Trying to move the discussion back to more of a political focus this "pan-celtic" stuff gives me an opportunity to try to work in an interesting article from the Sunday Times about the use of Scotland's past in the contemporary politics of identity into the discussion. Not having a go at anyone here by bringing this up but this Scotland as a "celtic" nation in contrast with England business always bothers me a bit for reasons that I like to think run a bit deeper than not liking a certain football team that plays in green and white hoops.

The artificial British construct of identity mentioned in this article appears to me at least to be being replaced by a Celtic one in some quarters IMO but surely if we are honest most Scots today have a lot more in common linguistically and culturally with peoplein say Newcastle than they do with rural Gaels from either Benbecula or Connemara or a Welsh speaking farmer on Ynys Mon? In what sense then is Scotland a uniformally Celtic rather than an Anglo-Saxon nation in the year 2000 in any meaningful way? It is clearly not IMO. Any thoughts at all on Colin Bell's article? I thought he hit the nail on the head personally about the current state of flux in terms of Scottish identity and how history is being used in a revisionist manner in contemporary Scottish politics. What then is Scottishness all about? I would argue that it is based on a shared civic sense of loyalty to a set of national institutions that survived the Union of 1707 rather than on an ethnically based sense of identity that revolves around a common ancestral linguistic and cultural heritage that predates that Union as Scotland had ceased to be a uniformly predominantly Gaelic speaking kingdom well before Bruce and Wallace. The last couple of paragraphs about ambitious politicians using Gaelic reminded me greatly of a couple of the SNP's more prominent intenet celebreties.

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