What the abuse of a BBC journalist says about Sturgeon’s Scotland

James Cook, the BBC’s Scotland editor, is ‘a traitor’. He is ‘scum’, ‘a scumbag’ and ‘a liar’. At least he is according to the Scottish nationalists who howled those epithets at him last night as he tried to report on the Tory leadership hustings. Outside Perth Concert Hall, a mob had gathered, as they invariably do when any of Scotland’s pro-Union parties meet, not for a spirited protest but to shout abuse and spew vitriol. These are the people who love Scotland so much they hate half the people living there.

There was the familiar ‘TORY SCUM OUT’ banner, complete with the black saltire emblem of Siol nan Gaidheal, an ethnic nationalist group that pledges itself to ‘the essential survival of our people as an ethnic and cultural community’, asserts that ‘every English incomer at present is suspect’ and states it will ‘not stand idly by and watch our country being used, abused or betrayed by enemies both internal and external’.