Dear Santa, I need a remote control that can shut out Unionist drivel

I imagine a remote control device that can do much more than switching the telly on and off.

Ideally, it will have a range of ­sophisticated settings that can be adjusted for ­particular politicians or even for keywords. For ­example, it should have a mechanism that can sook the word “divisive” from Labour MP Lisa Nandy’s gurning pieces-to-camera.

For all the status Nandy commands as a rising star of the Labour Party, she seems politically inflexible and incapable of ­discussing Scotland without using the word “divisive” or without advocating the most brutal intervention in our democracy.

I find it difficult to accept that this young woman, so prominent in Keir Starmer’s Labour Party, is shadow secretary of state for communities and local government. She displays such open resentment for the community of Scottish voters and yet thinks that by ­insulting them, they will meekly trot back into the fold of British Labourism.

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Her tactic seems to be to chastise and denigrate voters and hold them in ­contempt. Rather than woo Scots with policy promises, encouraging words and even the warm balm of democracy, she seems to prefer the brutal baton of the Francoist military, and would prefer to see Scots slugged around the skull rather than be granted any constitutional rights.

The last time I saw Nandy on television, she used the words “divisive” and “narrow” on about 20 successive occasions, delivering them like a salvo of abuse.

The SNP were characterised as ­“divisive” for demanding a “divisive” ­referendum and they supposedly have no other policies, beyond advocating ­“narrow” nationalism, which is by its ­nature “divisive”.

Anyone who lives in Scotland and has a passing interest in politics knows that the “narrowness” insult falls hopelessly short of the truth. One of the main ­reasons there has been a fragmentation within the ­independence movement in Scotland is that some have criticised First ­Minister Nicola Sturgeon’s reign for being too ­easily distracted by a wide a range of ­policy issues, from gender to the ­environment.

Alba Party activists never tire of ­pointing out that the journey to ­independence has been too slow, and that the ­devolutionary agenda is not ­campaigning enough. It is commonplace to hear someone say that ­issues like the contentious GRA ­legislation have led to the government “taking the eye off the ball”.

It would presumably surprise the out-of-touch Lisa Nandy MP that Sturgeon is often criticised for not being narrow enough.

There is, however, a very good reason that Nandy is so remote and out of touch. Scottish politics is rarely discussed in England and only vaguely crops up on the TV networks. Most worrying of all, it is not roundly discussed at Labour ­Party conferences any more either.

One of Starmer’s – and indeed Nandy’s – major faults is not being curious enough about Scotland, and so the party cannot hope to understand the historic flight from Labour, and the seismic shifts that have led to majority support for ­independence.

Nandy’s banalities do have a ­rationale of sorts but not one she should take pride in. Her opinions come with the glum ­certainty of prejudices she has picked up from brief conversations in the ­Westminster lobby.

But what of her own narrowness of thought?

For over a year now, she has all but argued that Scotland doesn’t really exist and that we are no more than a northern county like the Lancashire of her own electoral base.

I am not a fan of the passing insult ­“Brit-Nat” which turns the tables on ­critics of Scottish independence. It comes with an inherent weakness, in that it ­inaccurately portrays Britain as a nation, which it is not. Whatever their ­attachments to the Union flag, ­Westminster or even Cliff Richard at Wimbledon, they are not ­nationalists, in any recognisable sense of nationhood, since the island of Britain contains three ­nations and a rugged ­archipelago of ­islands and land masses. They are ­Unionists who struggle to answer very basic questions of the Union’s underlying values.

AND what of the veiled insult Nandy ­attaches to the word “divisive”?

It is such a ridiculous ­insult it barely deserves to be dismantled.

I cannot think of an area of political debate that is not in some way divisive: politics thrives on difference as much as it requires consensus.

Certainly one of the great historic ­divisions of the 20th century and the one that gave oxygen to the parliamentary Labour Party is that between capital and labour, with the powerful elites of the Conservative Party and the working class origins of Labour.

The differences may be less marked now, as Starmer seeks to triangulate his way to power in England, but you could not recite the history of the two parties without invoking division and ­confrontation.

Nor could you explain the current round of public-sector strikes led by ­railway workers, national health workers and teachers without conceding that there is a division between workers’ rights and the profit motive of owner-management.

Similarly, the issue that has dominated British politics for years now, and which brought the Conservative Party through numerous iterations of civil war, was ­Europe.

Brexit has been divisive in the extreme and yet despite the damage it has done to the economy, Labour still seem besotted by the outcome of a referendum that they know to have been damaging to the economy and to their own members, but cannot budge from their belief that it is the defining attribute of Englishness, and must be protected and even fetishised.

Try as I might to make sense of Nandy’s outburst, I cannot think of a single significant moment in world affairs, from civil rights to apartheid and from the Suffragette movement to CND, that was not in some ways shaped by social divisiveness.

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Nandy really needs to find a better way of describing Scotland as she is in perilous danger of looking profoundly stupid, something I suspect she does not want to be. Although she will have to wait until Starmer trips up, or enters the House of Lords, she has ambitions to lead Labour in the future.

SO, can you help? I want a remote ­control device that is encoded to transmit to Nandy.

Such is my desire to find the perfect Christmas gift, I have conceded that I may have to put the idea out to procurement. I am looking for digital interactive innovators to produce a device that is capable of sucking the cliches from the mouths of a wide range of politicians, from the evasive Grant Shapps to the emollient Alex Cole-Hamilton, but in these days of rules-based public procurement, it has to deliver value for money.

So far I have set up a VIP lane which gives privileged access to ­creative ­companies, mostly from Perth and ­registered at my mum’s house.

Whilst I am keen to procure from ­companies with proven digital ­interactive skills, for the avoidance of doubt, this does not rule out ferry construction ­companies, cheap manufacturers of ­inadequate PPE equipment, nor should it exclude the remarkable entrepreneur Lady Mayfair, aka Michelle Mone, whose reputation in the world of lingerie and backless bras makes her ideally suited to this kind of fantastical enterprise.