An Old Year: III.

One of my great-grandfathers was secretary to the Scottish Socialist Federation. It didn't count as a paying job. In fact, the city fathers of Edinburgh thanked him for his efforts by putting him out of work. In those Victorian days, victimisation was not a word in common use.

What made it almost funny was the job at stake. That great-grandfather was a carter. He shifted the manure left on the streets of Scotland's capital by the horses and carriages of the great and good. I can't improve on the metaphor. As it transpired, though, the position was too good for the likes of him.

A few years later, a grandfather on the other side contrived to give us a bit of family comedy. He got his cards, as a teenager, for organising a strike at a soap works in my fair city. The job was filthy, dangerous and nasty. The teenage firebrand wasn't having it. So much for him.

He became a railwayman instead. I still have a badge that used to hang from a watch chain. It boasts of “The Society of Railway Servants”. Even as a child I used to think, “Servants?”

The other grandfather would have had to stand on a tall box to come up to my shoulder. When Hitler's war was done, when he had finished laying their airfields and building their bridges, this one stuck with his union when they said craft trades still had rights in a brave new Britain.

Eloquent folk on posh papers called it a “demarcation dispute”. For granddad, on muddy building sites, it was pitched battles with pickaxe handles, men clubbing men, to establish – not that he'd have used the words – a worker's right to recognition and fair pay. He was quick on his feet. It must have helped.

Somewhere there's a letter from one of those fine Edinburgh hotels thanking my beloved grandmother for turning up during the turmoils of 1926. They didn't know the half of it. She was just a child then, and she didn't come from a family that could lose a day's money for the sake of a gesture. What's heartbreaking about the piece of paper, though, is what's on the reverse.

Bread, flour, milk: a pencilled list, priced and counted exactly, to get a family through the week. That grandmother would drive her husband demented when the wee chap came on the door, year after year, and the whispered dialogue began. “Could I have a word with Mrs Mackay?”

She gave them those “wee cups of sugar”, those ten bob notes, those words of comfort. She told men what would happen – and you could count on it – if the violence didn't stop. Year after year, my grandmother brought their children into the world. It was, with no sentimentality or fuss or chatter, what you did. The most political person I ever knew was a woman who could not have cared less for politicians.

None of those people believed in a promised land. If they guessed at all, they guessed and hoped that next year's kids might be luckier. They did not stoop to theory. They did not waste words on argument, or history, or old battles. If you had asked, they might have said things would be better next time. Nothing was settled, nothing finished: you go on, if you can go on, until the world is a better place.

Those old, long-gone people would have enjoyed 2014. They had no need to discuss or defend their “national identity”. What were you if not a Scot? The matter wasn't worth a row. They might have been baffled to hear that Labour, their Labour, was ranged against their country, but they would have digested the problem. A people's party without the people is no party.

That, in no small part, is where we are. The great-grandfather who took the minutes for the Scottish Socialist Federation would have grasped our reality instantly. He was, then and now, outrageously radical. He was one of those who believed that politics as you are given bears no resemblance to Holy Writ. Do it differently, do it otherwise, do it better: why not?

In the National Library of Scotland, there's a letter, written by the great-grandfather's brother. It might count as a parable for our times. In essence, it's a reproof, a ticking off to Labour past and present, in all its self-importance and self-regard. It's a letter from a James Connolly to one Keir Hardie saying – basically – that if you can't organise a simple meeting, kid, you're no earthly use to any of us.

That's one version of 2014. The Labour Party in Scotland stood revealed as an organisation that would have struggled with a menage, far less a national issue. Its only purpose seemed to be to dodge every question. It worked on behalf of the state and lectured the people. It ceased, finally, to regard itself as a movement.

Those still being paid by Labour don't care for that kind of talk, of course. They know their party has a big Scottish problem, but they no longer know what such a problem might involve. Things have become so complicated, Jim Murphy is misunderstood as an answer. A figure too right-wing even for Ed Miliband is just the ticket, apparently, for Scotland.

As most of the forebears would have said, “Hell mend them”. There are other problems to solve. How do we proceed now? Not, surely, by refighting old battles. Not by listening to the same old tales. Not by faction-fights and diatribes. Scotland in 2014 was inventive, creative, off-the-wall and daring. For some of us, the referendum campaign was fun. Can such things happen on demand?

People wanted many different things from a single vote. Good people thought that by saying Yes they might earn a just society. Some said we could clean up our land and air, our seas and our soil. Others said we could put a stop to the lunacies of austerity, or nuclear weapons, or economic apartheid. We hoped for a lot. Our dismal opponents just said “No”.

One part of this might be simple. You might begin by noticing that a new Scotland has already arrived. Then you might say that diversity is the very point of the enterprise. There are worse cliches than Mr Tamson and his numberless bairns.

Then – for this could matter – you might want to regard politics as something more than an endless fire-fight. Agreement is a bigger prize than any wee bump in the opinion polls. I've been using my own version of granddad's pickaxe handle for too long. If the arguments remain the same, the methods must change.

We can live without a Labour Party. I'm not sure we can live without the beliefs that first brought Labour to birth. When that party remembers as much, our politics will be respectable again. But I won't hold my breath. The important thing about those old, departed folk is that they didn't think for half a minute they were being radical. They believed they were being human.

We could try that. There's a country yet unmade, and a politics waiting.

ends  

The Old Year: II.

Personally, I never met a guinea pig I didn't like. They're lovely creatures. Not a patch on a Chinchilla, but the next best thing you'll meet to a human being. Warm, cuddlesome, docile, and hardly ever given to biting the hand that feeds...

Of course, when a guinea pig turns savage, egged on by the usual Commies, who knows what might ensue? Some might object to being treated like experimental lab rodents. That, obviously, wouldn't do.

We always knew, more or less. The decades of denials piled up, but we knew. You had a choice: either you were a theorem for the fun boys at the Adam Smith Institute, or you were a lab rat. In either event, a poll tax was due. Per skull.

As we reported yesterday, a Conservative government performed that ancient constitutional trick and lied through its shining teeth over the community charge. Everything said back then – everything – was just a description of the facts. Scotland was used as a proving ground. The life of a lab rat is no kind of life.

Still, that was a while ago. I must have “moved on” since then. Self-evidently, I must have forgotten the stout British Tories who would use the realm of Scotland for such a purpose. If I put my mind to it, I could even bring to memory some Labour boy from Kirkcaldy who argued – to my face – that to oppose the poll tax was to hurt the elderly. What became of him?

Oh, that: a pledge. An act of conspicuous arrogance from the person who told me that opposing the community charge was arrogant. What's worse, his friends still don't see it. Treat a nation as a bunch of lab rats and hope to maintain this Britain. If you say so.

I still owe money. Some folk who did well in the Labour Party spent months trying to hunt me down. I was one of those “Can Pay, Won't Pay” characters. They used to attempt to make charges against papers I didn't in fact work for. They used to use means I found unpleasant. What stilled my heart, and still does, was that the Labour Party did those things.

