ON WORLD Day of Prayer (March 1), Palestinian Christian women shared their suffering and resistance at numerous ecumenical services across East Lothian.

Powerful first-hand accounts recalled the historic oppression of Palestinians pre-dating Gaza’s current catastrophe. Kind Jewish neighbours were remembered, but testimonies didn’t flinch from recording Israeli state persecution, met by women’s prayers as “a form of loving resistance [which] calls the oppressor back to their humanity”.

Also on Friday, boomerang MP George Galloway claimed his Rochdale by-election win was “for Gaza”, before immediately boasting that “Keir Starmer has woken up to his worst nightmare”. Galloway’s aim – to damage a Labour Party already undermined by sabotaging the SNP’s ‘immediate ceasefire’ vote – triggered another national convulsion about race, Islamophobia, antisemitism and migration.

Panicked and hypocritical Rishi Sunak declared that UK Muslim women were being abused “for the actions of a terrorist group [Hamas] they have no connection to” – but didn’t recognise that Gaza’s slaughtered Muslim women and children are equally innocent.

Sunak hailed Britain’s successful ethnic diversity but ignored Theresa May’s “really hostile environment for illegal migration”; David Cameron’s “swarming migrants”; Brexit’s xenophobic hatreds; and the abhorrent Rwanda plan.

Sunak’s British fantasy of “the rule of law” and “democratic process” overlooked the illegal proroguing of Parliament; breaking international law; and decades of crude, offensive, anti-migrant tabloid headlines, and attacks on the judiciary as “enemies of the people”.

SNP MP Alison Thewliss rightly condemned Sunak for “stoking up divisions” and “pandering to the far-right” for electoral gain, which results in Sunak’s worst nightmare: an electoral outlook darkened by Brexit pigeons coming home to roost. Only die-hard but gullible Tory members accept feverish rhetoric that “extremism drains us of our confidence in ourselves as a people”, while Braverman’s right-wing extremism infects their own party.

Professor John Curtice chaired a recent academic panel discussion examining whether Scotland really is “different in its attitudes to migration”. Based on wide research, the answer is ‘yes’. The reasons why are complex, but 74 per cent feel strongly or very strongly that migration benefits Scotland.

A diverse Scotland hasn’t lost its confidence, nor lost its way down Brexit’s racist rabbit-hole. We’re already 25 years along the road towards being an aspirational, inclusive, modern country, outward-looking and not blinded by prejudice or fear.