IN those febrile days of 2014, fading now but not yet forgotten, a posse was marshalled from the ranks of Labour Unionists to hunt down all spectres and spooks disparaging England. Most of these existed only in the vivid imaginations of No activists eager to paint Scottish Nationalists into those sweaty corners occupied by the likes of Settler Watch.

It had become apparent early in the referendum campaign that Labour in Scotland, devoid of any coherent position on the great constitutional question, would emerge from it a political husk, a hollowed out thing that had sacrificed its soul to braying Unionism. In so doing it had fatally failed to acknowledge the strong currents of nationalist resentment in its own flock.

Lacking the means and the intellect to forge a rational left-wing argument for remaining in the Union many of its senior players sought rather to suggest that anti-Englishness lay at the heart of the Yes campaign and little else. This fed on an antiquated version of Scottish Nationalism which pre-dated by many years the process of modernisation and renewal begun by Alex Salmond. This view was also fuelled by a perception that the SNP harboured strong remnants of old-fashioned No Popery. Such historic notions ensured that generations of mainly lowland, working class communities consistently rejected the SNP.

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At one point in the late 1990s there were so many painted bampots yelling Braveheart! in built-up areas that you found yourself rooting for the old rascal Longshanks when the film eventually arrived on our television screens.

Mr Salmond’s evisceration of the rednecks in his party gradually made support for the SNP or at least for the idea of Scottish self-determination a valid option for people like me. Part of this process of detoxification came about through a growing resentment among traditional working class communities that the old civic Labour of Tamany Hall and Red Rose dinners and public sector contracts awarded on a nod and a wink had lapsed into a self-serving enterprise with the promise of ermine and a portfolio of non-executive directorships.

A similar sense of betrayal at grass-roots level throughout England has provided the spine of support for Jeremy Corbyn. A few years ago the prospect of this avowed unashamed Socialist would have been met with derision. Yet within four years he has defeated all of his internal opponents by landslides in two leadership elections and come within a whisker of defeating the Conservatives in last year’s Westminster General Election. This has induced a sense of hysteria amongst the pillars of the UK establishment and its batmen in the right-wing press who stand to lose most under a Corbyn administration.

Unspun: the political diary

Their attempts to tarnish him were once merely caricatures; now they are full Fred Quimby complete with cartoon sticks of dynamite and ten-tonne weights. At the start of the year he was a Czechoslovakian spy and a friend of terrorists. Now, for having asked reasonable questions about the Salisbury poisonings (still inconclusive) and about the morality of bombing Syria in retaliation for a chemical gas attack (of questionable provenance) he is the most dangerous man in Britain.

He is accused of fostering anti-Semitism yet when he shares a Passover meal with a radical Jewish group he is condemned for choosing the wrong kind of Jews. Presumably if he had been a tax-avoiding trader of arms to dodgy regimes and director of a firm that stood to profit from further upheaval in the Middle East he would have been deemed a model citizen.

Many among those who support Mr Corbyn are completely at ease in modern, multi-cultural Britain. Their parents and grandparents welcomed the Windrush generation from countries of the Caribbean who helped rebuild post-war Britain and construct new lives here. For every sullen Tory who reviled them there were thousands more ordinary UK citizens who embraced their culture and saluted their forbearance and counted them as their own. The wickedness that lay behind the philosophy that led to harassment of these people, jail and the threat of deportation may have been typical of a party which has been accused of losing its moral compass. But to lose your moral compass suggests that at some stage you ever possessed one. It is not typical of Britain itself. I travelled the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland on assignments during and after the referendum on independence. This didn’t alter my belief that Scotland should be an independent country capable of determining its own future in all jurisdictions but it reinforced my conviction that throughout the UK there is much more that unites us than divides us.

In 2013 Alex Salmond distilled this into the five unions in which Scotland would continue to participate following independence: the European Union; a defence union through NATO; a currency union; the Union of the Crowns and the social union between the people of these isles – “embracing them and using the powers of independence to renew and improve them”. This was to be the defining expression of modern Scottish nationalism: at ease with ourselves; supportive of our neighbours; at peace with them and equal to them. The same charisms underpin the process by which the Windrush families were able to settle here and enrich our existence.

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Last week James Dornan, the SNP MSP for Glasgow’s Cathcart constituency was justifiably angry at the Windrush scandal and the UK Government’s obscene immigration policy which had caused it. The words he deployed to express this were not and carried echoes of the SNP’s caveman era. “I truly despise being part of the UK. I feel so sorry for those who are permanently stuck with this bunch of incompetents and bigots. At least we have the opportunity to leave ahead of us, all we need is the confidence in ourselves to take it,” he tweeted.

Mr Dornan’s shallow grandstanding in defence of the odious Offensive Behaviour at Football Act meant that his attempt to become deputy leader of the party was reassuringly shortlived. Even by those standards though his Windrush sentiments were misguided and bereft of good judgment. That a product of a working class community such as he can gain a place in the highest chamber in the land is due to the sacred intervention of the Labour Party in Britain’s history and the many English people who helped to sustain it. Their offspring remain the best bet for removing the stain of far-right Conservatism from our lives. Being part of the UK has done Mr Dornan no harm at all.