For some time I have believed that one of the potential advantages of Scottish independence is that it would allow England to rediscover itself by going through the positive process of becoming English rather than British.

For a very long time the English have not had any particular sense of their own national identity. In recent years the flag of St George has been discovered, usually in a spirit of insecure belligerence, and flaunted in support of the English football or cricket teams. But for many English people, even the most self-consciously civilised and intelligent, there has been constant confusion as to the difference between being English and being British.

That most eminent of English intellectuals, the great socialist historian Alan Taylor, whose life almost straddled the twentieth century (born 1906, died 1990) got thoroughly mixed up in the very last paragraph of his masterwork, English History 1914-1945.

In this single paragraph he wrote of the British people coming of age in the Second World War. He wrote about the British people destroying Hitler. Then he wrote about an English soldier riding with tanks into liberated Belgium. Then he invoked the British people going through both world wars from beginning to end. Then he noted that few sang "England arise"; yet England, he claimed, had risen all the same.

This peculiar mishmash typifies the confusion that has bedevilled the English mindset for a long time. In 1991 I went on an extensive tour of England, researching a book I'd been commissioned to write as a detached yet Anglophile Scot. I found three great strands: intense dislike and resentment of London; an excessive localism and parochialism, well beyond anything I'd encountered in Scotland; and a constant uncertainty as to the difference between Britishness and Englishness.

Sometimes the themes were mixed up together. In a terribly run-down estate near Rochdale, just off the M62, I encountered a compassionate and humane vicar who was in despair. His parish was beset by drug-taking, prostitution and vandalism, by squalor and misery. The unemployment rate among the young was more than 70%. He contrasted this with his previous parish in Dorset, one of the wealthiest in England. Nothing in his upbringing, his training or his culture had prepared him for what he had found in this bereft corner of Lancashire.

He believed that his national church, the Church of England, had "ratted" on his estate. He said that his church should have had at least seven or eight people serving in his parish, not just him. He despaired of his country. He could find no binding, cohesive force. England was divided and broken.

His anger was eloquent and profound and I was perhaps naive to seek in a benign and nascent English nationalism a possible answer to his hopelessness. The disparities and divisions he had experienced bedevil many countries, not just England. Yet I sensed that he was longing for some national force to help his people, and to build a bridge between the two different Englands he had experienced. Britishness would have been of no use to him, but a benign encompassing Englishness might.

Nationalism need not be a pejorative word. The politics of nationalism need not descend into a jingoistic distortion of patriotism, or an unfortunate bragging ideology of national superiority. Nationalism is too often associated with ethnocentric or racist aggrandisement. It can and should be a binding, beneficial tendency, uniting people who otherwise have little in common. It can fuse a sense of identity, a sense of allegiance and a sense of obligation.

Unfortunately, too few politicians seem to understand this. Those politicians who are currently trying to talk up Britishness as an antidote to Scottish - and possibly now English - nationalism are missing the point. At best they are opportunistically looking to their own political careers; at worst they are myopically misunderstanding the benign potential of ameliorative nationalism.

The latest findings of the National Centre for Social Research indicate that fewer than half of Britons regard themselves as primarily British, with the strongest rise in a sense of separate national identity occurring among the English. I welcome this trend. I agree emphatically with Alex Salmond when he says that an emergent English identity is an extremely positive development.

To return to that fine historian, Alan Taylor. He enjoyed baiting the Scots, describing us as "Scotch". He also insisted it was reasonable to talk about "English feelings" and "English patterns of life". Fair enough. But although he could discern such feelings and patterns, he could not always distinguish them from what was British, not English.

Finally, the only self-consciously and forcefully British newspaper I know of was the short-lived British Gazette, used as a propaganda tool by Churchill during the General Strike. It sought the "unconditional surrender" of the "enemy" - ie, the strikers. Perhaps there is some kind of moral or lesson in that.