MANY of us who supported Scottish independence in 2014 were immediately pessimistic about the chances of getting to vote for it again in our lifetimes. The UK Government would surely now be wise to the undercurrents which had swept so many citizens into the Yes camp in those pulsating days.

Back then, the main reasons why so many had been persuaded to consider Scottish independence as a viable option weren’t really that complicated. The consequences of belonging to a United Kingdom ruled by an egregiously pernicious form of Toryism were becoming clear. As was the realisation that this might not be ending any time soon.

It’s since become fashionable in Unionist and Nationalist circles alike to cite shared financial concerns for the ultimate failure of the independence campaign. This though, was a simplistic analysis which overlooked what was happening in the country’s most disadvantaged communities, particularly in the West of Scotland.

The residents of these places also understood the uncertainties around currency and questions about the deficit. But having been forced to deploy desperate measures to mitigate the effects of the Tories’ one-sided austerity programme many simply felt that in an independent Scotland there was at least a chance that a new set of priorities might include their futures for once. Having nothing to lose, they could afford to take a risk about Scotland being independent.

Even so, the smart money was on the Tories plugging those gaps in our understanding of just how much Scotland meant to them so that the question of its independence would never arise again.

By the time the referendum campaign had reached its final week we were being asked to believe that Middle England was emotionally distraught at the prospect of losing Scotland and was beginning to seek counselling. This seemed to have been underlined when a train-load of D-list desperadoes pulled into Glasgow’s Central Station in the week prior to the vote. Other media obscurities lent their names to letters begging Scotland not to leave. It was heady and pathetic stuff.

In the weeks before the referendum I was being told a different story in England’s northern constituencies. As those middle-class luvvies were making their trip north I travelled down and across England’s backbone to solicit the views of real people. They loved Scotland too, but their message was a different one: Go! And take us with you.

The love-bombing of Scotland was all a chimera, of course. Within hours of the last referendum count having taken place, David Cameron was putting Scotland back in its box with English votes for English laws. The fabled Vow and the Smith Commission that followed it was akin to handing out sweeties to truculent children in a noisy nursery. The most extreme form of Brexit, long coveted by a cadre of Tory empire fetishists, started to become a reality just two years after the Scottish independence campaign. The centrepiece of the Unionists’ campaign – EU membership - had always, it seemed, been a confidence trick.

With the continuing weakness of both Tories and Labour in Scotland, the independence movement has had to assume the duties of both government and opposition. Thus, some of the fiercest criticism of the SNP has come from within the wider Yes movement. More often than not this has coalesced around the perception that the Sturgeon regime has neither sufficiently prosecuted the case for independence nor produced a legal and strategic framework for bringing about a second independence referendum.

A startling opinion poll last week even appeared to give sustenance to Scottish Labour ahead of the local authority elections. For the first time in a generation this feckless party might not face embarrassment at a national election in Scotland. Are some of its former supporters returning to the fold after years of SNP posturing on independence?

Yet, it also seems that the Boris Johnson administration is intent on providing a fresh impetus for the Scottish independence movement. The economics of an independent Scotland will always feature in debates on its future relationship with the UK. But increasingly, so too is a moral dimension. How long will Scottish voters feel so disgusted by association with Boris Johnson’s malevolent and inhumane government before they begin to feel ashamed for helping to prop it up?

You’re immediately wary of introducing a moral dimension to the democratic process. Let those who are without sin cast the first stone and all that. But when a government is intent on unstitching the fabric of the moral code by which it’s always purported to live we’re on fresh territory.

Boris Johnson’s Conservative government have spent the last three years scouring fresh depths of scurrilous and iniquitous conduct. Barely have we had time to comprehend each fresh corruption than another arrives to make the previous one seem banal. Perhaps the aim here is to desensitise us to the immorality of Mr Johnson’s administration and that we reach a point where it no longer registers. We are even presented with a choice of iniquities.

Perhaps here, the aim is to arrive at a point where they cancel each other out. What’s more morally repugnant: using a lethal pandemic to enrich your friends and family with corrupt access to multi-million-pound PPE contracts, or choosing to have a year-long bacchanal in government offices while the country locked down?    

Can’t decide? Well here comes Priti Patel, the UK Home Secretary, with a late tie-breaker. Her plan to bribe an impoverished and densely populated African country to take UK asylum-seekers off our hands is loathsome. That she is having to force it through in the face of her civil servants’ moral concerns indicates a government which has become impervious to what even the UK establishment considers acceptable.

The besieged Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy seemed delighted to receive Boris Johnson last week on a hastily-organised visit. Vladimir Putin will have been delighted too. When the west claims the moral high ground and chooses Boris Johnson and Priti Patel as its emissaries, tyrants and despots everywhere must cheer.

How long before Scotland chooses not to have its own reputation trashed by continued association with these people?

 

Our columns are a platform for writers to express their opinions. They do not necessarily represent the views of The Herald