tendency of getting touchy if challenged, hurt if mocked, and anxious if their views are dismissed without being given earnest consideration. For most Scottish nationalists, this is a familiar phenomenon. Mhairi wondered if familiarity bred contempt.  I wonder too. Their own hides toughened by years (and for some, by decades) of less than convivial or constructive responses to their constitutional ambitions, Scottish Nationalists haven't exactly been primed to respond sympathetically to the sudden sensitivity of their opponents. I've blogged before about my own encounters of this kind, where sympathy for Scottish self-government is written-off as a self-evident absurdity. It puts your back up.

You can respond to these testing experiences in different ways. The first simply repudiates any concern for those judging you critically. You may not take me seriously, but I don't care. I take myself seriously enough for the pair of us, as I'm going to win. I don't give a fig what you will or nil. But that sort of emancipation from concerns about how others see you isn't so easily achieved.  There's a quotation which I think is sometimes attributed to Voltaire, that to be free, all we need do is to wish to be so. There's a bit of truth to that, but liberty can be elusive. And we can grow perversely attached, even to our chains. 

You feel a similar glow when Salmond or Sturgeon does particularly well on the UK stage. A winning interview, an ace appearance on BBC Question Time, a flattering write-up. When the First Minister leathers a UK political worthy, trounces Neil or Paxman, or treads the world stage without looking like an inarticulate, over-promoted city councillor, you feel a sort of glad twinge. Biff. That's one in the eye for you, London establishment. Our man (or woman) can hold her own amongst the best you've got to offer, no bother. It's often struck me that there is a certain dubious logic beneath this wriggle of pleasure. A lack of self-respect which feels, however residually, that you've not really made it till you've made it in London and that our own judgement about whether Salmond or Sturgeon are talented or smart isn't sufficient - they've got to impress the very folk we don't care for and express indifference about for us to feel properly proud. 

It is an odd, ambivalent phenomenon, but not perhaps a unique one. History has known many edgy, lifetime outsiders, who secretly long to don the ribban or the ermine, to be recognised as respectable by the very establishments which they rejected and railed against (and vice versa).  Intuitively, the impulse is to some extent understandable, but it remains somewhat strange. I'm not criticising anyone for it, but the psychology of the Scottish nationalist movement is much more ambivalent and vulnerable than the orthodox Yes story of  confidence, hope and optimism sometimes allows.  Perhaps it speaks to the relative immaturity of our political culture, and the fact that many of our ghosts still walk amongst us, unexorcised. 

Not Scandinavia, but Ireland...

In a column in last weekend's Scotland on Sunday, former SNP MSP Andrew Wilson returned to a familiar theme, arguing that "British identity is key to debate on independence."   

Andrew worries that "fewer than one in ten Scots with a “strong sense of British identity” back independence".  What is to be done? Andrew's answer is that the Nationalists should cunningly hijack British identity, and rearticulate it in a form more amenable to our constitutional ambitions.

"... the SNP and the Yes Campaign have just over a year to communicate cleverly that Britishness is about much, much more than the functions of state government. Indeed, who the government is and what it does is the least important aspect of Britishness and most urgent to reform. The familial, cultural, social and economic ties that bind will endure and strengthen when the politics is taken out of the equation."

But is it really a question of "cleverly" articulating a new, non-state account of British identity, as Wilson contends? I'm not so sure. As I tracked in a post here some time ago, nationalist politicians have been using the language of a "social union" after independence for a good while now. The idea that Britishness and this "social union" can and should be used interchangeably, seems a more recent development in pro-independence rhetoric. And for me, one of the least convincing.  

On BBC Question Time a while back, the SNP MSP Alex Neil told the audience that "I am an Ayrshireman, I am a Scot and I feel British and European as well." Now, I've no window into the Health Secretary's heart. A cherished sense of Britishness may warm his cockles.  If so, little of that heat communicated itself in his answer. His Britannic protestations looked strained, and hollow, altogether too pleased with themselves. Some independence supporters may feel profoundly British, but I doubt most prominent Nationalists do, and for them to pretend to do so looks decidedly shifty, and decidedly not convincing.

SNP MP Pete Wishart has been at the forefront of the argument that we should think about Britishness in geographical, super-state terms, detachable from national governments, and independent from the question of whether Scotland sends parliamentarians to Westminster.  As is so often the case at the moment, Pete offers us Nordic models in justification.   

"Britishness is as much about geography as it is about identity and history. Coming from Perth in the northern part of the island of Greater Britain I am as much British as someone from Stockholm is Scandinavian."

This argument has a superficial allure to it. Scots won't lose Britishness if we vote yes. Fear not fellow citizens! We'd be just like those friendly folks lining the fjords of Sweden, and of Norway and Denmark. But what do most folk know about shared Scandinavian solidarity and identity? Bugger all. How does the reference connect up to Scots' lived experiences? Not to any significant extent. So why the devil should we think that recasting Britishness in terms of an alien concept of regional identity of which most folk know nothing is going to do the trick? 

