Josephine Tey's unflattering portrait of a Scots Nat from 1952 shows that nothing much has changed

The Scottish crime novelist Josephine Tey (née Elizabeth Mackintosh) is best known as the author of The Daughter of Time (1951), in which her bed-bound Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Alan Grant, sets about rehabilitating the character of Richard III. Her final novel, The Singing Sands (published after her death in 1952) finds the  detective on a train to the Highlands where he is to spend some weeks with his childhood sweetheart and her family recuperating from a nervous breakdown. While out fishing with his hostess’s son, he is confronted by a strange apparition in a music hall parody of traditional Highland dress who turns out (inevitably) to have a “barbarous” Glaswegian accent:

So they made tea for Wee Archie, glum and polite. He produced his own sandwiches, and while they ate he lectured them on the glory of Scotland; its mighty past and dazzling future. He had not asked Grant’s name and was betrayed by his speech into taking him for an Englishman. Surprised, Grant heard of England’s iniquities to a captive and helpless Scotland. (Anything less captive or less helpless than the Scotland he had known would be difficult to imagine.) England, it seemed, was a blood-sucker, a vampire, draining the good blood of Scotland and leaving her limp and white. Scotland had groaned under the foreign yolk, she had come staggering behind the conqueror’s chariot, she had paid tribute and prostituted her talents to the tyrant’s needs. But she was about to throw off the yoke, to unloose the bands; the fiery cross was about to be sent out once more, and soon the heather would be alight...

Grant wondered what the creature lived on. ‘Pomes’ did not provide a living. Nor did free-lance journalism; or, rather, not the kind of journalism that Archie was likely to write. Perhaps he scraped a living from ‘criticism’. It was from the ranks of the ineffective that the minor critics were recruited. There was always the chance, of course, that he was subsidised; if not by some native malcontent with a thirst for power, then by some foreign agency with an interest in trouble-making. He was of a type very familiar to the Special Branch: the failure, sick of a curdled vanity. 

In the book, it turns out that Wee Archie makes his money from smuggling, but we know what now subsidises these discontented fantasists: the public purse, via their public sector jobs and political office, thanks to the Scottish and – disproportionately – the English taxpayer. And it's to these England-hating wretches that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party is sucking up (and to the even ghastlier representatives of Sinn Fein – but, of course, Labour is the nice, moral party of fairness, equality and social justice, and we must never dare to question Ed Miliband's patriotism). It’s just a pity, what with oil prices plummeting, that the SNP didn’t win their referendum so we could have enjoyed watching them trying to pay for their fantasy policies with fantasy money – which is exactly what the No campaign predicted would happen. And, of course, their thoroughly immoral MPs have reneged on their commitment not to vote on legislation which only affects England, and on their promise not to indulge in a Neverendum - I'm half-Scottish, and that half is thoroughly ashamed.

Having worked in England for several years, Josphine Tey had to return to Inverness at the age of 30 to look after her sick father, and that’s when she began to write fiction. One can only assume that the virulent Scots Nats she met there got right up her decidedly conservative nose. If you’ve never read any of her books, her clear, unsentimental prose is a treat. The Singing Sands is excellent, but I'd probably start with The Daughter of Time or Brat Farrar.