JUST don't call him British.

The novelist Ian McEwan made headlines last week when he told the Edinburgh International Book Festival that he was "an English writer" and that there was no such thing as a "British" novelist. No such thing as British? What about Team GB? Danny Boyle? The NHS? Has the angry young radical of the 1970s turned into an grumpy Little Englander? Had the author of Atonement and On Chesil Beach joined the English Defence League?

No. I met him at the Book Festival and I can confirm that he does not have a shaven head or a Cross of St George tattoo. "Bookish" is a word that could have been invented for McEwan, pictured right with First Minister Alex Salmond.

He wears sloppy jackets and indeterminate trousers – the uniform of the liberal academic. Nor is he intending to vote for the UK Independence Party. He agreed that in the past it has been difficult to be overtly English without being taken for a boot boy, but that things seem suddenly to have changed. Like the weather. He wasn't making a political intervention, he said, just stating a fact.

Nevertheless, the BBC picked up on McEwan's aside and ran with it, presumably expecting controversy. Then, like the dog that didn't bark in the night, nothing happened. McEwan's remark hung in the air for a couple of days and then everyone moved on. An assertion of Englishness at a Scottish literary festival can no longer be relied upon to raise Scottish hackles. I searched for hackles all over Charlotte Square and found none – even when Joseph Stiglitz, the American economist, referred during his Book Festival event to "England" when he meant "Britain".

Could it be, I wondered, that we have finally got over this whole identity issue? Can we now stop bothering about who is what? Are we entering a period of post-national history in which it becomes as mundane to say you are Scottish or English as it is to say you come from Oxford or Edinburgh? And where it no longer matters how you define Britishness, or even whether you use the term at all?

Only a decade ago, commentators including Jeremy Paxman and Simon Heffer were churning out books about English identity and what it means. Devolution and the rise of the SNP had revealed, we were told, a black hole where England used to be. The English question was a backwash from the West Lothian Question – another dog that no longer appears to disturb the night hours. Why should Scottish MPs have a say in English affairs when English MPs have no say in Scottish domestic politics?

The English question was generally posed by commentators who were also euro-sceptics, some of whom thought that devolution was, in some way, an evil Brussels plot to break up Britain. There was a lot of talk about the need for an English parliament. There was a lot of talk also of warm beer, village greens and robust matrons on bicycles – a kind of Orwellian theme-park England that no longer exists.

Now, you might have thought that, with the SNP winning a landslide election in Scotland, the English Question would be posed with ever-growing urgency. But curiously, as McEwan indicated, the reverse seems to have happened. Identity wars are not breaking out. Nor has enmity between the Scots and English grown as many forecast.

Back in the 1990s, some Scottish and English newspapers became preoccupied with stories of growing anti-Englishness in Scotland. Tales were told of playground taunts at children with English accents. The film Braveheart was accused of inciting racial hatred. When a 19-year-old was beaten to death on the outskirts of Edinburgh, some suggested his English accent had been a factor, though other witnesses cited inter-school tensions. Devolution had fomented "a rising tide of anti-English sentiment", according to Katie Grant in The Spectator. Why couldn't we all just be one big happy British family without all this digging up the past?

Well, the past is history now. And as we roll on to the independence referendum, which would have been unimaginable in the 1990s, stories of anglophobia in Scotland seem to have faded as well. Perhaps Scotland and England have changed, grown up, during the devolution years. Separation is now openly talked about. Equally, it is all right for novelists to out themselves as English without evoking images of empire, jingoism and club ties.

I'M not entirely sure McEwan is right, mind you, about all authors being either English, Scottish, Welsh or Irish. Where would you place a writer like JK Rowling, who was born in England but has Scots ancestry and lives in Scotland, who writes about an English public school for wizards located on a Highland loch? But actually: who cares? We are becoming as promiscuous about national identity as we are about gender. You can be more or less what you want.

Indeed,you can have your cake and eat it, like the First Minister Alex Salmond who chaired the Ian McEwan event and insisted that Britishness was "part of a multi-layered Scottish identity". Scottish Nationalists seem to be trying to embrace the very British identity that English people such as Ian McEwan are abandoning. This is an antidote to charges of separatism. Nationalists now say that voting for independence does not mean leaving the UK, which pre-dated the 1707 Act of Union, being a product of the 1603 Union of the Crowns. Well, perhaps – though historians will say the term "United Kingdom" didn't really come into use until 1801 when the "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" was created. Before that, it was just "Great Britain".

Does this matter? Well, I think the panel of academics who reviewed Salmond's proposed referendum question last week had a point when they insisted it should read: "Do you want Scotland to be an 'independent state'" rather than referring to an "independent country" as the SNP favoured. Scotland is already a country, a nation, and that didn't change with the creation of the UK.

However, Scotland is a nation without a state, and that surely is what the referendum is about. It is about power, not identity; about who makes the crucial decisions about economic affairs, and where they make them: in Holyrood or Westminster. This is a constitutional issue about statehood. But whatever the result in 2014, the people of this mongrel nation will still be able to ascribe to themselves whatever national identity they want. And even change it day by day, like their clothes.