Wilson's choice of words is significant. Such a strategy is "clever", but I think, too clever by half, and unlikely to make much sense to your average Scot, with hazy British sympathies, and at most a couple of days in Stockholm, or a couple of episodes of the Killing under their belts. 

By making Britishness the answer to Yes Scotland's campaigning problems, Wilson's argument conflates two points. As he diagnoses, rightly, if the referendum resolves itself into a question of "do you feel British?", the SNP are stuffed. On the Better Together side, we've heard Ed Miliband's identity-driven British nationalist case for the Union.  According to the Labour leader, the referendum turns on the question of identity, his message to Scottish voters: Feel British? Vote No.  Independence supporters must resist this framing of the question.  Hitherto, they have done so by focussing on independence as a constitutional, civic and political issue, about powers, not identities.  The question before voters is not whether they feel British, but whether they want Scotland's democratic institutions to make key political decisions about their public services, their wars, their social security and taxation. 

One of the surprises of the Better Together campaign hitherto has been the absence of the full-scale sentimental British nationalist campaign promised by Miliband's intervention. You could do it marvellously. Twinkle-eyed Corby grannies, born in Dumbarton but long in the south, surrounded by a giggling knot of grandchildren, and ideally, with a son and daughter living on both sides of the Tweed, whose laughing children sound an untroubled mixter-maxter of accents. The young couple, one Fifer, one Londoner, who met at university in Edinburgh, and settled down, all invested in the idea that the noble goal of a multi-national state is worth preserving, all arguing we're "better together", as the saying has it. And so on, and so on.  

It might be an idea for Yes Scotland to get their retaliation in first, and to shoot a counter-intuitive ad with similar characters on both sides of the border endorsing independence, relaxed about the implications for their families and relationships. For Yes campaign to make the case for companionable Britishness, however, would be madness, and do Better Together's identity politics for them.

As many of you will know, since 2009, I have lived in the south east of England. I don't feel British to any significant extent. I enjoy warm and convivial relationships with my friends, neighbours and colleagues in Oxfordshire, unencumbered by any requirement that we share some defined regional supra-identity. I get along without Britishness quite happily. More and more, I've been wondering if independence supporters, tickled by the novelty of Scandinavian parallels, and the cul de sac of reclaiming Britishness from the British state, are neglecting the more obvious, more helpful contemporary example of the Republic of Ireland in talking about social, family and commercial bonds, after independence.

English-speaking, sharing a land-border and abiding historical ties, you'll find few people who seriously think, in Johann Lamont's ugly phrase, of the denizens of Tipperary or Cork as "foreigners" in the United Kingdom today. As is well known, Irish nationals enjoy a number of rights under UK law, including the ability to vote in our elections, free movement and immigration rights (above and beyond the rights of EU nationals in this respect).  For most folk in Great Britain, the Irish are betwixt and between, resisting the straightforward binary of the Self and the Other.  From my experiences in England, they are not significantly different from Scots in this respect, despite my Irish friends' "separate" government in Dublin, and "our" shared parliament in Westminster.

Identities don't belong to states. The Irish lesson shows us, in concrete terms most people in our country will understand, that our shared bonds in these islands won't break up if Britain breaks up.  We don't need any mediating concept of Britishness to make this happen, to maintain the to-and-fro of immigration and emigration, wandering carelessly over lightly-drawn borders, comfortably befriending, loving, working and belonging.  I don't need any pseudo Britto-Nordic construct to feel that my Irish friends here in England aren't the "foreigners" Johann Lamont would have them be. 

Ed Miliband: British nationalist.

The name may not be familiar, but most of you are likely to have come across some permutation of the “Moreno scale” in your time.  An attempt to measure national identities where dual loyalties may obtain, the Moreno measure sets the two potential identities against one another, obliging respondents to reject or give priority to one over the other, or in the alternative, hold the pair in balanced equilibrium.  In Scottish surveys, the focus has been Scottishness and Britishness, and the options usually take the following form:

Scottish not British

More Scottish than British

Equally Scottish and British

More British than Scottish

British not Scottish

For my part, I’m decidedly of the leftmost extreme.  I do not and have never felt British.  It is a concept which seems to address other people: I can’t find myself in it. Although I’ve lived and lived happily in England since the autumn of 2009, this resolution has not wavered, and is unaltered.  For me, concepts of Britishness generate only antipathy, and I find that I rub along quite cheerfully with my English neighbours as a Scot, without any need for an interceding British identity common to us both to form warm and meaningful ties.  Like my friends and colleagues who hail from Ireland - or Canada, or America, or linguistically adept folk from anywhere elsewhere in the world - shared language and common interests mediate the possibility of conviviality and social comity far more tellingly than any supervening national identity. 

