The rise of Scotland’s Covid nationalism

Whenever some London celebrity with a hamster’s grasp of Scottish politics simpers about moving north to escape the flaxen-fringed Franco in No. 10, the cybernat rank-and-file briefly down pitchforks to assure them ‘we’ll get the kettle on’. Like all megachurches, Scottish nationalism loves nothing more than a convert and English progressives all the more so for their loathing of the political and cultural character of England today. In so far as Scottish nationalism has anything as coherent as a philosophy, it is that Scotland is more politically progressive and therefore more virtuous than England. This fusion of national identity and moral superiority claims to be civic nationalism and, while it is less queasy-making than the nationalism of early (and not so early) leaders of the SNP, it nonetheless exists on a continuum with altogether uglier ideas.

Overt statements of Anglophobia are vanishingly uncommon in the SNP now, certainly at elected or ministerial level, and English people who move to Scotland are viewed warmly – provided they support independence or aren’t evidently against it.