British elections must no longer trample the will of the Scottish people: The Scots are solidly anti-Tory, returning just one Conservative M.P. to Westminster in the last three general elections, yet they are outweighed by southern English voters and regularly have to endure Conservative governments. Scotland should also be allowed to become a full member of the European Union, not a bolt-on to English interests.

Add social welfare to those motives. In Britain, it’s not only Conservative-led governments but “New Labour” ones as well that now seem committed to Thatcherite economics, to the steady privatization of health, education and welfare. Most Scots hate this.

The S.N.P. governments in Scotland have tried to barricade the Scottish National Health Service against the market reforms forced on the N.H.S. in England. Many people — including the former British prime minister Gordon Brown, who is himself Scottish — have called the postwar welfare state and the N.H.S. the greatest of British achievements. By defending what’s left in Scotland of that legacy, the S.N.P. risks being called, satirically, the most “British” party in the kingdom.

But Scottish confidence is not only rational. Put it like this: Ever since the 1707 union with England, when Scotland sold its independence for a share in the British Empire, a tiny blue-and-white cell has survived in the Scottish brain that sends out the message: “Wouldn’t it be grand if only, if somehow...?” For three centuries, inhibitor cells jammed the message: “We’re too wee, too poor, too thick... are you daft?” But now that “cultural cringe” has vanished, almost without a trace. And the blue-and-white cell is free to transmit.

If Scottish “yes” reasoning is not hard to grasp, neither is Scottish “no” reasoning. Some of it is material: People are not convinced that their living standards would survive independence, and would like firmer promises about pensions and interest rates. Some of it is fear for the economic safety of Scotland, turned loose among the giant predators stalking a globalized world.

Some of it is emotional: a feeling that Scottish and English societies are so closely integrated now that separation (a word the S.N.P. never uses) would be absurd, even anachronistic. Few, though, would go as far as one Conservative peer, a former cabinet minister, who said that independence would be a betrayal of the British dead in two world wars. But the British government’s motives for opposing independence are often puzzling.

The English media and many politicians explain the independence movement by claiming that the Scots are obsessed by “anti-English racism.” My own experiences tell me the exact opposite. Scots, these days, have almost forgotten about England, so fascinated are they by their own country. (This is sour news for the English, who can bear being hated but not being overlooked.)