Are there not some days when you look at England and see a country with which we have less in common than Burkino Faso? Maybe there have always been such days. There certainly must have been when Margaret Thatcher was in power and she was bribing the police to act like thugs in her war against the miners or when she imposed the poll tax on Scots. But such occasions still seemed too few to be able to supplant the memories of a brave and steadfast nation whose sons had died with ours in the war against fascism.

We are talking here about a people who have never bridled even as they routinely let Scots trample all over their Nigels and Cecils to run the army, the civil service, the media, the banks and the government.

And why did our families return year after year to Blackpool, Morecambe and Scarborough to renew acquaintances with Alf and Doreen, the proprietors of their favourite guesthouses, if it wasn't because they always regarded England as their home from home? I fear, though, that this age has passed and each year brings us increasingly more days when England looks like – and feels like – a foreign state.

In the last two years, we have witnessed Westminster's coalition government of English millionaire landowners decide that the poor must bear the brunt of their austerity programme and that the lives of the sick, the vulnerable and the elderly must become a little bit harsher. They continue to rail against benefit cheats and feckless families and irresponsible parents who refuse to discipline their children. They wish to penalise poor people if they insist on having more children. Soon, a standing army of state-funded child-catchers will emerge armed with licences to take urchins from their homes if it can be proved they were begotten in penury.

Yet even as they wage their war against the poor they continue to indulge the billionaire money-changers who, alone, bankrupted the country, fuelled by nothing more than avarice. These people are still awarding themselves obscene bonuses and destroying small and honest business by denying them credit facilities. The Westminster government, however, wants to bribe factory workers with worthless company share options in return for agreeing to go peacefully when they are sacked. And then they want to make it easier for bosses to sack workers without fear of falling foul of pesky employment laws. Here's a jolly wheeze: perhaps once the state rat-catchers have rounded up all the disease-ridden wretches of the feckless poor they could be made to labour in workhouses breaking stones and picking oakum.

When that idiot Boris Johnson addressed thousands of fawning Tories at their annual conference, they were incontinent with desire as he told them that they had to create the correct economic conditions that would allow the nation's wealth-creators to thrive. What he meant, of course, was that we should stand by again and refuse to intervene if the country's greediest and most ruthless bankers want to bend us over the kitchen table once more. When even Max Hastings, the world's most English person, feels moved to warn his countrymen about the perils of being seduced by mad Boris, you know that something is rotten in the heart of Albion.

Less than two years ago, we watched Met officers use the same intimidation that had worked on the miners to abuse marching students and public-sector workers. A few months later, judges sitting in London were abandoning all sense of proportion and natural justice as they handed down heavy sentences to youths caught stealing television sets during the London riots. Recently, the education secretary, Michael Gove, previously thought to be one of the government's more sensible and hysteria-free ministers, looked like he had also been afflicted with Mad Boris Disease as he attacked Johnny Foreigner in an anti-European frenzy.

A few days prior to this, in a joint newspaper article, the chancellor, George Osborne, and the work and pensions secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, discussed how they aim to reduce the welfare bill by £18bn. Aye, right. This fearless and crusading duo had obviously taken inspiration and nourishment from Johann Lamont, our very ain Scottish Labour leader, as their article was headed: "How we'll end the something-for-nothing-culture". There's an easier way for George and Iain to claw back £18bn. In so doing, they would be ending a real something-for-nothing-culture – the one that allows many of the richest people and the biggest companies operating in the United Kingdom to cheat the revenue out of billions in aggressive tax-avoidance schemes.

What has Labour been doing while all of this has been happening? Why, they've spent the last two weeks calling for the resignation of the Tory chief whip because he said something unpleasant to a couple of Downing Street coppers. Someone ought to tell Ed Miliband that saying unpleasant things to the bill on a regular basis is a sign of a healthy and mature democracy.

At the SNP annual conference in Perth, party delegates and supporters seem a little bit more subdued than they were at Inverness last year. They have not recently been accustomed to squabbling among themselves as they have been over Nato membership. And perhaps the most recent opinion polls purporting to show support for independence falling have led to a little more introspection. Yet they needn't worry too much. David Cameron and George Osborne are hellbent on making Britain as unjust, unequal and xenophobic as it was when Charles Dickens was writing about the iniquities of workhouses and Poor Laws. In so doing, they are helping to write the SNP's white paper on independence. In this, Alex Salmond simply has to say that an independent Scotland will provide for its poor and its weak; protect its workers; welcome asylum seekers, refugees and immigrants; refuse to kill its young men in unjust wars; and banish the greed of financiers and the opportunism of the energy cartels.

He simply has to say that an independent Scotland will be everything that sick England, right now, is not.

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