Kidding ourselves about class will only help Johnson secure a majority

But no, this report stuck to the straight and narrow. “About a quarter of independence voters and a quarter of Scottish Leave supporters would be prepared to countenance some form of physical aggression if it resulted in the end of the Union or Britain’s time in the EU.”

To be precise, 29% of independence voters would support “violent street protests” if it brought their goal closer, against 46% who would disapprove. As for Brexit, 26% would support violence to achieve it, while 50% would not.

These figures surprised me. The Scotland I live in is a douce wee country, where the people generally go about their business, let alone their pleasures, in a friendly and peaceable manner. They often talk to one another on public transport, and they are nice to visitors. Obviously I have been mixing with the non-violent majority. But I would never have dreamt that the violent minority was so large. This is despite the fact that, perhaps like most of us, I have witnessed the occasional scene of violence, something that outsiders often believe is a routine part of life in Scotland.

While I have never seen any trouble at a football match, in the distant period when I used to go out boozing on Friday and Saturday nights, there was certainly the odd rammy. But big brawls seemed only to come in the dog days between Christmas and New Year, because few people went to work and the men (nearly all men, then) had nowhere to pass the murky afternoons except in the pub. Once during that season, I was in a bar that erupted in violence, yet the half-dozen lads with flailing fists did not harm anybody else. There was blood on the floor, the police arrived and I gave a statement. Then I teetered home and slept the whole experience off.

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Even after I reached the age of discretion, and became the Conservative candidate for Maryhill, I was never actually offered violence. More than 90% of my prospective constituents showed with their votes on polling day that they did not like me or my views, but the reception they had given me on the hustings was more cool and correct than heated and abusive.

That was of a piece with the rest of our political life. Though certain of my fellow columnists try to persuade us that Scotland is seething with barely repressed revolutionary fervour, in fact, there has been no serious political violence for a century, since the George Square riot of 1919, when tanks appeared in central Glasgow. At the height of Thatcherism, protests against the poll tax did take place, along with fisticuffs on the miners’ picket lines. But they paled before the scale of the turmoil in the Yorkshire coal fields or of the riots in London. These were so bad as to put the wind up key Tory ministers and that was really the start of the Iron Lady’s downfall. Scotland by contrast has for 100 years been the least violent of European nations. Only Switzerland compares.

Margaret Thatcher

For most of those 100 years, Scotland has also been, in its politics, among the most left-wing of European nations, and this is consistent with another curiosity that 80% of Scots define themselves as working-class. Objectively, as Marxists say, this cannot possibly be true. We have a social structure formed by capitalism and the distribution of the classes will be much the same as in other Western countries. Yet Scots kid themselves that it is not. I suppose this must be because many of the older generation – 70% till quite recently – grew up on council schemes with manual workers for parents, even if they have themselves gone on to be lawyers, doctors or public servants. Loyalty to their background (which is a good thing) makes them prefer to think of themselves as something different from what they in fact are. The SNP panders to this sentiment by also pretending they are proletarians yearning for socialism and drawing up policies that indulge their fantasies (which is a bad thing).

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But some more statistics that came out last week indicate the proportion of SNP voters in the upper half of the class structure (officially labelled ABC1) is roughly the same as the proportion in the lower half (the C2DE). Funnily enough, it’s the same for the other parties. On account of Brexit and immigration, the Tories are now drawing as much working-class support as middle-class support. The Labour remnant contains as many Corbynista intellectuals as militant trade unionists. The situation in society as a whole means class is no longer the best predictor of voting behaviour, as it always used to be. People may make their political choices over the EU, over Scottish independence, over the NHS, over climate change and so on. Inside the polling both their social class, which they may not even clearly perceive, means little to them.

I’m going to vote SNP, but all this means it has been fighting a misconstrued campaign. Ever since Alex Salmond gave way to Nicola Sturgeon five years ago, the party has swung to the left, turned hostile to capitalism and advocated policies that scarcely connect to the digital world that we live in, drawing greater inspiration from the socialist Bennite agenda of the last century. For example, the Scottish Government is far more attuned to what it conceives to be the interests of left-wing west central Scotland than to the interests of the right-wing north-east, which it ignores. Yet the north-east is here, and it needs to win back seats.

As I write this column, two possible trends strike me as potentially decisive on Thursday. One is that, in Scotland, the Tories may not be massacred in all their 13 seats – but will hang on to enough of them to preserve their status as the main opposition to the SNP, so surviving extinction yet again. And then, it still looks as though, at Westminster, Boris Johnson will come out ahead of the other leaders, though it remains far from clear he will win enough seats to see him safely through five years of government.

What if Boris’s majority were less than 13? In other words, how would we feel on the reflection that he would have had no majority at all if the SNP had not failed to win back the conservative parts of Scotland where seats were going begging? I think we would feel pretty sick. Especially people like me, of a conservative nationalist disposition. We could say “I told you so”, but what good would that do in the cold light of Friday morning?