Yesterday I read the main foreign story in the The Times. �Thugs and threats on the street as nationalists rally to arrested leader� ran the large headline.

Yesterday I read the main foreign story in the The Times. "Thugs and threats on the street as nationalists rally to arrested leader" ran the large headline. This was about the demonstration in support of Radovan Karadzic in Belgrade. I read the long, thorough report carefully. Nowhere it the text did the words nationalists or nationalism appear.

This made me uneasy. Something in the back of my mind made me return to Saturday's edition of another London paper, the Daily Telegraph. In a comment piece, its former editor, Charles Moore, discussed nationalism. Moore's main theme was that nationalism mobilises resentment. This is only partially true, but it is a defensible position. What was more worrying in his argument were the references to Karadzic and Robert Mugabe Moore presented his analysis of the downside of nationalism and then - the killer moment - claimed that this "could spread to Scotland".

To be fair, he wrote unequivocally that Alex Salmond was no Karadzic. But somehow the association was left lingering in the mind. Moore contented himself with describing Salmond as "a clever rogue who knows how to exploit grievance".

Three weasel words there: rogue, exploit, grievance.

As someone who believes in Scottish independence but has never joined the SNP, I believe this kind of language is insidious and potentially hazardous. Mr Moore may be in danger of fostering exactly what he claims to deprecate.

Salmond is not a rogue; he is a responsible politician. Under his leadership, the SNP has made it abundantly clear that we Scots live in a world where crude isolationist nationalism is not an option.

As Alex Salmond understands better than most, our world is one of interdependency, a world in which transnational institutions, such as, for example, the UN, the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the WTO, Nato - often have more sway than mere nation states.

The SNP recognises this and so, I reckon, do most Scots. Again, most Scots who would contend for independence are not so naive - or so bad - as to think that the case and momentum for independence can be based on anti-English grievance. Sir Malcolm Rifkind, no less, dealt with this point brilliantly a few years ago when he pointed out that while Scots may occasionally be irritated by the English, they do not have serious grievances with them.

The essence of modern mature Scottish nationalism is simple. Scotland already is a nation, with a distinguished and proud history. We have our own legal system, our own church, our own educational traditions and so on.

What we do not have is our state. We are a nation waiting to become a state. No Scottish nationalist is trying to create a nation out of another nation: our nation already exists. All we are trying to do is to create - or, technically, recreate - a state to go with a currently stateless nation. This is not the work of rogues. What Scottish nationalists wish to end is nothing to do with England or Englishness. What they wish to end is the British state.

Why this should be so controversial and emotive beats me. I could write a book about the failings of the British state. Indeed, I have just written not a book but an essay for a forthcoming book on independence in which I try to explain that the British state, for most of its 301 years, has been anything but a success.

It has had a few periods of extraordinary greatness - most recently in the 1940s, when Nazism was defeated and then the virtually bankrupt state embarked on a huge and nobly intended experiment in welfarism.

But these were exceptional years. Since then there has been steady, corrosive and very sad decline. The reasons for the decline are many but the decline itself is indisputable.

And yet Mr Moore states that the break-up of Britain would be a catastrophe.

Catastrophe is a most powerful word. Catastrophic for whom?

For the people of England? Hardly. For the people of Scotland? Hardly. For the rest of the world? Hardly. There are plenty of genuine ongoing catastrophes in the world; Mr Moore should ponder carefully on them.

To return to where I began: I sense - and I very much hope that I am wrong - that we may be in for a period when certain elements in the English (sorry, British) media seek to tarnish the concept of nationalism with all sorts of innuendoes and seek simultaneously to smear Scottish nationalists, and particularly nationalist leaders, by indirect association with seriously bad people elsewhere.

This is unfortunate, and it will not elevate, or even maintain at the present standard, the level of debate as we continue to progress through a period of constitutional change.