INSIDE the heads of the UK’s most sclerotic Unionists a John Carpenter movie, full of menace and foreboding, is playing in a loop. Set in the here and now, Scotland has become a post-apocalyptic and monochrome wasteland where the writ of the free market (the one law that binds all others in the British establishment) has run out.

The citizens, ignorant and uneducated curs that they are, have given themselves over to vile and unnatural practices such as forcing business-owners to pay their staff a living wage and insisting that things such as healthcare and university education be free at the point of delivery.

Under threat of strike action employers are no longer permitted to pursue traditional and harmless practices such as having concupiscence with the new brides of workers on the first night of matrimony. Worse; families who have worked tirelessly on honestly begotten stolen land are now being forced, bit by bit, to hand it back to the people. Tax loopholes are being shut in sinister and underhand ways and this has hit wealth creators really hard. They now actually have to pay the same tax as everyone else on every penny earned inside the country.

The savages have handed back the nuclear submarines they were gifted and are now running around beating their swords into ploughshares and inviting the Russians and Chinese (a great bunch of lads) to diversity workshops in Ullapool. The country has become a haven for Mediterranean boat-people and Syrian refugees and this has led to MI5 installing listening posts along Hadrian’s Wall.

Because, as everyone but the naive Jocks knows, these people aren’t just harmless immigrants looking for jobs flipping burgers at airports. Oh no, they are all al-Qaeda and Isis operatives who’ll be pouring over the border declaring Yee-Hah on England and banning Radio 4 in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.

Every single man, woman and child has been forced to join the SNP and each of them must devote two hours of their week to flash-mobbing quiet city-centre shopping malls brandishing yellow placards. The implacable and cold features of their Dear Leader Nicola Sturgeon are emblazoned on every government building. Children as young as six months old are forced to march every weekend chanting “down with austerity”.

Entire families who voted No in the independence referendum are being grabbed in midnight raids and made to appear before workers’ courts at dawn before being deported over the Border. High-value prisoners like JK Rowling and John Barrowman are being offered in exchange for hundreds of Glaswegian King’s Cross vagrants.

There can surely be no other explanation why 56 out of 59 Westminster seats were annexed by the Scottish Nationalists. And just to make sure, the blighters locked up what few Unionists remained and placed a 7am to 10pm curfew on them and their families on May 7.

This is, in essence, the narrative that is gripping audiences all over England right now. The script was given an outing in the last weeks of the referendum campaign before being honed further still in the fiction factories of David Cameron’s strategy team. All that was required was for the more excitable elements of England’s right-wing press to give the legend an airing and thus deliver a Conservative majority when previously this was thought impossible.

The propaganda started when the Yes vote began inching towards the magic 50 per cent mark in the last few days of the referendum. Dan Snow, married into one of Scotland’s mightiest and richest landowning families, led a group of several hundred desperate English personalities pleading with the Scots not to leave the Union and expressing their undying love for Jockoland.

Yet the real feelings of some of them, along with many in the English commentariat, were revealed in the days before and after the May 7 General Election: don’t you dare try to come down here and seek to influence our government. From the childish, nasty and unfunny cartoons of Steve Bell to the biliousness of the otherwise excellent Matthew Parris and Hugo Rifkind, it seemed that middle England was having a psychological seizure at the prospect of the SNP routing the parties of the Union. They thought Scottish Nationalism had been put back in its box. “What, are you lot still here? Don’t you have caves to go to?”

The 15,000 souls who thronged Glasgow’s Hydro following Nicola Sturgeon’s appointment as SNP leader were also targeted. Discomfited by what they were witnessing and unable to explain the legions of ordinary Scots who were daily joining the SNP, several Unionist politicians and their allies in the press derided them as “fanatics” and a “cult”. The inference was clear: these people were simply too stupid to know any better and just wouldn’t see sense. They were economically illiterate and fuelled by nothing other than a sense of grievance and the emotion of the moment.

