THE AULD ENEMY? NOT ANYMORE...

England is a nation coming to terms with itself... and its new place in the world. So isn’t it time we put aside the enmities of the past and wished them well? (And they still didn’t beat us in the Euros!)

IKNEW the instant Harry Kane scored, in extra time against Denmark on Wednesday night, because of the roar from several adjacent gardens here in southern Edinburgh. I glanced out of the window to scenes of restrained celebration – clinking glasses, modest gesticulation, happy Morningside murmurs by the dotted tealights and smouldering chimineas – and, no doubt, there were similar scenes across Scotland.

Among English blowins, certainly, but also from the many of us who still cherish some sense of British identity, or folk who simply enjoy seeing something, be it snooker or rugby or an opera, being done well.

It would be foolish, of course, to pretend that there were not a great many Scots – not least in our pubs – rooting for Denmark in a puerile anyonebutEngland spirit and cursing Gareth Southgate’s luck.

If that was ever a universal sentiment, which I doubt, it would appear to be on the wane, though it is one that the English, on occasion, have reciprocated. It was years before the crowds at Wimbledon, for instance, took Andy Murray to their hearts – only after he burst into tears after his 2012 finals defeat at the hands of their old favourite, Roger Federer.

I have never been able to work up much of a lather against the English, probably because I identify primarily as a Gael, not a Scot. It is why I so enjoy my jaunts to Ireland, where no one is in a hurry, no one struggles with my accent and where, at every turn, I see the faces of my own people.

It’s just like the Hebrides, but with better beer. And, for Highlanders, our historic foe is the Lowland Scot, a tension that can be traced back to the Battle of Harlaw and the subsequent – and finally successful – endeavours of the Stewart monarchy to destroy the Lordship of the Isles.

Ironically, the king who did achieve that, James IV, was the last Scottish monarch who could speak Gaelic. His greatgrandson, James VI, tried further to crush Highland culture in the Statutes of Iona, and sent the Fife Adventurers to Lewis on express orders of genocide.

THE atrocities after Culloden, the Clearances (Patrick Sellar, a Moray man, described the people of Sutherland as ‘aborigines shut out from the general stream of knowledge and cultivation’), the 20thcentury plunder of Hebridean fisheries, mockery to this day of the Gaelic language and Highland Presbyterianism – little of this can be pinned on the English.

Indeed, there is a strange affinity between the Highlander and a certain sort of English gentry, the kind of people who serve in the Royal Household and have a long family tradition in the Armed Forces.

Both prize humility, courtesy, kindness. Both have a strong attachment to their given acres of land, a keen sense of given place – and the responsibility of stewardship for it. There is the same dry humour; a love of deadly understatement. The world wars are keenly recalled, the known fallen yet regretted.

Veterans today, of course, are pitiably few, but – as one remarked to me around 2006 – ‘When you have seen the Normandy surf pink with the blood of the boys, it puts an awful lot in perspective.’

Since the dawn of devolution, more than two decades ago, we in Scotland have not really noticed how rapidly England is changing.

When I wandered downstairs to watch the fraught, final minutes of extra time on Wednesday evening, followed, of course, by protracted redandwhite delirium, I was struck by the crowd’s diversity – a reminder of how successfully, since the Second World War, England has absorbed hundreds of thousands of immigrants with, by international standards, remarkably little trouble.

Save for a brief spell in the late Seventies, and again in the Noughties, the racist farRight has struggled to register in English politics.

It is not so much that the English find fascists repugnant; they have always seen them ridiculous – as her cartoonists, 80 years ago, had such a barrowload of fun with the leading Nazis.

Yet, while our pundits puff about the strange death of Scottish Labour, and the SNP continues to inch itself ever tighter about Scottish public life, England’s political landscape is in seachange.

That process did not begin with Boris Johnson, though he has profited from it. It was evident by the 2015 general election and was accelerated by the extraordinary moral and philosophical collapse of the Labour Party.

AMOVEMENT founded in 1900 for the betterment of working people has been hollowed out by ‘woke’ and not terribly successful graduates.

It is not so much that Labour has lost Scotland or ‘the North’. At election after election, it is losing the towns – places of conscious community, given high streets, prized and particular landmarks. It is

Friendly rivals: Bitterness is disappearing from Scotland’s relationship with England

becoming an ever less representative metropolitan affair, with people whose chief obsessions are arcane and bonkers questions of sex and gender, with folk hollering for ‘decolonisation of the curriculum’ and, to an extraordinary degree, with activists loathing – absolutely loathing – Britain.

