A HARD Brexit with a soft landing – that is what Theresa May is after, clearly enough. It sounds implausible, and it may soon emerge as impossible once the negotiations start in earnest in a couple of months’ time.

To be fair, the Prime Minister’s speech at Lancaster House on Tuesday set out a vision of future relations between the UK and the EU which in large parts is not entirely inconsistent with those we have enjoyed during our 44 years of membership: in her words, as “the best friend and neighbour to our European partners”. After Brexit, she wants us all to carry on trading freely in goods and services, and she hopes for the so-called passporting arrangements to continue for British financial institutions to sell their products across the Channel.

The crunch comes with immigration, the only one of the four freedoms in the European single market that sticks in the English throat (as we must specify in this case). It’s fine to drive a Peugeot, or to buy it from a bank account with Santander, or to insure it with Allianz. But to have it cleaned by a Pole is somehow beyond the pale.

May was, before she got to No 10, an illiberal Home Secretary, who never balked at persecuting inoffensive and hard-working immigrants under petty regulations – a practice that department still continues with the assurance of support from the very top. The odd thing is, however, that during the six years she sat in this hot seat she never once hit her target of limiting net immigration to the UK to 100,000 people a year. She missed it not by some minor margin but by a mile: the latest figures, for 2016, show net immigration of 335,000.

Seven years of failure for a policy on immigration may be to you and me a pretty sure sign it is the wrong policy, but May evidently disagrees. In her best vicar’s daughter’s manner she thinks the right response is to tighten things up – and if that means leaving the EU, then so be it. Yet I would lay a bet that after Brexit we will still be getting net immigration of at least 300,000 a year because in the British economy that is the level of demand for foreign labour, whether fruit-pickers or financial whizz-kids.

The forces underlying this movement are not administrative but economic. If migrants do not come legally then they will come illegally, as many do already, and the Home Office can find more work for its idle hands in vain attempts to catch them. Meanwhile, our relations will certainly sour with those countries which send us their migrant workers while accepting British white settlers in return: for these, the days may well be numbered.

Basically we have immigration because immigration is good for the UK – and so by an unseen hand, as Adam Smith would have said, we get immigration. Nowhere is the utility of immigration clearer than in Scotland. Our government is coming, if a little too slowly, to see that we should be trying harder to grow our economy. For growth, we require three inputs. We require technological advance, and our systems of education and training mean we get plenty of that. We require capital for investment, which also appears quite adequate. Finally we require labour, but unfortunately our workforce is ageing and shrinking. With a falling birthrate, immigration is the only answer.

England rejects immigration, yet Scotland needs immigration. In no other respect does the hollowness of May’s profession of solicitude for the entire UK appear more starkly. If England’s desires conflict with Scotland’s needs, then Scotland is the one that loses out. It looks as if this is going to be the story of Brexit. So much for the Prime Minister’s words on Tuesday: “We will put our precious Union at the heart of everything we do.”

Theresa May seems a woman still full of delusions, which will no doubt start to be pricked as soon as the negotiations with our European neighbours get underway: I think they will find her intentions nowhere near as benign as she claims they are. Meanwhile, I am sorry to say Nicola Sturgeon now has no hiding place.

LAST week I wrote how the soft Brexit that the Scottish Government outlined just before Christmas in its document Scotland’s Place in Europe was already being overtaken by events, and this week’s developments confirm that it has been completely overtaken.

Contrary to what that document expected, the UK will leave the European single market which it was decisive in setting up a quarter-century ago, which it largely shaped and which has brought many benefits. It will even leave the customs union, so will have to renegotiate the whole range of its trading agreements with the rest of the world. All this surely excludes the Scottish Government’s second preference, for some continuing special access to the single market.

Quite apart from whatever the Europeans might make of this, it would require the active consent and advocacy of the UK Government – which, after Tuesday, is just not going to be playing ball. “We do not seek to hold on to bits of membership as we leave,” said the Prime Minister.

Of the options available to Scotland, only a fresh referendum on independence is left. The First Minister has anyway already ruled out holding one this year. In 2018, the Brexit negotiations will be in full swing: unless they are obviously heading for a car crash, it would scarcely be the right time for a referendum on an outcome which is not yet clear. So we are looking to 2019 at the very earliest, and even that is an optimistic estimate which could easily slip.

It may not be easy to sustain over this period the kind of commitment and enthusiasm seen at the Scottish Independence Convention last weekend. But by peaking too early, the ultras who have been chafing at the bit for an early second referendum have only themselves to blame. My main criticism would be that they have still not answered crucial questions which, by reason of their unconvincing answers, caused the first referendum to be lost. Two years gives them ample opportunity to do better, so long as they leave off beating the same old tom-toms and uttering the same old war-whoops.

Above all, they should ditch sustainability and inclusivity and all that touchy-feely stuff which is the closest the Scottish Government gets to our reality of an under-performing economy that badly needs to raise its dismal growth rate. Two years is enough time to take some action and start to see some results. If not, it will hand the opportunity to the No campaigners in 2019 to switch the electorate’s attention away from Brexit (done and dusted, they will say) to the prospects for living standards in an independent Scotland: vote Yes for poverty will then be the refrain.

Yet that line of argument, dismal and depressing as only Scots could make it, would be likely to go down rather better than May’s rhetoric. Another thing she said on Tuesday was this: “It is only by coming together as one great union of nations and peoples that we can make the most of the opportunities ahead.” But unionists, faced with the challenge, have failed over recent years to define what Britishness is or why we should saddle ourselves with some overriding allegiance to it. In fact 45 per cent of Scottish voters have already specifically repudiated it.

The nations and peoples have been drifting apart, and one sign of it is their differing attitudes to Europe. The big task for nationalists is to make this fact still more explicit, and not to take refuge in delusions. Leave them to the Prime Minister.