A kingdom divided?

The Scottish Labour leader, Wendy Alexander, called again for an independence referendum in Scotland last night. That she is defying her party leader (one G Brown) and taking a huge gamble on the the very future of the United Kingdom shows that the 2007 Scottish Parliamentary elections were a very important moment in the history of these islands .

The SNP's victory in those elections was hugely significant, as was the publication of the Scottish Government's White Paper on Scotland's constitutional future. Here was one of the Queen's ministers (First Minister Alex Salmond) kicking off a process which he hopes will break up Her Kingdom. Historic, by any standard.

And extraordinary as well. There are many reasons we have reached this point, and I want to discuss some of these on this blog in the coming weeks and months. But one of the most obvious reasons is a lack of communication and understanding between England and Scotland.

I see one small sign of this every morning. I buy my daily newspaper from the newsagent inside Brixton tube. I tend to go for the Guardian but I could get almost any newspaper from Europe or North America. So today morning I could have read today's El Pais from Madrid, Le Monde from Paris or Die Welt from Berlin. (Strictly speaking I couldn't have read any of them because I am rubbish a learning languages but I could have bought them at the very least.) I could have read today's International Herald Tribune or USA Today. I could not, however, have read today's Scotsman. I could have got yesterday's edition but I'd have to wait until next week for today's copy.

Two nations part of the same state on the same island and yet it's not possible to read for me to read one of Scotland's national newspapers on the day it is published. (By the way The Herald and The Record aren't available at all.)

Why does this matter? Well on one level it doesn't - I read the papers online anyway. But the failure of communication between England and Scotland which this represents and the increasing division within the Union is going to be one of the major domestic political issues in the coming decades. And we need to understand each other if we are going to be able to navigate those issues effectively.