Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): Peter Preston's "Malaga to Manchester" in Tuesday's Guardian contained the usual parody of analysis and a predictable panoply of anglocentric mismeasurement of our constitutional log-jam. It's only in this sort of cultural environment that Lord Goldsmith can come up with such Dead Parrot Policy as the Pythonesque pledge to the Queen as a fillip to citizenship (sic).
"Take a nation increasingly obsessed with maintaining its own identity as powerful provinces that want to be nations themselves push for ever greater autonomy" he writes. The idea that Scotland, Ireland or Wales are "provinces" that "want to be nations" is such a historically inaccurate and politically useless analysis of the situation as to be both breathtaking and revelatory. It represents the very problem of anglo-imperial narcisissm that has driven the post-British electorate into the dynamism of the movements for self-determinaton, be they in Edinburgh, Barcelona or elsewhere across Europe.
The only group "increasingly obsessed" with identity are a small coterie of career politicians in and around Downing Street. Last year it was flagpoles, this year it's pledges to the Monarch. But Preston's analysis is not just disingenuous - it's disturbing. The casual linkage between ETA and the SNP is underhand ("Britain doesn't know where the next explosive pressures will come"), but the presumption of British identity is old hat. Like the title of the piece, the analysis stops 130 miles short. Despite Douglas Alexanders best efforts, "democracy in the right soil can change everything" he concludes. Well, it has - only Preston doesn't seem to have noticed.
As the Chancellor announced cripppling taxes on Scottish exports and the Scottish Government predicated its own Local Income Tax plans on the return of the £400 million owed to Scotland Guardian readers (North and South of the Border) deserve better.
