This is the former Labour UK government minister, socialist and internationalist Brian Wilson in the Scotsman today, gloating and crowing that the democratically-elected government of Catalonia has been deposed and imprisoned (the latest in a series of arrests and jailings of leaders of the independence movement) for seeking to discover the will of the Catalan people in a referendum, in accordance with the mandate they were elected on – an act Wilson somehow contrives to describe as “tyranny”.

Wilson, whose Twitter avatar is a picture of himself with Fidel Castro, asserts that the Spanish government’s literally fascist coup and oppression of its people is a “lesson for Scotland”. We doubt we’re alone in finding that view chilling.

It follows Wilson’s former Labour colleague, fellow former Celtic director and notorious all-Glasgow village idiot Michael Kelly declaring yesterday that Scotland should not be allowed to hold another independence referendum until everyone who voted in the first one was dead – a likely period of perhaps 100 years.

(Since 16-year-olds were entitled to vote in 2014, and it’s not implausible that at least one of them could live on for a century beyond that – the world’s oldest verified person made it to 122.)

The Spanish government plans to hold a new election in a few weeks’ time, having first imprisoned all the leaders of the independence movement, and has openly said that if the pro-independence party still wins that election it will simply overturn the result and suspend the Catalan parliament again until it gets a result it likes.

Scottish Unionists are now SO poisoned by their hatred of the SNP that they’re willing to not just be cravenly silent, but to stand up and cheer enthusiastically as peaceful democrats are bludgeoned by riot police and thrown in jail, elected governments are overthrown by force and elections are openly rigged in a modern European state in 2017 while its ruling regime, and supporters give each other Nazi salutes underneath the symbol of the fasces – still the official emblem of the Guardia Civil state police.

(Unlike in Germany and Italy, fascism was never overthrown in Spain. The murderous dictator General Franco died in office, and the current ruling Partido Popular headed by Mariano Rajoy are his spiritual heirs.)

The situation could barely be any more analogous to the Daily Mail’s 1934 infamy.

So we don’t think our headline is overstating the case. For the mentality of Scottish Unionists – even those employed by ostensibly respectable broadsheet newspapers – to have reached such depths is something which ought to terrify all reasonable people.