The National Indifference

Let me take you on a journey to a foreign land, though it shares a Queen and a prime minister. It is not far from home, if you come from England, and offers none of the immediate telltales of international travel, no ostentatious signs of difference. This land has red Royal Mail vans and Ordnance Survey maps. BBC Radio 2 brings Terry Wogan. Cars measure their speed in miles per hour and beer comes in pints.

But this land - which is Scotland - is becoming foreign to England. The three centuries-old union still stands strong in its institutions, but the joint cultural understanding that made the UK something more than a political arrangement is falling away. Two nations now talk of different things, discuss different people, and fear different threats.

Some of this pulling apart is political, and has to do with devolution. To talk politics in Scotland is for the ignorant English visitor to enter a conversation as remote as the Australian election - half-familiar, but distant. The common points of reference - people, parties, characters - that fuel English understanding of Westminster are absent.

The political day in England starts with Radio 4's Today program. In Scotland, it begins on GMS, or Good Morning Scotland. England has PMQs; Scotland FMQs, with four main party leaders, two of them women.

In Scotland, the replacement of Trident is a live issue. In England it passed without any proper debate. Policies on health and education are moving apart rapidly. In Scotland, Thatcherism and the poll tax are still something to shudder at. In England, they are largely part of history.

In Avie more this weekend, attending the conference of the governing SNP - perhaps the only journalist who traveled from London to do so - I heard much discussion of November 14.

What was it, I asked? It turned out to be the day that Scotland's new nationalist administration gives its first budget. This moment matters: but who in England, even among those who follow politics, knows of it? Who could even recognize John Swinney, Scotland's finance secretary? Or Wendy Alexander, Labor's leader? Or Annabel Goldie, from the Conservatives?

So much is different. It is ignorance that is making the difference - and it is an ignorance which is more English than Scottish.

It is obvious in the media, where newspapers, though not the Guardian, differ on each side of the border. Scottish stories are stripped out of London editions. Every BBC news report explaining that a policy only applies in England and Wales but neglecting to add what fills its place in Scotland adds to the incomprehension. The texture of Scottish life is reduced in the English mind to cliches of Highland romance or Glasgow poverty.

This is not really the same as a political separation, despite David Cameron's bid to join the bandwagon calling for English votes for English laws. It is more a growing separation of the mind. Eight years after devolution, England is coming to assume that Scotland is going its own way. People are closing the door on what seems to them a foreign country, ignorant of its geography and its politics.

There are still great points of connection - of family, commerce and politics. Scottish accents are everywhere in England. It is hardly right to talk of divorce, while the prime minister and chancellor represent constituencies in Fife and Edinburgh.

Slowly, like one ship steaming from port on a bearing only marginally different from its sister ship, England is losing sight of Scotland. The political union, convenient to both sides, may survive. The break is cultural: two nations, united by incomprehension.