BRITAIN needs to "wake up" to the constitutional changes Scottish devolution and the Scottish independence referendum are having on it, Gordon Brown has insisted.
"Scotland is changing Britain for good. Dead and buried is the idea of a unitary state now. Dead and buried is the idea of the sovereignty of the Queen in Parliament; that has given way to popular sovereignty where referendums will decide the biggest issues."
The former Labour Prime Minister explained there was a mistaken view that Scotland had just discovered it was a nation and was now asserting its nationhood, but he stressed Scottish identity had been a "constant in Scottish history".
What was new was the weakening of Scottish traditional institutions.
These include the likes of the churches, banks and sporting clubs meant they could no longer express Scottishness in the way they did and the vacuum was being filled by political nationalism.
Speaking to a lunch at Westminster, he said if a sense of Britishness could not be built around Empire, institutions, military pre-eminence and economic dominance, then it had to be built on the shared ideas of liberty, fairness and social responsibility.
lMr Brown is supporting England at the World Cup, and said: "I will support England if Scotland is not playing. This rivalry is part of the Scottish psyche."
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