BRITISH POLITICS IS NOT A FAMILY BUSINESS

"I would be heartbroken if this family of nations that we've put together - and we've done such amazing things together - if this family of nations was torn apart." David Cameron.

There is a long article in the lifestyle (Life&Arts) section of this weekend's FT by James Meek, based on his recently published book, "Private Island: Why Britain now belongs to someone else". Entitled "Power from the people", there is much to agree with in the article's description of the British malaise, although the diagnosis seems weak in places.

Meek maintains that Britain has undergone "some grand existential alteration" in the past 20 years ago, and I have to agree that the country is an increasingly peculiar place.

Take, for instance, the recent hounding of the Ashya King family across Europe by agents of the British state with the help of an EU arrest warrant. The family have now taken their child to Prague for medical treatment, a fitting conclusion to a particularly Kafkaesque narrative.

David Cameron and his colleagues appear to have intervened on behalf of the family, and rightly so. However, he is wrong to invoke mawkish comparisons of this and the modern nation state.

There is, quite frankly, a rather daft headline in today's Mail  newspaper about "Childless SNP chiefs 'who have no feel for UK family': Leaders of Scottish National Party 'want to break up Union because they do not understand families' which might have emanated from some Westminster spin-doctor, although the quote appears to come from a rugby player.

Modern politics is fundamentally about neither sport nor some ideal of family, and the sooner senior British politicians grow up and realise this, the better. As the Governor of the Bank of England said recently, Britain is a country with "deep, deep structural problems". Scotland and the rest of the country need a government capable of tackling these, separately or together.