Never a truer word

Patrick Harvie, Green MSP:

A common misconception about the independence debate is that the SNP are the only nationalist party. In fact, Labour, the Liberals, and the Tories are all nationalists, just UK nationalists rather than the Scottish sort. All four parties have an arbitrary view about where the dividing line should be drawn, all four know what the outcome is and look only for evidence which supports their views. My country, right or wrong, whichever country they have in mind.

Actually, that's not completely true, but the first two sentences were very good. National boundaries are hardly arbitrary, there's a logic behind them insofar as there's a logic behind nations; and nationalism doesn't mean "my country right or wrong" anymore than environmentalism means "tree hugging".

The reason that most people are nationalists is to improve their country, so there's an explicit recognition that things could, and should, be better. British nationalists, who demurely refer to themselves as unionists, have had a tendency to campaign negatively at the moment because they are for the Status Quo, trying to hold on to what they have. They have tended to concentrate on what is bad about other nationalisms without any positive vision of their own.

Back in 1999, in a lecture to the Scottish Council Foundation, Charles Kennedy MP, red-faced with schadenfreude or some other hard liquor, chortled in delight at the uncertainty facing England.

There is, according to the old joke, no equivalent in Gaelic to the word mañana - nothing, as the crofter is supposed to have said to the tourist, "expressing quite that degree of urgency". By the same token, there is as far as I am aware no equivalent in Gaelic, or for that matter in English, to the word schadenfreude, a useful German expression meaning to take pleasure in the misfortunes of others. But it is not an emotion exclusive to the Germans.

Do I detect a certain schadenfreude among Scots at the apparent current turmoil among the English over their sense of national identity? If so, it is given extra savour because that crisis of identity is provoked at least in part by the creation of the Parliament in Scotland and the Assembly in Wales. Suddenly it is Scotland which is forging ahead in a grand constitutional experiment, and England which is poring over its national navel and asking: who are we ... and why?

I don't think this is true anymore. I think that it is Britain that is poring over its national navel and asking: who are we ... and why? David Cameron and Gordon Brown have both made pro-Britain, pro-Union speeches over the last few years but I get the sense that the Great British Public is not as British as it once felt, and has been left feeling distinctly underwhelmed.