Aye but no but aye but...

"Are we going to another country?" asked my son, as we set off to see some friends in Edinburgh during the Easter holidays.  No, but yes, but not really, but interesting question, I found myself saying.  Once we got there I felt, even more than I had on many previous visits that there is something clearly different about Scotland, even Edinburgh. 

It's partly something to do with the architecture - austere solid stone versus flimsy pretty brick, shingles, stucco but also, as I looked at all the posters saying "kick out Jakey McConnell" and how the SNP will spend the money on the NHS and education not Trident, I wondered how different Scottish cultural values might be different to English cultural values and what kind of impact that might have on trying to define Britishness, as taught in schools or as part of the British citizenship test.

The female half of our Scottish friends in Edinburgh said she felt the same way about the architecture, when she visited Kent recently, and also said something about rather liking the hierarchy in England - I asked if she meant the class system, and she said "sort of".  I suspect, as a senior manager, she rather likes the deference she gets south of the border.  I asked Marcus, of  Harry's Place, (Scottish born, but also brought up in Yemen and Germany), over lunch today and he said he also found England to be much more class ridden and Scotland to be more democratic.

The second aspect Marcus mentioned is that the Scottish like to think of themselves as more left wing than the English, and in particular do not forget lightly the Thatcher era.  Certainly the male half of our Edinburgh friends is visceral in his hatred of Mrs T and memories of the miners' strike etc are still very fresh for him.  When I asked him about Tommy Sheridan and said "isn't he guilty as hell?", my friend said yes, but we all hate the News of the World even more, so cheered when he won against them.  So more left wing in the sense of deep, long lasting grudges?

The third aspect that Marcus and I discussed was the respective education systems.  Why is the Scottish education system still producing better results (and probably helps explain the less class ridden Scottish society)?  Marcus reckons it's cultural - being a hostile land to farm, Scottish people have had to find something other than agriculture to make a living, and this has meant work that requires education (running the British Empire for example), so education was much more valued, and more widely available across all classes.

So values surrounding class, politics and education differ, but, we concluded, it seems that the often mentioned British "sense of fair play" and "sense of humour" are both given importance north or south of the border.