EVEN the mere mention of the phrase “Scottish values” is to risk the usual onslaught from the Unionist Woodentop fringe accusing you of being anti-English. As we witnessed during the independence referendum and every week since, no-one does faux outrage better than the Unionist and Tory commentariat and their friends in the Scottish Labour Party.

English values, of course, are different. These values, you see, are held to be universal and the gold standard of values everywhere. Just as Greenwich Mean Time sets the world’s clocks, so English values – or “manners” as they are sometimes called – set the global standard on how the world ought to be judged.

Occasionally, the rest of the United Kingdom is permitted to share in these values and so the phrase “British values” is deployed. This was especially so, when the full might of the UK establishment was unleashed on Scotland in the last few days of the independence referendum campaign. In those glorious few days in September 2014 was Scotland any more British? And were we not told that Scotland was a “valuable” part of the United Kingdom?

We like to think we are a hardworking and gnarled wee people who will shrug our shoulders at the prospect of adversity but also at the prospect of triumph. Often it can be difficult to discern between a Scottish chap who has won the lottery and one who has lost the winning ticket.

We fancy that we don’t abase ourselves before those whom we’ve been told are our “betters” because, quite simply, we are all still the children of John Knox.

We are all considered equal before The Creator; there is no hierarchy and “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God”.

Lately, we have come to value above all else ideas and concepts of social justice. We have worked hard to ensure that minorities are treated equally here and that LGBTI people are included and can live their lives unhindered by discrimination and ridicule. We are proud there is free care for the elderly; that prescriptions are free and that there is free bus travel for everyone over the age of 60. Yet, much of what we value in how we order our society for the greatest good of the greatest many is also valued highly by many other countries. Scotland does not strive to answer the call of a higher purpose; we do not have a higher moral calling.

If some of us are being honest though, we also like to define ourselves by what we are not. Thus when a reactionary Conservative Government gains power at Westminster and moves ever more inexorably to the outer limits of hard and unrelenting right-wing ideology our instinct is to distance ourselves from it. As they seek to punish poor and vulnerable people for the greed and corruption of the banking industry then it’s natural that we want to put policies that help these people at the front and centre of our social agenda.

This is not to say that somehow Scotland values social justice, fairness and equality more than England does. It’s simply that in England a tiny cabal among the establishment have grabbed power and are ensuring they protect only their own. Yet, weren’t they voted in on a manifesto of cuts by a majority of ordinary English people?

Perhaps, though, as we saw in the independence referendum and the EU referendum, it is easy to exploit the fears of a great many people if you can bend the press and the BBC to your will. It also helps when, in Scotland, the leadership of the Labour Party has fallen into the hands of people such as Jim Murphy and Alistair Darling.

And for anyone who believes our state broadcaster remains an unbiased and objective reporter of the facts, I’d point you to their obsession with the far-right politics of Nigel Farage and the proof of its audience-manipulation last week. The way in which it has hounded and misrepresented Jeremy Corbyn is a grotesque defilement of objective journalism.

Thus we can see how a significant number of ordinary English voters can have their fears about immigration manipulated and exacerbated by the relentless daily diet of lies and propaganda carried by at least four national newspapers.

Each night this goes uncorrected by the state broadcaster whose executive decisions are made by a small group of people who shared the same boarding school dormitories as the right-wing press barons and their own executive underlings. In this atmosphere the sentiments of Norman Tebbit, carried in The Telegraph this week, are finding their mark. Tebbit, the most deeply unpleasant of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet of right-wing zealots, insisted that “the British way of life is under threat from Muslims who refuse to accept British culture”.

Tebbit, of course, paints the British way of life as a Xanadu of cheerfulness, tolerance and where everyone knows their place. Huzzah.

He neglects, of course, to provide any detail of what Britain has really become: a country whose biggest city has become a money-laundering gangsters’ paradise; a country that permits its richest people and companies to avoid paying for the privilege of doing business here; a country which victimises and humiliates its poorest people by devising underhand means of depriving them of benefits; a country which has begun to specialise in waging war with third-world countries and participating in drone strikes against innocent people; and a country which is now gleefully withdrawing into itself so that it will be free to reverse all of that obstructive human rights legislation.

In Elegy In A Country Churchyard, written in the 18th century, Thomas Gray mourns the passing of his friend, the poet Richard West.

It is my favourite English poem and it conveys much of what I love about England: its stoicism; its countryside; its cautious wisdom and sense of quiet decency.

But I wonder if the opening stanza, if it were written today, would convey sorrow for the passing of something quite different from the soul of England.

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me