In his "Defending the Union in England" speech this week, Ed Miliband applied himself to these sort of concerns. “What does this summer say about the United Kingdom? What does it say about our identity as a people in 2012?”, the Labour Leader asks, continuing on that in Scotland “the debate about who we are is in full force: “To stay in the United Kingdom or to leave? To be Scottish or British or both?” Note the framing. In a terse couple of sentences, Milliband has identified the independence referendum primarily as a test of popular feeling of identity.   On the logic he is propounding, if you are Scottish not British, you’ll vote yes in the referendum – anything else, and you’ll be opposed. 

What is interesting and curious about this account of the referendum is that it relies on an argument Miliband explicitly denigrates elsewhere. “The nationalist case, wherever we find it, is based on the fallacy that one identity necessarily erodes another”, he claims.  While this might be true for the black-white nationalist, if Miliband rejects this sort of logic, how can the independence referendum be a choice between being Scottish and British? On his own terms, rather than those of the straw man he duffs up, how can this characterisation of the referendum make any sort of sense? 

He quotes no nationalist who has framed the referendum as a moment of choice between being British vs Scottish, so he isn’t rebutting a specific contention made by a political rival.  I’m happy to concede that the Britishness vs Scottish model he discussed is one hypothetical argument amongst other arguments which a “Scottish not British” nationalist might make in the referendum, but Miliband doesn’t present this either/or choice as one nationalist articulation among others which might dissent from it, but instead, as an incorrigible, inevitable feature of nationalistic thinking “wherever we find it”. But if this sort of nationalism is a false choice – and incidentally, I agree, it is – then the independence referendum cannot really be about being British or Scottish, as Miliband suggests, can it? You can't posit a false choice, and then insist people stick to its dicky logic.

Accordingly, Miliband appears to be suggesting that the question – British or Scottish – is inevitably central to the independence discussion, whether or not nationalists actually base their arguments on the clash of identities he proposes. As Iain MacWhirter neatly summarises this morning, this is a familiar misreading of much of contemporary Scottish nationalism.  However, let's follow where Miliband leads.  Where does his theorisation of the link between nationalism and independence for nation-states lead us? Miliband seems to be claiming that nationalisms are inherently totalising.  But if Britishness is characterised as an identity constituted by its diversity, woven from various non-totalising national strands, for Miliband, Britishness surely cannot be a nationalism. But if not a form of nationalism, then what? He refers to the Jubilee’s exhibitions of Britain’s “gentle patriotism”, but at no point did he try to cavil out a workable distinction between British patriotism and Scottish nationalism, as Michael Forsyth did on BBC Question Time this week.  So we’re stuck with the confusion. 

I think it is safe to say that Miliband does conceive of Britishness as a nationalism, albeit different in kind from Scottish nationalism insofar as it is consciously constructed from other national identities which exist concurrently and compatibly with it. Which makes perfect sense, as his speech makes an essentially emotive nationalistic argument in defence of the current constitutional set up, shot through with premises he shares with many Scottish nationalists on the alternative side of the argument.  In many ways, Miliband’s speech exemplifies some of the British nationalist ironies I’ve discussed before.  Rather than using the Labour leader’s words, consider this pared down version of the argument.  Let’s take it through in stages.

I feel Xish

X is a nation.

Nations ought to be independent states.

Ergo, X should be an independent state. 

For Scottish nationalists of some persuasions, the argument takes this form:

I feel Scottish

Scotland is a nation

The United Kingdom is a state, but not a nation

Nations ought to be independent states

Ergo, Scotland should be an independent state and the UK Should break up.

What strikes me as interesting, and paradoxical, is that Miliband’s British national logic simultaneously adopts and rejects these premises.  Unlike the more typical Labour Unionist fare, Miliband’s defence of the United Kingdom isn’t premised on claims about shared social, economic and political projects.  While he makes a passing reference to impoverished grannies, his isn’t really an instrumental image of Union, bent on delivering social justice in a cross-national coalition of British workers.  His thesis isn’t stick together for a left-of-centre Britain, stay in the UK to help secure decent welfare provision for London’s vulnerable, but instead is explicitly concerned with a British identity, and implicitly, a British nationalism.  Despite his argument that either/or Scottish nationalism is folly and confusion, he puts British identity at the heart of his defence of the Union.  Indeed, one can summarise his argument in essentially the same form as the hypothetical Scottish nationalist case we were imagining:

I feel Scottish and British

Both Britain and Scotland are nations

Some nations ought to be independent states, others not.

Ergo, Britain should be an independent state, and Scotland shouldn’t.

If you accept these premises, the obvious question is: why should some nations become independent states and not others? I've argued before that this is one of the most curious aspects of British nationalist theory, coupling identity with the political project of sustaining the United Kingdom. For Miliband, nationalism seems both to entail and not to entail the demand that national identity find representation in political institutions, in parliaments and bodies and tribunals and so on. But for the Union to make any sort of sense, we have precisely to reject the idea that all nations ought to be independent states. Scots may be nationalists - think of themselves in national terms, share national identifiers - but the Unionist has to break the intellectual link between nations and the imperative to acquire separate sovereignty for those nations.  Critically, this sort of Unionism doesn't reject the idea that Scotland is a nation, but rejects the proposition that this must needs lead to distinct states and political institutions.  

