SO MANY people are commenting on how much Theresa May reminded them of Margaret Thatcher on Tuesday. However, for me, her Brexit speech made me picture Don Quixote, the mythical, mad and deluded knight tilting at windmills.

Trade deals have a golden rule; the more you have to offer the other side, the more favourable a deal you will get, and although the UK economy is big, it’s hideously vulnerable and unbalanced, and is significantly smaller than the single-market countries on the other side of the table. May’s contradiction-laden Brexit plan – yes that was the plan, there will be no white paper, just a press release and a wee talk – has been rubbished by EU leaders and expert trade negotiators.

Now, for those of you still hoping she has a chance of getting what she wants, there is an easy way to picture how the negotiations will go once Article 50 is enacted. Simply go to Gleneagles, get your golf clubs out and walk on to the first green and start to play. When you are challenged and asked if you booked a start time and whether you are a member, just say: “I want all the benefits of membership of this exclusive and expensive club without paying the membership fee.”

Suspending reality for a moment, let’s say they agree that you don’t need to “pay to play”. The other members would say: “Stuff this, I am not paying either.” Bringing this analogy back to the EU, if Theresa May gets the deal she is asking for, the EU and the single market will fail and, according to none other than the UK PM in her speech, that would not be in the economic interests of the UK. Every few days May or one of her ministers makes a statement, but the only thing that becomes clearer is that Brexit is going to be an act of economic and social self-harm. It’s like a political groundhog day that never has a happy ending.

The two statements that really jumped out at me over the last few days were firstly from May’s speech: “Spanish fishermen would be worse off without a good deal between the EU and the UK.” Which clearly suggests she plans to break a key Leave campaign promise to Scottish fishermen and use access to Scottish waters as a negotiating chip.

As I predicted months ago in this column, the UK will be in a weak position in the Brexit trade negotiations and Westminster, given a choice between maintaining single-market access for the city of London or protecting fishing grounds that largely only impact on Scotland, will sell out the fishing industry in the blink of an eye. Secondly, the Chancellor chimed with May’s end-of-speech threat to the EU when he said: “A low-tax Britain with a US trade deal could be a magnet for businesses wanting to escape regulation and tax,” if, as May suggested, the “UK is forced to change economic policy by the EU”. Forced? Are they kidding? There is no forcing required, this is the plan, a low-wage, low-tax (and for that read low services and privatised NHS) low-regulation, low-oversight, low-human rights, low-safety standards, low-employee rights UK. It is a neoliberal Tory British nationalist’s wet dream.

Can Scotland not make an offer to the people that would be better than that? But what would “better than that” look like?

We are beginning to understand what the likely offer from post-Brexit UK will be and we need to contrast Westminster’s bonfire of the rights, low-wage, small-government approach and never-ending austerity with a positive vision and a roadmap to greater shared prosperity and economic certainty through the powers of independence.

Westminster’s measures of success are limited by the base ambitions of neoliberalism. Is the economy growing? Is the stock market up? Are the rich getting richer?

Yes, then everything must be OK! But these narrow success criteria, only recently adding a begrudging nod to sovereign debt levels, fail to recognise that the purpose of economics is the distribution of assets and wealth to create the maximum wellbeing in society and a system that creates inequality and debt slavery ipso facto was a failing system even before the crash. Before indyref2 the pro-independence political parties must agree a more radical economic plan that is a departure from the failed economics that are being rejected by voters throughout the western world. Voters have lost faith (for good reason) in the establishment and are veering to the left and right, to anyone that says, no matter how unconvincingly, that they have a plan. Trump and Brexit, Le Pen, Syria have been filling the gap but none can provide sustainable solutions and there is big trouble ahead. If the independence-supporting political parties do only one thing between now and indyref2 it must be to agree an alternative economic plan that both rejects London City economics and offers better chance of stability and prosperity for Scotland.

The “everything will be the same but only slightly better” offering of indyref1 won’t hack it. It may well have been the right/only approach but the world has changed, the mask has slipped and the UK that people voted to stay part of has been exposed by Brexit to be a different, wholly unattractive beast altogether. We need to elevate economics to a higher purpose than greed and growth, we need to create a new model that understands that left and right are just different flavours of a failed economic system.

We need a new set of economic goals and measures to address the built-in imbalances of neoliberal/debt-fuelled consumer capitalism. We need to define a new Elevated Economics and offer a radical roadmap to prosperity driven by the impact, not just on economic growth but on wellbeing, sustainability, society, internationalisation, renewal and youth prospects, welfare and security. I don’t want independence for independence’s sake, I see it as a means to the end of building a radically better and more prosperous Scotland and, if we don’t offer a better deal than post-Brexit, isolationist British/nationalism then we won’t win.