RadNomad":kmroc55e said:..............Having been an expat for many years i have noticed a very clear propensity of Scottish Brit expats to tout the Scottish flag in clear defiance to the Union and the Union Flag. On the back of their cars for example. In conversations with Welsh and Scottish expats over the years i have found in general the Scottish to be far more vitriolic toward the English than are the Welsh. Also much more so than the English are toward the Scots. Can't comment on Irish having met very few. I have found the devisiveness of the Scots quite tiresome, though i respect their right to opinion and viewpoint. These are just my observations, not a reliable survey, ........................!
I'd agree from my time as an expat in Poland and Russia in the early 1990s. I always said I was British or from UK (rather than English) when asked, to me it's a better representation of the diversity and tolerance that I'd like to think the modern UK brings, at least in parts of it. The truth is that it is difficult to escape the legacy of being the global superpower albeit centuries ago. The results of Soviet propaganda had an interesting impact on the Irish dynamic. A couple of Poles couldn't believe it when asking where a friend / colleague from work and I were from, he being from Dublin, thinking we should be fighting rather than drinking together.
I do find Alex Salmond's anti-english rhetoric increasingly annoying. Now the suggestion that a currency union wouldn't work is bullying. Surely independence should mean just that, for a currency union to work there needs to be oversight and control hardly the characteristics of independence. Almost anything that he doesn't agree with is accompanied by words like bullying, reminds me of Robert Mugabe's ability to deflect the discussion with a few choice remarks about colonialism. His threat to refuse any share of the UK national debt is hardly the words of a man committed to a partnership to make a currency union work. Can you imagine the outrage if people south of the border suggested that independence meant losing all pension rights, oh I think that is starting. It all reminds me of a divorcing couple where should be amicable and sensible but somewhere someone gets bitter and eventually the wheels completely come off. I just hope the vote is decisive one way or the other, otherwise it will just run and run like Quebec.
As an aside, doing a bit of reading, (and I'm not a historian so need to do more research) but the Acts of Union only came about after much wrangling and possibly with terms / efforts to curb the behaviour of the monarchs from James VI / I et al who were much more in favour (for obvious selfish reasons) of a more absolutist monarchy they had had in Scotland rather than in England where there was a resistance to such behaviour.