Wee Ginger Dug: British rule began in triumphalism, but it won't end that way

My other half and I have now found a new place which is perfect, but we need to put in a new bathroom. So on Saturday, I put out a seemingly innocuous tweet asking for some leads for some pro-indy tradespeople.

It seems to me that since the indy community was generous enough to help me buy the place, I should ensure that the benefit of any work it generates should go back to the indy community, especially just now when work is so uncertain for so many because of Covid and the looming threat of a No-Deal Brexit. I will make no apologies for preferring to spend my money helping to ensure that those who helped me have the opportunity of work in these trying times. And if you consider that to be bigoted, it says far more about you than it does about me.

It’s a small way in which I can help to pay back some people who stepped up to help me when I was in a very bleak and bad place indeed. However, within an hour or two, my Twitter feed was full of a pile-on of enraged British nationalists having apoplectic fits, organised by a notorious British nationalist troll account, calling me a racist, a Nazi, and a whole lot of other choice epithets.

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Being a British nationalist with a visceral hatred of Scottish independence is a race now, who knew? Although they are most definitely an endangered minority. They are seemingly in a place where if you don’t want to invite into your home a right-wing xenophobic Brextremist who thinks being pro-indy is racist and the SNP are Nazis, and who sits on social media abusing and insulting independence supporters, it’s you who is in the wrong for it.

While they were calling me a racist, some of them were also telling me to go back to Ireland on account of the fact I have an Irish surname. My family came to Scotland from Donegal in 1910. I am a third generation Scot. But in the eyes of certain British nationalists, I will never be Scottish enough.

And these are the folk who call me a racist for not wanting my country to be ruled by Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg. You’ve got to love the cognitive dissonance of people who are pissed off at us for wanting to get the hell out, responding by telling us to get the hell out. These are the same people who have no issue with products having Union flags plastered all over their packaging. That’s just fine and isn’t nationalist at all. But then British nationalism is defined by its hypocrisy, starting with the fact that it refuses to recognise itself as being nationalist at all. It regularly accuses supporters of independence of grievance mongering, while its more extreme exponents sit on social media looking for something to feel victimised by. However, the staunch end of opposition to independence on social media is very easily triggered.

Faced with 17 polls in a row showing a majority for independence, a British government which is less popular than coronavirus, and the prospect that it’s only going to get worse for them once Brexit starts to bite, the Britnat zoomers on social media are clutching at straws more desperately than a sexually frustrated scarecrow with his hands down his trousers.

Within minutes of a new poll result being announced, up they pop to claim that the result is meaningless because “only 1000 people were asked”. That proves nothing, except that they don’t understand how opinion polls work.

Or they’ll refuse to accept that the result is meaningful because no-one asked them or their mates. Or most delusionally of all, they will insist the result doesn’t count because it was conducted by Angus Robertson and only residents of Glasgow with Irish surnames were asked.

We heard none of this from them during previous years when polls regularly returned majorities against independence, but now the polls are showing that opponents of independence are in the minority, they are not to be trusted.

The more entrenched opponents of independence have such a great psychological investment in telling themselves that they are the majority, the realisation that they are no longer the majority is met with a denial as strong as Trump’s refusal to concede that he lost.

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It should not have come as a surprise that a seemingly innocuous tweet asking for pro-indy tradespeople should have sent so many Britnats into a fit of apoplexy. When physicists said that the theory of relativity proved that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light, they’d obviously never seen a British nationalist on social media looking for something to allow them to claim victimhood status. They’re very easily triggered these days. It must be because their UK is falling apart at the seams and there’s nothing they can do to stop it except to claim that they’re the victims of vile separatists in what is presumably an attempt to appeal to the pity vote.

As Brexit starts to bite, and the Tories continue their assault on devolution – all of which will only boost support for independence – we should expect to see more of this kind of irrational lashing out from the staunch end of opposition to independence.

They are not representative of No voters as a whole, and certainly not of soft No voters who are open to persuasion, but rather they speak for that bitter minority which would refuse to countenance independence under any circumstances and which openly calls for the abolition of Holyrood.

As they see Westminster’s grasp on Scotland weaken, they will only become more angry, more shrill and more extreme, and as they do so they will only end up alienating what remains of anti-independence sentiment in Scotland. They are their own worst enemies, and their ugly sectarianism is only hastening the end of British rule in Scotland.

British rule in Scotland began in triumphalism, but it will end with a sectarian bigot on social media trying to make people feel sorry for them.