IT’S been one of those weeks when Scotland has been trolled by the UK Government and the Unionist parties. So pretty much like every other week then. As far as Scotland is concerned, the Unionist parties and the Westminster Parliament substituted trolling, rubbing our noses in it, and noising up for responsible government ever since the independence referendum was called.

For an even longer time, UK Government policy towards Scotland has been far more about getting one up on the SNP and scoring short-term political points in the pages of the UK media than it is about responding to the needs and desires of the Scottish people. That’s precisely what is driving the demand for independence, yet they just can’t help themselves.

The week began with Gordie Broon telling the Edinburgh Book Festival that it wisnae his fault. Nothing ever is. It was one of Gordie’s unprecedented intervening interventions of the sort which he does every intervening week. The Union is in mortal danger, said Gordie as he paced up and down like a demented polar bear in a zoo, because of the Tories. Not because of anything Labour has done you understand. Oh no, because Labour has never ever played the let’s-get-one-over-the-SNP-and-bugger-the-voters game.

The Tory plans for English votes for English laws will spell the end of the Union within a year, he intervened. Of course what Gordie is mostly concerned about is the status of MPs representing Scottish seats, not Scottish democracy. The real concern of the Parliamentary Labour Party’s much-diminished Scottish contingent is that their gravy train might run into the buffers, but the train was derailed by the electorate in May and there’s very little prospect of it ever running again.

But Gordie went on, pacing and intervening, without anyone ever questioning him on what he intervened about last year – things like assuring us that the poor, the elderly and the disabled were much safer in the UK. So how’s that working out then? Dropping dead after you’ve passed a DWP work assessment is now the leading cause of murder in the UK.

The Tories are stoking up dangerous and insidious English nationalism, said the man whose party has spent the past decade demonising a perfectly middle-of-the-road social democratic party which supports Scottish independence, and in the process stoking up dangerous and insidious English nationalism. However it’s only reprehensible when Davie Cameron and George Osborne do it, not when Gordie’s comrades do it. When the Labour Party does it, it’s just a bit of banter. Only you’re not allowed to call them comrades any more, on account of that making you a Jeremy Corbyn supporter and getting purged.

The Tories have stopped Scotland getting control of the social security system, intervened Gordie, and that means Scotland can’t protect itself from Conservative policies. This sort of thing will lead to the end of civilisation as Gordie knows it, which in his case consists of journalists not questioning him because it means that they won’t get invited to his next unprecedented intervention, which is scheduled for the day after Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour Party leadership.

So how’s that vow working out then? asked a member of the audience who didn’t need to worry about getting a press pass to Gordie’s next intervention. It’s been fulfilled, said Gordie, contradicting himself without pausing for breath. That’s the quality that makes Gordie a statesman, having the self-awareness of a spanner. A really tiny wee one.

NEXT up was Donald Trump, intervening from across the Atlantic, the only man in the universe with even less self-awareness than Gordie. Right-wing nut job opposes independence – now where have we heard that before? Oh yeah from the Tories and most of the Labour Party. Donald is a reality show gone wrong, and all that’s missing is for him to have a sex-change. One of his Republican competitors compared him to cancer, which was unfair. You can sometimes get rid of cancer.

Donald told the assembled media this week that he’d never heard of such a thing as a country having a second independence referendum, which means that he’s never heard of Quebec. But then Donald doesn’t do foreign. He wants to change the US motto E pluribus unum because it’s Latin, and that’s Mexican. He’s going to change it to “We shall overcomb.” As the American presidential campaign goes on, Donald reveals himself to be a nasty, ill-tempered, sexist boor, and that’s exactly what his supporters like about him.

He’s like Nigel Farage with worse hair.

And then we had another right-wing nut job with a dubious haircut. George Osborne came to Faslane in a pair of wellies so he could pre-empt Westminster’s decision about renewing Trident. Undeterred by the fact that 56 out of Scotland’s MPs are dead set against renewal, and Ian Murray is against it depending on who he’s talking to, George came north to rub our noses in his big missile.

George promised £500 million investment in extra facilities to make Trident even more efficient at being useless. This is the nearest that the Westminster Government offers Scotland in terms of job-creation schemes. But the only job-creation scheme George is really interested in is his scheming to make the job of Prime Minister his own. That’s far more important than 80 per cent of the Scottish population living in the zone that will be devastated and evacuated in the event of a serious accident at Faslane. Nuclear weapons should be sited somewhere remote, and we are remote from Westminster politicians. Our desire to get rid of nukes is remote from them too. They don’t care about Scotland because they don’t have to care.

I don’t want to live in a country that’s remote. I want to live in a country where politicians are kept close at hand, close enough so that their backsides are within kicking distance of my foot. Then perhaps we won’t be lumbered with weapons of mass destruction that cost billions and threaten the future of our country, and we won’t have to listen to washed-out has-beens’ intervening interventions being treated like holy writ.