THERE was a shameful episode at Holyrood last week when Scottish Conservative MSP Tess White tried to allege that the First Minister’s commitment to opposing racism excluded English people living in Scotland.

White later apologised and withdrew her baseless slur, but not before dozens of members of the frothier end of British nationalist social media had agreed with the evidence-free assertion that there are no more oppressed people in Scotland than English people and supporters of the Conservative Party.

The incident was instructive in the way it revealed the extent to which right-wing British nationalists in Scotland will twist language and reality out of all recognition in order to promote the entirely fictitious narrative that they are the real victims in a Scotland where those vile nats make it scarcely safe for them to walk the streets and pop down to the supermarket to pick up a punnet of strawberries in Union Flag-themed packaging.

READ MORE: Who is Tess White, the Tory MSP who heckled Nicola Sturgeon during FMQs?

The cherry on the delusion cake was surely the individual on Twitter, who described himself as a former senior civil servant, who wondered that since the police were arresting those Rangers fans who had been singing the anti-Irish racist Famine Song, then surely the next targets of ought to be Scotland supporters who had been singing Flower of Scotland. In the view of this spittle-flecked zoomer who serially retweets Scottish Conservative MPs and MSPs, the verse “send them homewards to think again” is not a reference to the army of King Edward during the Scottish Wars of Independence. It’s actually an injunction, presumably from the high command of Thatessempee, to deport all English people.

As the T-shirt says, you can’t argue with stupid.

Another favourite word of British nationalist zoomery is “Ulsterisation”. This refers to the supposed way in which the independence movement has turned Scotland into a bitter and divided society on the brink of descent into full-scale violence.

Naturally, apologists for British nationalism never consider that their own bitterness might be the issue here. They certainly refuse to acknowledge that the only politically inspired violence in Scotland since the independence debate started to dominate Scottish politics has been perpetrated by Union Flag-waving right-wing British nationalists, a goodly proportion of whom are associated with a certain football club, some of whose supporters were recently rioting in the centre of Glasgow and singing nakedly racist songs.

READ MORE: We English-born Scots are sick of being used as Unionists' pawns

In the eyes of British nationalists, any poor behaviour from a supporter of independence is characteristic of the independence movement as a whole. On the other hand the violent and abusive behaviour of a British nationalist is symptomatic of a few bad apples, and certainly doesn’t mean it’s the entire red, white and blue orchard which has a problem.

Equally, those same apologists for British nationalism responded to the blatant racism of some within their ranks, not by unequivocally condemning it, but with whataboutery and attempts to draw a false equivalence between the systemic and decades-long discrimination in employment, housing and education perpetrated by British nationalist so-called “Loyalists” against Scots with an Irish Catholic family background and the occasional and isolated instances of some drunk guy in a pub muttering about “the English”.

It’s already noticeable that British nationalists rarely use the neutral term independence supporters. People who support independence are invariably “nationalists” because the greatest conceit of British nationalism is that it’s better than the nationalisms of lesser nations by virtue of not being nationalist at all.

In their Brit-centric view, independence supporters don’t want independence, they want “separation”, a negative term which feeds the victimhood complex of British nationalists and which focuses on the process, not the end state, in order to highlight the supposed trauma and difficulty of independence.

Calling Scottish independence “separation” is rather like describing a month-long holiday in a tropical paradise as a trip to Glasgow Airport. “There will be paperwork, there will be queues, your luggage might get lost, don’t do it!

Perhaps the epitome of British nationalism turning language on its head in order to portray itself as the victim is the recent use of the term “pro-partition” to refer to independence supporters and the independence movement. This is the separatism slur on steroids and, as such, an indication of the hysteria and desperation of a British nationalism which is starting to realise that it is running out of road and running out of arguments.

In the context of the Scottish independence debate the term “partition” is not only Brit-centric but it also denies the existence of Scotland as a nation and a country in its own right. No-one in the Scottish independence movement proposes partition. The border between Scotland and England is one of the longest-established in Europe. Scottish independence will not alter the course of that border, neither will it create a new border where none has hitherto existed.

The Scottish-English border has run along its present course since the Middle Ages. Despite what British nationalists choose to claim, it is already the border between two countries. Partition is what British nationalists do to other countries when they fear they’ve lost control.

The only people in Scotland who propose partition are British nationalists. George Galloway’s uber-Unionist party demanded that in the event of a Yes victory in a future referendum, any part of Scotland where there happened to be a No majority should be hived off and remain a part of the UK.

READ MORE: Does Nicola Sturgeon's adviser think independence would be 'worse' than Brexit?

Naturally, there was no suggestion that in the event of a No victory any area where there was a Yes majority should be allowed to become independent anyway.

Even now, in the 21st century there are British nationalists who have learned nothing from the British partitions of Ireland and India and who propose to repeat the process in Scotland. Another British nationalist proposal for partition is the notion that, following Scottish independence, the UK could retain the Royal Navy bases on the Clyde as “sovereign base areas”.

British nationalism trades in anti-Irish racism and proposals to carve Scotland up. But in their twisted and contorted abuse of language, British nationalists want us to believe that they are the real victims here. They’re fooling no-one except themselves.