I can’t remember the last time there was a First Minister’s Questions like it. The air was charged with fury and indignation, irreconcilable certainties slamming into one another like ions in a collider.

Questions were drowned out by jeers and cries of ‘shame on you’. Accusations of incitement, racism, even fascism echoed around the chamber.

I’ll be damned. The wee pretendy parliament isn’t pretending any more.

The ignition point was Malcolm Offord, who told the First Minister that ‘immigration is too high’. Mutters went up, seats were shifted in uncomfortably. Presiding Officer Kenny Gibson stepped in: ‘Immigration is reserved’. That’s never stopped the SNP.

Offord persevered; this was about the knock-on effects on Scotland. Merely acknowledging such effects seemed to scandalise MSPs. Offord complained of the burden placed on social housing availability for native Scots when a growing influx of refugees must be accommodated. He pressed Swinney to tweak the rules to allow councils to put locals first.

The First Minister didn’t stand, he arose. History was calling him to his feet to test his character in democracy’s darkest days. He was Joseph Welch confronting McCarthy, Kennedy facing down George Wallace. He would overcome.

With a great swell of affected drama, Offord was decried as leader of ‘a party associated with the stirring-up of hatred’. Besides, the refugee housing rules hadn’t changed in 20 years.

Waves of self-congratulatory applause cascaded down upon Swinney, as MSPs clapped not only for his courage in standing up to The Far Right but for their virtue in clapping for his stand. The moral valour belonged to them all.

Offord disavowed lawbreaking like the racist thuggery seen in Northern Ireland and Scotland. ‘Whatever the problem,’ he stated, ‘violence is not the answer, but that is not to say we ignore the problem.’ The jeers climbed again but turned to derision when he added: ‘Weak politicians have created this unrest in our society.’ If they neglect to fix these problems someone ‘less savoury’ would come along.

The mockery was sincere. Few in Scotland’s political establishment can conceive of persons less savoury than Reform. Reform is the boogeyman within their echo chamber and they can’t see beyond it, not even to politics on the Continent where similar experiments in open borders have given electoral footholds to parties much more extreme than Reform.

Should it fail as Labour and the Tories failed before, Nigel Farage’s booze-and-fags nationalism could well be superseded by the blood and soil variety.

Swinney, his breast puffed out like a magnificent frigatebird in mating season, rounded on one of Offord’s MSPs, Thomas Kerr, who, he said, encouraged people to protest over the alleged attack in Belfast. This he juxtaposed, to much squalling all round, with attacks on police officers in Greenock.

Now it was Offord’s turn to sharpen his tone. Kerr had been clear, he said, that violence was unacceptable. Then he went and did it, by describing the ingress into Glasgow of ‘fighting-aged men with undisclosed nationality’.

From all directions came the cry: ‘Shame on you!’ There was more practised solemnity from Swinney, followed by an accusation Offord and Kerr were ‘inciting racial division’.

Naturally, there was much sympathy for Green co-leader Gillian Mackay’s demand for a crackdown on social media. The outrage isn’t the outrage, it’s democratic access to information and images about the outrage. That gets in the way of the all-important not looking back in anger.

‘Nobody should be made to feel unsafe on our streets,’ Mackay protested.

No, nobody should.