WE know the forces that defend the constitutional status quo are many and varied, ranging from The Daily Mail and Ukip through to Jeremy Corbyn and the Communist Party of Britain. So the ideological diversity of the movement for Scottish independence is natural, and indeed inevitable.

The multiplicity of voices published in The National every week reflect the fact that this movement is not a narrow stream but a broad river, always in a state of flux, and wide enough to accommodate a sweeping spectrum of views. The centre of gravity of the independence cause is clearly somewhere to the left of centre. But there is no consensus.

“Why the pursuit of equality will ruin Scotland for sure”, was the headline on Michael Fry’s column in The National last week in response to the SNP’s leftward shift. A few days later, Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp’s more moderate right-of-centre views were encapsulated in the headline “It’s not equality we want in Scotland, it’s fairness”.

“Fair” is a nice, bland, inoffensive word. Theresa May insists she wants “a fair Brexit”. Donald Trump says his immigration policies are firm but fair. Tony Blair’s speeches were always peppered with the word. Margaret Thatcher justified the poll tax on the basis it was fair because everyone would pay the same amount. No politician in history has ever boasted of being unfair.

By all means use the word fair. After all, everyone else does. But let’s not pretend that it is anything more than a platitude.

Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp and Michael Fry’s views are legitimate and deserve to be discussed. But they also need to be challenged.

So, let’s first clear up the misconception that equality is a synonym for total uniformity. According to that caricature, which both Gordon and Michael seem to accept, the creation of an equal society would mean paying everyone exactly the same wage, regardless of their skills or performance.

No-one to my knowledge has ever suggested that such a society is even possible. Even Vladimir Lenin argued for a maximum 10:1 pay differential – a pretty moderate policy compared to that of the American ice-cream giant Ben & Jerry’s, which, for 16 years before it was taken over by Unilever, enforced a maximum 5:1 ratio between the lowest-paid and highest-paid employee.

Building a more equal society is not about removing incentives, or stifling talent. Indeed, I believe those who staff our emergency services deserve to be paid a lot more than the regiments of coke-snorting, champagne swilling stockbrokers, hedge fund managers, merchant bankers, mergers-and-acquisitions specialists and the like who work in the City of London.

Standing up for equality means challenging a system in which wealth and income are concentrated into the bank accounts of a tiny elite while half a million children across the UK rely on food banks to stave off hunger. In April, it was reported that the wealth of the richest 1000 people in the UK had reached a total of £658 billion. They now own more wealth than the poorest 40 per cent of UK households. And it is growing exponentially. Last year, their mountainous riches grew by £83bn, or £227 million every day.

That daily increase alone would be enough to provide five million living-wage jobs, or foot the entire fuel bill for every household in the UK for two-and-a-half years. Fair enough?

And last year was no blip. There is now a long-term runaway gap, growing wider with every month that passes, between the richest and the poorest in the UK. Twenty years ago, when Tony Blair came to power pledging to build a “fair society”, the wealth of the top 1000 amounted to £99bn. It has since multiplied more than six-and-a-half times over.

Had the value of the state pension grown at the same rate, it would now be worth £415 a week instead of £122. Higher-rate Disability Living Allowance would be £329 a week instead of £83. And the national minimum wage would be £24 an hour rather than £7.50. That’s not fair, is it?

The truth is, we could never create a genuinely fair society without creating a more equal society. And no matter how you cut it, that can only be done by redistributing wealth and income from the thousands at the top to the millions at the bottom. I don’t suggest for a minute that it would be easy, given the entrenched power structures and the ferocity of the opposition to even the most modest attempts to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor. We also have to face the fact that much of the wealth in the UK is concentrated in the south-east of England.

But we can make a start. The idea of a citizen’s basic income begins to go to the heart of the matter – which is why it has aroused a hurricane of wrath in certain quarters. Right-wing business journalist Bill Jamieson could not contain his outrage at the idea that such a possibility should even be considered. It is delusional, he thundered. The shortest political suicide note in history. It would spark a wholesale exodus of people, savings and businesses out of Scotland. The First Minister and some of her Cabinet have taken leave of their senses, he roared.

When the right-wing Unionist establishment react to an idea with such vituperation, it’s a sure sign the Scottish Government may be on the right track. After all, Bill Jamieson stands in a proud political tradition that opposed allowing the lower orders to vote, denied the right of workers to go on strike, raged against the suffragettes, decried the NHS as communism, and fought tooth and nail to prevent the establishment of a Scottish Parliament.

But back to our own Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp, who claims equality goes against the grain of human nature, and that we are hardwired by evolution to be competitive and to accept the survival of the fittest. What sets human beings apart from other species is our ability to reason, to plan, to think things through, to work out what is in the best interests of everyone. It’s not that long ago that people defended slavery on the grounds that there had always been slaves, that some people were born inferior and others superior.

Neither Gordon nor I will be around to see it, but I’m pretty sure that in generations to come, people will look back in horror at 21st-century capitalism, with its wars and famines, its greed and hatred, its extremes of wealth and power. In the meantime, we should base our politics on our brains and our advanced emotions, not our primitive instincts.