J ames IV, King of Scots, never had to worry about elections. This freed him up to satisfy his voracious curiosity with strange experiments: according to one old tale, in 1493 he trapped two children, and a nurse who couldn’t talk, on Inchkeith Island in the Firth of Forth. James hoped that the children, deprived of modern influences on their speech, would naturally return to the true, divine language. They supposedly came back speaking Hebrew; for Walter Scott, it was “more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the sheep and goats on the island”. Last week’s Scottish parliament election promised an equally profane revelation. With Reform UK’s arrival in Scottish politics, Kenny Farquharson predicted in the Times that election day “will be remembered as the day Scottish exceptionalism died”. Sheepish voters, dumbly following the rest of Britain, would finally espouse the “rightwing populist nativism” that had hitherto been halted at Hadrian’s Wall.…