There is a distinguished BBC presenter who worked out the poll tax for himself. Once he had grasped that his cleaner was paying more tax from a working woman's wage than Mr Famous, he got the point. The poll tax was an obscenity, an offence against basic decency. And wrong.

What comes down through all the years is rhetoric. Rhetoric like, “Seriously? You can't see the problem?” Rhetoric like, “You do know what happens when a dominant power treats a minor possession as lab rats?”

What matters most about Kate Devine's story yesterday is that they couldn't admit it. In fact, it was fantastically important that assumptions be denied. British Tories; Scottish Tories; British Labour and Westminster power: “Would we treat you in such a fashion? The very idea.” No such thing happened. But it did, though.

It was easy for me. When the shifty guys turned up, I didn't have to fret much. I knew my little bit of law. I even said to one fat kid that I was glad he was wasting his time on my door instead of persecuting those who'd fear more. The boy, to his enormous credit, said: “I know Mr Bell. I'm glad, too.”

To be reminded of the poll tax is to be reminded of how we dealt with that kind of stuff, once upon a time. It's not so long ago. It was wrong, unfair and unjust. So we – and you can pick your preposition – opposed. This is not bad habit.

The past is past and dead, however. It was a council tax then, it's a spare room surcharge now. How do you respond? The poll tax was a moral issue. Some search their pockets and came up short on morality. And still do. They did, however, understand the meaning of a question.

But here's the thing. In all of those three decades, governments of Britain assured me, solemnly, that no one lied to me over the poll tax. My country was not used as a bottle of lab rats. The Lady Thatcher did not regard me, this voter, in such a fashion. The British state was never so careless with my rights. My bit of UK plc would never be used with such reckless abandon.

Until it was. I place my own interpretation on our reports. Personally, I'm hanging back for an apology. Realistically, I'm waiting to see what befalls. You just ran that poll tax thing on the Jocks because, in essence, you don't care? You ran that one in Jockland before – in essence - “the real thing”?

OK. I consider that fair, considering. It amounts to a version of Britain that I suspected was in the works. A bunch of lab rats: nice. In my memoir, Diary of a Running Dog, I'll be sure to put it down under “Tough but fair, huzzah.” But if you keep this up, you lose.

Why so? In essence, it's what we told you in all those old poll tax fights. If you must go on treating the people as peasants, you will have a some mean-spirited peasants on your hands. It's not complicated, or new. Lying to us is stupid; bullying us is witless. You have more?

I suspect you don't. Those old poll tax tales say to me that the British state is a hollow shell. This isn't my problem. Back then, you persecuted a lot of people I cared about. But you – all of you usual suspects – didn't wish to know of that. You invented a “spare room subsidy” instead.

You're not fantastically bright, friend. That's OK. On this side, we have to puzzle things out. “Another poll tax?” Course not. “Those horrors will try to impose a tax on letting a disabled child sleep secure.” “They wouldn't do that.” “Yeah, they would.”

So those of us – of a certain age – wonder about the poll tax, and why we fought it into the muck from which it sprang. Quaintly, it was a point of principle. It was wrong. We fought it, all those years ago, because of the people who thought it a jolly good idea. We fought it because the fight was honourable. A footnote: we won.

And something more. We knew – I knew – that the poll tax was an experiment conducted upon the realm of Scotland. It seemed to me then a bad idea for a United Kingdom. It seemed like a profoundly stupid thing for a good British patriot, like Margaret Thatcher, to attempt. But she did it. That old, shabby poll tax taught this recalcitrant hooligan more about the name on his passport than anything else ever would.

I still owe some tax. Will they give me a start in a foot race? I'm not so swift, these days. Or will they just ask instead who's in the spare room? Once upon a time, you knew who could trust. With the poll tax, it changed for good.  

The Old Year Ends. Part One.

As the year expired, an elderly lady materialised on TV sets across the land. In deference to centuries of invented constitutional theory, Her Majesty did not purr. Instead, she gave us a little talk. Her theme was reconciliation.

This was odd, even by the traditional standards of the royal house. It displayed a strange ignorance. It seemed to insist that Scotland in 2014 had endured terrible scenes of estrangement, anger and upset. HM Queen, like the rest of the British establishment, seemed to need to believe that Scotland had gone to war with itself over a vote.

An egg got broken: that, as best as I could tell, was the casualty figure. Everyone who was anyone got death threats. In the slapstick of social media, tempers and spelling sustained some damage. But that was it. Two million said they'd rather be British; 1.6 million said they'd rather not; and no one had to call the cops.

So what was Mrs Windsor on about, exactly, at Christmas? With whom – for grammar survived – did our 1.6 million require reconciliation? An historian yet unborn will one day say 18 September 2014 was the day Britain died. It was the day when close to 45% of the lieges told the nice old lady that, all things considered, they had their eyes on another kind of future.

But they did not riot. They did not, most of the time, fare badly with friends, family, or colleagues. Though too polite to say so, HM was another who was still determined to believe things about the desire for self-determination that are simply – very simply – untrue.

In 2014, people who really ought to know better called me a Nazi. Some of the old-school followers of the flag promised me an execution “come the day”. The nicer opponents just wished me a long spell of unemployment. Permutations on various uses for eggs and half bricks were plentiful. Back in the real world, people went about their business, and made their choices.

The Queen missed that part. Scotland made its choice in 2014 with enormous dignity, in enormous numbers, and with great panache. The kids turned out; the grandparents turned out; folk who'd never vote for any of the usual local deadbeats turned out. Reconciliation was neither desired nor required. The community of Scotland voted. And even those who voted No – especially those who voted No – made a point about their country. It lives.

Tragically, you will not find any of that in my forthcoming campaign diary, Memoirs of a Government Stooge. This was a good year for Scotland, but a bad year for most versions of my trade. I used to avoid the “parcel o' rogues” cliché. As it transpires, the gold is still plentiful, like the stooges, but passable prose is hard to come by. The stooges should be ashamed, but are not. There's time enough, though, for fun with them in the years ahead.

That point was missed this year, by winners and losers alike. The most important day for me was the day after. I did my share of consoling. A lost vote is scant recompense to those who were not around in 79. But you have to remember reality on behalf of those who are less dim than a monarch. We got a vote on independence? We got almost 45%? So why do you think our opponents were so very agitated on that morning after, and on every morning since? They fear something.

Self-determination is a glacial thing in this country of ours. In 1979, we were robbed of an “assembly” with no legislative powers worth a damn. In 2014, we declined Alex Salmond's prospectus of HM Queen, Nato, and a currency left in the sweaty mitts of George Osborne. We chose to regard those facts as details while we determined a future. But anyone who thought all matters were settled in the early hours of 19 September failed to attend to facts.

What do you do, exactly, with 1.6 million churlish folk? You could demand that they just “get over it” and go back to voting for their local Jimmy or Jim. Sitting in the back room of a London tower block, you could write a long lecture on “anti-politics”, then explain to the provincials that a vote for self-determination is just another protest against a “status quo”. There are lots of ways to miss the point. The status quo ante covers most.

