AS we stand on the threshold of 2022, it’s clear that for the Scottish independence movement, we’re not in Kansas any more. The happy unity of 2014 and the immediately following years is gone, never to be recovered.

However, whatever internal difficulties the independence movement faces are as nothing compared to an anti-independence campaign and British parties which have blown up their own credibility along with the strongest arguments they were able to deploy successfully in 2014.

Arguments about issues which are unrelated to Scottish independence aside, the difficulties and divisions of the Yes movement and the pro-independence parties are those of a campaign which can smell victory but which is split about the quickest and most secure means of achieving it.

On the other hand, the problems facing those anti-independence parties which still insist – despite all evidence to the contrary – that they are not nationalist at all are of a fundamental and existential nature.

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The Tories are faced with finding an appealing story to sell to the people of Scotland now that the party has killed off traditional Scottish Unionism with its strong sense of Scotland as an ancient country with its own distinctive place and rights within a UK conceived as a voluntary union of nations. They have replaced it with an aggressive and reactionary Anglo-British nationalism which sees Scotland as nothing more than a region in a unitary British state and which regards the UK as the political expression of a single British nation where Scotland has no inherent rights to self-government never mind self-determination.

The big problem for the Scottish Tories is that the so-called “muscular Unionism” of the modern Conservatives at Westminster –which views the Scottish Parliament as a hostile institution to be brought to heel, controlled and constrained – is one which might appeal to that minority segment of the Scottish population which thinks devolution was a mistake and which views itself as British first and foremost, but it is actively repellent to the majority of the Scottish populace.

The Tories have successfully positioned themselves as the party of those in Scotland who would oppose Scottish independence under all and any circumstances, but they have been unable to articulate a vision of a post-Brexit Britain which appeals beyond their core support of the irredeemably staunch.

Although Brexit and the English nationalism underpinning it have been key to the Conservatives’ success in England, they also deprive the party of any political space which would allow them to articulate a modern version of traditional Scottish Unionism.

Indeed, modern Conservatism is epitomised by Scotland Secretary Alister Jack, who views the Scottish-English border as having no more significance than a signpost by the side of the road and who admits he dislikes speaking of Scotland as a nation in its own right, preferring to regard it as a “region” within a single British nation.

Naturally a “region” has no absolute right to decide its own political destiny nor to possess its own parliament whose powers cannot be altered at the whim of the parliament of the “single British nation”.

The only thing currently preventing the Conservatives from the full-throated adoption of this vision of a unitary British state and nation and the relegation of Scotland to the status of a region on a par with Yorkshire or East Anglia is the fear of another Scottish independence referendum.

They know they need some carrots to dangle in front of the people of Scotland in that campaign to go along with the sticks of their scare stories and threats. Their big problem, however, is that their carrots are few and deeply unconvincing.

Given the events of the past few years, there cannot be many people left in Scotland outside of the leader writers of the anti-independence press and the news editors of BBC Scotland who will take a Vow 2.0 at all seriously.

Even they are going to struggle to sell a promise from this Westminster Conservative government that if Scotland votes against independence in a future referendum then Scotland will be rewarded with devo max and stronger and more secure powers for the Scottish Parliament.

We all know that if Scotland is foolish enough to vote No a second time, the Conservatives will take this as carte blanche to neuter Holyrood for good.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party is still chasing the federalism fairy. That would be the federalism which Gordon Brown promised us in 2014 was going to be delivered within three years of a No vote in that year’s referendum.

Yet here we are almost eight years on and we’re looking at a Holyrood which is being sidelined and hollowed out by Westminster.

In January 2021, when accused of deception over his infamous Vow, Brown denied making the promises he so publicly made and demanded that we “read the small print”. That would be the small print that reads: “Gordon Brown is a liar.”

Despite the fact that for the past two years we have had the most chaotic, incompetent and blatantly corrupt British Government in living memory, which moreover has signally failed to deliver any of the supposed advantages that Brexit was supposed to bring, the Labour leadership has been more occupied by its fight against its true opponents – other factions within the Labour Party.

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It is only within the past couple of months that Keir Starmer’s Labour party has been able to achieve a fragile lead in opinion polling over a Conservative Party which is increasingly in open rebellion against Boris Johnson.

That lead will evaporate the second the Conservatives decide that it’s time to depose Johnson and replace him with one of the authoritarian right-wing Anglo-British nationalists who have taken over the modern Conservatives.

The Labour Party’s plans for Scotland are hostage to their fortunes in England, but even if it did manage to win a majority in a UK General Election, the party as a whole has little enthusiasm for the federal fairy stories which the Scottish branch office tells itself at night in order to ward off the nightmare of oblivion.

Keir Starmer didn’t find space to mention plans for a federal UK in his 11,000-word essay published before the Labour Party conference, not even in the small print.

It would be nice to hope that in 2022 Labour will stop insulting our intelligence and put the fairy stories away for good, but they don’t have anything else to offer.