This England-Scotland rivalry is no easy matter to pin down

"BRAVE England go down with pride", "England robbed". With headlines like these in defeat, one can only guess what an English triumph in the Rugby World Cup final would have been like. Strangely, First Minister Alex Salmond was sanguine about that possibility. Before Saturday's final, a spokesman said: "Alex is rooting for England. He thinks they deserve to win with the way they have turned things around."

I'm sure one day all Scots will view a game involving England with the genuine warmth that is due a good neighbour. Currently, sympathy for their short-lived experience as underdogs is as good as it's going to get. That's due in part to the insufferable condescension of English TV commentators, and in part to our own insufferable defensiveness - given oxygen last week by ex-Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie on Question Time.

I've spent the last three days in Kelvin's home turf - the south of England - and it does increasingly feel like another land. Not foreign like Germany, but different like the Republic of Ireland. In Eire though, a Scot doesn't expect to be treated as a full citizen. In London, a Scot does - and a Scot is often disappointed.

On arrival, for example, I was cursing London Underground and First Western for installing ticket machines that proclaim "Scottish bank notes not accepted". As a result, the under-staffed ticket office at Euston was invisible behind a long queue of baffled foreign nationals and grumbling Scots - united in their exclusion from "our" capital's automated transport system.

I joined another queue to make a formal complaint and to my surprise the queue of Londoners was completely sympathetic. "I saw that sign. It's disgraceful." "I mean it's not like your notes ain't sterling, is it?" "Your money is legal tender. You should insist on your rights."

To cap it all, helpful customer service staff expressed astonishment that the constant level of complaint by Scottish customers had not yet forced a change of policy at the top. I had experienced an unexpected "Cheltenham" moment - when the Gloucestershire Question Time audience generously, spontaneously and unanimously booed MacKenzie and his anti-Scottish remarks.

Tempting as it was to leave the station fuming, I left with a smile on my face instead. And a realisation. The "no Scottish notes" policy isn't specifically anti-Scottish. It's just pro maximising profit. And anti-accepting the costs of diversity. And these - more than any overt racism - are probably the characteristics of "Britishness" that caused most of us to vote for a Scottish Parliament in the first place.

Later that day, I struggled to manage my temper at a Foreign Office drinks reception as an official spouted a torrent of anti-Scottish invective. "The second you people got your own parliament, your newspapers sacked their Westminster staff. You got what you wanted and thought you didn't need us any more. But suddenly your government wants money for foot-and-mouth compensation, and then it's a different story. Suddenly you remember Westminster exists. But Scots can't just switch the Union off and on when they feel like it. You people have to work at it."

Not much drink had been taken, and this diatribe was delivered as an uncontroversial statement of fact. I tried naming all the Scottish correspondents who unquestionably do still cover Westminster. I tried asking if cash-strapped Scottish papers should have ignored the new parliament on their doorstep or conjured up new staff from thin air.

But in the unyielding eyes of this Sir Humphrey, I'd already completed the transformation from human being to stereotypical moaning Jock - spoiling a simple drinks reception with prickly oversensitivity.

Here was a woman who would unquestionably "vote Kelvin" given half the chance. And yet, minutes later, she was listening to a fairly average speech by a Scottish Foreign Office minister with a wide, gleaming, beatific smile. No wonder it's hard to figure out the English. At Westminster, the hand that feeds these days is invariably Scottish. And no right-thinking English civil servant, think-tank or publicly funded body will bite that hand - however much resentment they feel towards it. But among the "free-thinking" press, it's different.

According to a fellow Scot who sits through a hail of anti-Scottish remarks every morning at his Fleet Street daily, every "extra" voted through by the Scottish Government is added to the imagined subsidy underwritten by the productive south. And in the run-up to the London mayoral election, there have been proposals for an M25-bounded mini-state which would spend its wealth locally and leave the whingeing Jocks, Geordies, Ulstermen and Taffies to argue over their shrunken slices of the UK pie. It's extreme, but is it evidence of widespread anti-Scottishness?

Gordon Brown was riding high among the leader-writing community of the right-wing London press while he was cocky and confident. It was his hesitation and weakness over the fudged election that ended his London honeymoon, not his Scottish origins. The powerful media stables of Associated Newspapers and Rupert Murdoch admire success. And Brown has been the most successful Chancellor for decades. But if he wavers, as Prime Minister, they'll back the next best bet - Scottish, Welsh, English or Californian.

Just as the money men and opinion formers of southern England set aside sentiment to topple Winston Churchill when his hand on the peacetime tiller proved wobbly - just as the men in grey suits came for the quintessentially English Margaret Thatcher - Gordon Brown and the McMafia will be tolerated until they fail to deliver a stable economy.

To that degree, the splutterings of Mr MacKenzie are irrelevant. And the unexpected level-headedness of English punters is the "Brave England" we can all admire.