WHAT happens when England says “No”? Over the years many words have been expended looking at this question from a Scottish viewpoint. Gallons of ink have been devoted to figuring out responses to this constitutional question. What will replace a Section 30? Should Scotland flirt with a UDI – a Unilateral Declaration of Independence? And what other avenues to sovereignty should be considered?

However, there is another way to consider this question. What happens when England says “No” to rule by a debauched elite who care little for their fellows, and avail themselves shamelessly in pillaging the public purse?

For a long time, this looked unlikely. With its handsome majority Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government of dolts seemed secure to abandon conventions and to ignore all attempts to control their behaviour.

When the TNT show on IndyLive interviewed historian Professor David Egerton of Kings College, London, he claimed that people in England are appalled by the Government’s behaviour and you should expect major changes ahead. As host of the show, I challenged him for evidence of this desire for change south of the border.

He was content to insist that those he met and spoke with had reached a point where they saw change as inevitable.

I must admit this was the only point in the entire show where I was sceptical. However, I did get the impression that Professor Edgerton perhaps knew a little more than he was prepared to reveal at that time.

Now, that evidence has begun to emerge.

Witness the recent Amersham and Chesham bye election, where the Tories were ousted from the seat they’d held for decades. Over-excited Liberals declared they “were breaking down the blue wall” in the home counties. While this may be palpable nonsense, it is certainly the case that they vastly increased their share of the vote in a safe Tory seat.

John Bercow, the former Speaker of the House of Commons has left the Tory party. A life-long Conservative, Bercow told the Observer he sees the Conservative party as “reactionary, populist, nationalistic and sometimes even xenophobic.” He also said Johnson lacks any vision for a more equitable society.

“I think increasingly people are sick of lies, sick of empty slogans, sick of a failure to deliver,” Bercow said.

Last Wednesday Scottish Green candidate, Laura Moodie, was my guest on the TNT show.

(Dear reader, if you are heartedly sick of the exceptionally poor offerings on the BBC and other mass media, then do forgive me for plugging the TNT show. The Nation Talks is increasingly the place to go for 60-minute, in-depth interviews of people, across the constitutional divide, who make things tick in Scotland. It’s live and free, so no licence, no problem. See below for details on next week’s guest.) Smallholder Laura spoke eloquently about the problems that Brexit is causing her, and her friends and neighbours. Shipping a small quantity of cheese to Northern Ireland now requires copious paperwork making the process unprofitable. Now, it is a routine view that the Tory vote in farming communities has been customarily high, certainly relative to support for other parties. It seems a shift in this traditional support is underway.

Friends and relatives overseas tell me that British products are rapidly disappearing from the shelves of local supermarkets, replaced by similar products from Ireland. As markets dry up, the inevitable additional costs of Brexit will be hard to deny; even for a government blessed with a supine media.

There is an increasing clamour in England to resist the latest crazy notion that pupils need to sing the new propaganda ditty, “One Britain, One Nation”, and thereby pledge their allegiance to an ill-defined state. Understandably, parents are unwilling to send their children to school simply to be brainwashed. Of course, this is happening at a time when general school standards in England are plummeting.

To meet the challenge of these tumbling standards, Joy Morrissey MP has come up with a super wheeze. The Tory MP has launched a scheme to put up a picture of the monarch in “every home, company and institution”. As less troubled minds have pointed out: “perhaps we could start by doing something for the 200,000 people without a home in which to put said portrait?”.

When you throw in the needless expense of the proposed new Royal Yacht you get yet another clear example of a government wholly unconnected and unconcerned with the challenges that daily confront their fellow citizens. It is little wonder that England is saying No to immoral government. As for Scotland, it is time to go.

Lin Anderson, the noted Scottish crime writer, is Wednesday’s guest at 7pm on the TNT show