When Britain first, at heaven's command, arose from out the azure main

Jo Swinson on Newsnight Scotland tonight, offering a list of "British" things we'd be bound to miss dreadfully under independence -

"We wouldn't have Team GB at the Olympics"

Can we have that in writing, please? I can see how that might mean we won't have Craig Reedie's vote come the independence referendum, but between you and me I think he was probably a lost cause anyway.

Swinson also offered a distinctly peculiar international comparison in an effort to demonstrate that a sense of Britishness can't possibly survive independence. She pointed out that Slovenians don't talk about being Yugoslavian anymore. Well, that's for a very good reason, Jo - Yugoslavia was an artificial construct that had no meaning outside the existence of the political state. By contrast, we all live on an island called Great Britain, and it was called that for centuries before there was an island-wide political state with its capital in London. But while there may not be a specifically Yugoslavian identity anymore, what certainly still exists is a transnational Balkan identity, and one that encompasses more than just the former Yugoslav republics. Interestingly, Slovenia is the only one of those republics for which the Balkan identity doesn't seem to have much of a pull, but I'm sure the fact that Swinson handpicked it for her example has got nothing to do with that. I'm sure it's also just pure coincidence that she preferred to talk about Slovenia's attitude to its Yugoslavian heritage, rather than, for example, trying to convince us that Danes don't feel remotely Scandinavian anymore because their country is independent from Norway and Sweden.