In 2014, Scotland decided that things could not go on as before. Those who wished to keep their powers, and their jobs, and – no small detail – their bonuses from head office, took fright. David Cameron, a Prime Minister, made stentorian speeches to describe his love for the churlish sorts. Her Majesty's head of government feared that his heart would be left in bleeding pieces if the churls got too churlish. But that didn't work.

The other one, the Conservative given charge of the Queen's Treasury, decided that scaring the Jockos would work better. I'd say only this: if George Gideon Osborne puts that effort on his CV, the Tory Party is in bother. Still, a few soft nationalists toughened up. A few Scots asked themselves about the actual negotiable worth of the currency the Chancellor meant to reserve – with half a dozen constitutional howlers – as his personal gift. A majority didn't care for that behaviour. They really didn't care for it.

In 2014, there was a historic event that had nothing to do with a plebiscite. This part is complicated. A great many Scots – possibly as many as 1.6 million – don't know, to this day, quite what they did, or why they did it. They've heard the shouting. They've seen all the usual media suspects announcing that the corpse lives, breathes, and walks. But we all know: on 18 September 2014, the Labour Party in Scotland expired. How come?

Like many, I get queasy during this part of the tale. In 2014, one mark of Labour's decline was that so few in its ranks understood why an alliance with the Tories would disgust quite so many people, and so deeply. What, asked their stoats and weasels, time and again, is your problem? If you followed their logic – feel free to take a crack – a pact with bankers' hirelings was the only way to ensure justice for all. Such was their genius.

Labour's role in Scotland in 2014 was to secure the proles for Britain. There is no nice way to put it. Threaten their pensions, frighten their children, make a desert of their future, but – so that message ran – get it done. These were old pages from an ancient script. The cold numbers say it worked a treat, on schedule and on target. The revenge taken on Scottish Labour is, however, another story entirely.

You could tell it in terms of those astounding SNP membership numbers. You could tell it by the semaphore of opinion polls, spelling out SOS for Westminster politics and Ed Miliband. You could even make a story from all the old comrades hearing last orders for a peerage. None of that would get you beyond act three in Labour's little tragedy. When push came to shove, the party that wrote Scotland's story for a century preferred suicide to the national interest. And, still worse, was proud of the fact.

We, 1.6 million of us, just turned our backs. They think we'll be “reconciled” to the rebranding of honest Jim Murphy? They think we'll be stampeded, as usual, by the old, rational fear of Tories? Labour is done. We're over it. In 2014, for or against, we were not dealt with honestly, from January to September. Those seasons will not be forgotten or forgiven. Humpty Dumpty can kiss goodbye to his wall, and whatever else he was sitting on.

If you happened to be old enough, nevertheless, it made for a strange year. A Scotland without Labour – Labour rough, foolish, thuggish, compassionate, or stolidly determined – involved an act of imagination. What were we without the familiar cast and the usual soap opera? When Johann Lamont quit as her party's branch office under-manager after the referendum, she managed – ever the good teacher – to deliver a lesson and ask a question. If Labour has rendered itself worthless, what remains?

Strange to report, some of the smarter girls and boys already had answers scrawled on the backs of their hands. While the usual dullards filled their column inches with tales of protest votes and anti-politics, a new Scottish generation presented itself on behalf of the Common Weal, as a National Collective, as a Radical Independence Convention. They were as incoherent, sometimes, as any nascent movement. They were also a lot of fun. More than that, they cared deeply and thought hard.

With my own faded colours up on the sagging mast, I spent most of 2014 wondering what had become of the British state. Why were its responses so feeble, its prose so vapid, its tunes so banal? For much of the referendum campaign, the only noise from the No side seemed to involve a clamour for “passion” on the United Kingdom's behalf. Time and again they tried. Time and again, while superannuated stand-ups and hack actors dumped their love bombs, they failed to manage sense, far less joined-up sentences.

I found that revealing. More than once, I caught myself thinking, “Jeez, I could make a better case for Britain than that”. In the year when we were being told to honour the carnage inaugurated in 1914, when the meaning of a United Kingdom forged in unspeakable sacrifice should have furnished a phrase for the meanest hack, we instead had self-satisfied jokers cackling that “No means no”. And so Britain died.

They haven't quite noticed yet. Her Majesty did her Christmas thing as though normal service had been resumed. Scottish Labour went on acting as though a Jim Murphy is the solution, not the name of the condition. But 1.6 million are beyond all that. We've handed in our notice. It's why all the instant cliches over who really won and truly lost have such force this winter. That British game, we say, is a bogey.

In England's capital, there is no shortage of folk turning a bob by explaining that these are strange days for conventional politics. They employ a couple of propositions. One says that a loss of trust in “Westminster” has invigorated those known traditionally as “other parties”. The antithesis holds that those others have done for the big old parties. A variant, tricky to prove, says that this is going on all over the western world.

So think of that, if you voted Yes in September. When you come to your senses, you'll go back to voting mostly-Labour. Were you living below the Border, you'd probably be backing the racist ticket. Your considered response to 307 years of Union was just a spasm, an “anti-Westminster” thing. You'll get over it. You'll be reconciled. Understood?

There's some truth to it. As 2014 ends, the parties accustomed to treating Westminster as their private Hogwarts can barely scrape together two-thirds of the vote in the average opinion poll. They and their institution are not held in esteem. Their scandals have given the very business of political argument a bad name. Coalition government has left many – let's say – unimpressed, and made the death of Liberal Britain seem less strange than inevitable.

None of that has much to do with what happened in Scotland in 2014. In all the chatter over parties and the usual politics, an essential fact got overlooked. A new generation got to vote and said, simply, “Why?” Their parents sentimentality for Labour evaporated. Any deference towards Conservatives and monarchs and old stories of a scepter'd isles disappeared. They looked at their country and imagined a better future. Their opponents just told scary tales.

The Yes voters lost, of course. There is no point in arguing over it. Equally, no one of a sound mind believes the 2014 generation will lose twice. Britain's best efforts turned out to be paltry. This writer expected more, in spring, than a few hacks turning puce for the sake of the honours list, or a consignment of party leaders shipped north in a hurry to placate the locals. For Unionists, the advice is offered free: poor show.

Those who believed their country should determine its own future might also wish to look back on the year ending. Why were so many of our people so easily frightened? Why were we hemmed in by an argument over bank-notes? Why did our older folk fall hostage to puerile arguments and barter a future that was not theirs to trade? And who said, finally, that we must dodge the heart of the matter?

If you seek the independence of Scotland, you must be ready and willing to talk about the country and its people. Your opponents will have plenty to say about “identity politics” while promoting a British identity. It's tricky and complicated. It tends to get messy. You have to be alert to every nuance. But in the end you have to be honest.

In my opinion, the referendum was lost because too many of us were afraid to say why a Scot would not want to be British. Too much time was spent attempting to square a circle: everything would change and yet, somehow, nothing would change. Currency, monarchs, the telly: it was as though we were doing no more than rearranging junk in the attic. And too many of us – this scribbler included – said we'd deal with these little matters later. That was a mistake.

