MUCH jollity will ensue in the next few weeks as it becomes clear who in Scotland’s swollen suite of civic panjandrums has been invited to John Swinney’s ‘Wha’s Like Us’ summit.

The First Minister wants to get decent people from all parties to unite against the ‘far right’ in Scotland.

His entire political career has been spent dodging principles and replacing them with clichés. He produced two more of them when announcing his summit. It was time, he said “to draw a line in the sand” and unite against “a politics of fear”.

He wanted them all to assert “the values of our country” so that we could create “a cohesive society where everyone feels at home”.

We’ll leave aside for the moment the fact that Scottish values are more or less the same as the values of people in almost every other country in the world. The majority of people everywhere are essentially decent, peaceful, honest, hard-working and compassionate.

It’s when political chancers like Mr Swinney have started to channel ideas about exceptionalism and tribal superiority that history’s biggest problems have started.

It’s clear that the First Minister is rattled by the growing popularity of Reform UK and the abject failure of the SNP to halt this.

Here’s the tragic irony, though. Many decent people have indicated support for Reform UK because the SNP has itself become a haven for frauds and extremists. These people have been given licence by Mr Swinney and his two predecessors to intimidate and harass people – mainly women – for refusing to participate in the lie that transwomen are women.

On his watch, civic Scotland has become a cold and pitiless wasteland where good people fear........

© Herald Scotland