Corner of a Scots heart that is forever England

Although the Prime Minister defines devolution as giving Scotland ''an exciting new role within the United Kingdom'', those most excited by the Scottish Parliament emphasise how different it should be from Westminster. The Scottish media positively encourages the possibility that devolution's driving-force will come from those who (like Winnie Ewing) see it as ''a base-camp on the journey to independence''.

Even Anglophile old Tory unionists like myself must recognise that possibility. I wish New Labour unionists had seen it more clearly before committing themselves to sweeping powers for a Scottish Parliament and uncertainty about Scottish MPs' future in the British one.

Even the most minor prophet should hesitate to predict what Scotland's constitutional structures and political relationship with England will be in 25 years' time.

But Britain is a complex cultural, historical and political experience. And although it's more than Anglo-Scottish partnership - think of Lloyd George's role in British politics and the Irish one in the empire - its most important element is accommodating affinities and differences between Scots and more numerous English.

For half a century this relationship's main problem has been to let Scots express and defend these differences.

They were recognised in 1707 by the ''devolution'' of law and Church and therefore of social service and education. They reasserted themselves as the state increasingly intervened in economic and social life, but were overshadowed by the common exigencies and emergencies of an empire in which the Scots' hearty contribution was disproportionate. The SNP is at its most absurd in trying to dissociate Scotland from a past in which Scots were missionaries as well as mercenaries of an imperialism which did more good than ill in the world.

The differences, which were bound to seem more acute in the aftermath of empire, have since been addressed by devolution, first in administration and then Parliament.

Now it's time to affirm the affinities. Some are obvious: the Cabinet and corridors are even more crowded with Scots than in Tory times. Yet the most important are not at the mercy of a few reshuffles or even the eventual return of a Conservative government.

This will probably reflect, even exploit, an English backlash against alleged constitutional and financial favours for the Celtic fringe, with a weaker Scots component than any twentieth-century government, and in certain parliamentary situations, might be tempted into dangerous deals with the SNP.

Robert Louis Stevenson, Scot of Scots though he was, reflected in the idiom of Victorian times that ''we shall never know we are Englishmen until we have lost India''. We should beware of the danger that a restive and frustrated England might want to assert itself in parting from Scotland.

But just as the differences between Scotland and England have survived nearly three centuries of union, so the affinities will assert themselves - not just when the Scottish Parliament settles down after next year's festival of national rhetoric and symbolism but in the unhappiest event (as it would seem to me and Donald Dewar) of an irresistible momentum developing for nationalism.

some nationalists share this thesis to an extent. In its more lucid moments, the SNP

accepts there are common characteristics among the British nations. It draws parallels with Scandinavian relationships.

And didn't one of its former MPs, Douglas Crawford, assure Herald readers last week that he was an enthusiastic Anglophile; and that, with an independent Scotland, ''England will have lost a surly neighbour and found an interesting friend''? It almost persuades Scots like me, for whom the rise of the SNP combines perplexity with anxiety, and may appeal to English folk baffled by recent ''surliness'' and the ''Braveheart'' cult combining bad manners with bad history.

I wish Douglas well in the SNP Anglophile tendency. But I think even his comfortable words reflect two cardinal errors of nationalism - particularly Scottish nationalism.

The first is that much nationalism, because it challenges the powers that be, deeply underestimates the value of continuity, order, and stability in all human societies except those deformed by totalitarianism. It's especially prone to illusions and grandiose expectations about the virtues of the state as universal benefactor, arbiter, and manager which once characterised socialism but have now been partly shed by New Labour. At this week's General Assembly, some commissioners seemed unclear about the differences between a Scots Parliament and the Kingdom of Heaven.

The second is that all nationalism defines its political and cultural priorities in ways which are essentially limiting rather than liberating. The most extreme current examples are in rival Balkan or Caucasian xenophobias or the failed terrorist attempt to impose one view of what being ''Irish'' means. Yet far more benign nationalisms strain the unity and harmony of sedate countries like Belgium, Canada, or Britain.

Too often nationalism fails to recognise that any ''nation'' only has meaning and value as a free expression of shared experience and common interest. Scottish nationalism's weakness is that it tries to construct a state on selective interpretation of Scottish history. The experience of union and the share in what Victorians called ''the expansion of England'' are as much a part of Scottish history and character as the turbulent centuries of independence.

Where my Anglophilia differs from Douglas Crawford's is that it's not only a liking for some English ways, people, places, and landscapes that reflect our differences, but an appreciation of English influences on things shared. Among them are our common currency and single market, centuries ahead of continental Europe's; our principal language and the English Bible; our Westminster parliamentary tradition; and even many influences on those enclaves of Scottish distinctiveness in law and Church. I may not rush to embrace bishops but my heart lifts when I hear so much of the Book of Common Prayer assert itself in the far more flexible traditions of Presbyterian worship.

Maybe I'm preaching to the converted. Maybe Douglas Crawford is right and we are all Anglophiles now. Maybe we shall all cry, ''Well played, sir'' when England scores the winning goal in the World Cup Final - unless it is against us.

I hae my doots. Meanwhile, when so many good and bad assertions of our Scottishness lie ahead, it seems a good time to assert an unfashionable but inescapable Britishness.