THIS week, it's not just the political bankruptcy of the Conservative Party that has become apparent.

That bankruptcy was made clear with Rishi Sunak becoming the second unelected prime minister in six weeks and then appointing a cabinet of Boris Johnson retreads, and even putting the right-wing extremist and serial incompetent Suella Braverman back as Home Secretary just six days after being forced to resign after what we now know were repeated security breaches by passing on sensitive government information and then lying about it to last week's unelected Conservative prime minister.

What has also become apparent this week is the intellectual bankruptcy of the Conservative case against Scottish independence.

Earlier this week, backbench Tory MP Giles Watling, who represents Clacton in Essex, told the House of Commons that calls for independence in Scotland are being driven by “the likes of Mel Gibson”.

We also saw the Spectator magazine choosing to publish a piece by "Effie Deans" – a name which needs to be put in quotation marks because that's no more her real name than mine is "Wee Ginger Dug”. Effie is a Conservative-supporting, anti-independence, British nationalist blogger, although being a British nationalist she would of course strongly refute any suggestion that she is any sort of nationalist at all.

For some years, Effie has been sharing her bizarre take on Scottish politics with the wider world, including one piece in which she suggested that three million Hong Kong residents entitled to British residency should be crammed into a Scottish island or peninsula in order to create a voting bloc of three million grateful British citizens in Scotland who would dilute calls for Scottish independence and who could even create their own movement to partition Scotland so that “Scottish Hong Kong” could remain a part of the UK.

In another notorious intervention, Effie railed against bilingual road signs in the Highlands, claiming that having the Gaelic version of place names on road signs in addition to the English name caused her to get lost when she was on a journey to Fort William.

Effie asserted that Gaelic is a “dead language” and averred that "language loss always happens by consent" – a view which no specialist in socio-linguistics would subscribe to and which completely ignores the wider socio-political context in which speakers of a minority or minoritised language exist. 

For Effie, the only purpose of Gaelic road signs is as a nationalist ploy to create an artificial difference between Scotland and England and to drive up support for independence.

All these blog articles are written in a turgid prose which in itself is an offence to the English language. However, underpinning it all is the classic Conservative Anglo-British nationalist belief – equally shared by Conservative MP Giles Watling – that calls for independence in modern Scotland derive from an atavistic ethnic nationalism based in ancient history and centuries-old grievances.

Indeed, the thrust of Effie's piece for the Spectator is that Nicola Sturgeon will find Rishi Sunak to be a much more challenging political opponent than previous Conservative prime ministers because Sunak is British Asian and his recent ancestors did not stride across the isles and glens slaughtering Jacobites.

For Watling as much as Effie, the view that Scottish independence is all about the distant past allows them to blame it all on unreasonable and hate-filled “nationalists” and to avoid any consideration that the actions of modern British politicians or the structure of the modern British state might have anything to do with it.

It's essentially comfort food for British nationalists which allows them to tell themselves: "It's not me, it's you." But without any real understanding of what motivates and drives modern calls for Scottish independence, Conservative Anglo-British nationalism will never succeed in its political goal of defeating calls for Scottish independence.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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