MARK Harper may be right when he says that because the SNP has 'failed to answer the practical questions arising from independence' the Yes campaign is likely to lose the Scottish referendum this September.

But thanks to globalism and now that the genie of localism is out of the bottle such a defeat is likely to be no more than a pause in the UK's advance towards a written constitution and the creation of a federation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as the best way to preserve the union.   When politicians like Harper and his colleagues in the Lib/Lab Con pact cling to the orthodoxies of British government forged in the imperial 18th, 19th and 20th centuries they demonstrate a lack of political imagination and overlook the electorate's distaste for Westminster's increasingly impotent and isolated party political elite.

Meanwhile, Britons struggle to come to terms with our democratic deficit as well as with the apparent failure of political thinking – be it liberalism, socialism or conservatism – to deliver the limitless material wellbeing to which we are assured by pandering politicians we are so entitled.  

Cultural anxiety and economic insecurity mean new forms of identity are needed, and not just in Scotland. Devolution has fractured in the English national consciousness the organic unity that was the United Kingdom.

So Gerald Morgan is right when he says it's high time the English were 'released' – released to celebrate, as Swinburne so eloquently put it, our 'chainless land', 'Shakespeare's voice, Milton's faith, Wordsworth's trust and Nelson's hand'.

Bringing decision-making and governance closer to our cities, towns and villages will re-engage our people with a sense of patriotism, as well as instil in current and prospective party politicians, as John Belcher aptly points out, a higher sense of duty towards their constituents.

In a society like ours increasingly obsessed with sex, power and money this might help us to behave less selfishly.

But since the primary institutions of British society – marriage and the family – have no clear endorsement from our political class we are at the mercy of the abstract idea of human rights slapped upon us by European courts whose judges have little interest in our social fabric.

How Christian is our social fabric? This is what really matters, and there is little doubt that now it is seriously frayed.

But don't worry Freda Margrett, Christianity will continue, even if it is forced underground by a secular establishment, because Judeo-Christianity provides the essential connecting link to 'our island story'.

Without that tradition, it is impossible to understand the language, the literature, the art or even the science of our civilisation.

But we can only call ourselves a Christian country if we choose the renewal of that tradition which, as T. S. Eliot saw, is at the root of almost everything we value. Otherwise, as Michael Nazir- Ali warns, 'our future will be to wander in a sea of moral and spiritual eclecticism without a compass to give us our bearings.'

– John Muir, Newnham.