A CHANGE is going to come. That was central hook of Theresa May’s speech at the Conservative Party Conference. The Prime Minister channelled the 50-year-old Sam Cooke song, trying to draw an ill-judged parallel between the black American civil rights protesters of the 1960s to the “quiet revolution” of this year’s Leave voters.

May was right in one respect, though. We are at a key moment in the history of the United Kingdom. More so than in many other years, the decisions taken by our leaders will have significant consequences for us.

And the choice for voters in Scotland has never been so obvious.

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Labour are effectively dead as a governing party. Presumably for a generation. Polls say they’ll be wiped out at the next election, a mixture of bitter infighting, Jeremy Corbyn’s incompetence and increasing irrelevance as they look set to spend the next three years talking mostly about themselves. They’ve probably got decades of infighting and bitter recriminations left in them.

This week it has become abundantly clear that the Tories are set on a course that Scotland rejects. One disgusting proposal is to kick out foreign doctors who have spent years working in the NHS because they want someone local to take the job. Another proposal, just as vile, is to make companies publicly declare foreign workers, so people can know how British they are. And are Labour opposing this? They say mostly nothing. One release even criticised the Tories for missing migration targets. Kezia Dugdale, to her credit, distanced herself from it.

Earlier in the week, David Mundell told conference that his party had made the Scottish Parliament one of the most powerful devolved assemblies in the world. And yet, if the last two weeks have taught us anything, it is that Holyrood, in many areas, is effectively impotent. But it needn’t be.

Our politics is different up here. Ruth Davidson and Dugdale are likely more in tune with Nicola Sturgeon on immigration than they are with May and Corbyn.

We are being dragged out of the EU, facing the real possibility of as many as 80,000 jobs being lost.

Surely even the staunchest No voter must look at the choice ahead of them? This isn’t about blood and soil politics. It’s about the pragmatic choice of what you want the future of your country to be.

There is every chance Scotland could soon face a choice between being an independent country in the single market, which welcomes migrants and has strong trading links across the border, or part of an isolationist, divisive, nationalist UK, where the colour of your passport is more important than the colour of your skin.

We know which we’d choose.