Conflict over our identities has replaced the battle of ideologies

The story of a British Sikh who had designed his own tartan pointed to the new Britain

THE PAST week is proof that God, if not exactly British, does indeed possess a very British sense of humour. Or perhaps it is just a strange coincidence of the planets. Either way, three events that could have the most profound impact on the future organisation, tranquillity and even existence of the United Kingdom happened on the same day.

The most obvious and disappointing was the failure to bind up the wounds of 30 years of conflict in Northern Ireland. The familiar politicians, with their familiar grievances, returned to our television screens to take turns at blowing out the light at the end of the tunnel. At precisely the moment when Tony Blair must have wondered what he can now do about this unaltered quarrel, he was faced with a new quarrel on an issue that, if anything, is even more significant for the UK. It is the beginning of a serious debate about the very nature of what it now means to be British.

On the same day as the Ulster peace talks disintegrated, the Opposition leader William Hague made a thoughtful constitutional speech with potentially historic implications. Mr Hague called for Scottish and Welsh MPs to be stripped of their powers to vote at Westminster on issues solely concerning England. In effect, Westminster would alternate between being a part-time English parliament, and a part-time parliament for the whole of the United Kingdom.

With the Scots and Welsh now enjoying - or at least tolerating - their own assemblies, Mr Hague's proposal has apparently simple logic. Only English MPs should vote on English Bills. Stopping Scottish and Welsh MPs from voting on English matters at Westminster is fair, Mr Hague points out, because no English MP has a vote in the Welsh Assembly or Scottish Parliament or, for that matter, at Stormont. Fair or not, it is certainly a turning-point.

The 20th century of British political conflict has been over differences between ideologies. It may turn into a new conflict between identities. As the old divisions of left and right recede, Mr Hague has raised the fundamental national question. What is Britain? What does it mean to be British - if anything - in a world of global forces and an increasingly powerful Europe? And what relationships should we have between the various parts of these islands?

As the American historian Arthur Schlesinger once put it, "The more people feel themselves adrift in a vast impersonal, anonymous sea, the more desperately they swim towards any familiar, intelligible, protective life raft; the more they crave the politics of identity."

For Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and most of urban, multiracial England, being British never meant John Major's nostalgic vision of spinsters cycling through villages in the early morning, church bells, warm beer and cricket. As the writer Andrew Sullivan put it recently, being British more likely involved crooked teeth, good manners, pragmatism, free speech, theatre, class, monarchy, poor heating, sexual awkwardness, sentimentality towards animals, stoicism and Marmite.

Being British, in other words, was like living on the film set of Notting Hill. We were supposed to be a nation of Hugh Grants, doing that irritating blinky-stuttering thing he always does. In fact, the new Britain is much more likely to include curry, Budweiser beer, e-mail, booze cruises, football, road rage, pizza, food scares and focus groups.

But whatever you list as the real Britain, in every part of these islands there is concern over our changing sense of identity. In Scotland, for years William Hague's Tories have been seen as "the English party". Labour and the SNP, in the old politics of ideology, are largely on the same side. But they are on opposite sides of the identity question, continually fighting over Scottishness as being inclusive or exclusive. The prospect now is a similar battle in Middle England.

New Labour and the Conservatives, ideologically not so far apart, will increasingly square up on the identity question, too: over the nature of Englishness, devolution, the euro and relations with Brussels. In a pamphlet published by the Smith Institute earlier this year, the Labour MPs Gordon Brown and Douglas Alexander took the nationalist argument head on. They argue that it is a point of principle that wherever you are from in Britain you will never find yourself classed as a foreigner in any part of Britain. If you give blood in Glasgow, it may be used to treat a car crash victim in Doncaster. If you pay taxes in Aberystwyth, you can be sure that it will help pay for a hospital in Newcastle or a naval base on the Clyde.

Labour sources suggest that they did better against the nationalists in the May elections in Scotland than in Wales precisely because they so aggressively nailed the SNP on the politics of identity in Scotland; whereas, one Labour source claims, in Wales Plaid Cymru was let off the hook of separation and national divorce. But William Hague's speech, in which he grapples with the problems posed by resurgent English nationalism, means a thoroughly new dilemma for a unionist Labour party.

Anyone who can count knows that without strong support from Scottish and Welsh MPs a future Labour government could find itself consistently outvoted on English issues in Westminster. Scottish MPs such as Gordon Brown and Robin Cook would rattle around the Commons with half a job. It would make little sense to put any Scottish minister in charge, say, of the Health Service, or any of those areas of national life that are already largely devolved to Scotland and Wales. Besides, the very arguments used by Labour to keep Scotland in the union - that Scotland receives a greater share of British taxpayers' money than England - are precisely the ones that can now be used against Labour to stir up English nationalism.

For this reason the Leader of the House, Margaret Beckett, immediately called the Hague proposals "extremely dangerous". "Mr Hague," she said, "has rushed into something which he presumably knows will give him short- term political advantage without thinking through the long-term consequences. Although he claims to support the Union of the United Kingdom he is in danger of fermenting exactly the kind of debate and discussion which will lead to its breaking up into its several countries."

But such a debate is inevitable. All Mr Hague has done is to speed it up. And there was, on that same extraordinary day of the Hague speech and the Northern Ireland farce, a third news story that pointed more optimistically to the kind of new Britain in which we all live. A British Sikh living near Glasgow, Mr Sirdar Iqbal Singh, has designed his own tartan. Mr Singh, a lover of the poetry of Robert Burns, has registered the Singh tartan with the Scottish Tartans Society.

The debate engaged by Mr Hague is going to be difficult, and there are potential dangers. But a United Kingdom that is inclusive enough to welcome a Singh tartan should not find it beyond our common wits to embrace new, reasonable relationships between England, Scotland and Wales and maybe - though I admit this is a stretch of the imagination - common sense in Northern Ireland too. Goodbye, Hugh Grant. Hello, Mr Singh.

The writer is a presenter on BBC News 24