Despite everything, 1.6 million believed that Scotland's interests could be managed better in Scotland. They are no worse off for it. The mess emanating from the Smith Commission will make life difficult for a few years, but a principle will be secured. In future, no one will ask why a power should be retained by Westminster. They will ask why it hasn't been devolved to begin with, as a matter of course.

Long years ago, sitting in a Glasgow pub with the finest Scottish novelist of my generation, the question of independence came up. My answer then, as now, was that it would happen in my lifetime. I didn't anticipate that we'd be cutting it a little fine, but Willie, cheery as ever, couldn't see it happening. McIlvanney was the one who called us feart in 79, after all, and he wasn't wrong. But in 2014, the fear fell away.

I'll remember that. They brought up every pop-gun in the armoury and people far younger than I found all their threats comical. Scotland woke up. Its young men and women turned the lead of the usual political crap into gold. They didn't get an answer worth the name from the decayed hulks of old political traditions, but they kept on asking their questions. They exposed the rot.

Things are set fair, I think, for a wee country.

ends      

The Herald. September 17, 2014.

Sometimes the big world takes heed of stateless people. Out there, the condition is understood. It falls, inexactly, not far short of homelessness. The person without a country is reckoned to be alone, a waif and a stray, lost.

I have a country. I can see bits of it from my window, green and gold now in the September sun. Some of what's out there is beauty enough to fill any heart. Some of it is brutal enough, bad enough, to cut a heart into bleeding pieces. One fact sits beside the other. The beauty is permanent; the rest is man-made.

There's plenty of history out there, a lot of what was, what used to be. In five minutes I could walk a fishers' track reputed – though who's counting? - to have moulded itself to trudging feet for a thousand years. Go up the road and the land rises around an ancient church. Here the dead in their mounds push upwards. On some of the stones there is one of my names. It's common enough in these parts.

If needs be, I can find the usual sources to remind me that this portion of an island group amounts to 78,387 square kilometres. That's little enough. Three languages are spoken within the patch. Close to 5.3 million people live upon it. Here's a next-to-nothing country on a planet in thrall to the big and mighty. So we live in a providential place that ceased to be a state 307 years ago.

That's a kind of homelessness. Or rather, the fact imposes a weird, dislocated sense of being homeless at home, a refugee abroad, one of those forever submerged in nostalgia for a place that has not been alive in centuries. This Scotland is spectral, an after-image. Ours is, persistently, a sentimental attachment to a footnote.

Landscapes and history do not qualify as argument. You need to reckon with four categories: country, people, nation and state. We can map the first, count the second, and remember that no one argues now about the third. Statehood is Scotland's phantom limb. Tomorrow, for the first time since country, people and nation earned their names, we get a vote on our loss.

Objections, well-rehearsed, are instant. One goes by the name of the United Kingdom. After 307 years we are enmeshed, they say, within a web of relationships banal and profound. To hear it told, I couldn't disentangle myself if I wanted to. That's true and obvious. Besides, I have no such desire. You do not shrug off three centuries like an old, tattered coat.

You would need to become speechless. You would need to surrender to amnesia. You would need to sever bonds and roots. You would need to ignore the organic reality of economies. You would need to forget affections, art, shared suffering, mutual endeavours. No one in their right mind attempts such a thing.

But Britain, the familiar name, doesn't answer. What have we heard time and again in this argument? We have heard people boast of the pride and comfort they take in a conjoined identity. Identity politics, once damned as divisive, is back in vogue now that Britain is at stake. For this voter, though, the identity insisted upon, the home strip and away strip, is peculiar. It doesn't fit.

The Union's defenders have homilies by heart. To be Scottish and British is to be a partner in something bigger, better, and – though the word is not dared – more civilised. Scotland does nothing but gain. If not, all is a challenge to be met, as the glowing word reminds you, together. No loss is ever mentioned.

A second claim runs that in a globalised world statehood is an affectation. The nation-state, that 19^th century notion, is redundant. You can't buck the markets, or the big and mighty. Power and ownership, like a state to call your own, no longer signify amid the universal brands, the imperial software, and the war-fighting coalitions of the willing.

I dissent. I neither agree nor accept. Statehood matters. Dozens of small nations on every continent have suffered more than Scots will ever suffer to claim the right. Once achieved, it is not surrendered. Why? How many of Britain's colonies have volunteered to return to mother's embrace? Are the Irish in the queue, the Indians, the Jamaicans, the Canadians?

Most of the countries in the world are small. Most do better for their people – and for people everywhere – than the big and mighty. Most do better than a north European island group still lost in dreams of days when it, too, was big and mighty. Why break up the United Kingdom? Because, in this 21^st century, such things must be broken up, for the common good. The only thing worse than Great Powers are those with pretensions to stay in a murderous club.

Even the biggest pay lip service to the ideal of self-determination. After all, who'd dare meddle with their right to choose? Try that at home, however, and Her Majesty's Government will send round her trans-national enforcers. Statehood for those who are not big, mighty, and bent on empire is the last, best weapon against the feudal conspiracy called globalisation.

No matter. I can keep it simple instead. The British state, its nuclear weapons and its perpetual wars, is hideous. The conviction that Dickens was the greatest novelist to have breathed is no counterweight. The behaviour of that state over the last fortnight has been proof enough of bad faith. The only idea has been to harry an electorate into submission.

To the charge sheet you could add endemic, institutionalised corruption, the self-perpetuating Oxbridge elite, the fealty to the City, the brutality towards the poor, the veneration of stolen wealth, the local military-industrial complex, the decadence of the Commons, all the media stooges, and a contempt for – because they mean you - “the provinces”.

In this, promises of a renewed Union barely pass as decent fiction. Ground through the Westminster mill, those meaningless, last-minute vows will be dust before the year is over if Scotland votes No. The British state is managing a problem, not renewing a rotting democracy.

Anyone who does not admit to knowing as much does not want to know. They should ask themselves a question instead. Why is a referendum happening, 307 years on? Why is there agitation still? Surely by now, in the 21^st century, the benefits of Union would be so obvious, and the bonds of affection so tight, as to make dissent ridiculous? That's not the case. Scotland, as an argument, refuses to disappear.

Where questions are concerned, the country that votes tomorrow is granted an equivalence. Simply this: it might be the last chance. The hope and memory of statehood has endured for three centuries, but they won't grant another ballot. Be sure of it. If the vote is No, Scotland will fade, slowly and surely and finally, from the community of nations. It will disappear like a bleached, inarticulate photograph of by-gone times, a curio for tourists, a lost thing.

The past has made us. Our future can only be heard in the shout of a single word. Aye.

Sunday Herald. September 14, 2014.

On Thursday, if you reside in Scotland, you can participate in the only vote on independence the country has ever been allowed. That, right there, is the big deal.

It may be you are one of 200,000 who voted by post before panic-stricken Better Together parties cobbled together another “offer” of nothing much. You might, rightly enough, be unhappy about that. It doesn't alter the rule. One person gets one vote.