Many Labour people who ought to have known better promoted this slander vigorously. They all require a history lesson. At every stage of the popular struggle for fairness and equality in pay, suffrage, rents and working conditions the protagonists were all dismissed and reviled as fanatics and deranged insurgents. Didn’t they realise that only the Eton and Oxford-educated elite knew how the economy worked and that if everyone just behaved and calmed down they would be given their grog and salted beef? And if that looked like failing then some wars could be organised, perhaps some vulgar sporting festivals and royal fecundity: for the purposes of diverting their attention, you understand, what?

On Question Time this week Jeremy Hunt, the Conservative Health Secretary, was talking about “wealth creators” and inferring that they must be left to run the economy. He expressed his fervent wish that the Labour Party would not lurch to the left “even though this would be good news for us”.

The Tories and those who back them all now smell blood, you see. If they can associate even mildly left-wing ideas as dangerous and insurgent in the minds of Middle England, then they might be able to destroy socialism for good and thus, once and for all, arrange the running of society to suit their venality and profit-driven greed.

I can scarce forbear to giggle when I hear the term “wealth-creators”. It suggests a group of kindly old white-haired men, bursting with godliness and beneficence who are only in the business of making lots of poppy just so that they can create jobs for the hoi-polloi. The truth of the matter is this: if many of them could make their millions without having to employ actual workers they would, gladly. Until that happy day arrives though, they will have to content themselves with paying the scum as little as they can get away with.

To that end they can use their wealth to attend fund-raising dinners where they can bid £150K for lunch with Boris and bribe Tory ministers to curb the unions still further, get out of Europe and banish the hated European Convention on Human Rights. Every little bit helps…

The pesky Jocks aren’t buying it, though. As Alex Massie in his rather wonderful essay in The Spectator this week observed: “Never before – at least not in living memory – has there been such a disconnect between north and south Britain.” This presents an obstacle for these people on the way to their Xanadu, where society’s values are set by the relentless tyranny of the pure market economy.

Forget all the mince about their professed love of Scotland and the social, emotional and cultural ties that bind our two great nations. If they felt they could have afforded it, Scotland would have been ushered out of the UK faster than a bellhop in a honeymoon suite.

But when you need North Sea oil tax receipts and the billions from Scottish companies to help with the UK balance of payments then separation isn’t an option. They put the lid on the first independence referendum by scaring Scotland’s OAPs with mendacious predictions about their pensions. Persuading useful idiots like Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown to help your cause and thus push the Labour Party in Scotland to the edge of extinction was just a wee Brucie bonus.

And buying off the waverers with a fictitious Vow that unravelled quicker than it took to throw away the fag packet on whose back it was written was just a jolly old hoot.

But the 56 Nationalist MPs and the inevitable talk of a second independence referendum demands an upscaling of the propaganda war. Thus lips have curled in disdain at the nature and character of the 56. Some of them aren’t even proper politicians for heaven’s sake. Mhairi Black, the youngest MP ever, has been depicted as a ned who stopped drinking superlager just in time to contest the election. That she has emerged under incessant questioning as a bright, eloquent and confident young woman has confounded many.

You would have thought that Labour in Scotland, a party which needs snookers just to fight another day, would have thought it wise to observe a period of silence.

But there they are still insisting that the electorate were just too dumb and unsophisticated to understand their message. One Labour-supporting columnist wrote yesterday: “It’s doubtful St Mungo could have won for Labour in Glasgow, or anywhere else, against the faith-based economics of independence.”

Again the inference is clear: the punters, all 1.5 million of them, were just too thick to understand economics and were swept up in a tide of nationalist emotion.

But what if they do understand only too well the consequences of full fiscal autonomy, no Barnett and the unpredictability of oil prices? What if they simply abjure the one-sided austerity of cuts intheir services and consequent job losses and instead favour limited borrowing to stimulate growth in the communities which house their less fortunate neighbours?

And what if many of us who voted for independence favour choosing to be more austere in our own lives by paying a higher rate of tax so that our poorer brothers and sisters might be lifted out of poverty?

If such behaviour is deemed to be bizarre and cultish then hand me my cloak and sandals, praise the Lord and sing Hosanna.