THERE’S a wee red, white and blue carrot being dangled in front of Scotland again. It’s every bit as mythical as Kevin the carrot in the Christmas advert, who at least has more functioning neurones than the Secretary of State for Scotland. Carrot-dangler-in-chief is the Tory Cabinet’s finger pointer north of the Border, Fluffy Mundell, who’s hoping his new role as vegetable tout will disguise the fact that he’s the turnip of the British Cabinet. Sadly for him, however, it’s only drawing attention to it.

But we shouldn’t be churlish.

The mythical carrot that’s currently being dangled in front of Scotland by the Tory Danglemeister is exactly like a real carrot in one important respect, it’s destined to have all the goodness boiled out of it, then be chomped up, swallowed, and then made to disappear, only to eventually come out of the other end having been turned into crap.

Desperate to put something of a gloss on the chaotic mess that now passes for governance in the UK, where blind panic counts as a strategy, the Fluffmunster has said that Scotland should embrace Brexit because, he hinted, there might be some lovely shiny new powers for Holyrood if it does so. He wasn’t keen to be specific about what these powers might consist of, and even less keen to specify how or when these mighty new mightish powers might actually be delivered.

The key word in all of this is, of course, “might”. Might is a word that covers an infinite multitude of possibilities. Might is a word that is the key to a multiverse of potential. Might is everything and might is nothing, and it’s a word that promises absolutely nothing concrete at all. This is why the word might is so beloved of chancers passing themselves off as politicians like Fluffybunny.

The word might speaks of possibility, not of probability.

All things are possible. All sorts of things might happen, but it doesn’t mean that the chances that they will indeed happen in this universe that we live in – as opposed to the fevered imagination of a desperate Unionist politician trying to save his party and the British establishment from the almighty mess that’s a definite and not a might – are even remotely good. The Unionist pitch to Scotland consists of confusing possibility with probability and presenting Scotland’s voters with all sorts of possibilities that have a zero probability. That’s why we get so many mights and coulds and precious few shalls and wills.

We had a lot of that during the 2014 independence referendum campaign, and now we’re getting a lot more of it in a desperate attempt to persuade Scotland not to have another after it has become clear that the promises we got from Better Together were not promises at all. They were just the mighteous weasel words of the self-righteous.

You could plant a feather and it might grow a chicken. You could have switched on Strictly Come Dancing and might have watched Ed Balls dance for five minutes without wanting to poke your eyeballs out with a rusty knitting needle and douse the bleeding orbits with bleach.

Alex Neil might make an intervention that’s not motivated by sour grapes. Donald Trump might complete a sentence without contradicting something that he said just five minutes previously.

I might get to the end of this column without insulting a Tory politician. And the atoms that make up Fluffy’s body might spontaneously rearrange themselves and turn him into a stuffed toy soaked with the disappointment of a child’s tears.

Oh no. Wait. Bad example. That last one has actually happened.

In the exact same category are the statements that Brexit might be good for Scotland, and Scotland might be granted all sorts of superpowers after Brexit. We’re in for extra powers after Brexit exactly as we were promised all sorts of superpowers if we voted against independence in the only referendum whose result the Scottish Tories have determined is to be respected. In real life, as opposed to the mightitude of a desperate Tory imagination, the only superpowers Scotland got after the No vote in 2014 were the power of invisibility and the power to turn everything we say into infrasonic waves that cannot be detected by the human ear, nor indeed by the ear of a stuffed toy. Scotland’s elected representatives in the Smother of All Parliaments, where Scottish democracy gets a woolsack put over its face, now have the ability to stand in front of the Conservative Government and eloquently articulate Scotland’s aspirations and expectations. To no avail, for our Tory masters neither see nor hear us. But still, superpowers are superpowers and, just as we were promised, Scotland now has the most powerful devolved parliament in the world. But only if you discount the 130 or so non-independent countries, states, territories and regions that have more control over their own affairs than Scotland does.

Now we have another “might”. In an effort to persuade us that the Scottish Government is playing a vital and important role in the Brexit process, the Tory Government tells us that Scotland has its very own hotline to the Department for Brexit, otherwise known as the Department of Broken Hopes and Dreams, and that hotline might even be answered. David Davis might listen, and he might even take heed. Only it never is answered, he never listens and he has not the slightest intention of paying Scotland any heed.

A few days ago, the SNP deputy leader Angus Robertson said communicating with the UK Government felt like shouting into a black hole. In fact, he’d be a whole lot better off shouting into a black hole as, according to one theory in physics, they are gateways to a different universe. So his words could end up in a universe where Scotland’s voice actually counts for something, where Scotland deals in cans, wills and shalls and not in mights and coulds. Because that sure as hell doesn’t happen in this one.