Ironically enough, this argument is precisely mirrored by various nationalists who've recently been (unlike yours truly) elaborating on their own sense of Britishness.  In response to Miliband's speech, folk like Pete Wishart contend that his argument simply conflates Britishness and the United Kingdom state. Just as the Unionist Scot must insist that his Scottish identity need not entail independence, so Wishart simply inverts the argument.  Even if you feel British, and identify as British, you may support Scottish independence. A shared national sensibility need not equate to belonging to the same state. On this, ironically enough, both Wishart and the most inveterate Scottish Unionist surely agree. Rhetorically, theoretically, both the Scottish nationalist and the British unionist have to find ways to isolate the institutional and political consequences of admitted national identities.  It's a queer sort of mirroring.

I was also struck by the terms in which Ed characterised his “dark English nationalism”.  A “mirror image of the worst aspects of Scottish nationalism”, the conception of Englishness which Miliband denigrates is envisaged as “anti-Scottish, hostile to outsiders, England somehow cut off from the rest of Britain, cut off from the outside world, fearful what is beyond our borders. Convinced that our best days behind us”. Ed circumlocutes around the real-world points of reference he intends to refer to, but it seems fairly obvious to me that the mordant, melancholy defensiveness he describes refers not to England, but to the primarily English spokesmen and women of contemporary mordant, melancholy and defensive Britain and Britishness.  Think about it.  England’s better days behind it? England doesn’t want all these immigrants? When was the last time you heard anyone say either of these things?

If, by contrast, you replace English with British, the sentences start sounding much more familiar.  And here’s the rub.  If you listen to contemporary political debate in these islands, you’ll soon find that the narrow nationalism, xenophobia, anti-European sentiments and melancholy for lost imperial mission which Miliband alludes to are primarily articulated in terms of Britishness, rather than Englishness.  As Michael Gardiner has so neatly put it, at present, we have a British politics in England as opposed to an English politics in England. That the key voices articulating this sort of British politics are English shouldn’t prompt us to make Miliband’s mistake of attributing to a “dark English nationalism” the vices of a very British nationalism. 

That he makes the mistake is explicable when we remember that it isn’t exactly unusual to see England/Britain conceived as the twin good-and-bad Janus faces of England’s patriotism. While Britishness is seen to be inclusive, civic, porous, available to all pigmentations in the human spectrum, Englishness has often been imagined in ethnic and racial terms, the property of white men and women.  The stuff of racist soccer hooligans and the EDL.  For those who see English nationalism as incorrigibly reactionary, Britishness offers the inclusive alternative national story. Madeleine Bunting's piece after the 2011 Holyrood election typifies this sort of anxiety: "If Scotland goes, all we'll have left is the Englishness we so despise".

In Scotland, by way of contrast, we have a nationalist discourse in which Scottish identity uncomfortably incorporates both of these elements, the racialising and the non-racialising.  There is evidence, for instance, that Scottishness is currently perceived as an civic identity available to our ethnic minorities in a way that Englishness is not. And a grand thing that is too. However, that isn’t the whole story, and there are certainly Scottish nationalists out there who would reject this understanding, couching their nationalism in suspect theories of race, envisaging their wan-faced compatriots as the privileged bearers of Scottishness.  A given Scottish nationalist may be a racist, or strongly opposed to racism, and must struggle between themselves to promote their understanding of their nationality, civic or ethnic, racialising or non-racialising. While Scots must contend with the Janus faces of their nationalism, for many folk in England thinking about Englishness and Britishness, Jekyll and Hyde are simply seen as two different men, the one brutish and unattractive, the other fond, open and fair-minded.  England all vice, Britain all uprightness.  Neither proposition seems to me remotely convincing. 

While Miliband’s distinction between a good and bad Englishness shows some awareness of this sort of analysis of nationalisms, his speech effects an altogether different sleight of hand, devolving British vices onto English nationalism, while glossing over the extent to which lapsed imperial and Britannic stories are palpably much more strongly implicated in contemporary Britain’s xenophobic, anti-European and nostalgic politics.  The exclusions demanded by our political discourses on immigration, for example, are conducted in British – not English – terms.  While the Janus-faced logic of nationalism is thus recognised in Englishness, it is conspicuously absent in Ed’s candyfloss account of Britishness, all inclusion, emancipation and generosity.  Humbug and moonshine.   

