I think I am having one of those anxiety dreams: you know, the kind where you’re in familiar circumstances, but you become scarily disempowered. You drive down roads that suddenly lead nowhere; you rush to tell people vital news, but can never catch them; you shout but no sound comes from your mouth.

In my dream I am trapped in one of those peculiarly tacky gift shops that you find at budget airports, places designed to extract the last remnants of foreign currency from your pockets. You will be familiar with their wares: in Cork, shamrock willy-warmers, St Patrick’s baseball caps and Guinness-supping leprechauns for the mantelpiece. In Stansted, Union Jack underpants and teapots modelled on London buses.

Except the shop I’m in is a Scottish one. Garish tartan is flowing down from the walls; blue and white nylon Saltires are wrapping themselves around my shocked shoulders; there is a ginger see-you-Jimmy wig clamped to my head and everywhere I look, I see a sea of tat – whisky miniatures, imitation bagpipes, shortbread tins, postcards of Highland cows with their tongues exploring up their nostrils. Why, there are even plastic models of Mel Gibson – press the button and he shouts “Freeee-dom” and his kilt flies up.

The worst bit of the dream, of course, is that I can’t escape. The tartan is now binding my ankles. Alex Salmond, the shopkeeper, is mocking me. “Relax, lassie, relax, this is the future,” he’s saying. His assistant, Linda Fabiani, the Scottish Culture Minister in another life, is putting headphones over my ginger wig. Pretty soon, I know they will take me along the corridor to Room 101, and I will see the light. The blue and white light. The beatific vision of a modern Scotland, as tat-filled and infantilised as a Scottish theme pub in Ibiza.

Dear reader, pity me and the millions of other residents of Scotland who are now imprisoned in what feels like a remake of Alan Jay Lerner’s musical Brigadoon. Under the control of the Scottish Nationalists we all now inhabit Hollywood’s enchanted Highland village, frozen in time, unable to leave or move on, doomed always to return to our couthy ways and quaint haggis-munching customs.

The Nationalists have two big reasons to be triumphalist at the moment: first, their opposition, the Scottish Labour Party, has mired itself in an impossible mess over funding; and secondly, on Friday we experienced the first St Andrew’s Day under SNP rule. It was quite gruesome, not just in its explicit propaganda, but in its heartbreaking cultural vulgarity.

Good God, one of the SNP Members of the European Parliament set the tone by getting the Manneken Pis in Brussels dressed up in tartan and peeing through a kilt, and then claimed it was “a great honour”.

On St Andrew’s Day the Scottish Executive – now, naturally, preferring to call itself the Scottish government – organised a vast array of silly public events all over the country, attended by ministers at considerable taxpayers’ expense. This is the start of Mr Salmond’s big idea for Scotland, a two-month Winter Festival, stretching to the end of January.

Last Friday – and I still can’t quite believe this – we had ceilidhs in swimming pools, ceilidhs on ice, ceilidhs in parks, free shortbread and Irn Bru, a “flying the Saltires initiative”, a world record attempt at the longest Strip the Willow dance, debates on independence, and countless Great Tartan Walks and pipe bands.

It went on and on, in every city, toe-curling in its parochialism. Merriment by order of the authorities. Can you imagine? It was as alien and embarrassing as an official outbreak of massed Morris dancing in Birmingham.

The great Scottish public, in their apathetic wisdom, obviously agreed. Turnout at events among those who weren’t being paid to be there (by us) was poor. The vast majority elected not to take a public holiday on St Andrew’s Day, a chance that was open to Scots for the first time.

But Mr Salmond, being as crafty a fox as ever got in a henhouse, is playing a long game. He knows that three quarters of Scots are not in favour of separatism, and it will take time to reverse that sentiment in adults. But children? Ah, the little ones are ripe for conversion. Besides, children love tat.

So a decree went out, not from Caesar Augustus, but from the SNP administration, that all the schools should be blue and white. A friend, a primary school teacher, described to me the compulsory pantomime: every child ordered to come to school wearing something blue and white or “Scottish”; every teacher put under a three-line whip to do the same. The whole week leading up to “Fabulous Friday” – name courtesy of inspired education officials – devoted to practising for a two-hour show in front of invited councillors and parents. A bit like a Russian youth camp, it seems, only much more lowbrow. “St Andrews Day? What the ****’s that for, miss?” the pupils asked her.

Thus, hundreds of teachers, across this educationally underperforming nation, faced a ragtag army of children wearing ginger wigs, or Scottish football jerseys, or Saltires draped around their shoulders, who spent the day screaming and flag-waving and learnt nothing except that, indeed, nationalism is intellectually best suited to the under 11s.

Now there is nothing wrong with cultural celebrations, or indeed a national day. But such things need to be aspirational, not populist to the point where they are mired at the bottom end of St Patrick’s Day, and simply come to represent arrested development.

But the man in charge of the tartan gift shop knows the power of mass propaganda. In his St Andrew’s Day speech, Alex Salmond made clear he is preparing the ground for an independence referendum in his present term of office. His is the rhetoric of the tartan evangelist. He spoke of the “new passion” in the country and announced “we are repatriating our national day. . . Scotland is resurgent and great days lie ahead.”

Passion? Enthusiasm? But wait, they are coming for me. The door to the room is opening. I can see the blue and white light beckoning. And I don’t think I’m dreaming any more.

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