Those who walk alone We can hardly expect those campaigning for a No-No vote to refrain from panic-mongering

I love it for its extraordinary variety of landscape, for its vibrant patchwork of surviving national cultures and regional differences, for its quite staggering physical beauty; I love it from the glorious coasts of Cornwall to the sad silence of the far north, from that smooth heart of England where the River Cam flows down past King's College Chapel, to the glens of Antrim, where the roadside hedges in summer burst out in a riot of fuchsia pink. I love it for the complex but remarkable history and the great working language we share; I want its peoples to live together in amity and real mutual appreciation, with no talk of forced unity, but no talk, either, of separation and irreconcilable difference.

To that extent, I am a ''unionist'', and pleased to be so; although I think it is for the people here to decide, from age to age, what form their ''union'' should take. Yet this week, Michael Ancram, the Tories' leading spokesman on Scottish Home Rule, made a speech suggesting that Scots like me, who care for the future of these islands as a whole, but still support the Government's present devolution package, are the naive dupes of a malign nationalism which will destroy all that we love.

He is wrong; and here's why. He is wrong, in the first place, because his thinking about nationalism has not progressed beyond that primitive place where we tend to think of our own national identity as essentially benign and virtuous, and other national identities as aggressive and sinister; he has not yet moved into the sunlit upland where we recognise that a successful politics of national identity is not about suppressing one identity and exalting another, but about creating political frameworks within which all our identities can express themselves, within reasonable bounds.

Scotland, of course, has its own share of primitive nationalists, who genuinely believe that people who feel exclusively Scottish are somehow morally superior to those who retain a sense of British identity; and to that extent, we can probably agree with Ancram that every nationalism, including the Scottish one, has its darker side.

But where Ancram's argument collapses into absurdity is in his absolute failure to turn the same critical searchlight on his own nationalism, the unexamined British nationalism of the United Kingdom's governing elite, which is often guilty of exactly the same kind of excess.

To judge by his remarks in Aberdeen on Wednesday, for instance, Ancram has now entered that zone of patriotic hysteria in which he genuinely believes that everyone who defends the idea of ''Britishness'', pure, simple, and centralised, is a hero and a champion of virtue; whereas everyone who prioritises a different identity - Scottish, Welsh, whatever - is in the grip of demonic and divisive forces. It is an attitude widely, if almost unconsciously, shared throughout London's political and journalistic establishment, even among those who fancy themselves broadly in favour of constitutional reform.

Hence, one must suppose, the extraordinary sanctification, in the public prints, of those two hoary old Home-Rule rebels Tam Dalyell and Llew Smith, who would, if they had flouted the manifesto on which they were elected on any other issue (personal taxation, say, or the need to get rid of Trident) have been scorned for the dinosaurs they are; and hence the wave of anti-Scottish hate-imagery currently polluting the pages of the London media, including, astonishingly, the front cover of last week's New Statesman.

Of course, this kind of response to Scotland's limited demand for democratic expression of its national identity within the UK is insulting, inflammatory and deeply unhelpful. But it is also the kind of knee-jerk reaction that can be expected from an establishment that has previously taken its own cultural and national identity absolutely for granted, as an unchallenged norm; and therefore tends to have unthinking and undeveloped attitudes to the whole subject.

Which brings us to the second reason why Michael Ancram is wrong about constitutional change. For despite its constant claims to speak for middle England, the governing class which takes these intransigent attitudes, and to which he belongs, is an elite which - in its emotional attachment to the old structures of the British state, and its almost mystical belief in the powers, prerogatives and virtues of the Westminster Parliament - is increasingly hopelessly out of touch with the views of its own people. It suits opponents of constitutional reform, of course, to portray the current proposals purely as a ''sop to Scottish nationalism'', a matter of the rebellious Scots against the rest; and Scots, too, have a self-absorbed tendency to debate these matters as if we were the only people in these islands who had a problem with the present constitutional settlement.

But as Paddy Ashdown pointed out in a powerful speech in Edinburgh on Thursday night - the only one of the referendum campaign so far to shake the debate out of its mood of ill-tempered Scottish introversion - the increasing sense of disaffection from the present political system, which grew up during 18 years of increasingly centralised and dogmatic Thatcher-Major government, was by no means confined to Scotland.

The fact is that there is now a substantial demand among thinking people all over the UK for a system of government that is less secretive, less class-ridden, more participatory, less centralised, more respectful of diversity; and the Tory idea that that demand for decentralisation and greater democratic accountability will somehow disappear, if the Scots can be frightened into voting No on September 11, shows a dangerous degree of ignorance about the present mood of England, perhaps accounted for by the exceptionally narrow cultural and geographical base, in the south-east of the country, on which the Tory Party at Westminster now rests.

What is true, though, is that if the process of constitutional change in Britain is to remain focused on those common and serious concerns of accountability and democracy, rather than on divisive issues of national prestige and advantage, then it will have to be led in that direction by responsible politicians; and this is the third sense in which Michael Ancram is wrong about Home Rule. For in making his arguments against the devolution package, Ancram adopts the posture of an observer and prophet of doom, who predicts inevitable evils flowing from the proposals; whereas in fact, politicians and leaders of his stature, in every political party, are not mere observers of the situation, but makers and shapers of the atmosphere within which an Edinburgh Parliament will work.

Of course, in these nervy pre-referendum days, we can hardly expect those campaigning for a No-No vote to refrain from using any argument that comes to hand, including the kind of panic-mongering and enemy-imaging indulged in by Amcram on Wednesday. But the recent history of Europe demonstrates with painful clarity that in situations where national identity is an issue, constant prophecies of conflict between nations have a strong tendency to become self-fulfilling, so strongly do they contribute to the atmosphere of mutual distrust and fear in which national attitudes tend to harden.

For every speech made and article written in that fear-mongering vein now, in other words, there will be extra work to do, once the parliament is in place, in countering the effect of those powerful negative images, and in rebuilding a positive civic relationship between the parliament in Edinburgh, and public opinion and institutions elsewhere in Britain and Ireland; and although I have no doubt that most Scottish Tories will bend themselves to that positive task with a will, once the parliament is elected, and their own substantial representation in it well established, it seems ironic that the language being used by their own leaders now will have made their task, as unionists in the Scottish parliament, that much more difficult.

In framing his Home Rule proposals, Donald Dewar has made every effort to ensure that the Edinburgh Parliament will not be a rest-home for Labour hacks or a bridgehead for virulent nationalists, but an assembly that reflects the face of the Scottish people as a whole. And in painting the possible character of that parliament in such a repellent light, the No-No campaigners therefore not only reveal more than they intend about their true opinion of Scotland, they also do infinite damage to the cause of trust and goodwill among the peoples of these islands, without which, when all is said and done, the Union they cherish cannot survive; and without which any larger dream of a new and vibrant common future, for this north-western achipelago of ours, is much less likely ever to be realised.