SHETTLESTON no more, Cowdenbeath no more, Ferguslie Park no more, Calton no more … One imagines The Proclaimers would walk 500 miles over sizzling coals to lawyers rather than allow the Scottish Conservatives to rewrite their classic anthem of emigre loss and longing. Which is probably why no-one has dared. The temptation to try must have been strong, though. The Scottish Conservatives are now standing so tall on the back of the party’s local election results it can only be a matter of time before civil authorities ask for an aircraft warning light to be fitted to Ruth Davidson’s bonce. There she stands, the 50-foot Tory woman, ready to attack SNP target seats across Scotland. Should you heed that roar?

“There are no no-go areas for the Scottish Conservatives,” said Ms Davidson as she launched her party’s General Election campaign. “We are truly a national party, we’re here to stay and we are leading Scotland’s fightback against the SNP.” Those who derive amusement from watching nice liberal folk go into a frenzy of chin-stroking over the state of modern democracy must have spent the weekend in Scotland being highly tickled. How could the voters of Calton, Ferguslie Park and the rest vote Conservative? Had these people no sense of history? Given what the Conservatives have done to Scotland, went the lament, you might as well throw the Saltire on a pile of fish suppers, bagpipes, Billy Connolly albums and books of Burns’ poetry, drench the lot in 25-year-old malt and set it alight.

A fitting riposte to such hysteria was published in the Letters Pages of The Herald yesterday. It came from David Bone of Girvan who said that to voters like him, born in the mid-1980s, Margaret Thatcher, the miners’ strike and the poll tax were history in every sense. He came of age in the era of Tony Blair, the Labour Prime Minister who promised that things could only get better. Except they did not. Of greatest impact on Mr Bone’s generation was not the Thatcherite reaction to the 1970s but the 2008 global recession. In place of strife over Thatcher, anti-poll tax demos and divisions over Europe, the Bone generation had Blair, marches against the war in Iraq, and Brexit.

That generation looks at people of my age and older and reckons it could only ever dream of having it so good. Look at us, with our houses, cars, jobs and pensions staring down from society’s rooftop at the ladder we watched being kicked away. The youngsters below can still get to where we are, but only if they have well-off parents to throw them a rope. How dare we lecture them from on high about there being such a thing as society when we were the ones that watched it being flogged at a car boot sale. Get your nationalised industries here, your manufacturing base, your free education, your right to benefits, your final salary schemes; they all went cheap.

It is every generation’s right to look on what has been done by their predecessors and despair, or at least wonder what we were smoking at the time. Particularly in those parts of Scotland that were Labour fiefdoms for so long, to little if any positive effect, one can hardly blame a voter for opting to put his or her cross by the Tory candidate’s name. How much of a daring leap is it to change your vote when you have lived your adult life in the knowledge that you will be dead decades before your fellow citizens in better off parts of the country? Live dangerously, vote Tory? You are already living dangerously just by being born into the wrong postcode. One understands, too, the unhappiness out there with the SNP and the push for a second independence referendum. This unhappiness does not show in the number of councillors elected, up from 425 to 431, share of first preference votes (32.3 per cent to the Conservatives’ 25.3 per cent) or most other indicators, but we are told it is there. Ms Davidson certainly believes there is a backlash afoot, framing her party’s entire campaign as a binary choice between the Conservatives (and her in particular) and a second independence referendum.

Such an approach plays to voters’ instincts to kick back against the establishment. Talking to some of those who opted to play single transferable vote roulette at the council elections, and who are toying with the notion of tactical voting pontoon at the General Election, there is a sense that they feel taken for granted, that the opposition parties have landed a genuine blow with the “get on with the day job” attack on Nicola Sturgeon’s administration. Moreover, Ms Sturgeon, in announcing another referendum, may have said she understood that this would not fill everyone with glee, but she surely underestimated what we might call, in good Scots language, the depth of scunnerdom out there. And so, having taken our Ebenezer Scrooges of psephology on a visit to Tory past and Tory present, we inevitably set course for Tory future. Goodness it is bright, at least according to the party. Better put those shades on. Analysis by the Conservatives shows some 15 seats could be within their grasp. That would indeed be quite a fightback.

Look beyond the razzle dazzle, however, and the placards proclaiming that the Conservatives are “leading Scotland’s fightback” and what is there to see? Not a lot bar saying no to a referendum and taking a pop at the SNP. Donald Trump won by telling America he would make it great again. Ruth Davidson tells Scotland to have a good greet at the prospect of an independence referendum. Go on, you deserve it. Costs nothing but your votes.

The General Election result will indeed have no impact at Holyrood other than giving a rocket-boost to Conservative confidence. If you fancied a protest vote against a second referendum, now is as good a time as any. The world would not end on June 9. Brexit will still happen, the stock market will jump, the normal business of state will be resumed. But still, caveat emptor and all that. The only difference is there will be more Conservative MPs from Scotland. More MPs to back the rape clause, for example. More MPs to reckon that benefit sanctions are just the ticket to galvanise the weakest into work, for example. More MPs to tell you there is no alternative to austerity or, in time, a hard Brexit, for example. The Conservatives are right: they should not be judged solely by what they have done in the past. They can also be judged on what they do in the here and now.