my brother and I spent Saturday at Nordicana 2014, a weekend celebration of all things Scandinavian at the Old Truman Brewery in achingly hip Shoreditch.

The place was packed, particularly for panel events featuring the casts of Borgen and The Bridge, but it was also overcrowded and understaffed. Alas, little of the Nordic efficiency mentioned by one speaker was in evidence.

That the event took place at all was testament to the remarkable success of Nordic television and literature over the past few years. As Nordicana's website gushed, the event (now in its second year) "embodies everything we have come to love about Scandinavian culture". Naturally, my thoughts turned to the independence debate during the proceedings (I'm beginning to think the NHS ought to offer treatment).

In the past I've referred to "Nordic fetishism", a rather tiresome tendency to argue Scotland has more in common with Scandinavian social democracy than Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism. Thus, goes the rather woolly argument, with independence Scotland would naturally slot into the Nordic geopolitical axis. This notion first surfaced in the context of the pre-1997 devolution debates and if it was inaccurate then it is even less compelling two decades later.

By any definition Scotland is not a social democratic nation. Like the rest of the UK its inhabitants generally want good (and free) public services and low taxes, while across Britain there's increasing skepticism about immigration, Europe and welfare. Indeed, the same could be said of the Scandinavian nations, without the low-tax bit. Over there, they generally expect to pay for good public services and low inequality; in political and cultural terms that's a pretty big difference.

The endless comparisons with Scandinavia among pro-independence supporters also caricatures contemporary politics in the Scandinavian countries, which aren't the uniformly happy, equal and racially harmonious places many in Scotland assume. If they think UK immigration policy is driven, as Education Secretary Michael Russell put it last week, by "a nasty xenophobia", then they should take a look at Norway, now governed by a centre-right administration propped up by a nasty xenophobic party.

Previewing his forthcoming book, The Almost Nearly Perfect People: The Truth About the Nordic Miracle, writer Michael Booth took light-hearted aim at Scandinavian caricatures in an article last week. Danish television, he wrote, is generally rubbish, Finnish men drink too much and Sweden "is not exactly a model of democracy".

Of course all countries have their problems, and there is much to be admired in how Norway et al have managed their natural resources and crafted their welfare states in the post-war era, It would just be more helpful if independence supporters sometimes acknowledged the cons as well as the pros, not least higher taxes (a feature of Scandinavian social democracy few in the SNP appear willing to embrace), expensive food and drink (try eating out in Oslo for under £50) and extremist fringe politics which puts Ukip in the shade.

Listening to Sofia Helin and Kim Bodnia (Saga and Martin in The Bridge) being interviewed at Nordicana 2014 I got the impression they were slightly bemused by the British love of all things Nordic. Asked how he felt being in London, Bodnia said, almost wistfully: "For all my life I've looked up to the BBC, to English theatre", while Helin spoke of her desire to work in London, praising the "openness" of the UK, which she said wasn't the case Scandinavia.

In his book, Booth charts the more nuanced, darker picture of Scandinavia depicted in The Bridge, "a region plagued by taboos, characterised by suffocating parochialism and populated by extremists of various shades". You won't, of course, see any of that mentioned in the White Paper; rather it focuses (not unreasonably) on increased childcare spending akin to Sweden, and so on.

The Scottish Government is also weak when it comes to explaining how it would actually deliver Scandinavian levels of equality (again, a noble aim). Any nation serious about tackling inequality must be prepared to utilise income tax, but here Scottish exceptionalism kicks in. Abolishing the bedroom tax, meanwhile, is presented as a panacea, as if the UK welfare state circa 2010 was the apex of social democracy.

Mark Carney's important speech also underlined the point that the Scottish Government might actually end up in a weaker position to fashion the Nordic economic and social model it claims to desire. A lot, of course, could be done at present in terms of income tax, council tax reform and the creation of supplementary benefits, but forging a devolved slice of Scandinavia within the UK I suppose doesn't quite have the same ring to it.

Actually, if you think about it, if anything resembled Scandinavia it was the UK between the late 1940s and early 1970s, when there was a political consensus in favour of full employment and greater equality. Since then, as in the Scandinavian countries, "social democracy" has been refashioned, and not always in a good way; Michael Gove has made much of his "free schools" policy being based on the Swedish model.

The BBC's Allan Little recently explored another aspect of Nordic fetishism in his radio documentary Does Scandinavia Want Scotland? In short, the answer to that question was "no", or at the very least they're agnostic. As even Lesley Riddoch, perhaps Nordicana's most articulate proponent, conceded, Scotland simply isn't on their radar. One Norwegian broadcaster told Little the Nordic Council, which won't even allow the devolved Faroes to join, was little more than a talking shop.

She also spoke of the "very strong relationship" her country has with the UK and speculated that even after independence it would still look to London, where the Norwegian royal family and government sought refuge during the Second World War. As the broadcaster mused: "I cannot see that Scotland would be our number-one playmate".

There's even movement in the other direction, with grand visions of a formal Nordic federation stretching from Finland to Denmark and a population of around 20 million, a unit big enough to flex its geopolitical muscles within Europe and beyond. Just as the US would rather the UK remained its unified conduit to the EU, many Scandinavian diplomats prize the (unified) UK as a counterweight to France and Germany at the top table in Brussels.

Such are the realities of geopolitics beyond the escapist fantasy politics of Nordic fetishism. It's also a little bit demeaning: surely the point of independence is not to "be like" another country but to do things in a distinctly Scottish way? Doubtless it might seek Scandinavian inspiration in certain areas, but the Nordic countries are not perfect, and nor is a devolved Scotland such an imperfect model.