AT the weekend, Glasgow’s streets were taken over by the Orange display of hatred and intolerance that likes to describe itself as culture and tradition. Equally traditionally, the hand wringing in the overwhelmingly anti-independence media in Scotland refused to call out this hate fest for what it really is.

This was not “Scotland’s shame”, this was not an event to be glossed over with the false equivalence of decrying it as “sectarianism”. This was British nationalism’s shame, British nationalism’s shame of naked anti-Irish racism and prejudice against the million and a half or more Scots of Irish Catholic descent. This was British nationalism in all its hate-filled, triumphalist, backward looking and reactionary glory.

Just as traditionally, those Conservative MSPs who take to social media to denounce peaceful and inclusive pro-independence marches and rallies which take place with minimal police presence and few if any arrests had nothing to say about a British nationalist celebration of intolerance which effectively closed down large swathes of Glasgow and which is invariably followed by a significant number of arrests for public order offences.

READ MORE: Andrew Tickell: Orange marches fool no-one - it is bigotry not ‘culture’

This isn’t “culture”, if anti-Irish racism is your culture then your culture sucks and you seriously need to find a new one, a culture that’s fit for the 21st century, not the 18th. Prejudice against your fellow Scots because they come from an Irish Catholic family background does not magically become acceptable just because your granny and grandfather were dyed in the wool anti-Irish British nationalist racist bigots too. It makes it worse because it shows that you have learned nothing and that you take pride in your ignorance.

Orange parades are an exclusionary and triumphalist expression of the British nationalist belief that the ownership of Scotland is theirs alone. It’s an ownership which is expressed in a dystopian collision of anti-Irish bigotry, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the world’s worst Weight Watchers group, with a guest appearance from Mr Benn’s bowler-hatted racist cousin.

Orange parades are not a colourful and joyous celebration of history. If you really just wanted to dress up in military uniforms to the thumping beat of drums in the company of your drinking buddies there are nightclubs for that sort of high campery. Orange parades are British nationalism telling Scots of Irish descent, and since 2014 also Scots who support independence: “These are our streets, not yours, this is our city not yours, this is our Britain, not your Scotland.”

That is why they insist on marching past Catholic churches in their pretendy and ill-fitting military-style uniforms. They are making an implicit and not too veiled threat. It’s blatant intimidation, telling their opponents to know their place or risk being put back in that place with violence. Orange parades are quite literally banging the drum for British nationalist entitlement. This is culture in the exact same way that a dog pissing on a lamppost is culture.

These days, mainstream British nationalism in Scotland likes to distance itself from the naked bigotry of the Orange Order, and tries to maintain the fiction that British nationalism really isn’t nationalist at all. The usual suspects in the Scottish Tories who get themselves worked up into a lather of indignant outrage at the decades-old tweets of a pro-independence comedian have nothing to say about the far more public and disruptive display of intolerance, racism and bigotry that British nationalism’s Orangeism represents.

The problem for mainstream British nationalists is that while they no longer espouse the anti-Irish racism or anti-Catholic bigotry of the lamppost markers of the Orange Order and its associated organisations, in certain key aspects the annual hate fest of Orange parades do speak for what modern British nationalism has become.

In the mainstream British nationalism of the post-Brexit Conservative Party we see the exact same fetishisation of the military, the quasi-religious worship of a parasitic royal family, the same xenophobic suspicion of anyone deemed not sufficiently true blue, and the same nostalgic looking back to the lost imperial golden age that never was.

Orangeism is merely the Scottish Conservative Party when it has been stripped of its veneer of respectability. While the modern Conservative Party in Scotland has now disavowed the crude anti-Irish racism and anti-Catholic bigotry that it was happy to be associated with in decades gone by, in many respects the disgrace of Orange parades is still the public and working-class manifestation of what Scottish Tories whisper in private behind the net curtains of the douce middle class.

Just last week we saw the British Government proudly announce that a return to imperial weights and measures was a key benefit of Brexit. It’s a move that would doubtless have played well with the British nationalist drum bangers on the streets of Glasgow over the weekend, defined as they are by the same backward-looking British nationalist imperial nostalgia.

The big problem for British nationalists as Scotland faces a second independence referendum campaign is that the debate about independence is a debate about Scotland’s future, British nationalism, in both its mainstream and Orange incarnations is defined by, obsessed with, and lost in the victories of the past, whether that’s the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, or the Battle of Britain in 1940. British nationalism has nothing to say about Scotland’s future.

READ MORE: Arrests after ‘racist and sectarian singing’ during Orange Order marches

In 2014, opponents of independence were able to dangle the carrot of EU membership and the promise of greater devolution. It’s now independence which offers the quickest route back to Europe, and with a Conservative Government which openly despises the devolution settlement and blatantly seeks to undermine it, no-one is going to believe any promises from the anti-independence campaign that a No vote in a future referendum would be rewarded with greater powers for Holyrood.

Now British nationalism only has threats, intimidation and scaremongering, a nostalgic obsession with military parades, imperial glories, the royal family and an all consuming flag fetish. In those respects the mainstream British nationalism of the Scottish Conservatives is exactly the same as the Orange Order, and likewise it is marching into the past, because there is no place for either in Scotland’s future.