Middle England bites back

Yet scratch this veneer of gentility and contentment, and it soon becomes apparent that, deep within its Barbour-wearing, Mercedes-driving heart, the most complete Regency town in England is angry, and angry about Scotland.

It's a very English anger, rooted in a sense of injustice and the feeling that not everyone is being treated equally: Scotland has its own parliament, Wales has its devolved assembly, but what does England get? Well, it gets the bill for the cost of it all, according to some of those out dodging the autumn showers scudding in off the Cotswold hills yesterday afternoon.

"Repair Hadrian's Wall, that's what I say - it was built in the first place for a reason," Tony Drew, 58, a businessman from Cheltenham, said.

He says his vitriol is about policy, not prejudice, singling out Scotland's political and financial position in the United Kingdom. "If they want to give their people a larger slice of taxpayers' money, let it be taxpayers' money from their own country," he said, adding: "The Scots are involved in the government of the UK; they make their own rules to suit themselves. That's a slap in the face to English people who sit back and let it happen for the sake of political correctness."

Mr Drew is far from alone. Indeed, some pollsters and analysts believe he is expressing resentments that are both widespread and growing in England - signs of a national reawakening that could test the United Kingdom's constitutional framework.

An ICM poll published at the weekend found that, amid an upturn in Scottish support for independence, our southern neighbours are even more enthusiastic than us about Scotland leaving the Union: 59 per cent of English voters favour Scottish independence, and 48 per cent want England to declare its own sovereignty, separate from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Andy Nicholson, 37, a mortgage consultant from Bath who was in Cheltenham on business yesterday, is another who believes the home nations should go their own ways. "Everyone should be equal and to do that we need to separate," he said. "The Welsh have their assembly, the Scots have their government and the English are just belittled," he said.

"I pay my tax and I just want the payback that I am justified in getting. I know its selfish, but I don't want the Scots getting all the advantages. If we were separate, then everything would be more fair."

Roger Bailey, 58, an actor from Cheltenham, said differences in public services north and south of the Border were making the Union untenable. "It would be nice if we could all live together in perfect harmony, but the truth of it is that when there's inequality in a system, something has to change," he said. "I think the change in this case will have to be separation."

Dills Bygott-Weebb, 45, a housewife from Worcester, said she was "outraged" that Scotland had been able to spare its own students from up-front tuition fees.

"I have a 20-year-old son at Manchester University and I have to pay for him for his three-year course," she said. "My husband's wages also pay for Scottish students education because their students do not have to pay," she said. "I wish England and Scotland would split. Then maybe our students would have free education too."

A defining feature of English unease over the current constitutional settlement is the demand for equal treatment. A MORI poll in July showed 41 per cent of English people backed an English parliament to match Scotland's. Sunday's ICM poll put that figure at 68 per cent.

Hoping to capitalise on such feelings, the English Constitutional Convention, a campaign that hopes to deliver an English parliament to mirror Holyrood, was launched at Westminster last month. Robin Tillbrook, the chairman of the English Democrats party and one of the convention's leaders, says his countrymen are simply following the sentiments of their Celtic cousins.

"If you'd asked me 15 years ago if I was English or British, I'd have said British. What's happened is that people in England have woken up to the fact that more people in Scotland and Wales don't feel that they are British, and Britishness is nothing unless it's a shared identity: you can't have Britain unless everyone believes in it," he said.

Arthur Aughey, a professor of politics at Ulster University who will next year publish a book about England's national identity, said that devolution to Scotland and Wales in 1999 had led some English people to feel that they had lost control of "their" country, Britain.

"Post-99, what's observable is a lot of the old arguments are reversed, and English commentators start to express the anxieties that the Scots, Irish and Welsh always felt about their affairs being controlled by someone else," Professor Aughey said. "So, you hear the anxiety that England has been silenced, its interests marginalised by a Scottish mafia engaged in an establishment conspiracy against England."

The Labour-dominated Scottish affairs committee of MPs warned in June that English unease could undermine the party's constitutional reforms; and just last week, Charles Clarke, the former home secretary, said the current settlement could become "unstable" unless England was given more recognition.

None of the mainstream UK parties say they are willing to go as far as backing an English parliament.

But Margaret Cleetham , 74, a retired nurse from Cheltenham, who is unhappy about both the West Lothian Question and free personal care for Scottish pensioners, is clear something has to change. "If this inequality could be stopped, then we wouldn't need to be a split country," she said. "But if it continues, we will no longer be classed as British."

Isabel Turner-Cross, 26, a student from Cheltenham, said: "It's acceptable for the Scottish and the Welsh to be patriotic, but when the English try to be, it's seen as racism. I think if Scotland and England were finally separated it would eradicate this problem."

BACKING FOR INDEPENDENCE ON A HIGH

SUPPORT for independence in Scotland is now running at more than 50 per cent, according to a ground-breaking Scotsman poll.

The Scotsman ICM poll last month found 51 per cent in favour of independence with just 36 per cent against and 10 per cent saying they did not know.

This was not the first time support for independence has topped 50 per cent, but it was the first time since devolution that ICM had recorded a majority of Scots in favour of breaking up the UK.

The last ICM poll to show an above 50 per cent rating for independence was in June 1998, with 56 per cent in favour and 35 per cent against.

The recent shift in favour of independence is challenging Labour's claim from 1999 that devolution would "kill Scottish nationalism stone dead".

For the first years of devolution, support for independence registered anywhere between 35 and 50, giving credence to Labour claims.

But its growth to more than 50 per cent, echoed by last weekend's ICM poll for the Sunday Telegraph which found 52 per cent of Scots in favour of independence - and an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters as well, suggests devolution is actually fuelling Scottish nationalism.

The Sunday Telegraph poll also found that 68 per cent of English voters want their own parliament, which suggests that discontent over the imbalance and problems with the devolution settlement is spread right across the United Kingdom.

Complete independence for England was backed by 48 per cent in England and 45 per cent in Scotland.

The results of the independence questions in opinion polls have been treated with scepticism by some unionists.

They have argued that different people have different views of what constitutes independence and the results would be different if voters were asked if they wanted more powers for their parliament first, and then asked if they wanted to be independent.

But, whatever the arguments, the polls do appear to show a definite shift towards independence in Scotland over the past year.