Yes voter JULIE McDOWALL says nippy Nationalists should stop targeting the bonkers bonfire brigade in East Sussex

A few weeks ago, Scotland was a triumph for democracy, with ordinary voters seeing they could deliver hefty shocks to Westminster, but yesterday much of that glorious collective energy was frittered away on petulance and hypocrisy.

With the daft furore over the Alex Salmond effigy it was business as usual on Twitter: instead of debate and campaign, it was once again about faux outrage, the desperate need to take offence, and ridiculous strings of exclamation marks.

The Waterloo Bonfire Society assembled two huge models of Alex Salmond and even the most nippy Nationalist would have to admit they were impressive.

How the second effigy was detonated

As they were wheeled through the streets of Lewes, East Sussex County Council's foolishly tweeted about it and Twitter went crazy. People were offended and outraged. The media got the story and the whole thing escalated.

Some humourless folk even called the police. In this age of austerity and cuts, the over-stretched police were forced to attend to a dummy in a skirt and a cute monster in a hat.

You might say the good people of Lewes are, in their fiery annual celebrations, conforming to a certain stereotype: the yokels in a provincial town gathering around a fire to scream, 'burn the witch!'

But we're also acting to type by being dour and humourless about the Salmond effigy.

And in amongst the complaints lurks hypocrisy. A quick search of this website shows there were attempts to burn an effigy of Thatcher at the embarrassing George Square death parties.

Arguably, that was in far poorer taste than the Lewes affair. At least Salmond was in rude health. At least he was able to respond. At least he wasn't an old lady with dementia and grieving relatives.

Besides, the Lewes bonfire has burned Cameron and Clegg effigies, and I'm sure most of us had a quiet chuckle about that. Where were the Scottish objections then? There were none but put a kilt on the thing and we start howling.

Why? Is our sense of identity so fragile? Having narrowly lost - or narrowly won - the referendum do we feel divided and, so, a bit defensive?

Alex Salmond has shown a sense of humour about the matter and I applaud him for that. He even seemed pleased to have been targeted, and he's right to view it as a sly compliment.

They wouldn't burn the leader of the Welsh Assembly, would they? But no-one knows who that is, you say. Well, exactly.

So let's laugh about it. Politics needs humour. It's one of this country's best methods for keeping our politicians in check. We're good at taking the pompous and powerful and reducing them via satire and caricature. It's an excellent way of reminding politicians that we can yank them back to earth when we choose.

Of course, there's already an excellent method for doing that - the ballot box - but many of us just can't be bothered on polling day, can we? That's why satire and mockery of politicians exists and why it should never be shouted down. That daft kilted dummy represents freedom of speech.

If I must reach for something on which to pin the silly outrage, then I could say the effigy was insensitive, as the indyref result is still fresh and painful for many but, even then, turning your anger on a dummy merely trivialises what the campaign and its outcome meant to you.

Isn't the Yes movement bigger than that? Can it be so easily dented by a celebration in a distant provincial town?

You could also argue the inclusion of Nessie transformed the effigy into something which wasn't just anti-Salmond but was anti-Scotland.

But even then, in a world troubled by Ebola and Isis and poverty, I just can't get offended by a monster in a jaunty cap.