Though they protest otherwise, the rule doesn't sit well with those who think they run your world. For them, being in charge of companies with numerous employees means the chance to influence numerous votes. If the firm in question matters to the wider economy, chances multiply.

The conceit isn't covered by the usual definitions of democracy. In fact, the idea that you can be told how to vote by those who serve only the City is one good reason why a referendum was essential. The United Kingdom, that land of liberty, does not tolerate these outrages so much as demand them.

The kingdom has become one giant rotten borough. Finance, business, corporate interests – all the euphemisms for money – took control of Westminster long ago. The self-interest is blatant, yet passed off as “wealth creation”. The crimes are heinous, yet no punishments follow. Still the boardroom nomenklatura expect to be obeyed.

You might call it a reason to be shot of the UK. Could Scotland do better? That's the wrong question. Instead we should ask: could Scotland, in reason, refuse to try? If the word “fairness” is being heard everywhere in these last days before the vote, we should consider the companies claiming the right, with menaces, to tell us how to think.

Last week, the bigger beasts piled into the referendum argument. RBS, the Lloyds group, Standard Life, BP, even the co-operative sorts at John Lewis: without saying as much – for they dared not – they let it be known that the consequences of Yes would be dire. The threat, plainly co-ordinated, bore but the wisp of a veil: vote for independence and you'll be sorry.

Had they consulted shareholders, employees, “partners”, or even – a novelty – customers? Captains of industry do not consult unless their jobs on the line. Did they rush to correct the false impression that mass job losses and price rises would follow their flight from the horror of independence? Only, in the case of the banks, after the fact, and as the law required.

For 24 hours it was a good tale for newspapers hungry for anything that might distract attention from the Yes campaign. If it later transpired that the Treasury had (allegedly) handed the BBC market-sensitive information about the intentions of RBS just to help a scare along, that could be brushed aside.

Instead, the preferred story was that Alex Salmond had been testy towards the august Nick Robinson, the BBC's political editor, at a press conference. Better still was the myth of big employers taking thousands of jobs and lots of money out of a Scotland “destabilised” by independence.

There are strands to this. One has to do with a legal responsibility to warn shareholders about the possibility – in the judgement of directors – of risk. Logically, executives are obliged to engage in contingency planning. Behind the “Banks Quit Scotland” headlines the reality was that RBS and Lloyds had laid plans to shift domiciles. In the case of the former, those involved moving its registered headquarters. Nothing less, but certainly nothing more.

After the BBC was done upsetting share prices, RBS made that much clear. In a letter to staff, the bank's chief executive, Ross McEwan, wrote that the HQ decision – if it happens – would be “a technical procedure regarding the rotation of our registered head office based on our current strategy and business plan. It is not an intention to move operations or jobs”.

Of course not. Despite any brasswork you might find in Edinburgh, Lloyds – with the remnants of Bank of Scotland in its bowels – has long had its HQ in London. RBS, that fallen giant four-fifths owned by the UK government, is a “Scottish bank” only in a formal, historical sense. It has operations based here because, as McEwan said, of “the skills and knowledge of our people”. Its true corporate identity is trans-national.

You could say the same of Standard Life and BP. They operate in many parts of the planet. Often they function in places that are less risky than downright dangerous. Somehow they cope. But when an extraordinary 97% of Scotland's adult population registers to vote in a democratic referendum, those who run these firms want us to believe they must club the panic button.

RBS, with George Osborne as its overseer, would probably claim it doesn't play with politics. So what are the risks it fears? Better Together's favourite tale is that an independent country would not be able to “stand behind” a bank with a balance sheet embracing hundreds of billions. Another collapse, we hear, would be another Darien. If not, the flight of RBS would cost Scotland millions in corporation tax.

First, the bank doesn't pay any of that, just at the moment, thanks to its parlous condition. Secondly, as Salmond explained to Robinson last week, the tax is levied according to the places in which commercial activity takes place. Unless RBS means to shut down every operation in Scotland – and it intends nothing of the kind – corporation tax is irrelevant to the argument.

For now, upwards of 80% of the shares are owned by the UK government. The risk of another RBS failure falls on London, not Edinburgh. But even that fact is not the entire truth. Who is this “lender of last resort” mentioned so often by Alistair Darling? The honest answer, for trans-national banks, is “lots of countries”.

As Business for Scotland has recalled, emergency loans of £285 billion and £115 billion were made available to RBS and HBOS respectively when global banking went to hell. Those huge sums were made available to “Scottish banks” by the US Federal Reserve. That's how the system (or scam) works. Barclays, the most English of banks, got £552 billion from the Fed. Everything depends on where a bank is doing business. The idea that such institutions exist thanks to one country is ancient history.

Those who run the things are cynical enough, nevertheless, to please their political friends and give the peasantry a scare. On Thursday afternoon the BBC's Robert Peston let it be known that David Cameron had been chatting with supermarket bosses to urge them – as the journalist tweeted – to “go public on how prices would rise in indie Scotland”. Just like that. It is not plausible to believe that RBS, Lloyds and the rest were not given the same friendly advice.

Is that what passes for democracy in Britain? Is that how you deal with a people trying to make a better society? Those are rhetorical questions. On Thursday, they will need an unambiguous answer. Better Together with the bankers and bullies of a corrupt UK? If that's still what you think, they saw you coming.

The Herald. September 13, 2014.

This morning, perhaps 12,000 members of the Grand Orange Lodge of Scotland and their supporters will gather on the green expanse of Edinburgh's Meadows. They will be preparing to march through the capital's streets for the sake of the United Kingdom and a campaign they call British Together. A lot of people who otherwise echo the slogan wish they wouldn't.

Evidently that rankles with the Order. They and their members, 50,000 of them in 600 lodges across the country, have been given a firm “No Thanks” by the official types at Better Together. A show of solidarity with the UK, and particularly with Orange brethren in the north of Ireland, is not wanted. Defiantly, the Order will march the streets of Edinburgh regardless. It's their Britain, too.

That fact, and all it implies, cannot be doubted. As we approach the vote, a great many people are proclaiming their Britishness. If opinion polls are right, perhaps half of Scots still assent to the idea. What's odd – and what has been odd for at least the last two years – is how few of them can manage a statement of what a belief means. A great many people with utterly contradictory claims about the UK and its values still want to say No to the alternative.

A few manage semi-mystical noises on the theme of a capacious dual identity, one that admits all who feel inclined. Those who are otherwise at each other's throats, politically, will tell you they are “relaxed” or “comfortable” with a grand coalition of the preposterously diverse. The only rule of British Club, on this account, is a desire to join the club.

As the treatment of “the oldest Protestant Christian fraternity in Scotland” would seem to show, that can't be entirely true. When Ukip's Nigel Farage came peddling his wares in the Union's name in Glasgow yesterday, the disdain from the cross-party Better Together coalition was icy. But isn't the Lodge part and parcel of a loyally British Scotland? Does Mr Farage not loom large in the politics of this Britain, if the BBC is – and you never know – to be believed?