Devolution & the UK's accelerating "social disunion"

“The social union” has become a sufficient commonplace in Scottish political discourse that increasingly little effort is expended in defining it. And an important concept it is too, inclusively capturing a range of stances, signalling the absence of anti-English animus in the SNP’s arguments for constitutional change, the repudiation of ethnic nationalism and a more relaxed posture towards Britain and Britishness than has hitherto obtained. Emphasising instead continuing ties and connections, it symbolises the rejection of what we might think of as a spherical imagery of state sovereignty, an isolated and insular affair, upon which nothing “external” enjoys any purchase. To move from Union to independence is not, on this theory, the foregoing of ties with England, Wales and North Ireland, but reconstituting those ties on a different, (and nationalists contend) more politically convivial basis. The concern is to “recast the relationship” with what remains of the United Kingdom, not to cast aside the relationship altogether.

A rummage back through the archives begins to explain the contemporary prevalence of the idea. The idea of “social union” has been bandied about by various nationalists for more than twenty years. As early as 1998 in the Scotsman, you can find Alex Salmond – as plain old SNP leader – saying….

“I think that people are looking for a continuation of the social union between English and Scotland after political union ends but the question will be whether the monarchy is the best vehicle for that”.

In the same year, Margo MacDonald wrote in the same organ of “the building of a new, equal political partnership with England, and the continuation and strengthening of the social union among the peoples of the British Isles”.   Mitchell, Bennie and Johns have recently suggested that the concept denotes, “the family, personal and professional links within the United Kingdom that would remain unaffected by constitutional independence” (The Scottish National Party: Transition to Power 2012, 121), but arguably, some versions encompass broader ideas of connectedness than those listed.

Different articulations stress different contents of this “social” – or occasionally “cultural union” (cf Pete Wishart), from the more formal and institutional to the personal and familial. Some versions emphasise future diplomatic solidarity and cooperation after independence - “Scotland and England will remain the best of friends and neighbours”. Others address more quotidian concerns about free movement of persons across future boundaries and borders. Will we ever see our cherished southern grannies or beloved cousins from Ashby-de-la-Zouche again? Will a Yorkshireman be able to cross the Tweed to enjoy a scone, or will independence force him to find a high tea in his own riding? Overlarding these are concerns in the professional domain. Will future, hypothetical Scots be able freely to take up jobs in Manchester or Bristol, if offered, after independence?

SNP arguments have – quite rightly – aimed to reassure and clearly set out an account of independence, rooted in recent European traditions of free movement of peoples, and shared access to cultural goods. Salmond again, in the April 13th 2007 edition of the Times, said...

“People in Scotland would be able to visit their granny in Grimsby in the same way as they currently visit their cousin in Cork”.

In a lecture at the London School of Economics in 1999, proposing a “council of the isles”, the Salmond gave this now characteristic account of the idea, incorporating both the more formal and informal connections which he envisaged would be preserved after independence:

“We have operated a social union for more than 300 years of political union and that social union will not change simply because our political structures change. We will still visit each other, inter-marry, move from one country to another for work and we will still buy and sell each other’s goods and watch each other’s television. We will still be the closest of neighbours and, I really hope, the best of friends”.

Even earlier, we can find a letter in the Herald from Margo MacDonald in 1992, lightly adjusting Lampedusa, to argue

“... if the social union of the UK was to be maintained in a good spirit the governmental institutions must change”.

But what conception of the social and the political?

The main conceptual work done by the idea of a social union is to distinguish the social from the political. You may abandon Westminster, and govern yourself, but all the other ties will remain – more or less – intact. But can that trick be so neatly transacted? Does the central distinction which gives the idea its force make any sort of sense? What conception of the social and the political does it appeal to?

One version might imagine some domain conceived of as "the social" existing inertly beneath the official institutional assemblages of our politics. Appealing to a cynical common sense that the political institutions of our life are an elsewhere, their animating concerns divorced from the ordinary experience of the average punter. You may be governed by a distant Westminster, or a less distant Holyrood, but either way, probably won’t be able to see the difference. On this account, the personal is determinedly not political, and the "social union" offers reassurance that voters' private domains will remain undisturbed by political and constitutional changes.

Where this conceptualisation arguably starts to break down, however, is that it runs directly counter to most mainstream Scottish nationalist conceptions of Scotland as a "distinct society", which distinctiveness it owes in great part to its distinctive politics, and after devolution in 1999, to its distinctive political spaces and institutions. On this account, politics are not distinct from the social, but are literally constitutive of a distinct social space.  The comprehensive line the "social union" hopes to draw between the social and the political  hopelessly collapses. This conceptual slipperiness is handily demonstrated by mentioning just a few examples from the contemporary independence debate. If the idea of "social union" derives much of its strength from distinguishing between what it suggests are retainable and sustainable “social” and discardable “political” aspects of Union, how can shared political institutions - currency, monarchy, what have you - plausibly represent the social union's full expression?

