It was only a matter of time, but I knew they would do it because they always do. They just cannot help themselves.
They have become so navel contemplative and ferociously Anglophobic over the years that a huge number of Scottish nationalists – possibly the majority – always demand the right to link themselves with whichever wee country in the world is being bullied by a bigger neighbour.
Thus, without a moment’s hesitation, they equate Ukraine being under attack by Vladimir Putin’s tank armada and the missiles he is raining down on their civilian housing precincts, with what the dastardly English have been doing to Scotland.
It is both a disgraceful calumny but much, much worse, it is also a grievous insult to the bravery of the Ukrainian people who are fighting to the death for their freedom.
They are so wrapped up in the pathetic little world most of them now inhabit, where everything Scottish is good and whatever is British or English is bad, they believe the faults of Boris Johnson’s government are somehow on a par with the murderous activities of the Moscow dictator.
This is is the view not of some SNP backwoodsmen but of one of its most senior and experienced politicians, Mike Russell, who is now the president of the party. Of course, he does not say so in as many words, but he does not have to. The trick at which Mr Russell and his ilk are past masters is the “guilt by association” trick that feeds the paranoia of most nationalists.
And so, when we hear talk of Russian “dirty money” flowing through London, he says it was that same dirty money that the Tories used to beat the nationalists in the 2014 independence referendum. Wait a minute, I thought the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee found it was the other way round and that there was “credible” evidence the Putin regime tried to help the nationalists win that vote?
However, in another sign of the nationalists’ “we wuz robbed” obsession with the referendum result, Mr Russell said just because “something was, doesn’t mean it will always continue to be, so whether that be rule from Moscow or the result of an eight-year-old referendum”. People had the right, he said, to choose how they are governed.
But, again wait a minute. Does this cod philosophy from the SNP president mean that the decision of the Ukrainian people in 1991 to get out of what was the Soviet Union can be set aside and ignored, as is the current belief of his fellow president in the Kremlin? The past does matter, Mr Russell, and it should not be cast aside as casually as he would wish just because he did not like the score in 2014.