The decline is such that if this Parliament, elected in 2019, serves its full term, it will be half a century since Labour won a general election under anyone else than Tony Blair. And if the decline continues, it will be because the Labour movement has thrown off the last vestiges of patriotism, comprehensively alienating its traditional and lifelong voters.

In its great days, its eminences were men who walked easily with princes. Jimmy Thomas, a crusty Welshman, became a great favourite of George V, not least for his dirty jokes.

The Queen got on particularly well with Harold Wilson. Callaghan threw himself into the Silver Jubilee with relish, and when Ernest Bevin committed Britain to building its own atom bomb, it was with the memorable words, ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack flying on top of it.’

But in February, when Sir Keir Starmer posed with that flag and spoke of Labour’s need to show ‘respect and commitment for the country’, he was openly mocked by such political titans as Clive Lewis and Richard Burgeon. Activists are more interested in critical race theory, even as voters slide annually to the Tories and a Prime Minister who, however buffoonishly, actually talks their language.

For years there has been a sustained rise in, if not quite English nationalism, certainly an English consciousness. When her national football side last played in an international final – so long ago I was 14 weeks old – it was Union flags, by the hundreds, that swayed in the terraces.

Tomorrow there is unlikely to be a Union flag in sight. The English have long tired of an identity limited largely to Shakespeare and sports sides, subsumed for centuries in a broader British consciousness.

That made sense when this island nation boasted the greatest navy on earth and for some 200 years devoted itself to great missions – the acquisition of an empire, the abolition of slavery, the steady development of a meaningful democracy and, of course, the destruction of fascism.

But these crusades are long past and, for over 20 years, our politicians have been dismantling the arrangements and institutions that kept the Union together.

Nationalistic choices by devolved governments – and, of course, varied electoral choices by their peoples – have imposed further strain, though I am not convinced that our decision to leave the European Union will accelerate Scottish independence.

In fact, I think it makes that nationalist obsession much more difficult – and precisely the same obsessions now laying Labour to waste may, too, undo the SNP.

If one steps back from tedious talk of currency, economics and trade, the strongest – and historic – arguments for the Union come into better view. It made sense in geography: Britain is an island. It made sense culturally: in 1707, Scotland, England and Wales were overwhelmingly Protestant, in the face of a succession of European foes – Philip of Spain; Lewis XIV – who wanted that faith wiped from the face of the earth.

And, in our own peaceful age, we forget another important reason: the Union put an end to Scotland and England fighting each other, after centuries of incursions and invasions and – especially in the Borders – considerable destruction of property.

As the United Kingdom settles in to her new, nimble and increasingly confident independence, that may in time have a shrinking effect on the Celtic nationalisms, especially as the EU, with each passing year, grows more self-evidently unpleasant and incompetent.

BUT there are certain shocks ahead. God save her, of course, but the Queen cannot live for ever, and no one can predict how the nations of the UK will react to the shock of her passing. You have to be in your late 70s to remember anyone else on the throne – or how confident and commanding a figure her successor will cut.

Then there are the uncertainties of Ireland, where seismic change happens very quickly. In 1914, the mass of the Irish people would have settled for Asquith’s very modest – even lame – measure of Home Rule. By 1922, thanks largely to British folly, there was an independent Irish state, which may well, sooner than most imagine, be a united one, leaving Scotland suddenly a most lonely and exposed place.

Northern Ireland, ironically, is the last corner of the UK where at least a scant majority still, just, identify themselves as British. But many Scots still feel British to some degree – and nearly 800,000 Scots live, voluntarily, in England.

That’s more than the entire population of Glasgow. And others, too, have a vested interest in Britishness – as their most comfortable identity, being not by heritage or ethnicity English.

For them, the Union flag stands not just for an identity, but for ideals. And quirks. Tolerance, kindliness, hard work, enterprise and family. Castles, churchyards, double-decker buses, queuing, cricket and football and chips.

The banners of St George that will blaze tomorrow stand for something no less benevolent – and, whatever the outcome, the bearing and decency of Gareth Southgate and his lads, their modesty and their courage and their individual self-effacement, must command respect from all in these islands.

And if they win? Well, the commentators will be simply unbearable, of course. But there will be a sweet, Scottish consolation.

Ours was the one side they couldn’t beat.