As a matter of practical politics, signalling a range of important ideals and commitments to an open-minded and porous Scottish nationalism, I'm happy to concede that the idea of a "social union" has its uses. Analytically, however, the central distinction it suggests between the social and the political is confused and confusing. Just as nationalists' accounts of a distinct Scottish society conceive of that society being substantially generated and sustained through its shared experience of politics and political institutions, so too, it seems obvious that shared UK institutions - parliament, PMs, television programmes, things discussed in them - in great part generate the ties which make being part of the UK state meaningful. These cannot be jettisoned and sustained simultaneously. Independence for Scotland will not mean an end to sociability across our jotted borders, but it will certainly mean that the available ways of being sociable will fundamentally alter.

Devolution: a social failure within the Union?

Watching BBC Question Time and the like, politically obsessive Scots tend to be well versed in UK national controversies, know the prominent faces, the vocabulary and key discourses. That is not to say your average anorakical Scot truly understands the politics of England – I am persistently befuddled by it myself, despite living here for the past two and a bit years – but politics in the UK is a matter of passionate concern for Scots, whether or not the policies which matter most to them are mostly decided in Edinburgh.

You can peep curiously across the Irish Sea and watch Vincent Browne tormenting Irish politicians, yet I’m always struck by the extent to which participants bandy concepts about that are clearly political commonplaces to them – but which sound a strange note in an ear tuned to Scottish and British politics. That doesn't mean I can't visit Ireland when I fancy - or woo, wed or enjoy friendly discourse in Dublin - but it does mean, of necessity, that when a politically obsessed Irishman and a political obsessed Scotsman wish to discuss their respective politics, a good deal of background reading will be required of both parties.  Not so an Englishman and a Welshman and a Scotsman taking in the party leader debates during the last election, or howling denunciation at some egregious prat on BBC Question time. When you cease sharing matters of concern – and shared political institutions, political arguments and structures are one way of constructing our shared sociability in these islands - the changes are fundamental.

Many Unionists talk of independence as categorical separation, and by implication, an unprecedented and threatening cleavage. The interesting thing is, we needn’t vex our imaginations, or project ourselves into the imagined future, to guess what things might be like after Scottish independence.  Devolution furnishes its own compelling examples of political fragmentation. Scottish political debate is given mostly to emphasise the ignorance which now characterises the UK metropolitan media’s engagements with Scottish politics. Just today, the Guardian’s Martin Kettle writes about “Devolution and the separation of the English mind”, and “Britain’s increasingly centrifugal politics”, which “means that the English are remarkably ill-equipped to understand or engage with changes in Scotland and Wales that are driving the future of the Union”.

Kettle’s is just one in a recent series of commentary pieces in the London press on this theme. In the Telegraph, Fraser Nelson has recently described a “tricolour Britain” – yellow, red, blue, north to south – on British political fragmentation, and the puzzlement in the metripol about its whys and wherefores.  But how many Scots – even Scots particularly interested in politics – seriously engage with the distinct political spaces and discourses and matters of concern in Northern Ireland, or in Wales either?

A scant few I’d say. The interest and significance of this is that this growing mutual cluelessness within the Union has coincided with the obliteration of many of the old barriers to the communication of political knowledge which obtained until quite recently. The London-based media has seen an explosion in eminently accessible sources, with which to allay their ignorance about devolved politics, if there was a will for it. While the average soul living in England would in all probability have struggled to find a local hard copy of the Herald or Scotsman or Sunday Post in the past, today we have a proliferation of sources of information online, replayable, rewatchable, scornful of jurisdictional boundaries. The potential for the England-based observer to access, imbibe and comprehend public discourse in Scotland has – arguably – never been better served.

Obviously, this knowledge is limited only to the more formal and institution sites of politics which are increasingly captured and broadcast unedited online and what the press write about, but what there is isn’t to be sniffed at. There are precious few practical impediments for the political observer based in England, not to accrue a decent understanding of the dynamics of politics in devolved settings. The irony being that while technology, online publication of text and transmission of video having given anybody with a laptop and an internet connection practical freedom to find out about Scottish politics, this theoretical liberty has coincided with London-based hacks’ great alienation from devolved politics.

Why might this be so? How can it be accounted for? In Michael Ignatieff’s recent interview on Newsnicht, the former leader of the Canadian Liberal party observed that “everybody’s saying nothing will change” in the independence referendum, but with reference to Quebec, diagnosed...

“The problem here is that we don’t have anything to say to each other any more. There’s a contract of mutual indifference which is very striking for someone of my generation ... Now effectively – effectively – we’re almost two separate countries. And that I think has produced this strange reality – we survived the referendum, but it did us damage.”

Ignatieff's observation suggests, to my mind convincingly, that political fragmentation shouldn't be thought of as an incidental development, nor entailed as of necessity by the creation of distinct political spaces in Edinburgh and in London, but is driven fundamentally by the fragmentation in political concerns, mutual indifference, the loss of common discourses and institutions, which generated and sustained a sense of common interest.

