To add to the procession of companies declaring for or agin Scottish independence can now be added a trickle of writers revealing their hand.

Last week Mairi Hedderwick give an emphatic Yes on Desert Island Discs, though sadly Katie Morag is still too young to vote.

Judging by conversations I have had, and some shameless earwigging, the Scottish literary establishment seems generally inclined towards a yay vote. One can't be sure, however. It could be that, in a climate that is increasingly febrile and judgemental, those who are swithering, or are die-hard Unionist, do not want their position to be known.

Wherever Scotland's writers put their tick, it was amusing to read Will Self placing himself firmly in the pro-independence camp, even though as a Londoner he does not have a vote. Married to Scottish journalist Deborah Orr, he has no doubt been inducted over many years into the minutiae of Scottish culture and politics, though perhaps he would have been sympathetic regardless.

In the New Statesman's recent Scottish edition, Self wrote that "On the whole, I've considered independence to be something of a no-brainer: if ever there was a small, potentially socialistic state that could do with being detached from its deluded imperialist neighbour, it's Scotland." He went further, saying that if Scotland did go independent, it was England that would feel the pinch.

Whether or not one agrees with his stance, it is refreshing to hear such unequivocal endorsement of Scotland from an English writer, especially one of Self's stamp. In earlier times - as recently as the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s - middle-class, Oxford-educated novelists were more likely to sneer at us, as if they had lifted their dislike of the entire race wholesale, and unthinkingly, from their caustic forebear, Samuel Johnson.

Few loathed Scotland more than George Orwell, who was virulently against all forms of nationalism, but held a particular dislike for the Scottish variety. Orwell considered nationalism within Britain to be essentially anti-English. "The Celt is supposed to be spiritually superior to the Saxon — simpler, more creative, less vulgar, less snobbish, etc. - but the usual power hunger is there under the surface. One symptom of it is the delusion that Eire, Scotland or even Wales could preserve its independence unaided and owes nothing to British protection."

Not surprisingly he was mightily disparaging of Hugh MacDiarmid, though of all targets this was one who could stand up for himself. But there were many other Scotophobes beside Orwell. Evelyn Waugh's views on the nation were obnoxious, as were those of the arch-chronicler of the English middle and upper classes, Anthony Powell. It almost feels traitorous to admit that these are three writers I return to again and again. Yet if one were not to read anyone whose political opinions were at times repellant, or misguided, or merely at odds with one's own, you would soon run out of reading matter. Perhaps, indeed, the vigour and forthrightness with which they aired their ideas in public is what, in the form of fiction, makes their writing so compelling.

Just as a single swallow does not mean summer has arrived, Self's pronouncement does not necessarily herald a wave of pro-Scottish opinion from England's literati. Yet it is indicative, I think, of a greater warmth between writers south and north of the border - and those in Ireland and Wales too. Recent decades have seen a radical blurring of national lines, the book festival circuit introducing writers to parts of Britain they have never been, or were unlikely ever to visit. There has also been a dramatic democratisation of literature across all its fields, the self-perpetuating elite no longer dominating the business - quite the reverse. That, I suspect, more than anything, has helped banish the fear and loathing writers used to nurse about their neighbours.