Wee Ginger Dug: Unionists are making it all too clear just how rattled they are

Because according to Gordie Broon, while we’re dealing with a pandemic whose effects are being exacerbated by a corrupt and criminally incompetent Conservative Government Scotland didn’t vote for – a government that will not be diverted from its pursuit of a politically and economically devastating Brexit and which is systematically undermining and neutering the devolution settlement – what we really need is stasis and helpless passivity.

Aye, Gordie, that’ll do it. That’s exactly what we need.

Perhaps the only folk more detached from reality than the Gordosaur – and to be fair he’s got an excuse because he’s living in the late Cretaceous period – are those BBC producers who keep trotting him out in the belief that he’s still influential with an increasingly pro-independence Scottish public.

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Of course, the reason he’s as bereft of credibility as a recipe for a fish supper from Tory smug boy Andrew Bowie is that we are still waiting for that devo max, that closest thing possible to federalism that Gordie promised he was going to deliver if Scotland voted No in 2014.

Naturally, Andrew Marr subjected him to some rigorous questioning about his abject failure to keep his word and demanded to know why we should believe him this time. Nah, of course not. The only way I’d ever see that happening is if I hallucinated it while having another stroke.

In recent weeks, even Fox News has taken to debunking and examining the pronouncements of Donald Trump, but the BBC still acts as an uncritical platform to amplify and broadcast the pronouncements of opponents of independence.

However, Marr did manage to ask whether Gordie would lead the No campaign in the independence referendum to come. There are a lot of people who could lead the campaign, he replied in what was both an obvious attempt to deflect the question and a failure to name any of these supposedly numerous leaders.

Of course, it’s obvious why Gordie doesn’t want to suggest himself for the job. He’s still in touch with reality enough to realise that if he did take on the role, the people of Scotland would demand answers to those difficult questions about his failure to deliver on his promises of 2014 that Andrew Marr and the BBC are so willing to give him a free pass on. Unlike the BBC, the people of Scotland know that talk of a federal UK is not merely flogging a dead horse but that the horse has already been boiled down for dog food which has been eaten by the dugs in the street.

They know Gordie’s word is worthless and it has already journeyed through their digestive systems and been passed out the other end and now sits in the House of Lords as a Conservative peer.

Talking of waste, who should come creeping out of his crypt to pop up on Twitter to give Gordie his full support but Margaret Thatcher’s McMinion and historic political failure Michael Forsyth. And it’s precisely because the likes of the Arch-Tory Brextremist Forsyth are so happy to support Gordie’s anti-independence crusade that the Gordosaur has no political capital left in Scotland.

Forsyth thinks a pandemic and a recession mean that Scotland shouldn’t have an independence referendum, but they are not enough of a reason to halt, or even pause, Michael’s red, white and blue wet dream of a hard Brexit.

Despite Gordie’s claim that there are a lot of people who could head up Better Together MkII, realistically it’s hard to think of a credible candidate. What is left of the Labour Party in Scotland has learned the hard way that sharing a political platform with the Conservatives is a one-way ticket to electoral oblivion.

And that’s going to be even more the case in the next indyref than it was in 2014, now that the Conservatives have transformed themselves into a political vehicle for right-wing populist Brextremist English nationalism.

The Tories who run the UK are only interested in spending public money to feather their pals’ nests. Now Gordon Brown is telling us to trust them with our future. Labour are part of the corrupt British problem, they are not the solution, and any Labour figure who allies with these corrupt and venal carpetbaggers in Better Together The Sequel would merely be signing a death warrant for the Labour Party in Scotland.

That just leaves the Scottish Tories as the source of a potential face, or rather two-face, for the anti-indy campaign. Unfortunately for opponents of independence, the Scottish Tories can only attempt to compensate for their lack of talent, skills, ability – and indeed backbones – with a nauseatingly unbearable smugness.

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It is proof of Andrew Bowie’s complete lack of self-awareness that he is so unaccountably pleased with himself, like an adolescent boy who has just discovered masturbation but who thinks it is a secret no-one else knows about.

Douglas Ross, in his short career as Ruth Davidson’s puppet – sorry, leader of the Scottish Conservatives – has already given us a lifetime’s supply of evidence to prove that his promises are worthless. Which only leaves Baroness Don’t-Call-Me-Baroness Davidson herself. However, having accepted a peerage and a lifetime free pass from democratic accountability for services to knifing her successor in the back and unilaterally overturning the outcome of a democratic vote within her own party is really not a good look for a politician who seeks to persuade Scotland that it will be respected and listened to within the UK.

And all the more so when her party has spent the last six years alternately ignoring Scotland and treating it with contempt over Brexit, and then using that Brexit that Scotland has rejected as an excuse to undermine the devolution settlement.

The bottom line is that it’s not for Gordon Brown or Michael Forsyth or any British politician to decide when the time is right for another independence referendum. It’s for the people of Scotland and no-one else. And, increasingly, the people of Scotland are looking upon the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of British politicians and deciding that the time for another independence referendum can’t come soon enough.