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Interesting times to be a Scot living down south. You hear some fun stuff.

Just last week I was on a train out of Marylebone station in London, a few days before Nicola Sturgeon announced she’d be seeking a second referendum on Scottish independence.

Anyway, the train pulled out and, in the seats in front of me, I heard these two English fellows strike up what passed for a political conversation for them.

(I should point out that these guys were straight out of the Harry Enfield ‘Loadsamoney’ playbook. Younger readers can ask their parents about this stereotype.)

One of them opened up with: “You know who I can’t stand? That Nicola Sturgeon. She makes my skin crawl.”

His friend agreed with him then came back with: “I like that Ruth… what’s her name? Davidson. Like her. She’s a straight talker.”

(Image: 2017 Getty Images)

Yes, we had a pair of morons who preferred pantomime villain Ruth Davidson to lovely Nicola. The kind of guys who’d look at a glass slipper and a jackboot and say : “Yeah, I like the jackboot me.”

They went on to get deeper into the hard political analysis with gems such as Scotland was “having a laugh” to even think about a second referendum, that our economy was “in the toilet”, that we should be grateful to England for bailing us out and that if we did choose to leave, then it would be “see you later mugs” and “don’t let the door hit us on the way out”.

After a while they veered off into talking about the NHS and how the Tories were right and we just couldn’t afford it any more, how they both paid too much in tax as it was and blah, blah, blah…

I sat there and tried to read my book, hoping the steam coming out of my ears wouldn’t eventually make it impossible to see the page in front of me.

Then, a couple of days later, after Sturgeon made her announcement, I made the mistake of looking at Katie Hopkins’s Twitter feed to see what she was saying about it.

It was basically an even more savage version of what the two political geniuses on the train had been saying. Even more eye-opening was reading the replies of some of her followers.

(Image: Getty)

You can imagine the kind of person who follows Hopkins, but I was still shocked. The venom. The anti-Scottish hatred. The whole “good riddance to bad rubbish” vibe.

It all helped to crystallise for me the whole reason I am pro-independence. The Hopkins/Tory/Ukip/anti-NHS/ pro-Brexit England is becoming a place of incredible viciousness and cruelty.

It is a country whose value system seems to have been shaped from the top down, which down here means the City. It means what is good for “business” and the rest can all go to hell.

Hopkins and those guys on the train have zero interest in society. Like Loadsamoney, they are a logical end product of Thatcherism.

Of course, Thatcherism and the City never counted for much north of the Border. It is the reason you watched Scotland go red during every general election of the 1980s while the rest of the country went blue.

It is the reason Scotland voted overwhelmingly to remain in Europe while England went Brexit bonkers.

We are a country where the phrase, “From each according to their ability to those according to their needs” is still not a collection of swear words.

The other thing I took from last week is this – do not be fooled again by the, “Oh please Scotland, we love you, don’t leave us” rubbish.

(Image: 2017 Getty Images)

There are millions of disgraceful, racist, Daily Mail-reading little Englanders who despise us but who are terrified Scotland leaving the Union would at least achieve one thing: Highlighting the utter, total folly of Brexit.

Indeed, Theresa May last week had the brass neck to say that it was not time for Scottish independence because we have the Brexit mess to deal with. That’s right – we can’t leave because we have to help them fix the mess that her party made and that we voted against.

Let that sink in for a moment…

I drew an analogy to this on Twitter, which I’ll have to clean up somewhat for use in this lovely family paper.

It is like having a number two-related accident in your pants and, rather than changing them, forcing someone else to wear them.

Back to the morons on the train. When we reached my stop, I got up and, as calmly as I could muster, in my thickest Ayrshire accent, said: “Your grasp on Scottish politics is laughable in the extreme.”

There was a stunned pause – they were on to football by now – then, as I got off, one of them shouted after me: “Why don’t you f*** off back there, you Jock clown.”

And you know what? If it somehow comes to pass in 2019, after 23 years down here, I might just do that. Scottish property searches on Right Move have never looked more appealing.

They can keep their little England with its racism, its spiralling prices, no freedom of European movement and private healthcare. Where the new bible is the Daily Mail and its flag is the sneering face of Katie Hopkins.

Good luck to them.