THE 19th-century historian and politician, Lord Macaulay, who of course had strong Scottish roots, once observed that he “knew of no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality”.

I always think of that remark when watching Willie Rennie work himself up into a lather about the fact that a nationalist party – the SNP – elected as the Government of Scotland on four occasions has the temerity to talk about independence in the Scottish Parliament.

On these occasions, Willie’s ridiculous indignation could power a small planet as he denounces as a criminal waste of time the simple act of aspiring to something better than the state we are in.

Indeed one sometimes fears for his health so animated does he become and never so much as on Tuesday when the Scottish Parliament considered the need for a written constitution – something that is actually LibDem policy.

Of course alongside him in the Chamber, Labour and Tory MSPs also vented their fury at having to talk about Scottish democracy and its link to national prosperity.

This belief that anything and everything is more important than the future of where we live is a strange one. Its perverse nature was particularly clearly displayed in an angry contribution from a Tory MSP I had never heard of before, Ayrshire’s Sharon Dowey, apparently now the Scottish Tories’ junior justice spokesperson, proving that she must be one of Douglas Ross’s hard-line trusties.

In the debate she asserted that “nothing that the SNP is talking about will help to build a better Scotland” and she then produced a litany of issues which apparently were being ignored in order to exercise what she called – inevitably – a “constitutional obsession”.

It is worth looking at those issues through something other than Tory-tinted spectacles. Sharon wants a Scotland – she said it herself on Tuesday – in which “victims get justice, schools provide more opportunities, motorists have good roads to travel on, vulnerable people get mental health treatment, islanders can get a ferry and everyone can access vital NHS treatment quickly”.

Well I want that too, although she and I would differ about the meaning of the word justice. I want a society in which poverty does not drive people to criminality and where hope and aspiration, not greed and selfishness are supported by government.

I want the justice of compassion as well as punishment – and I don’t want to force desperate human beings seeking sanctuary onto planes to Rwanda.

Moreover, I want a society where having voted for a government that will deliver those things, I won’t have imposed upon me an entirely different set of politicians, who – though never elected by my fellow Scottish citizens during my lifetime – still get to make the big decisions.

Like Sharon, I also want more opportunities in schools, better roads, quicker NHS treatment, and more ferries built.

But when the resources the Scottish Government has available are constantly cut in real terms by the UK Government (whilst lying about the matter), where fiscal policy, employment law and much of the tax and benefit system are still controlled from elsewhere, and where even during the Covid-19 pandemic that government furth of our borders is pursuing a disastrous, self-defeating and eye-waveringly expensive policy of isolation which damages our economy and our public services (for example by creating shortages of skilled staff), then I am entitled to ask Sharon why she continues to laud a system which actually works against delivering all the things she and I both want.

But Sharon is not for turning. In her contribution to the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday, she went on to describe what the Chamber was engaged in as “ a total waste of everybody’s time and effort” adding that it was “a disgrace that the SNP has come here to talk about some fantasy constitution when people in Scotland desperately need better public services now.”

In the real world, of course, the disgrace is not that there are those – around 50% of the Scottish population in most polls – who realise that until Scotland is able to choose and resource its own priorities then at the very best we will only be able to tread political water in our search for a better society.

THE disgrace is actually that we have forced upon us the highest inflation rate in Europe, which devalues every pound that we have available for public services, a staggering cost of living crisis including punitive mortgage increases which have come about because of woeful economic mismanagement by Sharon’s Tory colleagues at Westminster and debased standards in public life that the former leader of her party exemplified.

Not to mention the disgrace of a fantasy unelected elitist legislative chamber stuffed full of cronies and a class system that still allows 0.025% of the population to own 67% of private rural land.

The same contemptuous anti-independence arguments of course were trotted out in 2014. I remember being ridiculed for arguing that independence alone would produce a better education system in Scotland in the long term.

Yet the truth is that devolution can only provide sticking plasters for the damage caused by successive UK governments.

No Scottish Government has worked harder to try and heal the wounds of dependency than the SNP government over the past 16 years – but we can never do enough, particularly now that devolution itself is being undermined and weakened by Sharon’s London mates.

Real change, and real improvement – the improvements that Unionists like Sharon and Willie still say they want to see – will only come when normality is restored to the governance of our country.

Independence, based on a just and fair constitution that makes us citizens, not subjects, is the sole foundation stone for better public services as well as better lives.

That is the message that needs to be taken to the doorsteps not least because Unionist MSPs foam at the mouth when it is mentioned.