Little minds

Published on 06/07/2012 00:00

Allan Massie is right to warn that “Little Englanders will hasten the end of the UK” (Perspective, 4 July).

Once or twice a year I travel through England to France, where there are thousands of Little Englanders. Many long-time residents chose to live there because rural life “is just like England in the 1950s” (a fantasy, but usually code for “before large-scale immigration”).

Most are overwhelmingly opposed to Scottish independence, dubbing us foolish, ungrateful and disloyal and – almost without exception – display profound ignorance of the issue. The Anglo-British press, in England proper (we are “spared” the most rabid stuff up here) is the chief culprit.

If I point out that this “oldest political union” has indeed outlived its usefulness (to Scotland anyway), that everything in life and nature must adapt or die, and that the boons of being British are difficult to detect these days when “Broken Britain” tends to come near the bottom of reputable league tables of education, health, housing, pensions and wellbeing in the developed world, attention begins to flag.

Sometimes I throw in a bit of light-hearted history; at the end of the 17th century there was a serious proposal to unite with the Dutch, with whom the Scots had much more in common in terms of trade, education and Reformed religion, rather than with England – an early example of ABEism (“Anyone But England”).

By the time I quote Dominic Lawson, who admires Norway, “a country with fewer than five million population, prospering outwith the eurozone and EU” (although, like Alan Massie, I want Scotland to be in a revived EU) “trading freely and successfully while retaining the freedom to set interest rates and taxes that suit its own people”, I am usually talking to myself.

David Roche

Alder Grove

Scone

If I wrote about the Scots the way Massie did about the English some bright spark north of the Border would call me a racist.

Stuart Eels

Chippenham

Wiltshire