Born and brought up in Scotland, Tom Gallagher has taught at Bradford University's Department of Peace Studies since 1980.

The risk seems to be growing that the two pillars of the union will go their separate ways. The favourite theory is that the Scots will rush to recover the independence they abandoned 300 years ago.

I disagree. It is true that the Scottish National Party is likely to be the largest one after the spring elections for the Scottish assembly, but it will simply become the largest of a clutch of minority parties that dominate the parliament in Edinburgh thanks to proportional representation.

Under the terms of the devolution legislation, Edinburgh cannot actually initiate a referendum on independence. And I doubt if a majority of Scots could be found to vote for it unless the SNP were to break through the 50 per cent barrier, which is very improbable.

The wild card is England where a decline in the Britishness which kept the union alive is palpable. Fifty-nine per cent of English voters support the break-up of the union according to a recent poll (more than in Scotland!).

The ties between the two peoples cemented by trade, empire, participation in major wars, and struggles for social justice, are fraying. Many people in England took offence when Jack McConnell, Scotland's First Minister, said he would support any team which opposed England in the World Cup.

No longer are English people prepared to react to such Anglophobia with amused tolerance. Their own sense of ease with themselves has been swept away by an avalanche of social change which has transformed much of the face of the country in unsettling ways in a relatively short period.

The state is trying to plug a hole in the dyke by legislating against bad behaviour in public as well as ethnic and religious intolerance. But there is still no law preventing a trading of insults between the old nations of this realm.

Commentator and politicians like David Cameron, looking for an audience or the key to No. 10, are able to mine a thick seam of English dissatisfaction with the national condition.

Take a look at the way Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and indeed the Soviet Union broke up and it is possible to argue that the are playing with fire. The impetus for division in each case came from the centre and not the periphery. Centrist figures like Boris Yeltsin and Slobodan Milosevic decided it suited their interests to destroy the unions that they had previously upheld. They dangled material benefits in front of their supporters. But the chaos and, in the case of the Yugoslavia war, left millions of casualties.

If Britain is Balkanised, people in the North of England are likely to be bystanders. The parochial Wars of the Roses mentality ensures that its regional interest have never been articulated in the corridors of power. If the North found its voice, then maybe we could break free from the sterile quarrel between dissatisfied Celts and insular and far more privileged elite groups in the South-East.

Perhaps a new union could be forged that serves the forgotten and voiceless parts of the realm in a fairer and more effective way. Far better to make such an attempt than to relaunch a tribal conflict which could make Britain even more ungovernable and its citizens despairing that political decisions can ever improve their lives.