Prior to those heady, blue remembered days of the 2014 referendum campaign I’d always voted Labour. Even after it became clear that Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had squandered Labour’s first-ever three-term majority on cosy centrism rather than reversing two decades of Thatcherism I stuck with them. By then though, it was only a muscle memory activated by my family’s multi-generational loyalty to the party that compelled me still to look for their candidate on the ballot paper.

This party – more than any other - had lifted my people out of poverty and helped us face down the discrimination we had encountered when fleeing Ireland’s An Gorta Mor. They included us; supported us and then, in creating the NHS, comprehensive secondary education and free entry into Britain’s best universities, gave us opportunities. Until 2014, Labour still had a lot more credits than debits.

I’d resisted the SNP for several reasons: in Scotland’s Irish Catholic community they were still viewed with a measure of suspicion owing to the absurd interventions in the 1970s and early 1980s of its former National Convenor, Billy Wolfe.

Tony Blair led a very different Labour party (Image: free)

There was also something of a good ol’ boy, six-fingered banjo player attaching to them, caused perhaps by images of rustic itinerants emerging from the heather clutching out-sized saltires and channelling their inner Mel Gibsons. The SNP seemed to attract a disproportionate number of swivel-eyed weapons and rockets.

‘Nationalism’ as a term didn’t sit pretty with me either because, well … you know why. It conveyed exceptionalism and the sense that flags and ancient battles were more important than the international class........

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