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.........

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