Last week the Scottish Labour Party held its annual conference in Oban.  Scots-fathered, Fettes-educated Antony Charles Lynton Blair, born in Edinburgh on 6 May 1953, was the main speaker (notwithstanding the Man of Gloom).

His speech, touchingly titled Together not apart, confirmed the fears running through the Labour left that on Thursday 3rd May 2007 they will lose control of the Scottish Parliament, and thus over the fate of the Union ... and thus over the fate of England.

Today, a staggering ICM poll appeared in the Telegraph (interestingly titled “England wants its independence” for most of the morning, before mysteriously switching to “Britain wants UK break up, poll shows”):-

A clear majority of people in both England and Scotland are in favour of full independence for Scotland, an ICM opinion poll for The Sunday Telegraph has found. Independence is backed by 52 per cent of Scots while an astonishing 59 per cent of English voters want Scotland to go it alone.

There is also further evidence of rising English nationalism with support for the establishment of an English parliament hitting an historic high of 68 per cent amongst English voters. Almost half – 48 per cent – also want complete independence for England, divorcing itself from Wales and Northern Ireland as well. Scottish voters also back an English breakaway with 58 per cent supporting an English parliament with similar powers to the Scottish one.

Now, the sap of nationalism that is rising here is of the constitutional kind, not racial.  It is about the ending of governance from Westminster.  Scots and Welsh have traditionally defined themselves against their English neighbour, and for years noisily protested that Westminster was too remote and too London-centric to serve their respective needs.  But until devolution in 1998 it was very hard to get an Englishman to think of himself as other than just British, and of Westminster as other than just his Parliament.  That is changing now in an organic and impressive way, and it threatens not just to deprive the Labour Party of power for a time in Scotland and perhaps permanently in England, but to destroy it root and local branch.

So one would certainly expect that when the Prime Minister came to the dais in Oban last week for his very last speech to the Scottish Conference, he came armed with the most persuasive and powerful arguments for the status quo that man - or political speech writer - can muster.  Here they are, and when you read them think not just of the threat to Labour from constitutional nationalism ... think of a future time when the liberal elite as a whole has to defend its interests against a racial nationalism - against the real thing.

Blair said:-

Before devolution, Scottish separatists always had two arguments for separation.  First, the UK state was unreformable.  Wrong.  Devolution reformed it.  Second: Scotland suffered relative deprivation to England.  Wrong, again.  Scotland has benefited from the most sustained economic growth in its history.

So the two great pillars of argument for Scottish separatism have crumbled.  The case has gone.  Sadly the politics hasn’t.  The same people with the same politics want one last try.  Their argument has departed but their obsession remains.  And it is sad because whereas we should be debating the virtues of this or that policy, issue or personality, we are forced to debate again a cause: the Union or separation.

It’s not us who are insisting on it.  It is a shame we still have to debate whether the UK exists or not.  I think its an old debate, like: does Britain want to be part of Europe or not, a debate about a fashion that has long since lost its relevance or its sense.  In the modern, interdependent world, countries are moving together not apart.

So that’s the best they can do: an appeal to modernity; an appeal to prosperity.  There’s nothing else, unless you count upon some celtic fear of standing alone in the world.

From the perspective of a defence against racial nationalism - essentially, repatriation - these same appeals translate into negative appeals to defeatism (“It’s too late to change now”) and prosperity again (“you will be impoverished”).  There’s nothing else, unless you count upon the mild Englishman’s fear of his own authoritarianism.  (I am assuming by this time that liberal moral opprobrium will have lost its sting.)

Defeatism ... impoverishment.  These are the weapons the liberal foe will wield.  He must be disarmed.