THE other day I was talking to someone whose retail business depends heavily on tourists. For him the season has started badly. And, with half the world about to go football crazy, he prudently predicts June will be pretty much a write-off too. All will then depend on what's left of July, August and September to bolster his bottom line.

''What's the problem?'' I inquired. ''The strong pound?'' ''Not just the pound,'' he replied. ''We seem to be losing a lot of our English visitors too.'' And when I started probing his worries on that front my acquaintance launched into two putative explanations I had not anticipated. The first pointed to a creeping backlash south of the border against the looming reality of Scottish Home Rule. The second was what he believed was a growing conviction, in the wake of the Balerno killing of 19-year-old Mark Ayton, that people with English accents are no longer welcome

in Scotland.

In other circumstances I would be tempted - like most Scots, I suspect - to dismiss such fears as alarmist scaremongering. I have never shared the complacent image of Scotland as the most friendly country on earth. ''White settler'' antagonism in rural Scotland and the incidence of sectarian and racial abuse in our cities are too engrained in our culture for that. But I had slipped into that complacent mind-set which believes that, while Scotland has always had problems existing next door to a much bigger and more powerful neighbour, we had managed to sublimate most of our darker feelings about England and the English into non-threatening rituals and jokes.

Then, in the wake of that tourism conversation, I read, in last week's Spectator, a report on the Ayton killing by Katie Grant, an English writer (and Conservative activist) who happens to live in Glasgow. ''For many English people living in Scotland,'' she wrote, ''Mark Ayton's murder is the culmination of a rising tide of anti-English sentiment.'' I found Grant's analysis profoundly depressing. My immediate instinct was to dismiss it all as an inflammatory rant.

Grant claims the slogan ''English bastards go home'' is commonly daubed on motorway bridges. I drive around Scotland quite a lot and can't remember the last time I saw those words. And to conclude, as Grant does on the basis of one teenager's tragic death, that ''behind the mask of Scottish middle class respectability there lurks a racist monster'' runs the risk of compounding the very syndrome she seeks to expose.

And yet, away from the incendiary claim and counter-claim, I sense a real issue here that won't go away as Home Rule becomes our day-to-day constitutional reality. Before I sat down to write this column, I chaired a political debate at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall. Representatives of the four main political parties were addressing the annual conference of ADLO, the Association of Direct Labour Organisations.

With the recent revelations that four Scottish councils, led by North Lanarkshire and East Ayrshire, have run up mounting deficits in their DLO operations, the scene was set for a bit of a barney in Lally's Pally. I was conscious that ADLO draws its membership from all over the United Kingdom - it has 253 member authorities - and, as chairman for the session, was keen to encourage delegates from further afield

to participate.

But despite my repeated prompting, all but one of the voices raised were Scots. A woman councillor from Leicester warned Scottish local government minister Calum MacDonald: ''Get rid of us and you get rid of yourselves.'' But every other English and Welsh delegate stayed silent throughout.

When I apologised to one of the organisers for my failure to stir more cross-border response, he said: ''I think most of them felt it wasn't their place to get involved in the debate.'' Now, you can read that two ways. Either they didn't want to get embroiled in the downside of a debate about North Lanarkshire DLO's missing #5m. Or they felt that, with all the talk of what the Scottish Parliament would or wouldn't do to combat council mismanagement, this was a debate in which they had no credible locus.

If it's the latter, that same feeling may be beginning to make itself felt at Westminster. Yesterday, in his Guardian column, Hugo Young poured a large bucket of cold water over Gordon Brown's aspirations to become Prime Minister when Tony Blair finally calls it a day. This was not a return to the simmering tensions between 10 and 11 Downing Street when Paul Routledge published his biography of the Chancellor. Young now sees

Brown and Blair as standing

shoulder to shoulder in defence of fiscal prudence.

No, Hugo Young's argument now is that Gordon Brown can never credibly aspire to be British Prime Minister simply because he is a Scot. ''The de-legitimising of the Scot in British national politics is in danger of happening a lot sooner than anyone imagined,'' he argues. ''One absolute disqualifier from future promotion, at any level of Minister, is going to be Scottishness.''

If Young is even half right, this unintended consequence of Home Rule will come as quite a shock to the vast majority of Scottish MPs who have chosen to go on pursuing their political careers at Westminster. But clearly, when you think it through, the introduction of an asymmetric constitutional settlement in the United Kingdom after next May has real potential to unlock

such thoughts.

I was in Westminster at the beginning of the week. As I crossed the road beside Big Ben and started to walk up Whitehall, I was only too conscious that the first two monoliths on the other side of the road - the Treasury and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office - and the great white stone slab looming a hundred yards ahead on my side of the street - the Ministry of Defence - are all currently controlled by Scots.

If the mood I have traced, in just one week, through my retail acquaintance, the apocalyptic Katie Grant, that silent local government majority in Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, and Hugo Young, is speaking for more than themselves, then the unintended consequences of New Labour's devolution settlement could lead us to places most of us, including many leading politicians, haven't begun to comprehend.