Margaret Curran, the shadow Scottish secretary, is knocking on doors in her efforts to be re-elected as Labour MP for Glasgow East. But there’s an addition to the usual campaign scene: Mrs Curran is being “hunted” (their word) by a pair of aggressive Scottish National Party activists.

They’re following her around. They’re filming her. And as a woman voter opens her front door, and Mrs Curran tries to talk to her, the SNP duo are standing at the garden gate, shouting at them both.

“The bedroom tax! Why did you abstain from the bedroom tax!” screams Helen Tennant. “We’ve already leafleted these doors!”

One of the Labour campaign team asks Mr Doughty-Brown whether they have asked the voter’s permission to film her in her own home. “We’re in a public street – we don’t need permission,” he says. Someone else asks them to stop shouting. “Are you a police officer?” asks Mr Doughty-Brown. “Then go away from me, and go away from me now.”



Scottish Labout politician Margaret Curran being 'hunted' by SNP activist while she is canvassing in Glasgow

Welcome to Election 2015, SNP-style. Piers Doughty-Brown is actually proud of this encounter. He posts the video on his Facebook page.

“Long day hunting with Helen Tennant, but it paid off in the end when we cornered Margaret Curran,” he writes. Other posts on the page, in which he speaks of voting to select the SNP election candidate and of attending the party’s recent conference, make clear that he is an SNP member.

Helen Tennant’s Facebook profile picture was, until recently, a poster for a party fundraising event – or, as the poster puts it, “raising funds for the Glasgow East Election Fund, also known as the Get Curran’s Scalp Fund”.

The SNP doesn’t officially approve of this kind of thing. But the party doesn’t do much to stop it. Natalie McGarry, the SNP candidate in Glasgow East, issued a low-key rebuke to Mr Doughty-Brown. Even as she did so, however, she added that Mrs Curran was a “fair target for community justice”.

“People getting filmed is a regular feature,” says Frank McAveety, a Labour councillor in the area. “There’s been incidents where our street stalls have been filmed by two people simultaneously – one on foot, one in a car. We’ve had women canvassers intimidated by groups of men. They get shouted at – things like ‘you’re finished in this town’, like it was the Wild West or something. It’s targeted disruption, a very fevered atmosphere.”

On Friday night, both the Labour and Tory offices in Aberdeen were vandalised - the latter with a swastika and the letter Q, for "quisling", daubed on the building. A Labour canvasser in Renfrewshire was threatened with a chainsaw by an SNP supporter.

Compared with most nationalist parties, the SNP is, of course, relatively liberal. But as it pulls 20 points clear in the polls, the emotions now being roused in Glasgow are a reminder that nationalism is never completely benign. It is always polarising, and it always needs an enemy.

The SNP’s success in Scotland is mostly down to quite normal reasons – economic hard times, Westminster scandals and years of having better leaders, better discipline and a clearer “story” than their Scottish unionist party opponents.

But nationalism’s recent rise has also involved something more troubling; delegitimising and dehumanising those opponents – not just disagreeing with their arguments, but also denying their very right to argue at all.

“Margrit [Margaret Curran] is about to give her name to a foodstuff, like peach Melba or Pavlova pudding,” wrote one prominent SNP supporter last week. “Margrit’s toast is dry, stale, mouldy, and spread with invisible Labour jam. It’s difficult to swallow, and even harder to keep down. Her career is about to be regurgitated by the electorate of the East End, and a bit like Linda Blair in The Exorcist doing her revolving head thing, projected forcefully into far distant corners.”

That wasn’t written by one of the “cybernats”, the SNP-supporting mouth-foamers who put the antisocial into social media, but by a columnist in a real daily newspaper, The National, which states its support for an independent Scotland on its masthead, just in case you didn’t realise from the frequent appearance in its pages of stuff such as this.

In this new world, those who do not support the SNP cannot possibly be acting from honest motives. They must be dupes of the “Westminster establishment” – a category which, last week, included even Dawn Rodger, an undecided first-time voter in the audience for the Scottish party leaders’ television debate, who said on air that she’d been won over by Labour’s Jim Murphy.



Alex Salmond and Christina McKelvie (Allan Milligan)

Christina McKelvie, an SNP Scottish Parliament member and chairman of the parliament’s external- relations committee, and others including an SNP Westminster candidate, then retweeted a picture suggesting, falsely, that Ms Rodger was a Labour plant, resulting in the young woman being swamped with cybernat vitriol.

“I’ve deactivated my Facebook because I just can’t take any more abuse,” Ms Rodger says. “I haven’t eaten and I haven’t slept.”

