Scottish writer Hardeep Singh Kohli tells why he thinks independence wouldn’t stop Scots feeling British, and how the bigger question is how England would cope with the split. Here’s a preview.

Mark Sedwill, the newly appointed permanent secretary at the Home Office, has pledged to carry on tweeting when he takes up his new role as the top civil servant running the most challenging of domestic departments.

The spirit of 2012 challenged the core instincts of both left and right, argues Sunder Katwala. But will that optimistic sense of what is distinctive about Britain survive into 2013?

British Future’s first year has been an eventful one. The success of the Jubilee and the Olympics made 2012 a year to celebrate being British, and British Future followed this success through the year. We would love to thank everyone who has been involved with our work – from those who joined us in a bed in Yorkshire to those who ate food from around the world and painted their faces at our refugee Jubilee street party in Brixton. And we would also like to say thank you to everyone who worked on our publications and research.

But mostly we would like to wish you all a Merry Christmas, and a happy new year.

I’m a white girl from an academic middle-class Russian family and he is a black French man, born in France to Senegalese immigrants. When I told my mother my boyfriend was black, the first thing she said was: “Will you be able to put up with what the world will think of it?” “It is a different world,” I replied. So far, I have been (almost) right, writes Liza Bel, a radio journalist who now lives in London with her boyfriend.

When the parents of Olympic champion Jessica Ennis, who are from Jamaica and Derbyshire, met in Sheffield in the 1980s, a majority of the public opposed to mixed race relationships. This is no longer the case, shows the new report from British Future The Melting Pot Generation: How Britain became more relaxed about race.

Twenty years ago Time magazine put a composite photograph on its front cover. It was generated by an IBM 486 computer and fused together the phenotypical features of the world’s six main racial groups. The face that emerged was that of a woman with a striking, yet blended, appearance. The purpose was to sneak preview a mid-twentieth century future in which growing global migration and cross marriage would produce Global Woman, writes professor of political science at the University of Sussex Shamit Saggar.

As a senior leader in a secondary school I have become used to schools and the education of our young people being used as a political football, as part of a tiresome debate about standards, that rarely acknowledges the tremendous work of most teachers and young people, writes Jonny Uttley, Head of South Hunsley School in Yorkshire.

Where have the events of 2012 left British patriotism? British Future and thinktank Bright Blue held an event talking about whether the Olympics, Paralympics and the Jubilee have left us with a strong new sense of national pride, or whether the hype of 2012 was just that, and we’re still just a country unable to deal with its history.