I have a more natural place with the Scottish Socialist Party. They'll let you be as angry as you like

Then there's "arachnophobe" (the fear of spiders inspired his new show at the Fringe) and "reformed Rangers fan" and "working class" (although he used to think he was middle class) and definitely "Nationalist" (even though he's just been dumped by the Yes campaign for saying yes a little too angrily).

And there's one final label you could stick on the young novelist from Falkirk: "Olympic hater". When I raise the subject of the Games with him, just as they're winding down, he goes on a beautiful little rant full of fury and frustration. They should have read it out at last night's closing ceremony to give the cynics something to cheer about.

Bissett's take on the whole thing is that the London Olympics was quasi-fascistic corporate bullying. "It has used billions of pounds of desperately needed public funds," he says, "turned London into a militarised zone, turfed people out of their homes, hypnotised the political class and been given wall-to-wall media coverage, all so we can worship elite athletes shaving 0.001 of a second from an essentially meaningless record." And worst of all for Bissett: the whole thing came draped in the imperialist colours of the Union flag.

Bissett hates the Union flag, and the Empire, and Britain, and when he talks about those things, and why Scotland should be independent, he does it with his teeth bared. He tells me his next novel, his fifth, will be set in post-referendum Scotland but he's holding off on writing it until the result is known.

Bissett's case for voting yes in that referendum is simple: "Scotland was, is and remains a colony," he says. "The identity of England, and by extension Britain, is bound up with worship of the monarchy, institutionalist privilege, imperialism and slavery. As for Scotland's national identity, I don't even think we know what it is because we've had this thing sitting on top of us but loosely we could say it's the story of the underdog and that makes much more sense to me."

It's probably this kind of talk – nationalism with the sharp edges still on it – that got Bissett the boot from the Yes campaign. Initially he was invited to take part and you can see why: he's one of Scotland's most acclaimed young novelists who came to prominence in 2001 with BoyRacers.

He also has a talent for performing and has a colourful wardrobe, and vocabulary, and talks with the kind of authentic voice that could reach the voters that the men-in-grey can't. But just a few days before the Yes campaign launch, Bissett was dropped. And he thinks he knows why.

"The SNP have got their game to play and at one point I was invited to speak, then I wasn't," he says. "I suspect what's happened is they're a bit like 'you're a wee bit too angry for us to bring you in close'. And that's fine but that means I have a more natural place with the Scottish Socialist Party." He laughs and says: "They'll let you be as angry as you like."

The idea now is that Bissett will occasionally write for the SSP over the next couple of years, although the immediate future is taken up with his new play, The Red Hourglass, a dark, weird experiment in which Bissett plays six spiders, two of which are female.

One of them is a Black Widow who wears kinky Emma Peel boots and likes to seduce men with her polished abdomen. "Well hello there, sugah," she tells the audience at one point. "You sure do look mighty fine this evening. Big ole handsome fella like you. You gonna take a lady out and treat her properly?"

There aren't a lot of working-class guys from Falkirk who would be happy doing this kind of thing but Bissett is comfortable about expressing his female side (he's done it before with his stage show The Moira Monologues about a Falkirk matriarch). And anyway, once you find out more about The Red Hourglass, you discover it isn't really a departure for Bissett at all: it's about spiders but it's really about the working class, marginalised communities and the oppressed.

Bissett says it is this – oppression and its victims – that holds together his whole philosophy and, in recent years, has made him re-assess who he is. At the last election, for example, he voted LibDem but is now passionately Socialist; a few years ago he also considered himself middle class but now he sees himself as working class again. He did think when he went to Stirling University that he'd joined the middle classes for good, but the recession made him change his mind.

"When I left Falkirk to go to university," he says, "I was surrounded by people who had a more privileged upbringing and you become part of the culture, especially when you write novels. But I now consider myself working class. We're feeling the full ramifications of the crash in 2008 and we're in a period of class struggle and as a writer I have to ask myself what side I'm on. I'm on the side of the culture that I came from and the values that were instilled in me by my parents."

Perhaps surprisingly it is this sense of standing up for the underdog that also got 36-year-old Bissett interested in Rangers again after years of drifting away, sickened by Unionism and sectarianism. He says this started to happen because he saw the club's troubles as a political issue. "The fall of Rangers is the fall of Lehmann Brothers," he says.

"There is disconnect between ordinary fans and the people at the top of the game which is the same as the disconnect between working-class people and the banks. Rangers started spending big and everybody had to spend big to chase Rangers and now there's just unsustainable debt."

Bissett wrote about all of this in Pack Men, although that novel isn't just about Rangers, it's also about a young man who isn't sure if he's gay or straight and how he fits into the male group-think. Bissett is straight, but as a man who occasionally loves a bit of eyeliner and a pair of high heels, he has struggled with the same kind of issues. Recently, it got him into serious trouble on, of all places, a gunboat docked in Leith.

What happened was a group of Scottish writers were invited to a party on a boat. "I thought, 'party on a boat, great' and in my head I'm thinking the video for Duran Duran's Rio," says Bissett, "so I put on a pair of leather, high-heel boots, skinny jeans, a tartan women's jacket, eyeliner and a shimmery blue scarf."

And then he turned up and discovered the boat was a Canadian military vessel. Not only was he stared at, as the night wore on he found out that a few of the sailors were planning to beat him up and he and his girlfriend had to leave early. "It was an insight into the military mentality. It was: 'threat, neutralise'. It was homophobia. I'm not gay but that is what it was."

Bissett believes the fact he loves to dress up in this way, and isn't afraid of his feminine qualities, is consistent with his whole approach to life ("I'm broadly against oppression and bullying," he says).

But, apart from writing for the SSP from time to time, he says he would never consider translating this approach into formal politics of any kind. For a start, he says, he has a past – he's taken drugs and spent a lot of his 20s getting drunk at parties – but, more importantly, he enjoys being a writer.

That isn't an easy choice – he's £2500 into his overdraft and has no disposable income to speak of – but he thinks the best way to generate change, and provoke debate, isn't to get into politics, it's to use his keyboard. And you can see him now: tapping angrily at the keys, surrounded by Boyracers, Falkirk matriarchs and six slinky spiders.

The Red Hourglass is at the National Library from August 15-25 (except 17) at 7pm.

Alan Bissett

writer