But it does seem to have had the desired effect: “I’m a massive fan of everything [SNP leader] Nicola Sturgeon says. I stupidly said I’d back up Labour for reasons beyond me,” she adds.

Similar attitude correction is attempted on Scottish political journalists. James Cook, a BBC correspondent, received an “extraordinary level of vicious abuse” last week after reporting that some SNP strategists would prefer a Tory government – supporting a Daily Telegraph report that Miss Sturgeon was said by a government document to think the same. The BBC made an official statement insisting that its reporters were entitled to work without attack.

Abuse doesn’t stop reporters doing inconvenient stories, but it does raise the bar. Any story has to be important enough to be worth suffering the kicking for, and not all are. As a result, says one experienced Scottish political editor, “they’ve kind of managed to cow BBC Scotland”.

During the referendum, of course, thousands of SNP supporters demonstrated outside the BBC demanding the sacking of Nick Robinson, its political editor, who had questioned Alex Salmond, Miss Sturgeon’s predecessor, with insufficient admiration. A satisfied Mr Salmond told the SNP conference last month that the experience had “scarred” the corporation “and there has been some gain from it already from our perspective”.

The extent to which the SNP controls the cybernats is a subject of endless fascination for their targets. In his book on the referendum campaign, Mr Salmond comes close to admitting that their outpourings are not quite as spontaneous as the nationalist movement would have us believe.

“Social media and grassroots campaigning [were] areas where we had to excel,” he says. “We needed to encourage the growth of a myriad of individuals and campaign groups who would be diverse, and therefore unregimented, but would also contribute to the overall campaign.”

A Scottish political editor says that one of his colleagues did a senior SNP figure a favour at a difficult time and was asked what he wanted in return. Call off the cybernats, he said. “It stopped overnight,” says the political editor.

Several of the nastiest online bullies can be linked directly to the SNP, including Nick Durie, a party activist in the Maryhill and Springburn constituency, who believes that the UK – sorry, the “British empire” – is “one of the most vile polities in history”.

After the attacks on the BBC’s Mr Cook, Mr Durie wrote: “While nobody should insult or smear individual state broadcaster employees, it clearly is a sign of success for the democracy movement that the state broadcaster is having to take special measures to prevent its staff from being held to account. Long may that venal Unionist institution’s slow decline accelerate.”

Aidan Kerr, another journalist, recently revealed that four SNP councillors suspended in December for burning a copy of the Smith Commission report on extra powers for Scotland had been reinstated to leadership roles in the party. Describing Mr Kerr, a former independence supporter, as a “defector to the forces of reaction”, “beyond the pale” and “Right-wing scum, bought for the bosses’ bawbees”, Mr Durie said he should be “castigated, shut down and prevented from operating”.

Mr Durie, Mr Doughty-Brown and Sean Clerkin, another SNP-linked figure, a former council candidate, form part of what might be called the Nationalists’ shock troops, deployable at a moment’s notice against SNP enemies. Mr Clerkin’s big moment came in the 2011 Holyrood election, when he succeeded in forcing Iain Gray, the then Labour leader, to take refuge in a sandwich shop – subsequently seen as a defining episode of the campaign.

This time around, he has (unsuccessfully) tried to gatecrash the Labour campaign launch, got into a bit of a tangle with Gordon Brown’s police bodyguards and picketed Jim Murphy whenever he can, standing in his path and shouting into his face.



SNP activist Sean Clerkin confronts Labour leader Iain Gray in a sandwich shop

The idea is to get someone to hit you. It hasn’t happened, however – yet.

There are signs that the SNP leadership (themselves perfectly civilised people) are starting to realise how awful all this looks. Miss Sturgeon made a point of tweeting her support for both Mr Cook and Ms Rodger, and has been rather less keen than Alex Salmond on bashing the BBC.

There are two other reasons why the bullying is a mistake. If the SNP believes that independence was defeated only by the wicked Beeb, it won’t be able to tackle the real reason it lost: its complete failure to offer any convincing economic and currency argument.

If some people have been made afraid of admitting their opposition to the SNP – even to opinion pollsters – both the polls and the Nats will overestimate nationalism’s popularity and support, just as they did at the referendum.

Labour people know they will have a bad night on May 7. But they are not sure it will be quite as bad as the polls are predicting. In politics, a less bad defeat than predicted might be spinnable as a sort of victory.

Against all that, of course, is the understandable triumphalism of the SNP, and the irremediable nastiness of some of the activist base.

“Politics is now like a religion in Scotland,” says Muriel Gray, the Scottish writer. “It used to be debateable and enthralling. Now it is tribal, identity politics, for us or against us. Tragic.”

Scotland is a different country since the referendum, all right – but not always in a good way.