Some certainties of Scottish life have just been reaffirmed. We thought summer was beckoning, so Biblical amounts of rain have drowned our hubris.

And an SNP First Minister has made ambitious promises about what his government hopes to achieve while blaming Westminster in advance if it doesn’t work out.

Business as usual.

The independence question and the blame game that goes with it is never absent from Scottish political life, but everyone knows that independence is as relevant to the here and now as sunglasses and a piña colada. There’s no chance of a referendum in the foreseeable and people don’t want one imminently anyway, even many SNP supporters.

But for those background figures on both sides of the debate who are ever vigilant to the possibilities, some extra information came to light this week that will have cheered one side and worried the other: people’s sense of national identity is changing, with our sense of belonging to the UK apparently weakening.

The results of the 2022 census show that the percentage of people who say Scottish is their only national identity has increased since the previous census from 62.4 per cent to 65.5 per cent. Not a huge increase, perhaps, but when you set that against what has happened to British national identity in Scotland, it looks more significant.

The percentage who said their only national identity was British did increase, from the low base of 8.4 per cent to 13.9, but the proportion who said they felt both Scottish and British plummeted, from 18.3........

© Herald Scotland