Gordon Brown must be desperate to be a peer, or he owns a secret PPE firm

Scottish independence is an important cause but, for many of us, it will always be secondary to personal relationships; the love of family and religious faith. Likewise, support for the existing constitutional arrangements doesn’t necessarily imply you’re a Union Flag-waving royalist who fantasises about sending in gunboats to show our old subjects that Britain’s still the boss. It really is possible to be fully Scottish and patriotic yet value our role within the Union.

For Socialists and traditional supporters of what was the Labour Party this isn’t a problem. Internationalism quite literally implies support for the global class struggle between those who seek fairer distribution of the world’s vast wealth and resources and those who are sworn to ensure that the many are restricted to leftovers once the few have had their fill. In this, a working-class household in Scotland finds common purpose with those in England and Brazil seeking to survive in the face of embedded patterns of inequality and social injustice, the ribbons which form the DNA of our global economic structures.

National boundaries are important but not as important as the spiritual and emotional ties that bind us to those on the other side of the Border and across the planet fighting the intrinsic wickedness of market-driven capitalism.

Once in a while though, the imperative of class struggle finds common cause with a nation’s aspiration to determine its own future. In Scotland, this time is upon us now. How long this window remains open when two ideas, normally considered mutually antipathetic, converge is open to conjecture. If Jeremy Corbyn had been able to implement a Socialist programme for government across the UK, I suspect many of those who had recently migrated from Labour Unionism to Scottish independence might have had cause to re-consider their choices.

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This though, is both hypothetical and ironic: the same forces that impelled hundreds of thousands of Labour voters to join the SNP are those which combined to stitch up Corbyn. They all point to the ultimate failure of the British state and a Union which, while it may once have served a purpose (though I’m not even convinced about that) is now collapsing in on itself, having become a hollowed-out husk, kept going merely by a muscle memory of how things once were.

It’s a place where ideas of aggressive, ethnic superiority support a third-rate elite which has come increasingly to rely on the unregulated (and untreated) flow of foreign money into London. England’s capital effectively has become a sort of modern-day Republic of Pirates, run on broadly similar lines to the one which operated at Nassau in The

Bahamas in the early 18th century. When the government of the day exploits the panic wrought by a lethal pandemic to augment the fortunes of friends, families and supporters in a public contract, get-rich-quick scheme you know that the state has begun its death rattle. Not even Blackbeard and Calico Jack would have sunk to such levels of depravity.

Gordon Brown, the most hapless prime minister in living memory, was in the vanguard of those complicit in the takedown of Jeremy Corbyn. The man who once proclaimed British jobs for British workers in a vain effort to win favour with the Tory hard-right is at it again. He left his mark on the 2014 referendum campaign with a suite of delusional pronouncements which began to disintegrate when exposed to sunlight. Chief among these was the one about preserving a rosy future inside the EU. Another was his profound belief that Scotland, inside the UK, would become a fully federalised state.

This man raided a million pension funds in his light-touch deregulation of the rogue banking system yet there he was, warning Scotland’s elderly that independence would threaten their savings. There wasn’t a hint of evidence for this yet his travelling rent-a-crowd, handpicked from among Scottish Labour’s most gullible and impressionable (and career-driven) young hustlers accepted them as though they had been delivered in tablets of stone. The tablets they’ve been taking since then to justify such fictions have merely dulled their senses as their party has slowly decomposed.

Brown, it seems, has been given a licence to foam. In recent years he’s spent so much time in the company of hard-right Conservatives that he must either be desperate for a knighthood or has secretly set up a company specialising in PPE equipment. His consort of late has been Michael Gove, the man whom Boris Johnson has entrusted with saving the Union. This is not working out well.

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EARLIER this month he was slapped down by Nicola Sturgeon when his think tank, Our Scottish Future, a sort of Doomsday sharing-group for British Nationalists, produced numbers they claimed showed that Scotland’s Covid-testing model was failing. The life expectancy of this claim, like most of Brown’s other delusions, lasted about as long as a mayfly’s and evaporated on close contact with the laws of mathematics.

This week, in the Daily Telegraph (where else?), he managed to exceed this by numbering the main reasons why Scots might still cling to the Union. “We can appeal to history, tradition, culture and the longevity of our institutions, but it is through a focus on the everyday benefits of co-operation and reciprocity, represented by, for example, the NHS and our Armed Forces, and the sentiments that inspire them,” he said.

What might these inspirational sentiments be? Illegal wars-for-profit in Iraq? Shooting innocent Irish civilians in the back? War crimes in Afghanistan? Taking back the Falklands?

I’m refusing to get over-optimistic about the chances of a big Yes vote when the second independence referendum arrives. But if the spiritual leader of Better Together can’t come up with anything better than “the Armed Forces” for staying in the Union then independence is guaranteed. Next up: Broon on the Covid. “It could have been a lot worse, you know.”