It sounds like an idea dreamed up by senior civil servants after one too many G&Ts late at night in their London Club.

"These Scots, ungrateful sods, just don't realise how much they depend on OUR money. Well let's just remind this Alex Salmond and his smelly socks just where it comes from."

Unfortunately, the next morning they didn't just forget about it and instead persuaded the hapless minister to go ahead with the plan to put stickers bearing the Union flag and the legend "funded by the UK government" on infrastructure projects across Scotland.

Treasury Minister Danny Alexander claims these labels will "proudly adorn" wind turbines, roads even broadband.

But badging can backfire and as soon as they start appearing you can be damn sure they will be defaced with nationalist graffiti.

They are also a cartoonist's gift. The internet has been plastered with images of Trident submarines, members of the Royal Family, corrupt MPs and duck houses all with union flags and "funded by the UK government". It looks a propaganda own goal comparable to the Buzzfeed Lego men and the Patronising BT Lady.

I was born in London, so I suppose I'm technically funded by the UK government. Maybe I should have a flag on my forehead. But joking aside, I don't have an particular problem with this any more than those signs you sometimes see advertising spending by the European Union under its structural funds. I don't find them offensive, imperialist or racially objectionable.

However, I do think it is a curious move from a semiological point of view. Labelling things in this way surely sends precisely the reverse of the message that unionists normally wish to convey: that we are one and the same.

Flagging is what political analysts and historians sometimes call "othering" - suggesting to people the UK is an outside agency, even another country, not part of Scotland.

Yet as has been pointed out, public spending in Scotland is neither courtesy of the UK government nor the Scottish Government but the taxpayer. Most of what is spent by Holyrood on infrastructure is actually "UK funded" since it comes overwhelmingly through the Barnett Formula. Labelling something as being funded by the UK should be otiose, or at best a tautology. It is like saying your breakfast is funded by Mum.

This kind of badging is very much more common on the continent of Europe where you frequently come across signs with the European Union flag and a large sum of money under it wherever there are road widening schemes or underpasses.

These flages are regarded with suspicion in many countries because the locals think the EU is setting itself up as an alternative and superior power to their own elected government.

But are citizens here now supposed to regard the UK in a similar light to the EU? Hardly - since our relationship to the Union is supposed to be very different to our relationship with Europe. The UK is a fully-fledged political and economic union; the European Union is at best a confederation of independent countries, and a not very harmonious one at the moment as we have seen in Greece. It is "something else".

The more I think about it, the more curious all this is. Perhaps this labelling exercise indicates something more profound than a propaganda stunt. Many politicians in Westminster already act as if Scotland were a separate country and this is perhaps another unconscious expression of this decoupling. A psychological recognition that the Union doesn't really exist any longer - at least in the form it did after the Second World War.

When I was growing up in the 60s, the Union flag was pretty much everywhere and it wasn't something regarded as in any way unScottish. The idea of badging public infrastructure with "funded by the UK" would never have occurred to anyone any more than "funded by Britain". Of course it is funded by Britain - we ARE Britain.

So, this initiative may be a tacit recognition that Britain really has changed. That whatever the UK used to be it is no longer a unified political and economic space. Welcome to the future.