Fascinating subject and a good post Dave, and I was thinking about this just the other day in relationship to identity and how we perceive ourselves and others.

I grew up on the outskirts of Birmingham and although I was not born there I moved there as a baby and consider myself a Brummie . . . it's as close as I'll ever be to being an anything, and although I'm 30 years out of the city to me it's home.

Growing up in Birmingham was interesting in the 1970s/early 1980s. The city was a melting pot of races and nationalities from the Irish in Digbeth to the West Indians in Handworth and the Asians in Sparkhill. In those days there was a fair amount of racial tension in some parts of the city and this was noticed by us as kids. I can remember the shock when the local Co-Op in our white lower-middle class/working class neighbourhood was taken over by asians. Of course, they were far better shop keepers than the people who ran the place previously and soon became very popular, although amongst the kids at school it was universally known as the 'paki shop', even by one of my best mates, who was asian himself.

Looking back these attitudes were born of pure ignorance and (I believe) were a hangover from empire. In many cases there was no actual hatred, just a feeling that 'they' were different from us. I too was in my teens when the scales fell from my eyes and I realised that this ingrained racism had no place in modern society; this was around the same time I discovered socialism.

I had also moved from Brum (which I loved) to a posh village near a small market town in northern England, and there I experienced the sort of prejudice that so many immigrants report, although they had it far worse of course. To the locals in the posh village I was a dummie Brummie, an oich whose dad had made a few quid and moved to the 'nice' area (actually my parents moved for personal reasons it transpired). However, to the locals in the nearby town where I worked I was a posh kid from the snooty village down the road. In fact I was neither of these things but I couldn't make anyone understand I was a normal teenager; in the end I deliberately lost my accent under the pressure to conform and lied to people about where I lived to stop the constant knowing winks and other insinuations. I still live near the town (not in the posh village) and to this day it's a sore point if I'm honest.

It certainly influenced me, as I can't stand racism of any kind as what some people had to suffer must have been terrible. I did my family history, and that was enlightening too, as some of my ancestors fled persecution to come here (they were Huguenots from Nimes).

I'm detecting some of this in the Scottish independence debate, as a certain protagonists stir up anti-English hatred, and indeed my wife and I were racially abused by a shopkeeper on the royal mile in Edinburgh in September. It's pretty sad that the working people of our island are being torn apart in this way as there is enough division already without creating more.