I spent four years living in Scotland as a student, and my favourite Scottish faux pas was “Bloody English… Oh! Except you, you’re alright.”

Almost as if somehow by becoming known to them I’d ceased to be all the things they had grown up to hate. The more I probed who the “English” were it became clear they are a London set who impose a set of priorities on them they believe to be far removed from the needs of the Scots. Essentially in their view the Tories.

All my Scottish friends are warm, open and generous. As a people they are bright, determined and hard working; with some of the best academic institutions in the world. The problem is the strong Yes voters feel like they have never been allowed to go it alone and both resent the English for this and the sense they are in our shadow, even when they are not.

More than in any other part of the Union this has led to the lines between political outlook, and a desire for independence, becoming blurred. If you look at the evolution of the SNP, it started out as an offshoot of the Conservative and Unionist party in Scotland.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_Conservative_Party#Merger

So, as much as the SNP today would claim to be centre-left, there political outlook is actually centre-right. With a number of their “left” leaning rejections of “right” leaning policies (Poll Tax, etc), having a hint of them being resistance to governance from Westminster.

The culmination of this replacement of the Conservative party in Scotland is that they now only have one Tory MP out of 59. With the Liberal Democrats only having 11 this means that the current coalition only has 20.3% of the MPs in Scotland. So you can see why the Scottish electorate think they don’t identify with the current administration.

So, do they all vote SNP? Well it depends how you look at it. By majority in each constituency there are only 6 SNP MPs, with Labour having 41. So there is a massive Labour majority in Scotland of 69.5%. If you look by PR, which is how the Scottish parliament works, then SNP have 65 of the 129 seats, so about 50.3% of the vote. However, the Tories still get 17% of of the vote, so they are not actually as marginalised as the SNP like to say.

So might they identify better with the other members of the European Union? Scandinavian countries say? The reality is probably not. Scots and the English are more like siblings than either would like to admit. I think we are just caught in those difficult teenage years where until you leave home and go it alone, you don’t realise how much you have in common, and how much you will grow to rely on each other in adulthood. The problem is, how do we move ourselves to a place where we both view ourselves this way? After all there are anti Scot English voters too.

I’m a fan of both countries. I think together we are better. The problem is I just don’t think we can jump to a grown up relationship with the Scots without them having a stab at independence.

The trouble is full independence might be hard to return from. A future global recession might bring them back to the family, but I wonder if we might be better to formalise it. I think we should negotiate the Scots a UK membership repo. The chance to rejoin of their choosing at some point, either after a certain time frame, say 20 years, or an open option.

I think taking the time to realise we are weaker apart is the only thing that will provide the maturity to bring us back together.