Mark Smith: The reason Scottish nationalists and left-wingers are so in love with lockdown (www.heraldscotland.com)

But most important of all is the idea, which nationalists love, of a kind of Scottish gestalt, a collective identity and value system, for which, naturally, the First Minister is the appointed spokesperson. The obvious thing to say to all of that is that there’s no such thing – there is no Scottish identity or value system – but perhaps nationalists love lockdown because it bolsters the illusion that there is. Suddenly, all Scottish people are broadly behaving in the same way for the same reasons. Suddenly, there really is an “us”. And what goes with an “us”? A “them” of course.