Vote No and you vote to preserve the UK and all it contains: that's understood. So what does it contain? On the face of it, there are Labour people who style themselves progressives advocating the choice supported by Mr Farage and the Grand Orange Lodge. There are demure Liberal Democrats, otherwise fastidious about corporate predators, applauding when the bankers tell Scots how to vote. Then, memorably, there's a double act: Ruth Davidson and George Galloway.

Quite what the young voters gathered by the BBC for the televised Big, Big Debate made of that will become clear on Thursday. Mr Galloway had previously expressed a desire to be shot – his word – if he ever shared a stage with a Tory in this campaign. There is nothing new, however, under the hat. Nevertheless, the MP finds himself sharing an ambition in common with Tories, Mr Farage, and the Grand Orange Lodge. Irony doesn't cover it.

But what of Ms Davidson? Did she conclude that her new friend, the Respect member for Bradford West, has ambitions for the UK that she can tolerate? The question is not a joke. How did the leader of the Scottish Conservatives find the pairing tolerable? The tiny mystery of why Better Together preferred Mr Galloway to a Jim Murphy or a stray Lib Dem is one thing. The UK being promoted before first-time teenage voters via the BBC was a mess of absolutely contradictory propositions.

That UK is less a broad church than a gigantic cathedral full of warring schismatic factions. Should people vote No, what will they be voting for? Some Daily Telegraph souvenir Battle of Britain supplement with an imperial aftertaste? A trainload of imported Labour MPs who have just checked Wikipedia for the correct spelling of Keir Hardie? The Orange Lodge, Ukip, Mr Galloway, or something Nick Clegg said when he remembered that the Borders used to welcome Liberals?

The infinitely expanding British identity, elastic in all circumstances, might sound seductive. Multi-national, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, welcoming all: who could object? Mr Farage might. More than a few Tories certainly would. The Better Together people who have been telling Polish-Scots and others that deportation awaits if they vote Yes seem a little hazy, meanwhile, where infinite tolerance is concerned.

Each interview with Alistair Darling, chair of Better Together, brings its own entertainments. One comes, reliably, when the interviewer tries to discover how this veteran Labour figure feels about fronting a campaign for the coalition government and a rag-tag army of British patriots. The former Chancellor brushes it all aside with practised ease, of course. But the question has a point. Which Britain is he selling? Which Britain is supposed to make the heart swell with shared pride?

You could say, reasonably, that such is the nature of the campaign. On the Yes side a lot of us have become inured to repetition. Thus: the campaign isn't about Alex Salmond; his name isn't on the ballot paper; we're not voting for or against the SNP. Much of the media, and all of the London media, don't want to know. Nor do they listen to those who say they are Yes voters with no interest in nationalism, or identity, or Mr Salmond's devotion to monarchs and corporation tax cuts.

Those who find themselves on the left in Scottish political life are used to it. The slur that the SNP depends on “ethnic separatism” is just tiresome now. The idea that you could be voting Yes without the knowledge or wit to detect such a phenomenon is no better than vaguely insulting, especially when it comes from a disreputable Labour Party. But the claim that anyone of the left intent on independence is just another doomed romantic has already been answered.

You take the point, though. Why would Scottish Greens campaign alongside an SNP that makes so many claims for a carbon-based economy? Why would the Scottish Socialists support a First Minister bent on a corporation tax auction? On the face of it, the independence argument contains two motley crews, two groups forced to suppress profound differences for the sake of a single desired result. That's not the whole story.

There is a difference, a big one, between trying to preserve something that makes no sense and setting out to understand the world anew. When Labour or Mr Galloway line up with the Lodge, City bankers and Mr Farage, I know that someone is in the wrong, but I'm pretty sure it isn't me. I also know the Britain promised by these people is a thing so corrupted by its compromises and cons that there has to be a better way.

A No vote would not bother me overmuch. The fight, as Auden wrote of Voltaire, was always worth it. Scotland will be no worse off, if no better, and her children will not forget this argument soon. But still: those who would hide from the world within their fond, imagined memories of a fictitious Britain make me a little sad. They dream; they do not hope to wake.

The Herald. September 10, 2014.

When Johann Lamont, Ruth Davidson and Willie Rennie stood outside Edinburgh's Dynamic Earth yesterday to announce a “delivery plan”, you half expected to be asked if anyone would be in between nine and 12 a week on Thursday to sign for the package.

In that event, I wouldn't make too many plans. The box is empty. Or rather, there's a great deal of wrapping around nothing very much. At the bottom of this gift from the parties of the Union to the voters of Scotland there is just a timetable, of sorts. The parties swear, hands on hearts, that it is utterly reliable.

The assertion provoked a few questions from the media assembled in the shadow of Arthur's Seat. Wasn't the sudden appearance of this party gift bag so very late in the day a sure sign of panic in the Better Together ranks? Why didn't the Unionist parties make this move months and years ago? What was the great announcement, in any case, if not a mere restatement of promises made previously?

The questions continued. Why, even now, could Labour, the Tories and the Liberal Democrats not come up with a unified offer? How could voters be sure that the timetable would not be binned in the event of a No as – we can be sure – general election fever again took hold at Westminster?

A few more questions could have been added. The plan of action presented by Gordon Brown, the back-bench MP suddenly behaving as if he's Prime Minister again, is ambitious, to put it kindly, if only in its audacity. A White Paper is promised by St Andrew's Day and a draft bill by Burns Night. Forget the patronisingly daft choice of dates and the usual pledge to “consult”: is that even feasible when the three parties cannot agree on basic points?

Already there are mutterings from constitutional lawyers in Westminster and beyond. They reckon that “more powers” for Holyrood is a gesture with implications across the UK. They see a piece of major legislation requiring lots of the usual pondering. The idea that anything of the kind should be rushed through just because Labour is bleeding support in the referendum campaign is anathema. The sage types make an excellent point.

Voters might meanwhile question whether any of the Westminster parties will find reforms – whatever they might be – so desperately urgent once a No vote is in the bag. The Commons does not overflow with English Tories sympathetic to Scottish claims. None of the three parties, Labour in particular, has yielded ground on the powers that might be granted. And the objection sticks: why did no one in Better Together think any of this was vital before an opinion poll detected the rising tide of support for a Yes vote?

The permutations can be done in any way you like, but the things missing from Scotland's lucky bag are easy to list. Under no circumstances would a devolved Holyrood get a sniff of power over corporation tax, the instrument – or so Mr Brown used to say when he was cutting the thing – of job creation. Edinburgh would not be allowed near VAT. Labour is determined to withhold complete control over income tax. As for North Sea revenues, those symbols of Scotland's wealth: don't even think about it.

Even by the standards of Better Together, this is a mess. Amid the self-evident panic there is, too, a familiar arrogance towards voters. “Tell them something,” says the hard-pressed strategist, “tell them anything.” Above all, as George Osborne contrived while being interviewed by Andrew Marr at the weekend, tell the simple folk that repackaged old goods are new and irresistible.

