It has been made abundantly clear, for instance, that dissenting views on the transgender issue are not welcome within the government’s party. One of the government’s most prominent frontbench MSPs was sacked for her outspokenness on sex-based rights. Scottish universities have become similarly intolerant. Abertay University Law School recently investigated one of its students who was accused of “making offensive comments and behaving in a disrespectful manner during class discussion” after she said that her definition of a woman is someone with a vagina.

Last year, the Scottish government passed a law repealing a dormant blasphemy law, under which no one had been prosecuted for nearly 200 years. When examined more closely, it transpired that this symbolic gesture actually instituted a new blasphemy law. The Scottish Police Federation warned that the so-called Hate Crime and Public Order Act “would move even further from policing and criminalizing of deeds and acts to the potential policing of what people think or feel, as well as the criminalization of what is said in private.”

Progressives can trick themselves into thinking that they are moving in a clear linear trajectory from the injustice of the past toward the promise of the future. Yet more often than not, they merely replace one set of superstitions with another.