It is pleasingly ironic, in what is becoming a long list of ironies attaching to the referendum campaign, that the "indifference" generated by devolution and its creation of distinct political sociabilities in these islands has at once become one of the substantial arguments for a readily envisagable Scottish independence, and simultaneously, we find nationalists, promoting a conception of the social which aims to marginalise the social significance of a shared politics.  If devolution demonstrates anything, its is that shared politics aren’t distinct from the social, but an important way of being social, one way that our social ties are constituted. When those ties fray - or break - we quickly find ourselves contracted into two distinct, parallel political conversations. 

While the idea of "social union" is one intended to reassure, it arguable does so in a queer and unexpected way.  Devolution has already fractured the British state, and owing to that state's determined refusal to countenance the transformation of its centre - has already created the distinct political conversations - and for the moment, a unilateral rather than mutual indifference in England towards the devolved periphery. Independence won't inaugurate a new political sociability, but simply build on the current political and social drift, perceptible across these islands  Without the admixture of a revitalised account of the British state, independence merely completes the logic which devolution - unrooted in a broader, stabilising and federalising political project - set in motion.

Cadaver politics on tuition fees...

"I believe these reforms are fair, progressive - and above all necessary - in our national interest..." Every Tory coalition spell seems to employ some combination of this three-part incantation. I want to focus on the idea of necessity, the vision of (un)politics implied and the metropolitan Left's collective devolution blindness. Last week, the Scottish government published Mike Russell's Green Paper, Building a Smarter Future: Towards a Sustainable Scottish Solution for the Future of Higher Education, 

Tory figures - and pressmen who've accepted their axioms - gave a rather paradoxical impression in their discussion of these issues last week. Isn't this awfully unfair on English students? Aren't southerly youngsters getting a raw deal? Their answer is invariably yes, and as I noted in a recent piece paraphrasing my old friend Robespierre, leads to the rejoinder that if education spending is higher, all spending must be inequitably too high. This seems curious, since it implies that Tory figures like Peter Bone MP believe that if the Liberal-Tories could afford it, all students across the United Kingdom would benefit from free higher education. We can't afford it, hence, if you can afford it, you must be receiving an "unfairly" high distribution of public spending. On one level, this is simply wrong - and it should be conceded that such funding disparities would be perfectly possible if there was absolute equality in public spending. However, its important to ask why is the argument wrong in the way it is? Why this logic and this objection and not others?

I'd suggest that the pervasive tendency to cite necessity as a coalition justification strategy is crucial here. We are lead to believe that fees were introduced in England, simply reflecting "funding realities". It is contended that the Coalition's conclusion was reached on the basis of fundamentally depoliticised choices made in a benign technocratic-managerial vein.  That is not to say that one couldn't make a consciously politicised account of why would-be graduates should stump up for education, justified in contradistinction to other political beliefs and commitments. However, it is crucial to recognise that the Westminster government isn't making this case. Devolution and in particular, the choices of Scottish devolved institutions on higher education funding - fundamentally assails this twin account of tuition fees as de-politicised necessities. That, in part, goes some way to explain why the Green Paper provoked such hysteria - it threatens to make visible the fundamental falsity of the Westminster coalition's position, which is a choice among choices - and undoubtedly "political" in the sense that the policy choices are governed by particular ideological commitments (however minimally conscious individuals and parties may be about their selective philosophies). It is for this reason that a critique of our politics based on the idea that it is post-ideological is basically unhelpful - since it obfuscates the extent to which  the necessities of mainstream "common sense" are furnished or absent, based on one's theoretical orientations. What is surprising, given devolution's powerful potential to subvert coalition rhetoric, is the continuing absence of any devolved consciousness on the British left, which still seems to dream of Britain as a unitary state. This theme was taken up somewhat by Gerry Hassan has a piece on "Ed Miliband and the Limits of the New Socialism". 

It strikes me as interesting that so little of this rumination and critique on the Left refers - even obliquely - to Britain's altered State and devolution in Norn Iron, wurselves and our Welsh friends. I say this not in the spirit of a sour appurtenance but to note how curious it is at the level of the political imagination and of theory. I've encountered countless metropolitan articles talking about "the" NHS and so on - all of which obfuscate differences (potential and actualised) within the UK as it stands. Why do these not interest the London-minded left who seem to occupy a phantasm unitary UK which (if it ever existed in an unproblematic form) ceased to make sense long ago? Generally, folk have responded to these and similar questions by invoking solidarity across borders and an interest in the lot of your fellow man. However, if we accepted this logic, the invisibility of Britain's collapsed centre in their arguments should simply be understood as being elided by simplification. Devolved consciousness is present, but bracketed to produce direct prose and clear arguments. I'd argue that there's much more to it than this - and the striking absences here are more than simply incidental but fundamentally reflect a limited vision of British politics. Whether on BBC Question Time, in parliament, or in the pages of the metropolitan press - this is guilty cadaver politics and the lurching, stumbling steps of a zombified Britannia.

