THIS must be what it felt like to live during the 1950s. Short hair is back in fashion. Britain is consuming itself in an inward-looking xenophobia that’s being touted as patriotism. There’s nostalgia for the Empire. A former party leader is off to spend time in the colonies, or at least a reality TV version of a jungle. Austerity dominates all public spending decisions. We’ve got the threat of looming nuclear annihilation. And now we’re on a witch-hunt for the Russians who are apparently lurking under every bed. All we need is the return of Elvis and we’re sorted.

I checked under my bed, but it was markedly free of Russian monsters. There was only a suitcase, an old pair of shoes, and a half-eaten dog chew. There wasn’t even any cuddly monster like on the John Lewis ad on the telly. However since I’m a wee bit of an advocate for Scottish independence and therefore also for the destruction of the British state and the end of all that’s red, white and blue and true, the Russian must be me. I’m blaming that time I drove through Moscow in Ayrshire.

It’s foolish to dispute that Vladimir Putin doesn’t have an interest in weakening western states, but it’s also pretty foolish to tell yourself that the UK isn’t perfectly capable of self-destructing all by itself. Dysfunction is in fact about the only thing that the UK is still any good at. Recently it has been making a pretty good fist of tearing itself apart without any assistance from anyone. The spittle-flecked Brexiteers who dominate the British Tory Cabinet with their ideologically driven desire to rip the UK out of the EU haven’t been taking lessons from the Kremlin.

Immensely more damage has been done to us all by Boris Johnson’s lies about bent bananas than has been done by any automated Russian bots on Twitter. Mind you, Boris does have a Russian name.

There are millions of bots on Twitter. According to one recent study carried out by the University of South California and the Indiana University as many as 48 million Twitter accounts tweeting in English, between 9 per cent and 15 per cent of the total, are likely to be automated bots.

Despite the hysterical articles you may have seen in certain Scottish newspapers recently, only a tiny minority of these bots are controlled by the Kremlin – even those which tweet about Scottish independence. Many bots are set up by commercial organisations to retweet favourable mentions of a company’s products or services, others are launched by private individuals. Some serve a useful function and retweet news stories or other information such as traffic updates or weather reports. It’s remarkably easy to set up a Twitter bot, just Google “twitter bot free software” and you’ll find hundreds of links.

There are quite a few pro-independence Twitter accounts which are entirely automated. That doesn’t mean that they’re all part of some nefarious Russian plot to undermine the UK. There’s the positive case for the Union bot, which every evening tweets that it has examined so many million tweets and the positive case for the Union has still not been found. This bot is just an amusing wee joke, not a Russian conspiracy. I know a guy in Central Scotland who has created a number of “indy-bots”, which do things like retweeting tweets which mention indyref2 or certain other independence-related phrases. He’s not a Kremlin agent. He just does it for fun and to help spread links to pro-independence articles and information. You don’t need the resources of the Russian state in order to set up a Twitter bot.

Imagining that the drive for Scottish independence is being directed by a secret malign Russian hand must be a comforting myth for opponents of independence. It now joins that other comforting myth that the only reason anyone wants independence is because they hate the English.

British nationalist myth-making about Scottish independence means that supporters of the British state don’t need to look at the bad behaviour of British politicians in provoking Scots into supporting independence. It’s a lot easier for British nationalists to blame it all on bad people from somewhere else than to examine their own misbehaviour, lies, broken promises, and inadequacies. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?

An objective observer might imagine that there’s considerably more at stake for the British state in the Scottish independence debate than there is for the Russian state. For Russia it’s just about creating mischief and weakening a state that’s traditionally opposed to Russian interests. For the British state it’s an existential question that means the end of the Union that defines the UK, the potential loss of British nuclear weapons, the loss of a third of its territory, the loss of all those oil and gas resources that are propping up the pound, as well as the loss of much more besides. However, isn’t it strange that speculating about the Russian intelligence services interfering in the Scottish independence debate is a serious business carried out by serious journalists in the pages of serious newspapers, but if you speculate about the British intelligence services interfering in the Scottish independence debate then you’re a crazed conspiracy theorist with a tinfoil hat?

This particular bout of Caledonian Russian hysteria has been set off by Alex Salmond’s decision to allow his chat show to be broadcast by Russian TV. I was opposed to it because of Russia’s hateful policies towards its minorities, the Kremlin’s kleptocracy, and all the many other unattractive features of Putin’s regime. I was also opposed because I knew it was going to provoke a storm of outrage in the British nationalist media. But that outrage has been so over the top, so hysterical, and so disproportionate, that I’m coming round to the view that Alex Salmond’s decision to present his show on RT was really part of a cunning plan to give the British nationalist press enough rope to hang itself and destroy what’s left of its already shredded credibility. If that’s the case, he’s succeeded marvellously.