We must use Salmond's 'great debate' to strengthen Britain

Where's Scotland's Shostakovich, our brave-hearted Sibelius? The SNP need him and then leader Alex Salmond could fairly borrow the Scottish National Orchestra from Edinburgh's Festival so as to lift the spirits on Tuesday. For, at the city's Craiglockhart, as promised, the banner of nationalism is to be unfurled, the standard raised.

Unfortunately for the SNP, our great composer, James MacMillan, shows no nationalist fervour; our master of the rousing score, Craig Armstrong, is busy in Hollywood; the Orcadian maestro, Peter Maxwell Davies, is English. So, we'll have to do with the lyricism of our First Minister, Alex Salmond.

After 100 days in office, Salmond is to introduce a white paper showing the road to independence. We are to be hit with a document that I'm told will be titled: 'Choosing Scotland's Future - Independence and Responsibility in the Modern World'. The status quo is not an option (and certainly not as musical accompaniment).

I can mock on, but it's all in vain. The forces of unionism are in disarray. In conversation last week with a like-minded soul, I found we were bemoaning the truth that politicians we both like and admire follow an ugly philosophy of nationalism that would be anathema anywhere elsewhere in the world. It's very odd.

More than that, Salmond has had a hugely impressive start. From popping up in mud-covered Pennan to destroying Jack McConnell at First Minister's Questions (and seeing him off to the House of Lords, apparently) to seeking out cross-party support, to showing muscle over foot and mouth, he has established himself as Scotland's leader. In a small country way, of course. Gordon Brown has just as swiftly established himself as a heavyweight world leader.

So, on Tuesday, Salmond won't cry havoc. Instead, with very modern manners, he will begin a 'national conversation'. He will recognise that, although he believes in, and will argue for, independence, other views are held in the Scottish Parliament. He will emphasise that this is no attack on the Queen - no ma'am - but a readjustment of the 1707 Act of Union. We will all be asked to take part in a debate over what type of government will best suit our future. But the SNP have already decided that it will not be the one we have.

No, it seems we are going to be offered three choices. The first will be a gradual shifting, as and when necessary, of powers north under the current Scotland Act. The second will be 'devolution max', which will rewrite the act to include fiscal autonomy. And the third, full independence. Now, sans rousing music, we discuss.

From one view, the urge towards a 'national conversation' mimics Labour at its most banal. From another, this is an extraordinarily bold attempt to keep constitutional change in the air. If Salmond then succeeds in breaking the Union, his achievement will be every bit as remarkable as that of the Duke of Queensberry and his associates in 1707. Then there was a national conversation. 'May England for its insolence being damn'd, base epicures with pork and pudding cramm'd,' might have been at the intemperate end, but there was no shortage of well-written petitions and pitch-perfect speeches.

Professor Chris Whatley of the University of Dundee, an expert on the Act of Union, makes the point that there were unions taking place all over Europe in 1707, but the others came at the point of a bayonet. Salmond is trying - and so far succeeding - in achieving disunion without flag waving, nationalist cries and riots on the streets. (Well, apart from MSP Christine Grahame's ludicrous battle to have the Saltire fly above the Union flag over Edinburgh Castle - and you don't see Salmond near that argument.)

Instead, with a calm and reassuring voice, Salmond plans to lead the discussion. It is his duty as First Minister, he will say. Yet I will be astonished if we do not hear any reference to 'sovereignty' in his speech. I expect to hear that we Scots are a sovereign people and we retain the right to decide our own future. This may seem obvious, but the inverse, that by making our future within the Union, suggests we reject sovereignty. Or, in a phrase he will not use, it suggests that we are, at best, a colonised nation, at worst, the running dogs of the English.

Despite the calm delivery, Salmond's is fighting talk and it needs to be faced down. In what helplessly paranoid nationalist mentality are we not masters of our own fate? Gordon Brown, the man who is placing the good Scottish word 'dour' into global use, has just co-negotiated (with the French) an agreement to send a United Nations force to Darfur.

As a former correspondent in Africa, the very thought makes me shudder, but a small part of me wonders if Brown may not have the skills to finally to deliver a UN army as an effective force. Perhaps he has the grasp of detail that can make sense of the shattered truths of that increasingly complicated conflict.

Meanwhile, Brown has renegotiated the 'special relationship' with America. He has recommitted us to a defence of our shared liberal values and reconfirmed us as a serious world power, a power he is maintaining with the go-ahead for two new aircraft carriers and the controversial siting of an American missile defence station at Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. And he has shifted away from the neoconservative's schemes in nation building, asking for the release of British 'residents' and not just citizens from Guantanamo and eschewing the use of terms like the 'war on terror'.

You may not agree with some of the decisions, but we Scots are part of them and can vote and complain and argue appropriate to our own beliefs. As Salmond's sovereign people in our sovereign land, what part in these policies, in these acts, could we take? Salmond is planning to expand his powers abroad. Well, good.

Let's hope that will mean better relations with Norway and Iceland and a drawing back of Scottish talent from abroad. What we lose is the £30bn Britain spends projecting itself.

Some country has to act as a power in the world. The Council of the Isles (Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and so on) isn't going to offer much in the way of hard or soft power. Are the best of the values we have been raised on, the Enlightenment beliefs (the forces that clearly drive Brown), not worth projecting?

Brown has still to reach his 100 days as Prime Minister. Yet he has proved himself equal to terror, flood and, as now seems likely, plague (that further modern horseman, Europe, is approaching down the pike). No one can say he isn't holding his end up for the auld country.

Here in Scotland, Salmond is getting it all his own way. Unionism is in a mess. Yet within a few weeks, once McConnell has donned the ermine, there will be a new leader of Scottish Labour. Wendy Alexander is widely tipped for the role. She is close to Brown, sister of his great ally Douglas Alexander, and she has a tough task. She has to work out how to combat the seductive appeal of nationalism and its impressively persuasive champion. She should take a lesson from Brown who has so far scuppered Cameron in Westminster duels by refusing to engage with the verbal jostling of the Conservative leader.

Earlier in the year, I made a documentary about the Union. Des, the cameraman, used to mock me as I stepped in front of the lens by calling out: 'Remember, Ruaridh, it's all about you', a lovely little Scottish dirk in the side. Well, that is the hubris of the nationalism that Salmond will argue for on Tuesday. It is a form of self-absorption. We think it's all about us.

I am flying out to the Democratic Republic of Congo on Sunday to a village I last saw 11 years ago, just before it was subjected to a decade of war, murder and rape. It's not all about us. There is, as I said, a good reason why none of our great composers is writing the equivalent of Finlandia, the symphonic poem Finns were banned from whistling during the Russian occupation, and that is that artistic souls realise that there is nothing romantic in our self-absorption.

We have a Scottish Parliament which naturally and instinctively will want to draw more powers to itself. That is fair enough. The arts will benefit from the SNP Executive. Justice may prosper from imaginative local control. All these things sing to a stronger Scottish Parliament. Yet the discussion - this national conversation - should, I believe, be about how we achieve such things without sapping the power of Brown, a man raised on the philosophy of our country, and weakening a great liberal Britain's place in the world.