Neal Ascherson

The United Kingdom, as a multinational state, is beginning to show signs of disintegration. Even in England, opinion is growing rapidly impatient with the whole constitutional structure. Why is there no English parliament? Why do Scottish MPs vote on English matters? Why should Gordon Brown, a Scot from a Scottish constituency, be allowed to rule Britain as Prime Minister?

In the short-term, there are Tory votes to be gained in the south by calling for a ban on Scottish MPs voting on English matters ("English votes for English laws"). In the longer term, the prize the Conservative Party could win by evicting the Scots from British politics altogether is so enormous - so overwhelming, in fact - that it makes most Tory MPs nervous.

Since the 2005 elections, Labour holds a clear majority of the 529 English seats at Westminster. However, this result from Westminster's first-past-the-post electoral system and conceals the fact that the Conservatives actually won more English votes than Labour. The lesson is that any serious Tory revival could carry the party to an almost impregnable domination of English politics - as long as those Scottish MPs aren't there to spoil it.

For the moment, I cannot imagine any Westminster-British political leader bold enough to propose dissolving the 300-year-old Union treaty. None the less, a truly ambitious, coldly clear-sighted leader - once in power - could now bring about a situation in which the Union would unravel and it could be made to seem to be all the fault of the Scots.

Let me describe a country - a multinational state - in which the richest and most powerful section of the population has grown discontented with its relationship to the other nations.

Those other nations, meanwhile, press for more autonomy and a larger share of state wealth. But despite some startling opinion polls, it is still pretty unlikely that the component nations are yet ready to vote for the break-up of the state in a referendum.

And what country is that? It's Czechoslovakia in 1992. Allow me to examine the proposition that the Scots are preparing to march out of the Union. But the story of the 1992 Velvet Divorce between the Czechs and the Slovaks suggests that we may be looking at that possibility from quite the wrong angle.

When Londoners think about Scottish independence, they probably imagine half a million Bravehearts standing in Princes Street and roaring: "Freedom!" That's improbable. Independence can happen by metropolitan push as well as Nationalist pull. Much more likely, a series of disputes between Westminster and Holyrood about money and reserved powers will seize up the weak and ill-maintained machinery of devolution. Then the London negotiators may lose patience and tell the Scots that, if they still want more, they should go off and have their own state - by that stage, the simplest solution. That's a fatalistic scenario: institutional defects working out their own logic.

But what about agency? What if some politician in England decided that he or she had an interest in making that machinery seize up? The background to the Czechoslovak split was certainly both institutional and political. After the collapse of communism in 1989, Slovak nationalism had revived, but mainly as demands for greater autonomy rather than full independence. Meanwhile, the public in both nations felt sceptical about the existing federal government structures, redesigned in the 1968 constitution after the Warsaw Pact invasion. But the motive power for the split - the agency - was provided by the Czech politician Vaclav Klaus (today the President of the Czech Republic).

An ambitious and crafty neo-liberal, Klaus concluded that Slovak needs and demands would always obstruct his own plans in a federal Czechoslovakia. In an independent Czech state, on the other hand, he would be relatively unhindered. The difficulty was that neither the Czech nor the Slovak public wanted the federation to break up. Instead, although discontented with the present structure, they looked forward to a better one.

What Klaus achieved, in the years leading to the final breach in late 1992, was to provoke a series of unacceptable proposals from either side which would end in a separation apparently caused by Slovak nationalist intransigence. In this dance, his tango partner was the Slovak politician Vladimir Meciar, who did not originally want Slovakian independence but fell into almost all the traps dug for him by Vaclav Klaus. The journalist Theodore Draper wrote: "It was as if Meciar pounded on Klaus's door without really wanting to knock it down; to Meciar's surprise, Klaus opened the door and Meciar fell in."

As Abby Innes, author of Czechoslovakia: the Short Goodbye, comments, "It was the Czech and not the Slovak will to separation that proved implacable." Both sides declared that negotiations on a new federal or confederal relationship had failed, and that independence was the only conclusion. Both sides, quite scandalously, refused to hold referendums on Slovak independence or the dissolution of the federation because they knew they would lose them.

Czechoslovakia ceased to exist on January 1, 1993.

This story puts conventional predictions about the Anglo-Scottish Union in a new light. The congruencies of that Czech-Slovak divorce with the topics I have been discussing are obvious, and the old Klaus/Meciar script can be rerun with a new cast in the British present.

First, politicians and journalists with an agenda have tried to foment a general Scotophobia. Directly, they have failed, but they have encouraged English ethnic awareness and drawn English attention to the defects of the Union as expressed in the devolution settlement. For the purposes of the phobia-mongers, that can count as success.

Secondly, there is now discontent with the 1997 devolution settlement on both sides of the border. The 1707 Union itself is no longer perceived in England as an indispensable pillar of parliamentary democracy.

Thirdly, the notion of "Britain" is weakening as identity politics - already embedded in Scotland and Wales - take root in England. "Britishness", as the common culture of a group of human beings exercising social and political leadership, has almost ceased to be tangible. The gentlemen class has left the public stage, and the repackaging of Victorian bourgeois ethics as "British values" is too vapid to be a substitute.

So far, the resemblances between us and 1990s Czechoslovakia are striking, if never total. But now comes the most delicate question.

Does England have a Klaus? Could he already be leading a party? The role of Klaus is implicitly offered to David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives. So far, though, it does not look as if he has the power hunger, or the political imagination, to accept it. But it must be plain that almost all the preconditions for what Vaclav Klaus did, with the stumbling assistance of Vladimir Meciar, are now being rolled out in the United Kingdom. Already, since May last year, different parties are governing in London and Edinburgh. In a few years, the SNP administration led by Alex Salmond may be facing David Cameron as British Prime Minister.

From now on, the real strain will begin to bear down on the devolution settlement after its first easy decade. The stage will be set. And all it will then lack is a leading actor, an English or Scottish politician ruthless enough to divide in order to rule.