Though I support Scottish independence, I’m probably not its staunchest or most compelling advocate. Self-determination is merely my preference; not my heart’s desire. If Scotland were never to gain its independence in my lifetime, well … I won’t lose much sleep. It comes in a very distant fifth or sixth behind family, faith, football and relationships … even the welfare of some of our threatened beasties.

And besides, it’s not as though we’re seeking to decouple from a punitive, malevolent psycho-state like Romania under Ceausescu or Erich Honecker’s East Germany. It’s jolly old England with whom we share a border and in whose wars and adventures of empire we have long been an enthusiastic partner.

If we weren’t joining the English to fend off the predations of malign foes then we were filling our boots gleefully when we’ve occupied and ransacked lands in the sub-continent that are incapable of defending themselves. There are currently more than 400,000 English people living and working in Scotland and around 800,000 of us operating south of the Border.

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They are our lovers, partners, colleagues, friends and relatives. We share a large part of our culture with England as well as our common language. What we like to call “our values” correspond largely with theirs. Hell, our nationalist government has even come lately to support the aggressive military alliance known as Nato and tugs its forelocks as dutifully as any full-fat English Tory whenever a member of the Royal Family comes to visit. That all said, it would still be good to write our own cheques; take full responsibility for our own mistakes and make the odd tweak here and there to spending priorities.

Let’s talk too about patriotism and all that comes with it. Being a Scottish "patriot" or a British "patriot" is usually followed by some hokum about being "proud" of your country and what it’s supposed to stand for. Saying that you’re proud of being "Scottish" or "English" or "British" is as meaningless as saying that you’re proud of being a mammal as opposed to an amphibian or a vertebrate.

We’re here purely as a happy accident of birth. Neither we nor our ancestors earned our existence on one of the most affluent and climatically beneficent places on God’s earth. Our nation’s achievements are no more or less exceptional than those of many other small nations.

Yes, yes, yes: I know we had the Scottish Enlightenment and that stacks of American presidents have Scottish lineage and that the Declaration of Arbroath is probably the third stone tablet that Moses dropped on his way back down from that Mount Sinai.

Perhaps you might claim that much of what we’ve achieved in science and the humanities came as a result of our great education system. Isn’t this something of which we should be patriotically proud? Well, perhaps. But we were able to develop this over many years of peace and prosperity.

This was partly due to having had the good fortune to have been invaded and visited by refined peoples and civilisations who settled here. They chose to gift us something of themselves and to enhance and strengthen our gene pool. Our natural resources remained intact.

We also took our share of the booty that came from Britain’s wars of empire and our enslavement of Africa and Asia as we competed for supremacy with other powerful, white European nations. Indeed, our meddling in the affairs of many sub-equatorial nations and our voracious appetite for their natural bounty inevitably caused the instability that undermines these regions today.

British greed helped destabilise these regions and when some of them were on the verge of determining their own futures in relative peace we told them lies and betrayed them. In a refreshing moment of candour, David Cameron pointed this out in 2011 on a visit to Pakistan in 2011. Mr Cameron, then Britain’s Prime Minister, was asked if he had any solutions to end the conflict over the disputed Kashmir region. His response couldn’t have been better pitched. “I don't want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world's problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”

He was right. After two centuries of looting India and violently repressing its peoples we left it in a ruinous state of religious and civil strife. Britain was the worst thing ever to happen to this region. The way Britain treated India would become a template for its crimes in Ireland.

David Cameron got it right on KashmirDavid Cameron got it right on Kashmir (Image: PA)

In 1915, Britain agreed a secret concordat with Russia that effectively divided up and parcelled out the Ottoman Empire after first defeating the Turks and then ending WW1. The Russians got Constantinople, the Dardanelles and came to possess half of European Turkey. Britain laid claim to the territory that would eventually encompass Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq.

Not content with that, we sent Captain TE Lawrence to stir up and lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916, promising King Sherif Faisal of Iraq full independence. Instead, we eventually allowed them a sort of twilight independence after signing the secret Sykes-Picot agreement with France that effectively carved up the region between the two European nations.

Of course, if Scotland were to become independent we delude ourselves that we would establish a much more enlightened immigration policy than England’s and that “refugees are welcome here”. But let’s be honest here: they’d be welcome here until they weren’t.

Scotland might have different social needs stemming from our ageing population’s future demands on the public infrastructure and a falling birth rate. But we are a small country and it wouldn’t take long before we began to fill up and we too would begin to talk about looking after “our own” and sustainable “quotas”. And then what?

After the horrors that we as part of the UK have visited on the countries and peoples of Asia and Africa we have no right to deny anyone entry from these places. There can never be too many of them. And if they make our lives a little more crowded and a little more uncomfortable, so what? This would be generational justice. At some point, someone has to pay for what we did to them.

Kevin McKenna is a Herald writer and columnist. This year is his 40th in newspapers. Among his paltry list of professional achievements is that he’s never been approached by any political party or lobbying firm to be on their payroll.