IT was Vladimir Nabokov who wittily warned against the lazy use of coincidence in literature.

With his tongue firmly embedded in his cheek, Nabokov once wrote: “A certain man once lost a diamond cufflink in the wide blue sea, and 20 years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish – but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”

Nabokov is right when it comes to storytelling and plot construction, but he would have enjoyed the joyful serendipity of last Tuesday when Scottish patriot Ian Hamilton passed away, and the last liberator of Scotland’s Stone of Destiny was pronounced dead.

Hamilton was one of the four students from Glasgow University who travelled to Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1950, under the cover of darkness and through blankets of snow, to liberate the stone and return it to Scotland.

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Within a few hours of news of Hamilton’s passing in Argyll, the old school country and western icon Loretta Lynn died in her home, Hurricane Hills in Tennessee, an area once populated by Scots farmers who emigrated to the USA.

Hamilton and the coal miner’s daughter had nothing much in common beyond a vague humanity, but they are now forever locked in my mind through the sheer coincidence of their day of death.

Every time I am reminded of the Stone of Destiny, I will think of Loretta Lynn, and when I pass through Scone the next time I’m back in Perth, it will remind me of a country and western great and the long journey of Scottish independence. As Nabokov wrote: “That’s what I like about coincidence.”

Although Ian Hamilton and Loretta Lynn’s deaths became fleeting partners in coincidence last week, I have to share with you another coincidence that takes us from Scottish traditional music to the dark financial forces that are pulling the strings of modern conservatism.

The story begins back in 1945 in a Scottish community in Tennessee, hidden away in the train tracks and farms between Memphis and Nashville, not far from where Loretta Lynn’s ranch at Hurricane Mills now stands.

It was Hogmanay when most Scottish families would head out to barn dances in local communities before they were torn asunder by the construction of Interstate 40, the near-symbolic highway that cuts the USA in two, stretching from California to North Carolina.

Standing on stage with a four-piece country group called the Canyon Cowboys was a fiddler of long-time Scottish ancestry called Jim Stewart – his sister Estelle was in the audience, hosting a noisy family table.

Watching the show, detached and more surly, was the Buchanan family from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, whose son James McGill Buchanan was home on leave and was destined to become one of the most famous economists in the world, a Nobel Prize-winner in 1986, and now the ideological guru of radical conservatism.

The bewildering coincidences of Scottish migration and the Caledonian diaspora is a subject we know far too little about. Here’s just a tiny glimpse.

Jim Stewart left the Tennessee farmlands and dreamt of setting up his own records store to sell bluegrass, hillbilly and Scottish country dance tunes first on 78rpm shellac and then on 45rpm vinyl as the recording industry flourished. His sister found premises on a corner on McLemore Avenue, Memphis, and the two of them mortgaged their starter homes and combined their surnames – he was Stewart, and she was now called Estelle Axton – and together they founded Stax Records.

Within a matter of a few struggling years, Estelle Axton came to learn that the Scottish country dance tunes were no longer selling and most of their local black customers were looking for contemporary R&B. Circumstances forced them to change direction and they began to record local artists, the mixed-race Booker T and the MGs, local celebrity Rufus Thomas, and eventually the meteoric superstar Otis Redding.

So a Scottish fiddle player built one of the greatest soul labels ever but what of his grumpy onlooker? What, in turn, can we say about James McGill Buchanan? Firstly, he is the only Nobel Prize-winner called after a bus company and a bus station, and he has been described by the August 2017 publication of The Atlantic as “the architect of the radical right”.

Buchanan fell in love with politics and economics reading his grandfather’s library, including a well-worn copy of Adam Smith’s The Wealth Of Nations, which had come with his ancestors from Scotland.

Like president Richard Nixon, who was an early convert to Buchanan’s thinking, both men despised the power elites of the Ivy League universities and the northeast corner of the USA.

With evangelic zeal, Buchanan tore into what he often saw as the powder-puff privilege of Boston and New York. From his university base in Virginia, he set out to “create, support, and activate an effective counter-intelligentsia” that could transform “the way people think about government”.

Buchanan’s approach to economics raged against what he described as “the licensed theft” of governments that want to increase taxation to fund public services. He became known as the grandmaster of “public choice” economics and the politics of self-interest.

Buchanan rejected “any organic conception of the state as superior in wisdom to the citizens of this state”. It is exactly the kind of theorising much loved by the right who are allergic to public spending, welfare support and any belief that the state can be caring and beneficent.

In an investigative feature in Byline Times, Sam Bright delved into the deepening links between Liz Truss’s government, shadowy think tanks and the free-market enthusiasm of James Buchanan’s legacy.

MOST governments engage with think tanks or special advisers, some from academia, others from the growing industry of advice-for-sale, but what differentiates this latest brand of free-market conservatism is their closeness to the unaccountable think tanks of Tufton Street in Westminster, such as the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), the Adam Smith Institute, the so-called Taxpayers’ Alliance, the Centre For Policy Studies and Policy Exchange.

Most of these policy units have gulped down Buchanan’s Kool-Aid and are hungry to hack back every area of public service, privatising the national health service, exposing the prison service to the free market, allowing fracking, tearing up green-belt legislation and peppering the road system with tolls.

It has been a chaotic first month for the new Prime Minister and her Chancellor, which has seen at least £300 billion wiped from the combined value of the UK’s stock and bond markets. Confidence in the UK has been shaken, yet still there are those that have profited, and the neo-liberal think tanks that have enabled Truss and Kwarteng’s reckless ideas are still working their voodoo in the background, serving the vested interests of big businesses, fossil fuels, tobacco, and junk food.

Despite their protests, the Tufton Street think tanks share one thing in common, they have undue influence on the current government and are reluctant to be entirely honest about who calls the tune.

Leaked documents and investigative journalism seem convinced that their funders include American billionaires, tobacco firms, oil magnates and foreign oligarchs. This is the exciting new Britain that Scotland is tethered to.

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Be under no illusions – the baseless mantra of “growth, growth, growth”, spoken with such wooden convection by Liz Truss, is true if what you are measuring is food-bank usage, child poverty, bankers’ bonuses and waiting lists.

It is no great secret, but each annual Tory conference comes with a barely hidden contempt for public services and the safety net supposed to help our most vulnerable.

We now have the most hopeless Conservative leadership of modern times, and they are being worked from behind by some of the most repellent characters known to man.

Sometimes it’s no coincidence, sometimes it’s just planned.