Identity crisis at heart of Scottish referendum

Leaving the Nato summit in Newport in south Wales last week, an English colleague looked out of a taxi window as it made its way through land that once was home to a thriving steelworks.

“You know, I have always considered myself to be British. I have never considered myself as English. For me, that evokes football hooligans, racists and St George’s flags,” he said.

In a week’s time, he and millions of others could – could, one stresses – be faced with an identity crisis that could have the deepest, most troubling consequences.

Too often, the English are a contradiction: mixing reserve and a degree of condescending superiority with a lack of pride in their core identity that can be baffling to observe.

That contradiction has been on stage again. For months, the powers that be in London looked on the Scottish referendum debate with a degree of bemused, detached interest.

Emotional tug

The polls showed that the campaign was serious, but not serious enough to threaten existence of a 300-year-old union: the degree of interest shown reflected the belief that a No result would emerge.

In the last week, however, this has changed, prompting panic. David Cameron travelled to Edinburgh and, on the point of tears, came as close to begging Scots to vote No as a prime minister could do.

Cameron is no fool, whatever else he is. He knows that a majority of Scots will have laughed watching him on evening news bulletins. But his target was not them.

Rather, it was the 4 or 5 per cent who could be swayed by an emotional tug late in the campaign, perhaps one that surprises them by its very existence.

Too often, it has been lacking in the No campaign, which has instead told Scots “to fumble in the greasy till” and cast their vote according to their base interests.

Even if base interests motivate much of voters’ actions, it is rarely a good idea for a politician to give them reason to think that he or she believes them capable of nothing more.

However, it says much that no one has been able to give the great oration in words that would live into the future, declaring why a union that changed the face of the globe should continue to exist.

The Yes side, meanwhile, has fought to the heart, telling Scots that life can be better, fairer under independence – even if the package is utterly free of any of the measures that would bring it about.

Not all of it is rhetoric: the bedroom tax, which penalises council tenants if they are deemed to have too many rooms, is an obscenity, even for Scots who have never passed the threshold of a council house.

Equally, it suits many Scots to believe that they have been endlessly downtrodden by the English: the figures, often, tell a different story. For much of the time, Scotland is the UK's Mr Average.

In fact, it is better off – even with grim Glasgow poverty – than all bar two of the nine regions that make up England, a fact that was acutely expressed by Newcastle City Council leader Nick Forbes.

The UK’s principal difficulty is not that Scotland has been uniquely abused, but rather that the UK has become ludicrously tilted towards London.

Vanished kingdom

Increasingly linked to the world, but increasingly divorced from its own hinterland, London has become a separate world, believing that it can control regions it does not even understand.

If Scots decide to stay, they will get significantly more powers – even if the fine print of the deal would not be agreed for months after the ink has dried on ballot papers.

If the United Kingdom begins its path next week to become yet another vanished kingdom in the mists of history, then relations could become deeply strained.

Cameron pledged on Wednesday to do everything possible to help make an independent Scotland work, but there is no guarantee he would be left in his post by his own people.

If, on the other hand, it survives, then it will have been the closest of shaves, but one that will prompt demands for genuine constitutional reform throughout the UK – not just in Scotland.

However, the atmosphere could be toxic. Hundreds of thousands – perhaps millions – of Scots believe that they are on the threshold of a new dawn. If they lose now, they will forever believe it has been snatched away.