HE was, I thought, only stating the bleeding obvious. But that can be a helluva dangerous thing to do in politics.

Late this spring Elías Bendodo, a very senior Spanish conservative, smashed one of the great taboos of his movement. He admitted that the “country” his fellow partisans and patriots worship might not be quite what they thought it was.

“I believe that, effectively, Spain is a pluri-national state,” he told Madrid’s El Mundo in May.

There must have been a fair few tuts – gasps even – as news of his words reached the headquarters or the Partido Popular or PP, Mr Bendodo’s party. This, after all, was heresy for the Spanish right. Or very close to it.

It has long been politically impossible for populares to admit their state contains more than one nation. Spain, for them, is an indivisible nation-state; one they – when last in office – used the full force of the law to preserve.

READ MORE: The battle for Spain

It was a PP administration which stopped the Catalan independence referendum of 2017. Now out of power – and competing for votes with the far right – they do not want to look soft on secession.

Spain, to use the peculiar lexicon of its constitution, contains “nationalities”: Catalans, Basques or Galicians. But the Spanish state, both in law and in the minds of nationalists, is one “nation”.

Yet there is a question being posed again this summer, a deceptively simple one. What, it asks, is Spain? Is it a pluri-national state as Mr Bendodo appeared to acknowledge? Or is it a single nation state, albeit, confusingly, one with minority cultural and linguistic “nationalities’?

This matters. Why? Because nations are usually internationally regarded as having the right to self-determination. And because Spain has a written constitution: changing that document to declare the state was plurinational would be a huge deal.

So for, say, Catalan independentistes, getting Spain to admit to being multi-national helps push the dial towards their goal of establishing their “right to decide” their own constitutional future.

(This language may sound familiar to Scottish readers. It should: Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP have starting singing more or less the same Catalan as they argue for indyref2.)

The Herald:

For those who believe in a single Spain an acknowledgement of its national diversity can feel like the beginning of the end.

Mr Bendodo’s words, therefore, sparked a proper stushie. Spanish nationalist parties quickly moved to try and outflank – out-staunch – the PP on “national” unity.

Santiago Abascal, the leader of the far-right Vox party, said Mr Bendodo’s words showed his party had “little faith in the nation”, by which, of course, he meant Spain.

The anti-secessionist Ciudadanos said that the PP was on a “terrible path” of concessions to nationalism, by which, needless to say, they did not mean their own.

READ MORE: The non-separatist nationalists

Mr Bendodo’s is effectively number 3 in the PP. His número uno was not at all happy with him. Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo made it clear his underling had made a gaffe.

“Spain is not a pluri-national state. It is not one now and it never will be,” declared Feijóo. There was not, he added, even a debate to be had about this. All that had happened was that opponents had tried to take advantage of an “error”.

But this has not stopped the “what is Spain?” question being asked. Pro-independence or autonomy parties from Catalonia, the Basque country and Galicia this month tried and failed to get Spain’s Congress to support a resolution declaring the state to be pluri-national.

Currently Spain is run by a coalition led by the Socialists and propped by another left party, Podemos. Socialists voted against the proposal, as did the PP and the Spanish nationalist parties. Podemos abstained.

So what does the public think?

Catalonia’s leaders have long referred to their homeland – still often referred to as a “region” of Spain in international press – as a “nation”.

Polls suggest some ambivalence and confusion among the wider population. Around 49% of Spanish citizens consider their state to be pluri-national and 44% say it is not, according to a 2021 poll discussed in digital business news outlet El Confidencial earlier this summer. But the same survey also found 64% of respondents do not think that any of the state’s regions should be defined as a nation.

This, of course, looks contradictory, weird even. But Spain, at least, is sort of having something of a conversation about its nature. I am not sure the same thing can be said about the United Kingdom.

We have pretty much exhausted ourselves trying to answer the Scottish question. We rarely even pose the British one.

What is the UK? Well, the name suggests its a pluri-national state, a nation of nations, a union. The state’s leaders, mass media and civil society routinely and unproblematically talk of “four nations”, in a way that would be impossible in Spain.

But there are also nationalists who believe Britain in an indivisible nation-state and who do not think, for example, a second indyref would be legitimate. Or who suggest voting on the future of the “country” should be for everybody in the UK.

These are completely contradictory visions of the British state. Yet they can co-exist, even in the same party.

Spain’s constitution spells out what it is. In the UK, without a single written founding law, we somehow live with a sort of creative ambiguity about the very nature of our state. That has its pros and its cons.

Mr Bendodo, meanwhile, had to “correct” himself. Spain’s Conservatives were not yet ready for his take.