Well, that'll be us affronted again. With the gentle humour for which he is celebrated, Jeremy Paxman has failed to praise the national poet. Our poet, that is, not his. The detail is relevant. It is just possible that had Robert Burns been Irish or Australian the voice that is Newsnight Scotland's best excuse would not have been heard. There is something about Jocks that Paxo Britannica can't resist.

Fair enough. Burns is not to every taste, though taste deserves a mention. A career spent barracking politicians no doubt tunes the ear. A hobby devoted to provoking the easily-provoked probably becomes addictive. The poet, ironically enough, also enjoyed winding up the great, the good, and the sensitive types.

Still, "a king of sentimental doggerel"? Handy publicity for the Chambers Dictionary, but some way below that work's usual standards. Burns was at his worst, Afton Water always excepted, when he tried his hand at Mr Paxman's dialect. I draw no conclusions. In his own tongue, following Henryson and Dunbar, Ramsay and Fergusson, as a political radical and satirist, lyric poet and (unpaid) restorer of a native culture, the bard did not fake emotion. Couldn't afford the luxury.

Mr Paxman knows all this, doesn't he? If he does not, the loss is his. If he knows, as they say, fine well, then we are back in a familiar game. Putting 300 years of fascinating history aside, he started it, yet again. Somehow the Scots get under his skin and the BBC man - nation speaking unto nation - does his best to return the favour.

I can get a little queasy, too, about the notion of a national poet. On the other hand, if we must have one, we could do worse. The clutter around Burns is a nuisance, but a surfeit of suppers doesn't make him a poetaster. As a professor at Cornell once said of the verses: "The claim could be supported that, next to Pope, Burns is the greatest eighteenth century master of these literary types." A fair scribbler, then.

So is it the funny words? English folk tend to have problems still with a language they refuse to recognise as a language. Best to leave that one to Ezra Pound on the subject of England's own Geoffrey Chaucer: "Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever."

Burns was a sophisticated writer. In Mr Paxman's terms, he knew his stuff. Walter Scott told Byron that the peasant, who never saw the inside of a high school, "had an education not much worse than the sons of many gentlemen". One study has claimed that the poet was better read than Byron, the old Harrovian, himself.

And sentimental? Put it this way. There are verses in The Merry Muses of Caledonia that would cause a riot if they were taught in classrooms today, verses that even now would not be printed unexpurgated in any newspaper. "Bawdy" is the Newsnight word. Besides, if sentimentality, real or imagined, is a problem, I look forward to Mr Paxman on the subject of England's greatest novelist. Burns can't hold a moist hankie to Charles Dickens.

Never mind. Mr Paxman likes to tread that fine, twisting line between fact and opinion. He also enjoys putting the Union's minority partner in its place. Scottish Raj; Newsnight Jockland; chips on both shoulders; political attack dogs; treacly sentimentalists: does he mean us? I hope the trout are biting during the broadcaster's Scottish holiday, because I'm not.

He needs to be a bit more original, for one thing. Sometimes it seems they are queuing up south of the border to poke the Scots with sticks. A while back "anti-English racism" was the great horror. Then, perennially, there is the myth of subsidy junkies.

This newspaper did the sums, long before the price of a barrel of Scottish crude reached mesmerising levels, and failed to make that charge stick. The sniping goes on. London's Evening Standard never tires. In the shires and in the Tory party, agitation over "English votes on English issues", West Lothian queries and the origins of Gordon Brown continues. Lord Coe decrees that there will be a "British" football team at London's Olympics, even if the Scots (and the Welsh, and the Northern Irish) are absent. We have to spread ourselves thin, we 8% and a bit of the UK population, to catch all the flak.

Nothing new in that. No sooner was the ink dry on the treaty of Union than the London backlash, complete with mob violence, had begun. As the historian Linda Colley explains: " large numbers of Scots were penetrating England itself, compromising its identity, winning access to its riches and cutting out English men". Someone must have thought the Union was our idea.

Now Burns. Not, by any chance, because he is the only Scottish poet Mr Paxman and his compatriots have heard of? Surely after 300 years "stronger together than apart" ignorance of Scots, Scotland and Scottish culture could not be endemic?

Of course not. Thousands of English-born folk, welcome one and all, vote with their feet each year. Nightmares about overcrowding, housing, health, education and the thing called "quality of life" seem to dissipate. Those they leave behind seem almost envious, sometimes, over the legislative bits and pieces flowing from a devolved parliament.

Whether it is smoking bans or bus travel for the elderly, personal care or cancer drugs, England spends a lot of time catching up. Not that I would boast: those chips on the shoulders get in the way. This is, historically speaking, playground stuff, but what might be called the underlying psychology is fascinating. Put the SNP and political nationalism to one side: there is a real sense now of cultural drift and difference.

These days Mr Paxman's BBC has to be reminded to append the words "in England and Wales" to reports, but that merely emphasises the contrasts. On the other side of the looking glass, this Scottish commentator finds post-devolution British General Elections to be strange affairs. Too many of the arguments over policy have nothing whatever to do with us.

Mr Paxman is on record as believing that the people of England couldn't care less if Scots went their own way. In my book, that's handy, if true. In fact, if I happened to be entirely devious I would be congratulating the broadcaster for helping Scots to see themselves as those of his persuasion see them. But I wonder, not for the first time, if Paxo Pasha has thought things through.

Oil, obviously. It's valuable stuff: who'd have guessed? Squaddies, too: still more valuable. Nuclear submarine bases, land, natural resources, a Labour Party, a seat on the UN Security Council, and "punching above one's weight" in Europe: I could go on. That's Mr Paxman's job, and his evident pleasure. I still wonder about psychology, and about the effect on England's teeming millions were they to wake up and realise how small their crowded corner of the island can seem.

They might feel - though let's not be patronising - a little diminished. They might even notice chips on their shoulders. Everyone else does.