The referendum on Scottish independence is now only two months away.  Opinion polls have never shown a majority of the Scottish population ready to vote for secession.  And most experience around the world of referenda on constitutional issues is that as the vote approaches, the electorate moves towards the status quo.

But such a nervous reversion to the familiar has not happened in Scotland.  If anything, support for independence has stabilised at around  40%.  The outcome will therefore depend on how reliably expressions of intention are translated into votes on the day.  There is a possibility, although not a very strong one, of a ‘yes” outcome for which no one either in London or in Scotland is really prepared. 

          Although that is just an outside chance, it is now probable that  the vote for independence will be sufficiently large to keep the issue  alive. John Curtice, the Scots based doyen of pollsters, offers an important  insight into why matters stand as they are.  The key to the preference of voters, he explains, is not whether they feel a strong sense of Scottish identity – the overwhelming majority of Scots do.  The question is whether they also feel a strong sense of British identity.

In that lies the source of the failure of the ‘no’ campaign to make headway.  Its tone has been predominantly negative.  Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has warned his countrymen to ponder the future of their pensions. The Governor of the Bank of England and the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury have been called on to express worries about currency and banking.  George Robertson, a former Secretary of State for Defence and Secretary General of NATO, told the country that Scottish independence would be ‘cataclysmic’ for the security of the west.

But self-assertion is a common reaction to bullying, especially among Scots. The underdog resisting oppression with aggression, usually pointlessly, is a familiar theme of Scots historical myth, from William Wallace through Rob Roy and Alan Breck to Jimmy Reid and Upper Clyde Shipbuilders. So the effect of this scaremongering is only to reinforce Scottish identity while undermining rather than reinforcing British identity.

         So the failure of the ‘no’ campaign is a failure to state powerfully what it means to be British  Perhaps because the leaders of that campaign have not been sure what they would say.   Political leaders in France, or Russia, or the United States – perhaps even Spain – would not encounter a similar problem in asserting national identity.  But Britishness  has historically been bound up with Empire and maritime dominance – both activities to which Scotland made disproportionate contribution. But these things have gone and it is hard to define what the multicultural United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland represents.

        The usual mechanism for managing multiple identities is federation.  But this is not an answer here, since England  counts more than 80% of the UK population and there is no real interest in establishing an English parliament. Yet without one there is no answer to the ‘West Lothian question’ – why can Scots MPs vote on issues in  England, while English MPs cannot vote on the same issues in Scotland because the relevant functions have been devolved. 

      This problem is aggravated by the degree to which the centre of political gravity in Scotland now differs from that of the rest of the UK. In the last two decades, the Conservative Party has not succeeded in electing more than one Member of Parliament from Scotland, and a likely outcome of the 2015 Westminster election is a Labour government which would lose its majority if Scotland became independent.  David Cameron, and even more Margaret Thatcher before him, have appeared as alien figures in Scotland; their very accents seem to emphasise they come from a different place.

It remains overwhelmingly likely that Scotland will vote in September to remain part of the union.  But it is also more likely that the United Kingdom is sleepwalking towards disintegration – not this time, but next.  British political leaders were wrong to believe that they would bind the UK together through devolution, and they are probably again wrong to believe now that giving more power to the Scottish government will now have that effect.  These moves only strengthen the sense of a distinct Scottish identity.  They need instead to make being British something to be proud of.