NINE years after he’d told his fellow Scots to stand on the Union’s broad shoulders Gordon Brown is still peddling Scottish inferiority. Mr Brown, like many former politicians who seek to imbue their existence with gravitas, has got his very own think-tank.

This one is called Our Scottish Future and is a sort of Carry On Up the Albion production featuring a scarecrow scattering of familiar cranks and Union Jack fetishists.

Our Scottish Future held a rally in Edinburgh on Thursday night whose top table featured the Welsh First Minister and the Mayor of Manchester. There was also a professional comedian. The multi-millionaire and private-education enthusiast Anas Sarwar was there too, presumably to tell the audience not to get any ideas that his family’s remarkable business success was anything to do with Scotland being good at stuff.

The sole purpose of these groupings, it seems, is to tell the world that the country which educated them; provided them with jobs, training, confidence and connections, is nevertheless far too small and far too ill-resourced to make any decisions without the approval of their betters in London.

Many hard-working Scots have a quiet attachment to Britain without feeling the need to bend the knee to it.

This isn’t nearly performative enough though, for the Our Scottish Future desperadoes. Bizarrely, they seem happiest when they are telling the world that Scotland isn’t really a country and must never be left alone in the house without a responsible adult.

Even more absurdly, according to Mr Brown, research carried out by Our Scottish Future showed that “Scotland’s problem is with Whitehall, Westminster and a London-centric system”. Which rather neatly encapsulates many of the reasons why 1,617,989 of us voted Yes in 2014.

 

BROKEN PROMISES

MR BROWN, of course, spent much of the 2014 referendum making promises and issuing guarantees that would have made Charles Ponzi blanche.

Not the least of these was the one in which he claimed that only by voting No could Scotland be guaranteed membership of the European Union. And remember The Vow, written on the back of an empty cigarette packet and worth just about as much?

That Vow promised that devolution would be reinforced with added powers that would have effectively have made Scotland a federal state. Since then the UK Government has violated the Sewell Convention with the same abandon that they broke lockdown rules.

Almost as fatuous as that claim was the prediction by Better Together’s campaign director, Blair McDougall that Boris Johnson would never become Prime Minister. In making this forecast Mr McDougall referred to Mr Johnson as a “clown”.

Under Mr McDougall’s steerage Better Together seemed to be making an elaborate bid to being crowned with the title of the world’s worst political campaign. So dire and uninspiring was the Better Together campaign that, in less than 18 months, support for Yes went from 27% in the polls to 45%.

By the end we were checking to see if Gerald Ratner had been appointed strategic director.

 

SNP RETALIATION

UNSURPRISINGLY, the SNP felt duty-bound to rebuke Mr Brown in advance of his big night out with Our Scottish Future. Jamie Hepburn was chosen to do this and duly called for Mr Brown to apologise to the people of Scotland because “jobs have been lost and living standards have been harmed”.

This might have held more weight if it hadn’t come from Mr Hepburn, a man who comes with the designation Independence Minister.

Some have suggested rather unkindly that Humza Yousaf only created this utterly meaningless ministry to ensure that the word ‘Independence’ gets used at least once every day in cabinet briefings.

Indeed, the more you think about it, perhaps I’m being unkind in describing the Better Together campaign as the world’s worst political campaign.

In the nine years since the first independence referendum the SNP have contrived to bury Scottish independence for another generation. A film is surely in the works to chronicle the downfall of this dysfunctional party of fake actors.

How about A Fridge Too Far?

 

ACCESS DENIED

TO a gathering of Scotland’s Catholic deputy head teachers in Cumbernauld. They have invited me to entertain them with tales from the crypt, including such shenanigans and malarkey as described above.

Afterwards, I have a most intriguing and rewarding conversation with some of the delegates.

I’d heard that at least one organisation, supported entirely by lavish amounts of public money, was angling to gain access to Catholic schools for the purpose of spreading quack gender ideology under the guise of anti-bullying.

Happily, I’m assured that organisations such as this one will never be permitted access to Catholic schools. So, at least one sector of our education system is keeping the lights of true progressiveness on as, one by one, they’re being extinguished across the rest of the country.