The Chancellor, like Better Together generally, was naughty. The Scottish Referendum Act decrees that in the 28 days before polling neither of the governments party to the Edinburgh Agreement should publish new information intended to support one outcome or another, or information dealing with the referendum question, or information supporting arguments for one side or the other. So what was Mr Osborne up to? What was the unveiling of the “delivery date” if not a breach of this “purdah”?

Downing Street has a bland if flagrantly dishonest answer to that. Mr Osborne, a government minister, breached no rules, a spokesman said. The offer comes from “pro-Union parties, not the UK government”. Like it or lump it. Two of the parties making the incoherent offer happen to form the government in question, but the hair has been split, at least to the satisfaction of those bending the rules. Downing Street is meanwhile “content” - you bet – with Mr Brown's statements.

You could wonder if it matters, especially when the Better Together parties – not to mention the UK government – are floundering to stem the tide of Yes. That would miss the point. Some 200,000 postal votes were reported as returned before Mr Osborne spoke, before Mr Brown returned like Labour's Cincinnatus, and before three Scottish leaders found themselves grilled by the media. Those 200,000 voters knew nothing about any “fast-track plan” for still another devolution scheme. Whether you incline to Yes or No, that's wrong.

No one involved on the Union side – Jim Murphy, Douglas Alexander, Mr Brown himself – has bothered to do more than brush the issue aside. Had Yes Scotland been involved in such a swindle you would have heard the uproar all the way from Kirkcaldy to Westminster. When the sleight of hand is done in the sacred cause of the UK, however, we are told to look the other way.

First David Cameron insisted there could only be a “straight choice”, Yes or No. Now, desperate, he and his bedfellows would have you believe that a rejection of independence leads finally to the elusive “devomax”. Even that isn't remotely true. Nevertheless, 200,000 people are entitled to ask, “What did I just vote for?”

This is Better Together's last throw of the dice. The wailing calls of London commentators for that fabled positive case are irrelevant now. It was promised time and again and it failed to materialise. Revealingly, crushingly, none of the politicians charged with saving the UK has managed more than Mr Cameron's twee protestations of love for the Scots who decline to grant him more than one MP. Ed Miliband meanwhile asks for the Saltire to be hoisted above England's cities and towns. Perhaps he thinks people have forgotten what it looks like.

Both men will appear in Scotland today, as though to defy their miserable popularity ratings. English and Welsh Labour MPs are on their way too, to stiffen spines. But the telling statement on the state of the UK will be an act of omission: England's Tory MPs will stay away, as instructed. Having them in these parts might remind Scots of what being British means. That, reasons Better Together, will never do.

Instead, it is Mr Brown's job to shepherd former Scottish Labour voters back into the fold. While coalition politicians keep profiles lower than the horizon, the former Prime Minister is supposed to save the Union. Along the way, he might ask himself why the Labour vote strayed to begin with.

Sunday Herald. September 7, 2014.

In March, the Parliamentary Labour Party voted for the coalition government's benefits spending cap. Not just any cap, or even the principle of a cap, but George Osborne's precise, £119.5 billion punitive limit covering most things save pensions and the Jobseeker's allowance. Only 13 Labour MPs refused to follow their leadership.

Ed Miliband took this course despite warnings from Save the Children and others that the £3 billion in “savings” sought by Osborne would throw 345,000 children into poverty over the space of four years. He did not listen to campaigners who said that, once again, the disabled would be victimised. Labour's justification was that it would manage the cap with more “fairness” than Iain Duncan Smith. Such, these days, is the party's yardstick.

Obviously enough, even that achievement, if the word is deserved, would depend on Miliband winning a general election. At the time of writing, YouGov's September polls have discovered Labour leads over the Tories of between 1% and 3%. That might do, just about, if you set aside the fact that two-thirds think the leader of the Opposition is doing “badly”, and then forget that he and Ed Balls are not rated highly – to put it gently – for economic competence. Miliband is in no position to guarantee fairness to anyone.

That hasn't stopped him, of course, from throwing the word around during one of his visits. What else does he tell people who are deserting the Labour cause in the referendum argument? His party constitutes Better Together's last line of defence and the defence is crumbling. Precious few Tories would or could reject the Union that defines them. Labour people – if such a constituency still exists – need to believe that hope remains for social justice within the United Kingdom. So Miliband obliges.

The SNP, he tells us, is offering “a con”. The fact that no one will be voting for that party on September 18 is ignored, as ever. According to Miliband, “a Labour government is on the way, a Labour government with genuine proposals for social justice”. That this would also be a Labour administration capitulating in the argument over austerity, one that will abide by Osborne's spending plans in all things, one that can provide only a sketch of “more powers” for Scotland, is also overlooked.

In this country, Miliband's colleagues like to accuse the Nationalists of failing to use such powers as they already have. The argument runs that more could be spent on childcare provision, for one example, without the fuss and bother of independence. Labour fails to state what should be cut, from a Scottish budget shrunken by Osborne, to make such things possible.

They are not keen, either, to explore Jack McConnell's recent assertion that the Barnett formula will give way to a “needs-based assessment” - assessed by whom? - if there is a No vote. How this could ever sustain anyone's dream of social justice is a question unanswered. Why a country perfectly capable of independence would submit, in any case, to means-testing by a government bent on cutting its budget is another of life's mysteries.

Run your own affairs or squabble with Balls over the nation's wealth? Compete for a slice of the loaf you baked in the name of solidarity? The benefit cap vote was a sure sign of Miliband's intent. If he is elected – that gigantic “if” - there will be plenty of talk of fairness to go around, but social justice will remain a cap-in-hand affair for every part of his UK. To Scottish Labour voters choosing Yes, that sounds like the Union they know only too well.

To them, Miliband offers a faintly comical proposition: vote No for the sake of his ambitions and all will be well. If ever a plan was fraught with risk, as Better Together would otherwise say, that one leads the field. Even if you make the bet that Labour can fend off Ukip, prevail against voting habits in the English south, suppress its own worst instincts and see sense amid the austerity mania, you are left with a question. When did Miliband's party last deserve to be called progressive?

A typical Labour answer might be “It depends what you mean”. The leader would point, as he did last week, to plans for a 50p tax band and a 10p starting rate. He would assail the SNP, hypocritically, for planning to cut corporation tax after serving in government while Gordon Brown did that very thing and boasted about it. He would offer a (temporary) freeze in energy bills and then grow vague when more powers for Holyrood were mentioned.

But still: that benefits cap. Real money taken away from real people simply because Osborne means to diminish the state and because Labour no longer has the Balls to say that this is economically stupid and morally wrong.

Nothing progressive can come from a party bent on such a course. Nothing that party offers, circumscribed by expediency and electoral calculation, matches the opportunity of independence. You can have Miliband's remote hopes. Or you can rip it up and start again.

The fact raises another detail left unspoken by Labour's leader last week as he struggled to rally the troops and shore up a No vote. Nationalists themselves no longer pretend that the Yes campaign is their property. People, especially Labour people, insist noisily that their choice of independence has nothing to do with nationalism. This is fundamental.

