WESTMINSTER never wanted to give Scotland any more powers – they fought tooth and nail to keep devo max off the independence referendum ballot paper last September because they knew it would either win or split the No vote, allowing Yes to win outright. They only promised more powers when their own polling suggested they were in danger of losing, and they have been backtracking ever since.

They know that more powers – specifically the vow of substantial further devolution – is very popular and they know they can’t attack it or be seen to obviously backtrack. So they have chosen the deceitful tactic of targeting one of the foundation stones of more powers – full fiscal autonomy – because they see it as vulnerable to political spin, since people don’t really understand what it means.

They are clearly about to throw the mother of all scaremongering campaigns against full fiscal autonomy. We will hear fears of a big deficit as a result, that differing tax rates will mean confusion and a race to the bottom. We will hear from Westminster’s friends in big business, who will talk about uncertainty affecting investment; they will claim it will cause a huge black hole and threaten pensions, to place older people in fear of losing their paltry incomes.

After all, such tactics worked during the independence referendum and they calculate that it will work again. You might think it’s a suicidal tactic – after all, talking Scotland down and referendum scaremongering sunk them in the polls. But a Labour insider boasted to me that the more powers argument is keeping the SNP vote high, and if they destroy the case for more powers then they destroy the surge.

Project fear is alive and has three stages. Stage one was when the London media jumped on YouGov research claiming the vow didn’t make a difference. This was the groundwork for a retreat from more powers. You can see the rationale: “We offered a vow but it didn’t make the difference, therefore we don’t have to implement it.”

Stage two is to undermine the prospect of more powers with scare stories, thereby avoiding the fury backing out of the promise would otherwise create.

Stage three will be for Westminster to pass a massively watered-down more powers offer so they can pretend the vow has been delivered, despite the fact that nothing of any substance will have been devolved and certainly not the job-creating, economy-growing powers the people want.

The obvious problem is the SNP would call this a material change to the constitutional promises and would feel duty bound to include a new referendum in their 2016 Holyrood manifesto. David Cameron has the solution, saying on Wednesday that he “would not sanction a second referendum on Scottish independence, insisting that the issue had been ‘‘settled”.

There are several problems with this approach. First of all, banning another referendum will backfire more severely than the original Project Fear on the unionist parties in Scotland, (although Cameron doesn’t care).

And a precedent has been set. We now know that if a party with a referendum in its Holyrood manifesto can command a majority, they have a moral right to hold one. If Westminster outlaws future independence referendums, having failed to deliver the promises that won the last one, then that amounts to an assault on democracy.

Secondly, the whole premise is based on a lie, the vow did matter: the YouGov poll stated the vow was the main motivation for voting No. That means it created the single largest weekly fluctuation in the campaign, stopping the Yes momentum dead in the last week, and suggests that without it the result would have been even closer. But more importantly the “main reason” definition hides the fact it was a contributory factor for many more people. We will never know exactly what difference the vow made.

IN Wednesday’s leaders debate, Jim Murphy claimed full fiscal autonomy would result in a £7.6 billion black hole in Scotland’s finances, based on calculations from the Institute for Fiscal Studies. But his claim is just a load of scaremongering nonsense.

More powers isn’t just about who pays the bills. It’s about the Scottish Government getting control over powers to create jobs; to create a fairer and more equal society that will make more people economically active; to invest in productivity-improving measures that will grow our economy; to implement bespoke tax and regeneration policies that will increase revenues and, in the medium-to-long term, make the bills easier to pay.

It would also involve negotiation on service charges and a fairer cut of defence costs, as well as debt interest payments that would reflect Scotland’s fiscal contribution to the UK. That would stop billions of pounds a year being ripped from our national accounts and labelled a deficit. The best time to negotiate these is when Scotland holds the balance of power.

In short, if we have a black-hole-sized deficit now under Westminster’s control, then that is Westminster’s fault. Must we give Westminster more time with all the economic powers retained so it can do more damage to Scotland’s economy?

Westminster parties don’t want Scotland to have more power, because if we made it work it would mean in a future referendum they wouldn’t be able to create uncertainty and fear. Everyone involved in the Yes movement, no matter what party you back in elections, must start campaigning now to have the powers we were promised delivered – or it’s all been for nothing. l Gordon MacIntyre-Kemp is the founder and chief executive of Business for Scotland.