Ed West mentioned in The Spectator the remarkable failure of the anti-secession celebrities in Scotland to come up with “mystic chords of memory” arguments for keeping together Britain:

Hugo Rifkind had an interesting piece in the Times yesterday on the Scottish referendum arguing that the No campaign, by focussing on economics and pragmatism (where they obviously have the edge), had totally conceded the realm of emotion and attachment. Yet Rifkind, coming south in his twenties to settle in London, had found that England was his home, too, and ends his article explaining why Britain is indeed one country. The whole No campaign seems devoid of any idea of British patriotism, indeed barely mentions the B-word in its literature, instead approaching the thing like an unhappy spouse weighing up the costs of sticking with it or leaving to end up poorer. If that’s the reason for union, then it’s not one that’s going to keep the marriage going for very long; and indeed opinion polls show a huge gulf between the over-sixties and the rest of the Scottish population, which suggests that whatever the result this month, independence will come eventually. And in the south many of those advocating the United Kingdom sound remarkably like they could be making the case for the European Union, using arguments for pooling resources to create a social democracy. JK Rowling’s version of British patriotism may have angered some of the SNP’s weirder supporters, but it would leave many Englishmen cold. Likewise with Eddie Izzard or Tony Robinson: the cheerleaders for union are mainly coming from the soft Left, the very people who least empathise with patriotism or understand the things that hold people together – history, mythology and hormones.

Consider the failure of J.K. Rowling, the leading popular culture light of the Better Together campaign (she grew up in the veddy English Bristol area of western England, but moved to Scotland to be near her sister after her divorce), to appeal to British patriotism, even though her Harry Potter books are a wonderful capstone of what writers of English and Scottish (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson and J.M. Barrie) ethnicity have jointly given humanity: the world’s finest children’s literature. Rowling strikes me as one of nature’s conservatives who is intellectually hobbled by today’s sterile liberal Nice White Lady political concepts ill-suited to her rich imagination.

Ross Douthat in the NYT offers what his heroine Rowling should have been able to come up with: