SINCE Christmas is above all a time for loving thy neighbour, I thought it might be a good opportunity to speak lovingly of England.

Like many supporters of Scottish independence, I am a confirmed Anglophile. I spent most of my childhood in England. England to me – the England I know and love, and sometimes miss – is country pubs, real ale, ploughman’s lunches, smelly dogs by open fires. Old market towns. Castles, museums and heritage sites. Preserved steam railways lovingly sustained by volunteers. Sunday morning walks on public footpaths through wintering Wessex woods.

Lazy summer afternoons. Afternoon tea. Tea rooms. Tea and cake. Proper china pots of tea. The common, tacit wisdom that tea solves all problems. Picnic hampers. Outdoor summer plays in the grounds of ruined abbeys.

Rowing on the river. Cricket. Test Match Special. In Our Time. The Shipping Forecast. Navy Days. Gin and tonic at six o’clock sharp in the wardroom scruffs bar.

Sir John Betjeman, with his war on Slough and his gentle tirades against hideous bungalows.

There is even a lot to be said for English food: cooked English breakfasts, Cumberland sausages, Lincolnshire sausages, sausage rolls, pork pies, fish and chips (best on the Yorkshire coast, with Whitby as the epicentre of greatness), roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, beef Wellington, lamb with mint sauce, Coleman’s mustard. Mince pies, brandy butter. All traditional English Christmas food, with the possible exception of sprouts.

Pimms. Elderflower cordial. Pick-Your-Own fruit. Coxes apples, West Country scrumpy so authentic it’s got bits of dead wasp in it. Summer pudding, scones, clotted cream, custard, roast potatoes, Stilton, Marmite and Weetabix, possibly even all at once. Victoria sponges, Victoria plums, Victoria by The Kinks. Statues of Queen Victoria.

Magna Carta, the Glorious Revolution. Parliamentary government (although not necessarily the current lot, nor its current corrupted state). The Levellers (not the band). The Tolpuddle Martyrs. The Abolitionist movement. Chartists. John Bercow shouting “Division! Clear the lobby!”

A swift half on the way home. Skittle alleys. Hobbyists, tinkerers, amateur inventors, part-time paleontologists, autodidactic experts in obscure subjects, bearded local historians, folk musicians, beekeepers, artisan mead-makers, bell-ringers in M&S cardigans. Writers in big old drafty houses full of books and paintings, which they can hardly afford to heat.

Self-deprecation. The way the colours and textures of villages and cities vary with local stone types. Thatched roofs and Tudor streets.

The English language: its convoluted history, generous vocabulary and manifold accents. Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Kipling. Charles Dickens, Benjamin Zephaniah, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy and CS Lewis. Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice. Agatha Christie. Winnie-the-Pooh, Thomas the Tank Engine and Postman Pat. The Secret Garden, Brambley Hedge, Terry Pratchett. The distinctly English humour of Monty Python, Blackadder, Fawlty Towers and Alan Partridge.

Panto. Gilbert and Sullivan’s giddy operettas. The abundance of ancient village churches with hand-tapestried hassocks, musty smells, memorial plaques and an almost tangible presence of congregants gone by. Ghosts, both in and out of their proper haunting grounds. MR James, RH Malden, EG Swain.

The gentleness of the Downs, the majesty of the Lakes, the ruggedness of the Cornish coast. The view from the East Coast mainline. Badgers, otters, robins and hedgehogs.

High-quality period dramas and television adaptations. The breadth and variety of knowledge. David Attenborough. The windy staircase and top floor of double-decker buses. Foxgloves and delphiniums. Early winter evenings and fireplaces. Bonfire Night. Village fetes.

The Women’s Institute and the Mother’s Union.

Yet for all this cultural and historical greatness, England today is in a horrible mess. It is a country that has lost its way, forgotten its values, debased its institutions, betrayed its own history. Having been the centre of a globe-spanning Empire from the 18th to the 20th centuries, it has internalised an imperial mindset, a sense of exceptionalism, that now, in its reduced circumstances, makes it look ridiculous. England is, at best, a medium-sized, medium-ranking, European nation. The sooner it recognises this the better it will be.

England is also a country that has never found its own political expression. England, as a nation distinct from the British Imperial State, has no parliament, no government, no voice of its own. The pathetic, self-destructive madness of Brexit is really a cry from the heart of a confused and abandoned England that has lost an Empire and no longer knows itself. At the root of all this is a constitutional crisis – a crisis of identity, institutions, values and principles – that the people of England will have to resolve, perhaps rather urgently, when the reality hits hard.

It is in an independent Scotland’s interests for an independent England to thrive as a stable, open, democratic, prosperous country. As a gesture of neighbourly love, we should give them any help we can.

The TNT show is on a short winter break but you can enjoy again our previous guests Brian Cox and Eddi Reader. Seasons greetings to all.