Don’t dare pinch these symbols of Scotland!

THERE’S a touch of the English rose about Nicola Sturgeon, wouldn’t you say? That peaches and cream complexion, t hose hazel eyes, the pink- tinged cheeks? Or perhaps she’s more of a florists’ rose – if, that is, you’re a bit hazy on the details.

Certainly, the SNP didn’t seem to know the difference between the bog standard florists’ rose – usually grown in East Africa – and the Scottish rose, when they turned up for the Queen’s Speech looking like a bunch of provincial wedding guests who’d taken a wrong turning at Piccadilly Circus. Apparently Alex Salmond, pictured, and the rest wore the flowers to symbolise the little white rose of Scotland.

Like many Scots, I like roses. I have several varieties in my garden, including a demanding early bloomer that snakes up the wall of the house and needs ruthless pruning.

Roses are not an easy flower. They require loving care, extra attention, all of which is worth it for the nodding heads; those gently unfurling petals. Then there’s the scent. Roses smell of long summer days and possibility.

I don’t really care what sort of rose the Nationalist MPs were wearing, although they did look a little like welldressed seals when they started all that clapping business. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes, even a party with 56 Westminster MPs. What I do care about though, is the symbolism.

The white rose of Scotland is associated not just with the nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, but with the Jacobites, and Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the country in general. It is a national emblem much like the Saltire, the noble cross of St Andrew, recognised the world over as our nation’s flag.

Except that today, the Saltire is no longer the flag of all Scots. It is the flag of Scots who support the SNP. To display a Saltire on one’s car, or in one’s garden, or on one’s cheek (as I remember doing once, years ago, during some dismal national football match), is to make a potent political statement.

Through endless campaigning and association, particularly throughout the Yes campaign and in the run-up to the Westminster elections, the St Andrew’s cross has been entirely politicised. The SNP has taken away my national flag – and I miss it.

So you’ll forgive me if I don’t jump for joy that they have again commandeered another Scottish emblem for their own use. The white rose, which has been associated with Scotland for hundreds of years, has been plucked from its stem, manhandled into a Nationalist buttonhole and pressed into service as yet another oafish chapter in the SNP’s Big Ladybird Guide to Stunt Politics In Westminster.

It is another example of the SNP’s devotion to ruling by division and desire to turn everything in the Scottish heritage cupboard (watch out tartan shortbread tin, you might be next) into a political symbol. And for those of us who don’t support the SNP or independence, another little piece of our identity has been chipped away.