One of the assertions from No voters that was most difficult to argue against was the, "I feel British," statement. No matter how well we argued other matters, this is such a subjective and highly personal feeling that no amount of arguing seemed able to break it down. It is, though, also a very vague argument since, when challenged, few people could ever explain what it meant to feel British.

When you think about it, that’s not surprising. We all have multiple identities because, essentially, people are tribal in their instincts. We gather in family groups, we associate ourselves with our local community, our town, our city, our country, or even our continent, depending on where we find ourselves and who we find ourselves with. It’s not a particularly admirable human trait but it’s there in all of us to some extent. The problem is that, for some people, tribal identity, whether it be via a football team, a club or association, a political party or a nation state, is so ingrained that it defies logic. Why hate someone because they carry a flag of another nation? Why hate someone because they wear a football strip of a team you don’t support?

There probably isn’t an answer to this. The only observation we can make is that, while there was undoubtedly a small minority among the Yes movement who voted out of an ethnic dislike of England, the vast majority of Yes voters were anything but nationalistic. The nationalism was almost always from the No campaign, with flag waving and repeated appeals to shared history.

It is still unclear what it means to be British. The word has different meanings and connotations depending on who uses it. For most in the Yes movement, it was a pejorative term aimed at Westminster elitism and its imperialistic outlook. For many of those who voted No, it probably meant an identification with the vestiges of Empire, with punching above our weight and having an ingrained distrust of anyone unfortunate enough to be born a foreigner. That may sound like a harsh assessment and a sweeping generalisation but how many times did you hear No campaigners mention that a vote for independence would make us foreigners? Margaret Curran MP even went so far as to rail against the thought that her own son would suddenly become a foreigner, as if that meant she would, by default, be forced to hate him. It’s a sad, narrow-minded and xenophobic view that most in the Yes campaign simply do not share.

That’s not to say all No voters think that way but the official No campaign certainly promoted that nationalistic viewpoint and, judging by the referendum result, conversations with No voters and comments on social media, a great many people seem to have identified with it.

There is something sad about anyone feeling that their sense of Britishness (whatever that is) would be diminished by living in what they saw as a foreign country. Is their sense of their own identity so fragile that they would not feel British if they went to live in France, Spain or the USA? It’s not as if Scotland was proposing to go anywhere, simply to govern itself. It was intended to be a political divide, not a cultural one, but, judging by the comments from the No campaign, too many people didn’t see it that way.

Unfortunately, it’s a difficult state of mind to alter. The State system is geared towards engendering a sense of loyalty to Britain into all of us from a young age. Those are hard bonds to shake off and some people will never manage it. What was most disappointing about the entire referendum campaign was that most of the racist, ethnic arguments came from the English-based media. Please note, that’s not an anti-English statement because many of the journalists involved were Scots; it was a London-centric perspective that dominated, a perspective that contains an unhealthy level of racism which is all too evident in the anti-EU, anti-immigrant stance of most of the London-based media and many of its readers.

The Commonwealth Games was a prime example. We were assured by newspapers such as the Daily Mail that English athletes would be booed and English fans would not be made welcome because the journalists could only perceive the independence movement by the standards of their own, racist viewpoint. What happened? Glasgow showed the world that there is another sort of Britishness we should all aspire to. Yes, we supported Scottish athletes when they were involved but we also applauded athletes from every other country and we enjoyed watching English, Welsh and Irish athletes doing well. That is a sense of Britishness we can admire. It’s the sense that we identify with our own country but we also support the other countries who share these islands.

Wouldn’t it be nice if "British" came to mean much the same as "Scandinavian"? It would be a geographic description, an acknowledgement of a shared past and shared culture but no more than that.

That’s the sort of Britishness we should all strive for.