These voters, these patient insurgents, are not interested in a Miliband policy auction. Worthless “guarantees” based on the theoretical possibility of yet another compromised Labour government no longer detain them. The point now is self-determination, not the SNP. If you want social justice in Scotland, design it yourself, argue for it, and vote for it. This is a DIY job; home assembly required.

Miliband has few choices in the matter, of course. He personifies all the contradictions of British Labour. Whom does he satisfy these days, where and how? His colleague Andy Burnham, he who set in motion the process by which Hichingbrooke hospital in Huntingdon became a privatised “operating franchise”, now warns against the privatisation of NHS England. Good for him. So below the border Labour campaigns against what was, barely five years ago, Labour policy.

No one can force a Scottish government to privatise Scotland's NHS: that has never been argued. Edinburgh's budget can be squeezed, though, and there is plenty of appetite for that, as Lord McConnell has illustrated, in Westminster. But the Labour voters turning to Yes have a still deeper understanding of reality: judge London's parties by what they have done, by what the Tories are doing, and by what Miliband would do while he serenades us with fairness. Contracts to private firms from NHS England topped £10 billion in 2013. Call it a clue.

“Trust me,” says Miliband, “I'm progressive. I ache for justice and fairness. Just ignore all the things my party has done and means to do if another generation believes a word of it.” In days of hope, the ambitions of this year's Labour leader seem like paltry things. Worse than that, they seem, because they are, all too familiar.

The Herald. September 6, 2014.

David Cameron probably wishes that, like most people, he had never heard of the 2^nd Earl of Guildford, otherwise known as Lord North. The Prime Minister's 18^th century predecessor didn't do such a bad job, by the standards of his day, but he did make a tiny error. He was the man who “lost America”.

In point of fact, North ceded the 13 Colonies to settlers who actually lived there, but at home his contemporaries didn't see things that way. Up at Edinburgh Castle there's an old door on which is carved the image of a scaffold and the words “Lord Nord”: you get the idea. If Scotland votes Yes Mr Cameron's Tory colleagues will be less crude, but the punishment will be just as certain.

There is no chance that impeachment – the fate that befell North – will be demanded. A leadership challenge in the modern style is the likely outcome. According to some reports, that very thing is already being discussed on the Tory back benches. For all the bland noises from Better Together, the talk is of catastrophe, humiliation, and a predicted “flood of anger”.

It's nice to be taken seriously, for a change. In any case, the chatter reflects reality. How can you continue as the Prime Minister of a United Kingdom that has ceased to be united? It speaks to the job description. It also asks a fundamental question of Mr Cameron's competence. If you can't keep Britain together, what can you do?

Perhaps for that reason, among others, the Prime Minister will have none of it. This week he told Radio 4's Today programme “emphatically” that he will not quit if Yes wins a majority. The issue at stake, he said, is “not this prime minister or that prime minister, or this party leader or that party leader. What is at stake is the future of Scotland…”

Translated, this was Mr Cameron attempting, yet again, to prevent the vote becoming a referendum on the Tories. He has a healthy appreciation of how that experiment tends to end. He has been less than prominent in the independence argument for the self-same reason. He has stayed out of it, for the most part, and avoided provoking the Scots while Labour has done the front-line work and suffered the – now considerable – damage.

Ironically, what must have seemed like tactical cleverness is now the heart of Mr Cameron's Lord North problem. If and when it all goes wrong, his unruly back-benchers will ask what became of Dave when it mattered most. They will say he took refuge behind the human shields of a Better Together campaign they derided. Most of all, they will say he was cavalier in discharging a solemn duty to the UK.

A lot of those preparing to do the talking are not much interested in what becomes of Scotland. People who have expended rhetoric on the topic of whingeing, dependent Jocks are not especially sincere when they invite Scotland to stay dependent. They'd rather take a sledge hammer to Barnett and budgets. Failing that, they will take a Prime Minister's scalp.

A Yes vote would just be another excuse to attack Mr Cameron for the sake of their real obsession, namely Europe. The catastrophe of independence – and so forth – would be an ideal opportunity to remove an obstacle, as they see it, on the road to their own referendum project. Getting the faintheart out of Downing Street in order to get the residual UK out of Europe sounds, for these Tories, like a double bonus.

Still and all these people, and many more besides, would have a point. It is unthinkable that Mr Cameron could cling on after a Yes vote. It is silly, if understandable, that he should pretend otherwise. But even on a personal level, it is hard to see how the Prime Minister can claim he would be “heartbroken” by a Yes vote yet determined to stay in his post.

The British state would be in crisis. His reputation, like his economic and defence planning, would be in ruins. Westminster would be facing the kind of upheaval it has not experienced in three centuries. It would be the sort of situation in which calls for the Queen to intervene would no longer sound quaint. And Dave would soldier on? That's risible.

It also does no service to the voters of England, whatever the “tactical” thinking. Most of what they hear about the referendum turns on explanations of how much it matters to the entire UK. This is Scotland's choice, as Mr Cameron himself would put it, but the consequences of Yes would be profound for England, Wales and Northern Ireland. We are supposed to believe, nevertheless, that the consequences wouldn't be too profound for Mr Cameron.

An English voter – or a Scottish No voter, come to that – is entitled to ask a basic question about all of this. If Mr Cameron refuses to pay the price for losing Scotland, in which circumstances would he resign? The guesses would make for an excellent parlour game, but they would not reassure anyone asking if their government is in safe hands. The evidence would be stacked high against the Prime Minister.

In fairness, Alex Salmond has also felt it necessary to say he has no intention of resigning if the vote goes against him. In this case, the mantra runs that he means to see out his term as First Minister, that he was elected in 2011 – handily, too – with a mandate to serve for five years, and serve he will. Marking a decade of his SNP leadership partnership with Nicola Sturgeon this week, Mr Salmond made his case again.

Clearly, he can't be forced to quit unless his party turns against him or, by some miracle, two-thirds of MSPs force an election. He remains a popular First Minister with a working majority. Besides, Mr Salmond and Mr Cameron are at one, for once: “it isn't about them”. But the SNP convener has spent his political life working for this referendum. Ms Sturgeon is a better than able successor in waiting. Would the First Minister really want to continue?

He reckons, as you would expect, that the question won't arise. Mr Cameron can no longer muster the same confidence: hence the growling from his back benches. Mr Salmond is also spared the prospect of the kind of Tory interrogation that will be inevitable if there is a Yes vote. For the Prime Minister, it could happen even if the vote is No.

Mr Cameron has worked hard to prevent a Scottish plebiscite on his party. His own Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, has even been obliged to suggest that her Prime Minister won't be around for much longer. She has implied, in so many words, that if Scots have no taste for the paramount Tory they needn't worry their heads about it.

That isn't really the problem. The fact that Britain's Prime Minister has felt unable to lead a campaign to save Britain is one explanation of why a referendum is happening at all. Mr Cameron's blithe refusal to contemplate resignation on 19 September is another.