When The World Knows Your Name As England

I purchased some bottles of Corona Extra beer in Ireland recently and happened to notice that the inside of the bottle top was marked Irlanda. It was obviously stamped as a signifier for the export market to which it was intended. Naturally, I was interested to see what the inside of the bottle top would say in Scotland. It would, of course, have been too much to hope that it said Escocia, yet I presumed it would say either Reino Unido or Gran Bretaña. But alas, the world knows our name as England and, accordingly, it was stamped Inglaterra.

It made me think about those Scots who bemoan the fact that they are treated as English when they travel abroad and then, come an election, vote Labour as they always have. Labour are a unionist party and the very reason why the wider world thinks that Scotland is a part of England is because of the Union. Indeed, shoehorn any country into a shared state for 300 years with a country 10 times its size, in terms of population and the inevitable result will be that the smaller country essentially disappears - at least in the eyes of the wider world. Neither Labour, the Conservatives nor the Liberal Democrats have any genuine interest in Scottish national identity – why would they when it is in direct competition with their own sense of British identity?