SPEAKING at an event during the Edinburgh International Book Festival last month, the respected historian Professor Tom Devine warned opponents of independence that the Union between Scotland and England was now more precarious than at any time since the Jacobite uprisings of the 18th century and that the prospects for Scotland remaining a part of the British state were worse than they had been at any time since the 1760s.

Devine noted that there has been a substantial and significant demographic shift in Scotland over recent decades with a large, indeed overwhelming, majority of younger people now preferring independence. He remarked that opposition to independence is quite literally dying off, saying: “The Grim Reaper may be on the side of the SNP’s position.”

Devine went on to explain that there has been a historic and fundamental change in the nature of the Union since the Brexit vote. With Scotland voting to remain by a large majority yet having the Conservatives’ hard and uncompromising Brexit imposed on it anyway, this was, he said, the first time in the history of the Union that Scottish opinion on a major issue has been denied.

Furthermore, with Westminster refusing to allow another independence referendum, despite the Scottish Parliament having a very clear mandate for one, the British government is effectively denying that Scotland is a nation with a right to self-determination. He added that under Boris Johnson: “We have now moved quite dramatically, and very swiftly, from a union by consent to a union of enforced law. In my opinion, a union of that type cannot stand.”

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Devine also expressed his surprise that more people in Scotland are not outraged by this dramatic transformation “which has literally occurred over the last few years after nearly three centuries of a different and more harmonious regime based on respect and concern for the sensitivities of the other”.

The lack of general Scottish outrage beyond convinced supporters of independence is not too difficult to understand. The UK in general and Scotland in particular have a media which overwhelmingly see their primary task as fending off support for independence, attacking the Scottish Government, and deflecting criticisms of the Conservative Party.

As a case in point, look at British media coverage over the past few weeks of the shortages which have afflicted British supermarkets and have recently extended to petrol stations. We’re told it’s because of the pandemic, because of the so-called pingdemic – anything to avoid mentioning the real cause, the self-inflicted and entirely unnecessary hard Brexit imposed on us all by the Conservatives for their own selfish and party-political ends. That is what has created a shortage of HGV and delivery drivers, by driving away the EU citizens who were formerly disproportionately employed in this sector.

I have friends and family in Spain, a country which has been hit hard by the pandemic, but there are no issues with supermarket supply there. They look askance at the UK, whose government is incapable of ensuring that its citizens are kept supplied with the essentials of life but which proudly delivers blue passports that no longer permit freedom of movement throughout Europe as though this was some sort of triumph.

Equally, the sharp rises in energy prices are blamed by the supine British media on Russia, or on an increase in demand elsewhere, while carefully protecting the Conservatives from blame. But it was the Conservatives who deregulated the UK’s energy market and removed the obligation on the energy companies to store gas which could have mitigated the present crisis.

This is a crisis which has been magnified and exacerbated by the policies of a Conservative Government which repeatedly gets away with its assaults on the common good and public services because it is protected by a British press which prefers to attack the Labour Party and a Scottish press which sees its job as being holding power to account, but only if the power in question is the power of the Scottish Government.

But never fear our, ahem, world-beating government of Global Britain has a cunning plan to solve the supermarket shortages, at least in the short term. But the short term is all that matters to a Conservative Party that will not look beyond the attention span of the tabloid press news cycle. The cunning plan is essentially as follows:

“Dear Europeans, please come back on a temporary visa for a couple of months until Christmas Eve, in order to get us out of the mess that we created by driving you away in the first place. We need you to deliver Christmas presents, fuel, food and drink, so we don’t have newspaper headlines saying that we’re the Grinches who have stolen Christmas.

“Then, from Christmas Day, we will restore the hostile environment and we’d like you to bugger off back where you came from so we can return to being massive racists who blame you for everything so we can get the cheap headlines in the right-wing press which are all that really matter to us. Yours, the Conservative Party.”

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Meanwhile, research from this newspaper has proven that the BBC consistently frames political stories about the SNP-led Scottish Government in a negative or hostile way while taking great pains not to be similarly critical of the Conservatives at Westminster.

Given this media landscape, the truly surprising thing is not that there is so little widespread public outrage at the way in which the Conservatives under Boris Johnson have unilaterally rewritten the traditional understanding of Scottish Unionism in order to strip Scotland of its right to self-determination and change the basis of the Union from a voluntary one to one based upon compulsion and the negation of the democratic choices Scotland’s electorate make at the ballot box.

What is remarkable is that despite the best efforts of Scotland’s British media to pour cold water on the flames of independence there remains not only such a high level of support for independence and another referendum but a widespread desire for the Scottish Government to get on with it.

The British media will keep trying to protect the Conservatives, but increasingly the people of Scotland see right through them.