We should focus on the truth about Nazi sympathisers in Scotland

Ramsay, allegedly protected by his class and connections, was interned rather than convicted. The vicious anti-Semite was publicly frank about his admiration for Adolf Hitler; the German dictator was, he said, a “splendid fellow”.

The Peebles MP had a castle in Angus and a crackpot theory that local tradesmen were part of a Jewish plot. Ramsay even said he was ready to use violence to end the “Jewish Problem”.

And this was not just talk. Ramsay on the eve of the war set up a pro-Nazi group called the Right Club which included senior figures in politics, the civil service and even police and military.

We now know his gang was infiltrated by M15. Ramsay’s chief of staff was jailed for espionage after she was found with war secrets and shown to have already sent some to Germany. Spooks, according to declassified papers, discovered the MP was angling to be Germany’s commissioner for Scotland.

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Filmmaker Tim Tate, author of Hitler’s British Traitors, called Ramsay and his mob “Fifth Columnists”. They were not alone. The UK had several circles of rightist extremists – often ostensibly Conservatives – who were either sympathetic to the Nazis or who saw the Bolsheviks as a greater threat. This cohort included a clutch of very rich Scottish aristos. We like to forget this. Or some of us do.

But I keep remembering Ramsay. Why? Because there is something very “today” about this lowlife. And not just because his post-war book, a cranky and well, vile, fantasy about Jewish conspiracies, has resurfaced online. It is shared on the websites of the new far right, not least in America.

It is now terrifyingly easy to stumble on the kind of anti-Semitism Ramsay espoused. Nastier populists use weasel words to talk about Jews, to conjure up a mythical elite of “others”.

A favourite recent Jew-baiting trope is “globalist”. This is now widely pushed by the US and European far right. And, tellingly, by propagandists for the Vladimir Putin regime.

That is the other thing that makes Ramsay feel so “now”. An authoritarian regime is once again waging a war of conquest on the continent. And once again we have Scottish apologists for this. Not many, and not anywhere as close to power as Ramsay was. But they exist.

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Lest we forget, at the last Holyrood elections there were two parties, on either side of our constitutional divide, led by politicians who hosted shows on what disinformation experts would describe as the TV propaganda wing of Putin’s military.

Those soft on the current Kremlin are rarely true believers in the way Ramsay was. There are vanishingly few Scots, I think, who are in any way invested in what passes for the ideology of Putinism, who believe Ukraine as a nation is a fake construct, a US proxy, or that Russian soldiers are fighting Nazis and Satanists.

I think there is a weird Scottish social media narrative which, in a roundabout way, helps illustrate this.

In the folklore of very online British nationalism it was not a Tory MP who led Hitler’s fifth column north of the border but an obscure Scottish nationalist chicken farmer.

The poultry breeder, one Arthur Donaldson, really did spend a few weeks behind bars after security services got an uncorroborated tip-off. According to an anonymous source, he had said that if Germany won the war the Scottish movement should be ready to show the Nazis it was “not with England”.

This is important because Donaldson – though a fringe figure in the 1940s – was to go on to become leader of the SNP decades later. So was he really a Nazi sympathiser? Well, not according to historians.

Richard Finlay, professor of history at Strathclyde University, has gone through Donaldson’s private papers. There was no evidence, he said, of Donaldson having any affinity to fascism. Either in his own documents or Nazi archives.

Claims to the contrary, Mr Finlay, told The Herald’s sister paper The National, were a complete and utter myth. The M15 source, he added, was telling his handlers what they wanted to hear.

Yet type Donaldson’s name into Twitter and you will discover armies of people who think he – and sometimes the entire SNP – were plotting with the Nazis. Indeed, the made-up social media story mirrors that of the real Ramsay. But it is fake history.

Saying Donaldson was a Nazi has become a rite of passage for the most zealous unionists. I doubt many believe it to be true: for them, reality does not matter; this is just trolling.

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Which is a shame. Because the actual story of Donaldson in many ways is as timely as that of Ramsay. And I think the internet make-believe lets the SNP man off the hook.

We should remember what Donaldson really did and really believed. Because it is worthy of scrutiny. And criticism. The future SNP leader – and a small number of colleagues in something called the Scottish Neutrality League – in the early 1940s campaigned against conscription because they thought it breached the Act of Union.

They put – in my view – eccentric local preoccupations ahead of huge global dangers. Donaldson and his kind just did not get that defeating Nazism was way, way more important than their cause, however heartfelt.

This, I suspect, is also what happened to Brits who, for example, worked for Putin disinformation channels. Obsessed with their own narratives, they failed to grasp the bigger international story.

As Putin missiles Kyiv and shells Kherson, we should think about both Ramsay and Donaldson. These men have nothing to tell us about the Conservatives or SNP, then or now. But I think they show two different ways of enabling great evil.