IT could have been so different. Independence could have real significance and purpose today. Indeed, the way politics has unfolded, independence could have stood as an alternative to the cycle of stagnation and failure that’s taking us god knows where.

But matters aren’t different. Independence is traduced - meaningless. And it’s been battered into submission by the very people who championed it. The destroyers of independence are its torchbearers - specifically Nicola Sturgeon and Alex Salmond, and the cultish loyalists who still cleave to them.

In truth, independence has become a nauseating grift, shanghaied by failed politicians desperate for some end-of-career relevance, and pay-days which keep them in the cosseted comfort to which they’ve become so very accustomed.

Looking back ten years to the referendum, I feel physically sick at what nationalists did, not just to Scotland through their uselessness and division, but to the independence project which provided hope to nearly half the nation that there was an alternative to the never-ending downward trajectory of Westminster politics.

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But now independence is chloroformed - poleaxed until some far off future point when matters get so bad, thanks to the clunking blindness of what passes for power in London, that it can again be resurrected as a vehicle for change.

And matters will get bad. That’s the only - and terrible - road that independence is left to travel thanks to nationalist failure. Britain will have to break before independence has another hope.

And Britain will break. The path the new Starmer government is on won’t lift the country up. It will continue the harm the Tories started. Starmer’s brutality will just come with tea and sympathy, rather than a two-fingered sneer.

Starmer has told us what the future holds. He could have started his rule by throwing the weight of change onto the rich, making clear he was coming for those who hadn’t paid their fair share with heavier inheritance and capital gains tax. But he didn’t. His show of strength was casual social violence towards pensioners, leaving those on the breadline to freeze.

The decision to remove winter fuel payments was taken by a Labour government whose MPs claimed more than £400,000 in taxpayer handouts to heat their own homes over the last five years.

That’s monstrous. The image which comes to mind is a repellent glutton snatching the last crumbs from the plate of the old.

Labour is telling you what they are - and we need to listen. They aren’t going to save us from the legacy of the Tories. They’re just a less chaotic form of what we had over the last 14 years.

That could make them more dangerous. At least Tory mayhem made them evidently unfit for power. Labour’s dead-eyed managerialism is a great shield when it comes to the punishment they’ll mete out.

Nor is Starmer hiding that he’s just as venal as the Tories. There’s claims Starmer’s assets may be worth more than £7million. Yet he and his wife take free clothes from their tycoon donor, Lord Alli, who was given a temporary Downing Street pass.

Yes should have provided hope but it's been betrayedYes should have provided hope but it's been betrayed (Image: Stewart Attwood)

I sit on the liberal-left. If the behaviour of Boris Johnson made me retch, then logic dictates my stomach should heave at Starmer now. And believe me, it does.

Yet, I see loyal Labour acolytes claim there’s no comparison; they tell us to wait and not judge Starmer so quickly. They’re built of the same cultish material as the worst Tory or nationalist.

And that’s the horror for Scottish voters. There’s no fundamental difference in any damn politician. I began watching the recent Salmond-Sturgeon documentary, but couldn’t finish it. The sight of them and their apologists turned my guts.

They treated independence like a hijacked car. They stole it from the people who believed it. Independence became a means for the likes of Salmond and Sturgeon to carve out some lucrative niche. They both turned it into a cult for their particular brand of true believers.

These poor fools who followed Salmond and Sturgeon - and still believe their lies - wait like the last remaining members of a death cult for some celestial bagpipe to sound, announcing the new dawn of independence.

It will never happen so long as this disgraced old guard remain on the scene. Their very presence in public life makes us part of the nauseating spectacle that’s their endless narcissistic blame game.

And look at the state of the Yes movement. All that’s left are the online morlocks who devolved so much over the years in their tribal darkness that they now eat each other amid ever increasingly bizarre schisms.

For pity’s sake, did you see Salmond’s independence rally in Glasgow at the weekend? It was humiliating. Just a few hundred souls - and some dogs wrapped in Saltires, as if the sense of sadness couldn’t be worse. Indy rallies once commanded 100,000 people.

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Is that what the Yes movement is now? Grotesque friendless losers screaming into the digital ether in their mammy’s basement, and some old folks in George Square. Scotland’s brightest minds were once the face of the Yes movement - academics, writers, actors.

If independence hadn’t become a toy for the likes of Salmond and Sturgeon it would today stand as the only possible alternative to what Starmer is doing to this country.

If independence had been respected - been given meaning - then it would be a principle people could rally around in the face of the deadly direction Starmer now takes.

Starmer risks putting rocket-fuel into the tank of the far-right. Voters fled the Conservatives desperate for change and hope. Starmer is showing us there is no hope, no change, just more of the same. So where will the disillusioned look next when they soon tire of Starmer?

That’s why independence matters. It could have been a bulwark against what’s coming. But the bulwark was destroyed by those who claimed to cherish independence.

So here we are, on our own, waiting for what comes next, with no possible means of escape.

One chance remains: that the cause of independence is given life by a new generation - of citizens, not politicians - who refashion the Yes movement in time to offer an alternative to what’s inevitably rushing rapidly towards us.

Neil Mackay is the Herald’s Writer-at-Large. He’s a multi-award winning investigative journalist, author of both fiction and non-fiction, and a filmmaker and broadcaster. He specialises in intelligence, security, crime, social affairs and foreign and domestic politics.