ARE you scared yet? Are you cowering in sheer terror? There are so many scare stories being thrown around that you should be gibbering like a maniac by now, that’s exactly what commentators in the Torygraph are doing, although to be honest they’re always like that. The only thing that’s clear now from the great EU debate is that it doesn’t matter which side wins in the EU referendum, we’re facing the end of civilisation as we know it.

There’s now less than a month to go before the vote, and both sides have already ramped up the hysteria to such an extent that their invitations to become contestants on the next series of RuPaul’s Drag Race have been withdrawn because the programme makers don’t think that level of melodrama is remotely believable. Mind you, the Leave campaign’s Jacob Rhys-Mogg isn’t remotely believable as a human being, but that didn’t stop him from being elected as a Tory MP for Somerset. Before he got involved in Conservative politics, Jakie lived in the pages of a PG Wodehouse novel where he had a role as a spurned fiancé.

Just a couple of months ago Cameron swore blind that he’d campaign to leave the EU if he didn’t get his way with Brussels, but now he’s swearing blind that it would cause an apocaplyse. Monday saw the release of a report from the Treasury which made two apocalyptic forecasts about what might happen if the UK were to leave the EU. We’ll either be in the doo doo, or we’ll be in the de doo doo doo de da da da, and the entire country will not only have no job and no money, so it will just be like being back in the 1980s.

Despite the fact that Treasury forecasts are typically about as reliable as Jacob Rhys-Mogg’s knowledge of plotlines in the Kardashians, the BBC spent the entire day reporting on Cameron and Osborne’s response to a report that they themselves had published. It’s a bit like interviewing a novelist and asking them for a response to their own novel, only works of fiction are usually grounded in more realism than a UK Treasury report.

Meanwhile the Leave campaign released its new campaign video, in which we learned that if the UK leaves the EU, no one will ever get sick again and accident and emergency waiting rooms will be happy sunny places where old ladies will skip in and out in five minutes with a beam of joy on their faces, but if we stay in the EU the NHS will be overwhelmed by Turkish people seeking allergy relief because they don’t have antihistamines in Ankara. The Leave campaign would have us believe that all 80 million people from Turkey and the Balkans are poised to move to Wolverhampton, but of course they vehemently deny that they’re making immigration an issue.

Just to recap then, in case you’re a sane and sensible individual and you haven’t been paying attention because when you want a scary story you stream a Freddy Kruger movie from the internet, you’re going to be screwed whatever the outcome of the vote.

According to the Remain campaign, if Britain votes to leave the EU your house will be worth less than one of those wee plastic houses in a Monopoly set, you won’t have a job, the pound will be on a parity with the bin bag, there will be World War Three, and you’ll get Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. Meanwhile according to the Leave campaign, if Britain votes to remain in the EU your job will be taken by a Turkish migrant, the health service will be privatised by German bureaucrats in the TTIP negotiations, there will be World War Three, and you’ll get George Osborne as Prime Minister.

The rest of the threats from both sides might be as overblown as Donald Trump’s hair, but the last ones about who gets to become Prime Minister are very real indeed. You’re not really voting on whether the UK remains a part of the EU or leaves it, you’re voting to settle the question of which ridiculous and dangerously incompetent public school buffoon gets to become the next leader of the Tory Party, and so gets to become Prime Minister. Should it be George Osborne with his expertise in towel folding and budgets which fold after three seconds of scrutiny, or Boris Johnson with his clown act covering for a rampant ego and a sense of entitlement that would make a Premier League footballer blush. That’s your choice right there. Aren’t you just thrilled that Scotland’s a part of the UK? Are you scared yet? Dunno about you, but I’m terrified.

Faced with such an unappealing choice, neither side is able to make a positive case for either leaving the EU or remaining in it. It’s like having to make a positive case for either staying at home to watch a three hour documentary on the BBC about Prince Andrew’s services to golf, despite knowing that the only difference between Nicholas Witchell’s royalist brown nosing and disappearing up the backside of the monarchy is depth perception and that’s hard to judge on a 2D TV screen, or going to a Ukip presentation on the wit and wisdom of Nigel Farage presented by a wee free meenister with a bad case of haemorrhoids who had a vindaloo for his tea.

We’ve got a month of this left. The fact that the only people who are attempting to make a positive case are the SNP’s Nicola Sturgeon, Plaid Cymru’s Leanne Wood, and Caroline Lucas for the Greens tells you all you need to know about the intellectual bankruptcy of the British political system and British politicians. The only ones capable of saying anything positive are the ones who want to put an end to the British state, the only ones who are offering a choice of something other than a choice between Boris or George.

The real choice facing Scotland is whether we want our country to become an outward looking European nation and state in its own right, making our own decisions and being in charge of our own destiny, or whether we want to remain onlookers in the Boris and George schoolyard fight. It’s a no-brainer really.

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