IT’’S hard to believe that independence was once almost the only topic of conversation in Scottish politics. That and Brexit.

Just weeks ago, everything was still being seen through the optic of these two constitutional issues, from the BBC to the packaging on teacakes.

Independence in particular has been all-consuming. For a decade, it has felt at times as if there is no other story in town, no other matter of importance that might merit the full energy and intellect of politicians and public. We have had plenty of debates about health, education and policing, but all too often they have become ding-dongs about Westminster funding or the nature of the devolution settlement – proxy arguments about independence.

Scottish politics has been a permanent rugby scrum, with the constitution at its bitter heart.

What a difference six weeks make. Jackson Carlaw aside, politicians have all but stopped using the i-word. Why? Because quite frankly it doesn’t feel important.

The same is true of the benighted Brexit debate. Just one year ago, broadcasters were camped out on College Green following a string of failed knife-edge votes on Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Who’s discussing it now?

With shortages of protective clothing for NHS staff, frontline workers dying of Covid-19, the disease tearing through care homes and grave questions hanging over the governments of the four UK nations about their slowness to impose social distancing and recognise the importance of widespread testing, a new and much-needed perspective has been imposed on the independence and Brexit debates.

It’s not that these issues don’t matter: they do and will still matter after all this is over.

But what the coronavirus crisis illuminates in an unforgiving way is this: whatever framework for government we have (whether the UK is inside or outside Europe, whether Scotland is inside or outside the UK), there will be issues that it cannot much help with. People care most about issues affecting their daily lives. In a crisis, constitutional questions will never matter as much as the quality of the leaders we elect, who their advisers are and how good they are at taking decisions on our behalf.

The constitution can define the decision-making structures but often it won’t make those decisions any easier.

There is no major constitutional dimension to coronavirus so far, not really, spats about EU procurement and the distribution of protective clothing between UK nations aside. If Scotland were independent, Nicola Sturgeon would still be reliant on the counsel of her medical advisers in tackling coronavirus. If the UK were already outside the EU, UK ministers would still have to make difficult judgments about how to get us out of lockdown.Governments everywhere, big and small, are facing similar challenges and feeling their way through.

Coronavirus brings this home to us. You wouldn’t expect doctors at a patient case conference to waste time arguing over which operating theatre to use when what matters is the treatment plan the patient needs.

The sudden demotion of constitutional issues in the public consciousness also highlights something else: how, up until now, these questions have sucked airtime and attention away from other issues of importance, including the NHS.

The NHS has been run down to a truly alarming extent over the last decade. For years, doctors and nurses have been trying to shout above the melee, stressing the word “crisis”. A GP I spoke to at the beginning of February spoke despairingly of the absence of a consultant psychiatrist in Dundee. There was not a single person doing that job, not even a locum. He had to manage patients with suspected schizophrenia himself, without being able to get a formal diagnosis.

This was the state of the NHS going into the coronavirus emergency.

Doctors and nurses have not been quiet about this stuff; their language and tone has become increasingly blunt and exasperated as the years have passed, but has it cut through as it should have? I’m afraid it hasn’t; instead, we have simply become inured to the idea of the NHS being in crisis and returned all too quickly to those well-trodden arguments about “Westminster austerity” or the SNP’s supposed preoccupation with independence, arguments which are all too often about apportioning blame to someone else.

I should right here and now offer my own mea culpa: if as a nation we have disappeared up our own flagpole, journalists are partly responsible. We feed this stuff and obsess about it as much as the politicians. And it’s not just SNP politicians and their media cheerleaders who are consumed by it: the Scottish Tories’ breathtaking hypocrisy at the 2017 election in attacking the SNP for being taken up with independence while making their whole campaign about, er, independence, underlines the unhealthy co-dependency that exists between nationalists and Unionists, both of whom see partisan advantage in going on about inependence.. Talking about it allows both sides to divert attention away from the problems they don’t know how to solve.

But we need to be honest about this damaging myopia. We need to get better at keeping questions about the constitution in their place.

The magnitude of the coronavirus crisis is gob-smacking, awe-inspiring, frankly terrifying. The danger to life it poses is just one of its impacts. We can only guess at the toll the disease and lockdown are taking on inequality, mental health and levels of domestic abuse. The economic impact looks set to dwarf anything any of us have seen in our lifetimes.

Ministers, even ones doing their best in unprecedented circumstances, need to be held to account for their decisions and so it’s good news that at Holyrood and Westminster, politicians are returning to virtual work.

Eventually as the immediate crisis winds down, there will be a temptation for them to return to business as usual.

We can only hope they don’t. The agenda of the next 10 years must be public health, economic recovery, tacking inequality and confronting the climate crisis. Brexit and independence have their place in those discussions but that place is not always centre stage. We would all benefit, after normal life resumes, if the constitutional navel-gazing didn’t resume with it. It’s time to get real.

All columnists are free to express their opinions. They don’t necessarily represent the view of The Herald.

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