My Dad was down south for a bit, and got his usual paper: the Daily Mail (we have very different tastes in media, I must stress).  But it wasn’t his usual paper, because at home he gets the Scottish edition. Down south, he got – of course – the English one. Some of it was the same, so you got the usual “did fish gods build the pyramids?*” features and the incomprehensibly popular “Women! You’re fat and ugly unless you buy this expensive quackery!” sections, but the one big difference between our edition and the national one was the anti-Scottish anger.

(Incidentally my dad’s basically apolitical and couldn’t care less either way, so we’re not talking about a rabid Scotsman looking for bias in the sassenach press. Particularly as he’s an Englishman. He was quite taken aback by the tone of the coverage.)

It’s something some of you have commented on here before, but from what I’ve seen online – as far as I can tell newspaper sites don’t differentiate between Scots and English visitors, so the versions I see are, I assume, the English versions rather than the localised ones – it’s getting increasingly serious. It may have started as an attempt to get Labour, but it does look like it’s gathering a momentum of its own.

The majority of Scots may be against independence, but if the Mail’s correctly judged the national mood then it may not be a case of Scots demanding a separate country; it’ll be the rest of the UK telling us to piss off. And you can be sure that’s something the new SNP administration will be doing their damndest to encourage.

* I’ve nicked that from somewhere. Jeremy Hardy, maybe?