If you want a dose of nationalism’s red meat, then I recommend the speech by Stephen Flynn, the SNP’s Westminster leader, during last Saturday’s debate in the House of Commons about potential nationalisation of Scunthorpe steel works.

In a final snarl, Mr Flynn declared: “Westminster is only interested in Westminster; it is not interested in Scotland”. The basis of this contention was that the UK Government was prepared to nationalise Scunthorpe but had failed to do so in the case of Grangemouth oil refinery.

In Mr Flynn’s analysis, if that is not too strong a word, this had nothing to do with the relative circumstances, pros or cons. It was purely an ethnic calculation. We were being discriminated against because we are Scottish and “Westminster is not interested in Scotland”.

Such utterances have become so much part of Scottish politics over the past 20 years that they are rarely subjected to textual analysis. Yet in any other context, surely they would be called out as racism – the allegation of prejudice on the basis of identity.

As Mr Flynn well knows, there is a market for such opinions – as there is for any form of extremism. There are plenty of people in Scotland who want to believe or pretend they are discriminated against. The more vulgar and untrue the allegation, the more likely it is to find an audience.

This attempt to create a “Scunthorpe v Grangemouth” conflict is sufficiently absurd to illustrate the point. The SNP have never called for the nationalisation of Grangemouth. In his six years in the House of Commons, two of them as his party’s........

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