THE growth of the so-called Scottish political and media “Raj” may cause much angst at dinner parties in Notting Hill and Islington but in the rest of the country there is no such resentment — yet.

That is one of the conclusions of research conducted by social psychologists at the University of Lancaster and presented to the British Psychological Society conference in Edinburgh yesterday.

Contrary to popular perception, the researchers found that the English were perfectly at ease with the Scots having their own Parliament, and at the same time holding power and influence in Westminster and the higher echelons of the London-based media — a development dubbed the “Scottish Raj” by Jeremy Paxman, the BBC Newsnight presenter.

“The idea of the Scottish Raj may annoy people in the media and in politics but it simply has not filtered down to the ordinary English man and woman,” Susan Condor, one of the researchers who interviewed around 100 people several times over the past five years for the study, said.

“English people like the Scots and they are happy about the Scottish Parliament. They do not feel they should have the same amount of self-rule because they do not have a sense of competition with the Scots or the Welsh. They feel that as the biggest constituent part of Britain, they have a sense of responsibility to other smaller parts and that they have to demonstrate a certain constructiveness to their political demands.”

The researchers found that there had been no growth in political nationalism in England because of devolution. “People in England know Scots have their own Parliament but that’s about it and they are not annoyed about it,” Dr Condor said. “It is a sense that this is what the Scots have decided they want and that therefore it is appropriate that they should have it.

“What has happened is that because of devolution people in England feel more able to say that they are English as well as British and that it is a perfectly legitimate response. That was not always the case in the past because English people were taught that the appropriate response to questions about nationality was to say they were ‘British’. Now they feel more free to say they are English. But the sense of British identity has not declined. It is just that they are able to say they are English as well.”

The researchers are sceptical that this new sense of “Englishness” will one day manifest itself in calls from south of the border for a break-up of Britain and for the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish to go their own ways. “The break-up of Britain could come through a more formal political route but it would not be something at the moment that the English would push for,” Dr Condor said. “Such a break-up is certainly not the settled will of the English people.”

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