This April Fool’s Day a young man took exception to a boring new bilingual logo for a Scottish Government quango.

Adam Wilson did not like that national social security agency’s signage was in both English and Gaelic. So he chopped off the Celtic words and tweeted what was now a monolingual logo, saying: “This looks much better.” He later said he was joking. Scotland’s Gaels did not get the gag.

There is nothing unusual about anti-Gaelic bigotry in Scotland’s polarised political cyberspace. Twitter and Facebook, after all, are brimming with angry British nationalists who see the language as a proxy for Scottish independence and a whole bucket of other prejudices.

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But Mr Wilson is not a loyalist with a Union Jack avatar. He’s a 22-year-old Labour councillor from Dumfriesshire who, judging from his Twitter feed, genuinely believes in social justice. And it is this passion, he says, which has prompted him to question policies his own party introduced to support a minority: Gaelic speakers.

“Some of us came into politics to tackle poverty, fight for education and challenge injustice,” Mr Wilson tweeted on Easter Sunday. “I fail to see how Gaelic language initiatives implemented by any party achieve any of this.”

Mr Wilson was at primary school in 2005 when Labour and its coalition partners in the Liberal Democrats passed the current Gaelic laws, including those which pave the way for the cost-free inclusion of Gaelic in some signage or on government logos.

Twelve years ago Labour’s logic was to include Gaelic because Gaels were a minority Now it has members whose logic is to exclude Gaelic because Gaels are a minority. That is quite a turnaround. How did it come about?

My guess is through social media. Labour is already wrestling with a row over pernicious anti-Semitism. New sentiment opposing spending on Gaels probably has the same genesis as anti-Jewish prejudice.

Labour activists , after all, are as likely as anyone else to become radicalised online. Some will have been exposed to the gradual normalisation of anti-Semitic memes - even crude ones showing the “Jewish Masonic Conspiracy”, such as the mural Jeremy Corbyn now famously failed to register as grossly offensive.

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Others, in the heat of the independence referendum, will have clashed with aggressive Yes supporters who put “Saor Alba” on their Twitter profiles even though they have no idea how to pronounce the old “Free Scotland” slogan in Gaelic. Some Labour unionists will have found themselves making common cause online with stauncher British loyalists with stronger, more visceral dislike of Gaelic. Such ultra-unionist voices, some clearly influenced by the political language wars of Northern Ireland, rarely stop to think that the Gaels they insult might well have voted No back in 2014.

Is Labour now ridden with such attitudes? Probably not. The party is full of champions of Gaels and other minorities. But the time might have come for it defend its own record on Gaelic, which trumps that of the SNP.