Matthew d'Ancona: Britishness is an idea whose time has come

The real referendum question should be: do we truly care? In an interview in today’s Times, David Cameron admits that he wakes in the middle of the night sweating over the possibility of defeat. But — to generalise — most Britons outside Scotland seem to have slept pretty soundly during this tumultuous, photo-finish campaign. And therein lies the problem.

On Monday night “up to 5,000” people gathered in Trafalgar Square at a rally organised by the Let’s Stay Together campaign, issuing a heartfelt plea to their fellow countrymen north of the border not to secede. I do not mean for a moment to belittle this display of solidarity, or the round-robin letters organised by (for instance) the valiant historians Tom Holland and Dan Snow. But compare Monday’s event to the march against the Iraq War in February 2003, which attracted between 750,000 and three million people, depending on who was counting.

On August 9 the organisers of a rally in support of Gaza claimed that 150,000 had marched through London for their cause. In July, hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers took to the streets in opposition to government reforms and cuts. Remember the 300,000 who marched in defence of the countryside in 1998? Or — a century ago — the mass demonstrations for and against Irish Home Rule?

I hope passionately that Scotland votes to stay in the United Kingdom tomorrow. Yet I have to acknowledge that, whatever the outcome of tomorrow’s vote, the Union has already lost much of its emotional force, its institutional power as an expression of solidarity. By the Blair era, “Cool Britannia” was just another marketable brand, a design and commercial concept suitable for export.

For the Conservative Party, supposedly the ancestral guardians of the Union, the referendum is just another excuse for the pinstriped vultures to circle over David Cameron. The introspection of the Tory tribe is breathtaking. Even as Great Britain faces constitutional extinction, Andrew Rosindell, MP for Romford, calls on the PM “to decide what the honourable thing is to do” if the Scots vote to leave; while Christopher Chope, the MP for Christ-church, plans to sabotage Cameron’s “Devo Max” proposals should they vote to stay. Why bother with trivia like the survival of the Union when you can get on with the serious business of undermining your party’s leader?

To the outside world, the prospective secession of Scotland looks like the senseless partition of a global power that still has a permanent seat on the UN Security Council, is one of the G8 nations and continues, in Douglas Hurd’s familiar phrase, to “punch above its weight” on the global stage. To the English — to the extent that they care — the whole business is a ludicrous, self-indulgent outburst of provincial pique. For the Scots who crave independence, it is all about a myth of decolonisation.

In this context I am always reminded of Renton’s glorious monologue in Trainspotting: “It’s nae good blamin it oan the English fir colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just w*****s. We are colonised by w*****s. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant healthy society to be colonised by.” Self-loathing and self-assertion are often close partners, as Renton reflects: “What does that make us? The lowest of the low, the scum of the earth. The most wretched servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation. Ah don’t hate the English. They just git oan wis the shite thev got. Ah hate the Scots.”