Scottish and Welsh nationalists have nothing to celebrate. They lost before England got on the pitch

So football isn’t coming home after all. 

Nevertheless, across the UK, or at least in parts of Scotland and Wales, the celebrations will go on. Social media has been peppered in the last few days with photos of Scottish pubs and homes draped in the national flag… of Spain. The old “anyone but England” approach to football has taken a grip once again among the Auld Enemy north of the border, as well as in the western reaches beyond the England-Wales border.

Much of it is playful, harmless banter. The betting company PaddyPower released a video over the weekend of well-known Scottish football personalities pretending that they had Spanish roots and Spanish tastes to justify their desire for an England defeat in the Euros final. And to be fair, much of the rivalry and teasing is good-hearted on Scots’ part, a reluctant admission that our own national team has never reached the heights of success of the England team, and is never likely to.

But there’s a darker side to it too. The National, a nationalist daily publication whose sole raison d’être is to support the campaign for Scottish independence (like the New European, it was launched only after the cause was lost in a referendum), produced an eyebrow-raising front page on Saturday with the headline, “It’s time for revenge!”

The target for this revenge is revealed in the accompanying text: “Every summer, they fill up your beaches. They drink all your beer. They make a mess of your plazas. They eat fried breakfasts all day instead of your wonderful food. They retire in your towns and sponge off your public services. ¡Ni siquiera se molestan en aprender el idioma! (They don’t even bother to learn the language!)

“The National says it’s time for revenge! Our message to Spain: save us from an England win (or we’ll never hear the end of it!)”

The English are largely the same race as the Scots, so accusations of racism are misplaced. But xenophobia certainly applies. Setting aside the rather fanciful notion that Scots only go to Spain in the summer in order to enjoy the culture and learn Spanish cuisine while practising their language skills, the editorial wreaks of sheer, naked hatred.

That bit about never hearing the end of it, however – that bit’s right. In the run-up to yesterday’s final, even those of us north of the border who were cheering on the England team were braced for an avalanche of crowing, the likes of which has not been seen since the first brief sixty or so years after the 1966 World Cup victory. But who could blame them?

When Scotland qualified for the World Cup finals in Argentina in 1978 and England didn’t, we behaved as if we had already won the tournament. We invented a very specific, very painful form of hubris by producing our own chart hit, “Ally’s Tartan Army”, which boasted: “We’re representing Britain and we’ve got to do or die, England couldnae do it ’cos they didnae qualify (hey!)” A few short weeks later, the team returned home with their tails between their legs and with most Scots trying to forget the whole Argentine experience. If that’s how Scots behaved when all we had done was qualify, imagine how we’d have behaved if we’d won the damn thing! Or made it past the first round.

Resentment towards England in all matters football was just a harmless part of growing up in the 1970s, but it never reached the heights – or the gutter-level depths – of The National’s rhetoric. Yes, we were encouraged to cheer on whoever was playing England in whatever tournament, but a lot of us grew up and grew out of that. Sadly, too many didn’t. And some have got a lot worse.

The National has evinced a new form of bitterness and hatred that goes far beyond traditional rivalry. It’s happening in Wales too. One builder in Cardiff was quoted over the weekend as saying: “I’ll be raising a glass of Spanish wine when England lose. It’s in our blood, we just can’t support England.”

The whole thing just feels so childish. I mean, Edward I was a very long time ago. 

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that banter has turned to bile. The deliberate splintering of our nation by the devolution experiment into four separate, competing administrative areas was always going to exacerbate nationalist rhetoric and sentiment. In the 1990s, ministers dismissed such warnings and pressed ahead anyway and you will find not a single one today who is willing openly to admit they might have made a mistake. 

Most Scots recognise over-the-top rhetoric when they see it and those with any level of self-respect, maturity or treble-digit IQs will have the sense to feel embarrassment on seeing The National’s odious front page. The bad news is that in many parts of Scotland and Wales last night, there was a palpable sense of relief, and no doubt there were many toasts drunk to the new European champions. 

That is sad but inevitable. And protests by English friends that they would support Scotland (or Wales) were they ever to reach an international tournament’s final stages will, I suspect, remain ever after an unprovable assertion.