Scotland’s fate is more important than David Cameron’s

‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’ So wrote P.G. Wodehouse, and he wasn’t just talking about nationalists. And right now, that thunderous cloud is me.

What I would like, you see, is for English pundits to stop connecting with the Scottish independence debate merely in terms of what it means for David Cameron. It’s an interesting question the first time, and not long ago my colleague Matthew Parris crafted a must-read column out of the idea in the Times. Otherwise smart and sensible people keep wanting to bang on about nothing else, though, and it makes me want to chew rocks. ‘Will Cameron have to go if he loses Scotland?’ they say, which is the cue for other people to say ‘Yes!’ or ‘No!’ or ‘Who cares?’ but in the bitter manner, this last one, of people who do in fact care enormously.

Stop it. Who cares? They consider the end of a 300-year-old union, and the only thing they can get a grip on — their only emotional handhold — is whether one co-alition prime minister would have to leave his job a year early? Really? This is the best they can do? Five point three million people heading off into the unknown; the birth of a new nation, calamitous or proud; who they will be, what they will think, what they will want; the voluntary departure of the United Kingdom’s largest minority; the rejection of Britishness itself; debates over EU membership; debates over Nato membership; a land border on the English mainland with a competitor nation; the first in a wave, perhaps, of many European secessions; a subsequent rise in English nationalism (which has never yet managed not to be ugly as hell); a looming fight over oil and wind and banks and money and the Army, and their stuff, and where the hell we who are left would keep our bloody ginormous submarines.