THERE’S definitely something in the air, and it’s the rising smell of British nationalist panic.

With more than a dozen opinion polls in a row showing majority support for independence and that ESSEMPEE on track to form a majority government following next May’s Holyrood elections and standing on a clear and unambiguous mandate for another independence referendum, British nationalism’s victimhood-seeking, ad hominem attacks and blame-shifting have become so shrill that bats across Scotland have been deafened.

There seems to be a lot of very angry and bitter Britnats on Twitter these days. You’d almost think that it’s because they can see their Precioussss Union crumbling before their eyes – oh wait, that’s *exactly* what it is.

Just this week we have learned that the sad death of Charles Kennedy was all the fault of that ESSEMPEE and had nothing to do with his long battle with alcoholism or the way in which he was abandoned by his own party after his career imploded.

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The accusations that SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford engaged in a “bullying campaign” which “hounded Kennedy to his death” originated on the permapursed lips of Labour’s Britnat howler Brian Wilson, who is not exactly an objective witness, but which have been taken by the Britnat frothers on social media as gospel truth. The fact that Blackford was himself the victim of harassment from the notoriously unpleasant and harassing LibDems doesn’t rate a mention, because it’s only SNPBad, right?

Meanwhile, to the ever growing list of things that are all the fault of that ESSEMPEE, we can now add a No-Deal Brexit. You might have thought that the blame for Brexit rested with a Conservative party which froze out the devolved governments – not only from any input into the negotiations with the EU but which also failed to keep them informed, and which has ripped up its previous agreements with the EU and threatened to break international law, in the process trashing what little there was left of any goodwill from the EU towards Boris Johnson’s maladministration, all in its hellbent pursuit of the hardest possible Brexit.

However, if you thought that this meant that the possibility of crashing out of the EU without a deal was the responsibility of a criminally irresponsible Conservative party, you would of course be wrong. That is because absolutely nothing can possibly be the fault of the Conservatives when they coexist in the same universe as that ESSEMPEE.

Having systematically sidelined the Scottish Government from Brexit negotiations, Michael Gove, the UK Government minister for slimeballery and oozing, a position he job shares with every other Tory cabinet minister, now wants us to blame Nicola Sturgeon and the Scottish Government for undermining negotiations. And there we all were thinking that the British Government was doing a grand job of that all by itself. Gove’s petulance is because Nicola Sturgeon had the audacity to make her own representations to EU negotiator Michel Barnier and was not content to sit in silence despite being told to wheesht by her British superiors.

Of course it’s not like anyone is surprised that Gove won’t take responsibility for his own government’s mistakes. Michael Gove wouldn’t take responsibility for a loud and smelly fart in a lift he was occupying all by himself.

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Gove is desperate to deflect blame because Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, has warned that a No-Deal Brexit will cost the UK more in the long term than the economic damage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Most observers agree that the biggest obstacle to a deal is the intransigence of the Prime Malingerer himself, and his crazed desperation to keep his swivel-eyed crazed Brextremist back-benchers on board as his administration lurches from one self-inflicted crisis to another.

Meanwhile, all is far from well amongst Johnson’s colonial administrators in the Scottish Conservatives. Arch Brexiteer Michelle Ballantyne MSP has resigned from the party, reportedly because she is unhappy with Douglas Ross’s attempts to distance himself from Johnson and for copying successful SNP policies like free university tuition and free school meals.

This may be the first instance ever in Scottish politics of a rat swimming back to a sinking ship.

There are significant policy differences between Ballantyne and Ross. Whereas Ross voted against free school meals for kids from poorer families, Ballantyne would prefer poorer families just had fewer kids.

One thing we can be sure of is that as the Conservatives continue to trash their Preciousss Union, the howls of impotent rage from British nationalists on social media are only going to increase in volume.