A RUEFUL Labour supporting friend of mine who had been active during the 2015 UK election campaign told me weeks before the poll that he felt his party might be eviscerated. At that point the numbers were already beginning to spell out the word APOCALYPSE but my friend’s presentiment of doom was also based on what his elderly mother had been telling him. “The SNP first sent round an awfully nice chap who was almost apologetic about bothering her, knowing that she was a solid Labour supporter, so they just spent a very pleasant 15 minutes or so talking about holidays, families and football.

“A week later another SNP canvasser arrived, a woman this time. Once more, politics was never mentioned until the nice SNP lady asked my mum to tell her what was important to her. By the time the fourth SNP visitor turned up a few days before the election he was armed with my mum’s entire political DNA and my mum in turn was ripe for the plucking because none of the first three Nats had tried the snake oil routine. They had charmed her from her Labour-supporting branches so that when, at last the man with the hard sell came to call she was already halfway across the threshold.”

To encounter the SNP Party machine can be an unnerving experience for the uninitiated; like a frog in boiling water you don’t know you’ve been done until it’s too late to react. On another occasion while I was hacking away at the coalface of truth on Her Majesty’s Daily Mail several years ago I took a phone call late on a Friday night from one of the SNP’s senior spin doctors. I can’t tell you who this man is, apart from the fact that he possesses the same Christian name as me and he shares his surname with the firms that make posh sweaters and fancy crisps.

“How’s the family, Kevin,” asked Kevin.

“Aye good,” I replied warily, knowing that this fellow never phoned at this time unless it was to exact a small penance for a cock-up.

“And what about the Celtic,” he asked. “Your boys are playing some attractive stuff,” he added, but by then I’d divined what my sleek adversary was really on about. Almost an entire week had passed since our error the previous week when an academic had made a false and potentially damaging claim about the SNP. By the time Kevin had called I’d thought we’d got away with it. Instead he was just biding his time.

Without raising his voice and in a tone that was almost apologetic he was able to extract from us a small retraction and the concession of a double-page spread by Alex Salmond the following week to counter the untidy claims of the academic.

Both of these anecdotes, I believe, are illustrative of why the SNP spin machine will not give a Friar Tuck about last week’s numbers in The Times claiming to show that support for independence has fallen by a single percentage point since the first referendum. They will be treated with insouciance.

The SNP would bite your hand off if they were offered a starting point of anything over the 40 per cent mark when the second referendum comes. They still possess a slick and assured campaigning team and strategy which their opponents simply cannot emulate. The two main parties of the Union in Scotland lack a strategy between them apart from talking about a second independence referendum more often than the SNP.

Much has happened since the first independence referendum and almost all of it is good news for supporters of Scottish independence. The UK is in the throes of a nasty, extreme right-wing ferment stirred up by the Conservative Government at Westminster. While we watch in transfixed horror at the alt-right visigoths and knuckle-draggers now gathering for the feast at Trump Tower we are inclined to pity the poor souls who bought the line about draining the Washington swamp.

Yet, the Tory Brexiteers led by Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and David Davis have performed the same confidence trick on the working class people of England’s northern midlands. These were the people who were persuaded to vote to leave the EU in the delusion that they were somehow delivering a blow to the British establishment. The establishment though, has only been strengthened and, if Brexit does ever happen, then they will know soon enough how the establishment intends to arrange things. Freed from those pesky EU shackles like employees’ rights, sickness benefit; trade union representation, the minimum wage; blacklisting and victimisation at work, the Tories and the bosses who give them support are currently preparing for a feast while hoping everyone else is occupied by negotiations over free trade and free movement.

Some Unionist commentators have recently been unkind about the instincts of the SNP and those who remain steadfast in our belief that an independent Scotland offers a road-map out of greed, inequality and the nihilism of the survival of the strongest. They accuse them falsely of claiming that ‘Scottish’ values are different from UK values and that they march to a higher moral calling.

I’ve never witnessed any pro-independence voter claim that Scottish values are superior to English or UK ones. If any Yes voters believe that then they are of course wrong. In the main, we share those characteristics we value most about ourselves with our great southern neighbours. The real issue here is this: to what extent have the traditional British virtues of fair play; caution and quiet charity been trampled underfoot by an English Conservative Government which is dealing in the values of Trafalgar, empire and the pirates of the British East India Company?

There is no requirement now for anyone on the Yes side of the independence debate to proclaim superior Scottish values. All they need to do is proclaim the great English values and then mourn their passing. Only one country within the UK wants to restore the values that ordinary English people hold most dear… and it isn’t England.

Note to Nationalist spin doctors, here is your new campaign slogan: Re-discover England… in Scotland.