Members of the Scottish National Party’s youth wing took part in a demonstration in Barcelona in favour of a vote on Catalonian independence

The Scots were hard to miss in Barcelona last weekend. A contingent of SNP Youth members were met with wild applause when they attended a referendum rally. Tricia Marwick, a senior SNP figure and the former presiding officer in Holyrood, addressed the crowd. Alex Salmond was on Catalan TV.

But if the affinities between the SNP and the Catalan independence movement are obvious, the contrast between the responses of the governments in Madrid and Westminster could hardly be more stark.

Faced with his own “separatist” threat after the 2011 SNP landslide in the Holyrood election, David Cameron’s reaction was imaginative and enlightened by comparison with the almost impossibly low standards of Mariano Rajoy’s government in Madrid.

Mr Cameron acceded to almost every nationalist demand. The