THE Scottish election isn’t until tomorrow, and the howls, wails and renting of garments has already started in a Unionist camp that is bracing itself for another defeat. The Westminions are getting their SNPbad in early: mind you, they never really stopped playing that tune.

Over in the Times, the windswept but not really interesting BBC presenter,Neil Oliver referred to the campaign for Scottish independence as a hate-fest. Scotland is a howling morass of vileness apparently. Neil is upset because he didn’t expect to find himself in this position, a historian on the wrong side of history.

Usually what happens in independence campaigns is states of emergency, internment camps, extra-judicial deaths, bombings, and violence. Scotland had none of that, to the great and lasting credit of both the Yes and the No side in the debate.

Yet someone threw an egg at Jim Murphy, and this counts as a hate-fest. Still, Neil is well-qualified as a Westminster apologist, what with him presenting all those archaeology programmes and the UK being the ruins of an ancient empire.

The objective truth is that Scotland is a model to the world about how to handle the issue of potential independence. The lack of violence in the Scottish independence campaign is a testament to the great political maturity of Scottish people and to our commitment to democracy.

The Scottish process was held up in admiration in other nations around the world. We deserve a collective pat on the back. Yet people like Neil Oliver go on about a hate-fest, oblivious to the fact that the only violence on display during the independence referendum campaign was on a par with that seen during any election campaign, and with the exception of an egg it all came from the Unionist side.

Some others have been complaining that pro-independence satirists don’t attack the most dominant party in Scotland. “What sort of satire is that?” they ask, in what is really a plea for pro-independence supporters to make jokes at the expense of the independence side because Unionists lack the wit to do so with success. No matter how many heartfelt articles the Unionist apologists write for the papers telling us how awful the SNP is, no matter how often or how hysterically they scream about the badness that lurks at the heart of pro-independence parties, they gain no traction.

IT’S a tough gig, being a Unionist opinion-former when no-one comes round to your opinions. Instead they’re reduced to complaining that independence supporters aren’t doing their job for them. “Why aren’t you attacking the SNP eh? Eh? They’re the Scottish establishment, not us, poor wee harmless Unionists that we are.

“It’s the SNP that ought to be the target for your witty barbs and jibes and cartoons featuring goldfish.”

What they’re really saying is dear God please give us a break, do our job for us because we’re failing miserably. It’s a cry for help. They need all the help they can get, because certain Unionist cartoonists in supposedly left-ish British newspapers think that satire is mushing up Nicola Sturgeon’s face.

The only part of the Unionist ruminator complaint that is correct is that it is indeed the job of the satirist to attack and make fun of the powerful, but that’s exactly what pro-independence satirists do and their targets are spot on. That’s because the dominant and most powerful political parties in Scotland are still the Conservatives and Labour.

It doesn’t matter that the voters of Scotland have numerically turned the representatives of these parties into pandas up here. These are pandas that are not confined to a zoo. They’re confined to Westminster, which admittedly can be difficult to distinguish from a zoo. However, they’re still the most powerful parties in Scotland, not the SNP, and certainly not the broader independence movement.

It’s a Unionist party that tells Scotland if it’s going to war. It’s a Unionist party that imposes nuclear weapons on Scotland despite the fact our own elected representatives are overwhelmingly opposed. It’s a Unionist party that sets Scotland’s budget and that decides what the Scottish Parliament does or does not have power over. And it’s going to be a Unionist party that does that irrespective of how much support it gets in Scotland.

The SNP is the biggest party inside the little play-pen of Scottish politics, but it’s still a Unionist party that guards the bars of the pen and keeps us in our place. It’s still a Unionist party that tells us what toys we can play with. It’s still a Unionist party that tells us when it’s time to go to bed. It’s still a Unionist party that tells us what we can watch on TV.

We’re currently in a situation where the most powerful political party in Scotland, the party that determines your pension, your benefits, your retirement age, is a party that received a mere 14.8 per cent of the popular vote here and is blessed with a single MP who, when you look at him in a poor light, could easily be mistaken for Paddington Bear.

We’re controlled and dominated by parties that we don’t vote for, yet if you’re a Scottish satirist you’re supposed to ignore that glaring iniquity and concentrate your fire on the goings-on within the little play-pen.

Ever since I started writing and blogging about Scottish politics, I’ve refrained from attacking the SNP, the Greens, or the socialist parties. My goal is independence, and I’ve never made any secret about that.

We live in a country whose media is ridiculously skewed and unbalanced. This is the only daily newspaper that supports a constitutional settlement that has the backing of about half the Scottish population, and this newspaper is a recent development.

Scotland’s media landscape is overwhelmingly Unionist, and if the massed forces of Scotland’s professional Unionist media are not capable of successfully satirising the independence movement on their own that’s entirely down to their own inadequacies. I’m not in the business of doing their job for them or supplying them with ammunition to make up for their own shortcomings.

We have a vote tomorrow.

I’m going to vote for Scotland to be a grown-up and mature country, a country that takes responsibility for itself. I want to live in a Scotland that profits from its own successes, and deals with its own failures. The Unionists want a Scotland that is infantilised and kept in the play-pen while the big boys and girls that we can’t control or influence make decisions on our behalf. There’s going to be a lot more howling from the Unionists after tomorrow.