>>2395854Nationalism is a spook, but there is a hierarchy of spooks. In Europe, nationalism is less of a spook than racism, particularly the banal Celtic nationalisms that primarily pursue "being a normal country", not "being some imaginary ethnically pure homeland."
Scotland and England are "real" nations, real in the sense that they really do have a sense of national identity. "British" on the other hand, is a
former national identity which has been on the wane since the 1980s, when Britain destroyed its single national identity. (many English think of English and British interchangeably, but that's because they live in the largest single country. They have no need to think of the other nations, which itself reflects the fact the multi-national union is a joke.)
I must be concrete here: If you live in Scotland but you work for British steel, get your coal from British Coal and commute using British Rail, heat your house with British Gas and fuel your car with British Petroleum then it is quite natural you might imagine you live in a country called "Britain", and you may closely identify with that country. When Steel and Coal disappear (at the whim of perhaps the embodiment of every negative English stereotype), the railways become "Scotrail", your gas provider becomes Scottish and Southern energy, and your car is fueled by Shell, it is quite natural that you might conclude that "Britain" is a nonsense and that you are Scottish. What real material things do you see in your day-to-day life that reinforce a sense of Britishness? This isn't blood and soil nonsense, it's just concrete economic phenomena.
Then there's a whole political dimension in the background: Scottish Labour were obliterated by Scottish Nationalism, but Scottish Labour spent the 1980s stoking Scottish Nationalism for their own electoral ends. (playing up that
Scotland didn't want Thatcher, that
Scotland had neoliberalism imposed on it by voters elsewhere) Then Scottish Labour, who really really played up how much Scotland was distinct, and how much Scotland wanted lukewarm social democracy, got elected and immediately started doing neoliberalism minus imagination. Scottish Labour had always viewed Scotland merely as a way to get a career in the UK parliament, not really taking it seriously. That backfired spectacularly and lead to the rise of the SNP. (who ironically, under Sturgeon, wound up in much the same place.)
Read David Edgerton's "The rise and fall of the British Nation" (despite the title, it's not a right-wing screed about brown people. it's an economic history explaining how Britain was just one of many nations that emerged from the collapse of the British Empire, going through a range of postwar myths, and then explaining how after a fairly successful nationbuilding project, Britain threw it all away in the 1980s.)