ACROSS the world, democracy is an endangered species. British politics in the past few days has been fixated on the psychodrama of a narcissistic, proven fibber abandoning his constituents in a fit of pique, with the obvious aim of destabilising a government led by his former colleagues.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic pond, another narcissistic, proven fibber has dominated the US news cycle by claiming the Federal Department of Justice is deliberately engaged in a plot to send him to jail, lest he become the Republican candidate for the White House and likely next president.

Anyone who thought that – somehow – Western politics was returning to some kind of normality should now brace themselves for the worst. Not only is normal service not going to be resumed, it is more than likely that matters are going to get a lot, lot worse.

For starters, Donald Trump looks set to win the 2024 White House race. All the various indictments are doing (even when justified) is to give The Donald the oxygen of free publicity and the aura of a martyr to the metropolitan elites and Big Tech.

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The very latest polls give Trump an absolute majority among Republican voters, virtually handing him the nomination. National polls put Biden and Trump neck and neck. But the ageing Biden faces competition for the Democratic nomination from the looney, populist, anti-vax Robert Kennedy Junior. The charismatic Kennedy is already polling one in five Democratic voters in the primaries.

Even if Kennedy and Trump don’t go head-to-head this time, Kennedy is clearly positioning himself for the 2028 contest. The fake news populists are not an aberration – they have become the political norm.

Ditto with Johnson. By resigning, along with the loopy Nadine Dorries and another Tory MP nobody had ever heard of, Boris is seeking to rewrite the historical narrative.

No, he is not being hounded out of Parliament as the result of a sinister conspiracy orchestrated by Harriet Harman, former civil servant Sue Gray and disgruntled Tory remainers.

Johnson fibbed his way through his journalistic career, fibbed his way through several marriages, fibbed his way through the Brexit referendum, and fibbed his way through the pandemic. Truth and Boris are strangers to each other.

Johnson’s only concern is his own self-promotion and the rest of us be damned. By engineering three unnecessary Conservative by-elections, Boris has launched a scorched earth policy against Rishi Sunak and what remains of the Tory Party. Boris only cares about Boris.

These events go beyond the foibles of individuals. It is interesting that on the same weekend that Johnson quit Parliament, one of his key financial backers, the hedge fund titan Crispin Odey, was forced to resign from his City partnerships as a result of a Financial Times investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct over several decades.

The oafish, arrogant Odey made himself a billionaire through high-risk financial gambling, including selling the pound short in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. Weirdly, Odey is a notorious Brexiteer and funded various No campaign groups.

The billionaire, loony libertarians who back the likes of Johnson and Trump are interested in chaos because betting on chaos is what makes them billionaires in the first place. The last thing this billionaire class wants is financial regulation of the EU-type – hence their so-called libertarianism.

It is no accident that two prominent Johnson backers in Parliament – “Sir” Jacob Rees-Mogg and John Redwood are 1) leading Brexiteers; 2) run their own financial investment companies; and 3) are extreme, free-market libertarians.

Modern populism and libertarianism is about the right to make as much money on the financial markets as quickly as possible, without hard work.

OF course, populism requires a mass following – suitably manipulated – to provide it with an electoral base of support. But again, more is involved. The new populist movements, with their conspiratorial outlook, provide a comfort blanket in world growing daily more insecure economically and socially.

A world where genuine communal, family and fraternal institutions such as trades unions have withered away leaving the individual defined only as a consumer.

The new populism provides the masses with a synthetic identity and a contrived community sustained by truly fake news and invented enemies to unite against, provided by unscrupulous, narcissistic leaders.

Has Johnson gone away? Of course not. He needs the media spotlight, and it needs him – at least until a populist successor emerges.

And neither Sunak nor Starmer fit that bill. Or – dare I mention it – Humza Yousaf.

If the Conservative Party tries to prevent a Boris comeback, then Boris is prepared to destroy the Conservative Party. That is the new reality after this week.

The same goes for Trump in America. After Trump comes no return to the Punch-and-Judy politics of the Republican and Democrat past. Trump has wrecked the Republicans and Robert Kennedy Junior will do a Trump on the Democratic establishment. The post-war political model is dead.

From this perspective, our failure to secure independence in Scotland, and so free ourselves from this political nightmare, is a disaster.

It now leaves the movement highly vulnerable.

After Sturgeon, some are arguing a return to a “long-haul” politics in which patient persuasion will win convincing majority (say 60%) to independence, and that this will convince the UK Government to grant a fresh referendum. OK, so it takes 20 years but it is at least a road map of sorts.

Except it isn’t, in a world of permanent populism, one where UK populist leaders are playing by new rules. Starmer may win the next General Election but his timid Labour government will crash and burn as it tries and fails to tackle the British economic crisis.

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Starmerism is just a Labour version of the pale technocratic vision offered by Rishi Sunak. Both are vulnerable to the rabble-rousing populists who will offer to borrow and spend their way out of economic trouble. Johnson is now the “king over the water”, no matter which boring technocrat sits in Downing Street counting beans.

Frankly I can’t see Humza Yousaf, or his inevitable successor after the UK election, offering a fiery alternative to the rising populist tide. Instead, we need to fight British populism with better political weapons and specifically with a harder-edged emphasis on independence.

Those on the left tempted to downplay independence “temporarily” – in order to promote an alliance with Labour on economic matters – are equally misguided.

Rather, we need to mobilise an intransigent, pro-indy movement committed to make a populist, UK government unworkable north of the Border. We need to provide a fighting alternative that offers the waverers in the Scottish electorate a clear, bold alternative to fake British populism, be it Boris or his clones.

A retreat by the indy movement into passivity, low-level propagandism or excessive timidity will hand the initiative and momentum to the British populists.

Today, the movement still retains momentum, though we don’t know it. Boris is about to wreck the Tory Party permanently. Timid Starmerism will quickly prove a dead end historically and Labour will return to its cycle of historic decay.

The indy movement has to seize the day. All out on June 24!