I've spent two years living in London, and a significant amount of time in Spain. Both places have similar issues with regions having legitimate claims to distinct linguistic and cultural identity. The independence movements are biggest in Scotland and Catalonia, but not entirely limited to them.
In both countries I was always pretty amused by the weird denial and contempt for the "fringe" regions by people in the dominant ones - Southern England/London in the UK, and Castile/Madrid in Spain - along with a tendency to infantalize the people in the other regions. It's a bit hard to describe because it was inherently contradictory, but basically there's a denial that linguistic/cultural identity differences actually exist, essentially denying that Catalans actually do speak Catalan for any other reason than to be difficult, or that people in the North of Britain aren't just putting on those funny accents so they sound like characters in a teevee show about people from The North. It's aided by the fact that lots of people in the fringe regions do learn to code switch, to speak "proper" English, for example. It makes their "real" accents* seem like their fake ones.
Simultaneously, there's a degree of contempt for those other people. Why don't they speak correctly? Why do they insist on doing things a bit differently? A common comment from people outside Catalonia when discussing the region is something along the lines of, "Barcelona is really nice, but the people are horrible."
I'm not saying everybody literally believes these things, but it's a gut reaction that gets expressed in various ways.
Anyway, was just thinking about these things in the context of Cameron, Clegg, and Miliband heading up to Scotland, and Miliband, in particular, calling on everyone to fly the Saltire. We'll just fly this silly flag for a couple of days and make everything better you naughty children!
Yeah, that'll help.
*I'll leave it to others to argue about the degree to which contemporary Scots and other related dialects are separate languages, but they're certainly different.
