I'm not an Anglo, I'm a Scot

One complained: "Why are there so many people who don't have a vote telling people how they should vote?"

Another wrote of my support for the Yes side, "His stance was completely hypocritical. He has voted with his feet."

The criticisms got me thinking. There's an old maxim that you should wear your insults with pride. The likes of "Chartist", "Red" and "Desert Rat" all originated as terms of abuse but were soon taken up as badges of honour by the labelled. I thought maybe I should do the same.

No, I don't mean tag myself "The Hypocrite". I mean Anglo-Scot. Yes, Anglo-Scot and proud. Well, maybe that's taking it a bit far. Anglo-Scot and content. I could write about that.

Then I looked up some definitions. This blog was turned upside down. Wikipedia says: "In Scotland, the term Anglo-Scot, often shortened to Anglos, is used to refer to people born in Scotland with English ancestry."

Rubbish was my first thought. Another Wiki blunder. But it's not just Wikipedia. On another site, Jamie Maxwell also uses the term Anglo-Scots to denote English-born people living in Scotland.

On yet another page, Wikipedia hedges its bets. "The term 'Anglo-Scot'," it states, "can mean a number of rather different things." That is, "English people of Scottish descent‎" or "Scottish people of English descent."

Eh? So what does that make me, Scots-born living in England?

Confused, I carried out a straw poll among my acquaintances down here. The overwhelming consensus was that an "Anglo-Scot" is someone with one Scottish parent and one English! Add that definition to the lengthening list.

Instead of writing a blog, I was suffering an existential crisis.

Maybe I'm too wrapped up in football culture. In the middle of the last century, an Anglo-Scot meant a Scots-born player plying his trade in England.

In the 1960s, I can remember the commitment of Anglos being questioned. Some seriously proposed fielding an international team composed only of home players. That's right, we'd leave out the likes of Denis Law, John White, Billy Bremner and Dave MacKay. Heady days indeed.

In more desperate recent times, that soccer definition has changed. Now Anglo-Scot means any footballer playing in England we can make eligible for Scotland through the most tortuous contortion of rule books and genealogical trees.

I began to question all this Anglo stuff. Take Anglo-Indian, for example. It's never meant an Indian-born person living in England. Nor an English-born person living in Indian.

Instead, it was used to refer to a person of mixed British-Indian heritage, a British-made caste, above Indian but below 'pure' white.

That's also a good illustration of the misuse of 'Anglo' as an abbreviation for 'British'. It would be nice to think of it as a quaint aberration of old-fashioned history textbooks - the Anglo-French Entente of 1908 and all that. But it's still with us. Shell, for example, proudly advertises itself as an Anglo-Dutch company.

All this gave me food for serious thought about my own status.

I'm glad the definition of Anglo-Scot is all over the place. To hell with this Anglo tag anyway. I've never thought of myself as anything other than a Scot. A Scot who lives and works in England.

I'm not an Anglo-Scot. I'm not an Anglo anything.

Of course, the future of Scotland should be entirely in the hands of the people who live there, whether they are Scots-born or not. But I still have a legitimate interest in that future. My brothers and sister and their families all live there.

Besides, I'm an English resident of the Billy Bragg faction. I believe England, especially the north, would benefit enormously from Scotland gaining independence.

That's why people like me want to have our say about Scotland. We don't live there. We can't vote in any referendum. But the ties aren't broken. We're still Scots.

We don't need any prefixes.