Latest Gordon Broontervention hits the Private Frazer barrier

He reminds me of my dad’s old doctor. Whenever you went for a consultation he would let you know that he knew someone else with the same symptoms, only they had died painfully and horribly. But even he could beat Gordie in a cheeriness competition.

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You wait ages for a Broon-tervention, and then two come along at once. It was only a few days ago that the former Prime Minister, whose ego is inversely proportional to his ability, made a Broontervention to warn us about the doom that would befall us if Scotland went for independence.

It’s a defining characteristic of Broonterventions that no matter how often they occur, when they do happen it’s for the first time ever. There’s a special footnote in the laws of quantum physics to describe it, the post-neoclassical endogenous growth theory rule.

That would be the sort of growth that he meant back in 2009, when he was Prime Minister and people still took him seriously. The Clunking One announced at PMQs that public spending would continue to rise, and that there would be a 0% rise in the fiscal year 2013-14. That’s a degree of clarity that Theresa May would be jealous of. He was far too busy saving the world to bother his immensely huge head with trivial little matters like Scotland.

Fast forward several years and pontificating on the fate of Scotland is the only time that Gordie can get anyone to pay him any attention, because only the British nationalist media in Scotland still takes Gordie seriously. Yet even there it’s obvious that the enthusiasm is waning.

There’s only so much doom you can portend without breaking the Private Frazer-barrier, and Gordie smashed that quite some time ago. He can portend doom several times in one single pace of the carpet in front of a captive audience of invited Labour hacks and press people in a room where the windows have been bolted in order to prevent anyone escaping.

This week’s Broontervention is doom-mongering about the fate of the NHS and the trauma in store for it in an independent Scotland. During the independence referendum Gordie portended to one and all that transplants wouldn’t be possible in an independent Scotland and if you needed a kidney you’d be left to die on a dirty trolley – a supermarket trolley at that.

But you wouldn’t be able to get a trolley because you need a pound coin to liberate one from the trolley park and Scotland wouldn’t be allowed to use the pound. That’s if you could fight your way through the ravaging zombie hordes in order to reach the supermarket, which would have sold out of square slice anyway. The shameless lie was breathlessly reported all over the Scottish media because it was the Gospel according to Gordon.

Although to be fair, Gordie was perfectly correct about transplants not being possible. It’s just that he really meant that it’s not possible to transplant a sense of shame, as he demonstrates every time he Broontervenes. But that’s the case with or without Scottish independence.

We can always rely on Gordie to warn us that an independent Scotland will be so friendless even the midgies will be lonely. In an independent Scotland the Daleks will find you hiding behind the sofa.

In an independent Scotland Annie Lennox will sound like a cat being neutered without an anaesthetic. In an independent Scotland no plain loaf will have any outsiders. In an independent Scotland Whitney Houston won’t always love you. In an independent Scotland there will only be liquorice without any allsorts. In an independent Scotland when you reply “aye, right,” to a stupid question, people won’t realise you’re being sarcastic.

You get the drift. You only need to see the headline “Gordon Brown intervenes” to know that we’re all going to die horribly, in penury, with no food, clothing or shelter, or even worse no internet, and we can only be saved if we put our trust in the Gord who will lead us all to salvation under the one true federalism. You don’t even need to read the article to know that it’s going to involve carpet-pacing, invited audiences and lashings of dooooooom.

It’s just a pity that after the 2014 referendum, when Scotland did put its faith in the one true Gord who was going to personally ensure that the promises made by the anti-independence parties would be delivered, he vanished more quickly than Ruth Davidson when a Scottish Conservative councillor has been caught being racist on social media. So even if, and it’s an immensely big if, bigger even than Gordon’s ego, Gordon’s assurances were accurate, he’s doing to do precisely the square root of hee-haw about it.

Gordon Brown is right about one thing. The NHS is facing trauma. It’s facing trauma if Scotland is foolish enough to remain a part of the UK. The Conservatives are not taking us out of the EU in order to preserve public services.

They’re doing so because they’re hell-bent on implementing a Thatcherite low-tax, low-wage and minimal public service economy. Preserving and maintaining the NHS under such circumstances is going to be all but impossible. Preserving and maintaining NHS Scotland when the Conservatives are determined to use Brexit as an excuse to undermine and hollow out the devolution settlement is at best wishful thinking.

And let us not forget that the devolution settlement, which is now facing an existential threat, is one that Gordon Brown swore he’d personally defend. Yet here he is Broontervening.

Gordon Brown once promised Scotland a state where the government was committed to redistribution, to pooling and sharing, to looking after the poor and the vulnerable. He promised a country with a strong NHS, with good public services. The truth is that such a state is no longer possible within the UK. The Britain that Gordon promised has vanished along with his defence of it. The NHS is 70 years old. If we want to still have it in 70 years’ time that’s only going to be possible with an independent Scotland.