BBC Question Time & Britain unquiet grave

 

Readers' editor Chris Elliot had a piece in the Guardian this week on Getting to grips with devolution. It reads in part, quoting an irate readership:

"The assumption that "government" initiatives apply to every country in the UK, no matter what the issue, is a source of endless frustration and resentment for readers, particularly those who live in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.

Another reader writes: "Your writers and editors have not come to terms with devolution to Wales and Scotland and the restoration of Stormont." Instead of journalists making a gradual adjustment, he adds, "there is a steady deterioration." For example, he said, recent stories about Simon Schama advising schools on narrative history, children in primary schools not achieving appropriate progress in maths and English, and GPs holding budgets all seem to apply only to England – yet nowhere in the stories is this stated.

This omission, he says, amounts to misinformation, and as such is not only potentially damaging to democracy but also to the reputation of the newspaper.

He says: "If you … report a health, education or social services story from anywhere other than England, the relevant minister is styled 'the Welsh health minister' etc. Perhaps it would concentrate the minds of your journalists if Westminster ministers were routinely styled 'the English education minister'."

Although I'm not the author of any of these remonstrating epistles, I certainly enter into their spirit. This is clearly not an issue for the Guardian alone, but fundamentally about how British politics is imagined, how its polyphonies are or are not represented and understood, what viewpoints and privileged, emphasised, lent dignity or undermined. A few palacating, exculpating remarks tend to be made about the complexities of devolution, suggesting that we'll get accurate reporting tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, once all of the bemusing details have coagulated into common sense in the media's collective brain. Yet as one reader suggests, observing how broadcasters comport themselves more than a decade on from the passage of the Scotland Act, there seems to be little evidence of a slow acquisition of devolution competence and devolution confidence. Indeed we'd be hoodwinking ourselves if we imagined this is simply a matter of technical expertise and slow-learning journalistic shallowpates.

This piece proves surprisingly apt in the context of last night's BBC Question Time, conducted from Glasgow. Devolution may have said the last rites over the unitary British state, but the Corporation seem intent on damning the detail, damning the difference, and using vehicles such as Question Time to deny the death rattle and insist on the continuing vitality of a United Kingdom which has been consigned to its institutional and political grave. In her piece on the programme this morning, Joan McAlpine styled this "engineered cohesion". Since it is almost Halloween weekend, when rag-torn spectres walk and graves are unquiet - I prefer a much more ghoulish comparison. It is necromancy, cadaver broadcasting, which attempts to reanimate the spent life-force of a political past which is no longer relevant or interesting. While Dimbleby may have directed the sorcery, as ever he is ably assisted by the chanting band of haughty old jingoists, opinionated bigots and Westminster chauvinists who dominate the metropolitan broadcasting spaces and enjoy privileged access to British telly and press.

The Scottish blogosphere has been very much on form in its discussion of what transpired in the studio. James Kelly points out that after Dimbleby had clamped down on Nicola Sturgeon's brief reference to fiscal autonomy in the context of the Westminster cuts agenda with the phrase - "We may be in Glasgow, but Question Time goes out to the whole United Kingdom" - the panel had already spent...

" ... the first fifteen minutes of tonight's edition of Question Time - broadcast from Glasgow, remember - taken up with a discussion about a remark made by the Mayor of London, in his capacity as Mayor of London. And yet Dimbleby still couldn't see the irony of chiding Sturgeon for spending just a few seconds talking about a 'non-national' issue later in the programme. "

This is so obviously rich, so obviously ridiculously hypocritical that we ought to pause, just a moment to ask the interesting, patience-trying question - just how does the distinction make sense to Dimbleby and his fellows? How can he possibly fail to notice the disparity? No nationalist himself, Alex Massie teases out the premise - but sees the issue more in terms of the parochialism of the metropolitan "centre" towards the rest of the country per se. While Scotland may feel particularly stung by this attitude, Massie contends that the issue can and ought to be framed in far wider terms:

"This is not a Scotland vs England affair; rather it reflects a presumption that while it is taken for granted that viewers in the rest of Britain should be interested in discussions about tube strikes in London or the next round of Boris vs Ken, matters of more local interest in Glasgow or Manchester or Cardiff cannot be expected to interest the wider audience."

For me, Gerry Hassan puts it best and suggests the most effective exorcism.

"Then there is the issue of the nature of the UK and Scotland’s voice. I don’t think it is possible for the UK media, political class and elite opinion to develop a nuanced, subtle, informed understanding of the UK; it just isn’t going to happen; they believe that their bunker-like Westminster mentality is a rich, pluralist, cosmopolitan view of the world, unsullied by the unreconstructed lumpenproletariat who live out in the sticks.

Change can only come from without. That requires taking action, and in Scotland’s case it means creating our own media spaces to develop our national conversations and debate. Maybe the slow hollowing out of the mainstream will make enough of us realise that we have to show initiative, take some power and create our own alternatives."