MY FRIEND has just returned from a holiday to Geneva. He hated it, describing a soulless and sterile wasteland of banks and hotels without even a decent cinema to provide the cultural basics that make a community tolerable. Despite its beautiful physical setting, Geneva is becoming an example of what the sociologist Marc Augé called a “non-place”, a space so transient and anonymous that no human being could ever call it home, rather like an airport, a motorway or a shopping mall.

I mention this because, if we aren’t careful, Geneva could play a significant role in any future Scottish independence referendum. With London’s financial district suffering from post-Brexit blues, I’ve heard it said, in some quarters of the Yes camp, that after independence we could become “Geneva without the yachts”, a safe house for bankers fleeing regulation.

Personally, I’m getting a little queasy from the rush of déjà vu.

Not so long ago, we had the Celtic Tiger, Iceland and the “Arc of Prosperity”. The ideology said Scotland would become gloriously prosperous not long after independence, because we’d cut taxes and slash regulation for big companies. Capital would flood in, leaving us rich beyond our dirtiest dreams, only troubled by how to spend our fabulous loot.

Then 2008 happened. Suddenly, unregulated banking was so last year. You could hear the buzzing from Glasgow as Holyrood politicians rushed to “shred” any documents connecting them to Fred Goodwin.

However, certain facts remain impossible to shred, even today. At the height of Scotland’s bank boom, the combined assets of our two largest banks were 21 times larger than our total GDP. By contrast, tiny Iceland with its bloated banks had a ratio of just 9.8, while beleaguered Ireland’s was only 4.4. If their banks were bulls in a china shop, ours were velociraptors in a nursery.

The crash could have killed the case for Scottish independence. Scotland alone, let’s be clear, could not afford the extravagant cost of these taxpayer bailouts.

Yet overall, the case for independence has been boosted since 2008 beyond our wildest dreams. Why?

First, because the banks had been controlled in Westminster under Blair and Brown, and they had praised Britain’s financial miracle in near orgasmic terms. The crisis may have exposed the weakness of Scotland’s economy, but it also completely exposed the moral corruption of British capitalist politics.

Second, because Westminster politicians reached the patently absurd conclusion that “lavish public spending” had caused the crisis. As Frankie Boyle remarks, this is a bit like watching Colombo with your elderly Gran. Before Colombo begins, they show you the man committing the murder. But your Granny will declare halfway through the episode, “I think she did it!” And you need to shout, “No, Gran, they showed you! It was him!”

Similarly, with the bankers, we all sat and watched them do it. Yet, somehow, millions of people agreed with Britain’s elected politicians, “I think it was them that did it – the bloody immigrants and the scroungers!” And we screamed in exasperation, “No – it was the fucking bankers! You watched it, remember?!”

Joking aside, the result was unrelentingly grim. Thousands died after being declared fit for work by the Department for Work and Pensions. Cuts hit women, the poor, ethnic minorities and the disabled hardest. It was a targeted campaign of cruelty against society’s most vulnerable people, led by the most privileged, just a few years after bankers had crashed the economy.

A third factor was our own campaigning. We put in years of painstaking work to drag the independence campaign out of the “Arc of Prosperity” plus Fred the Shred mire. With Radical Independence, we constructed independence as the total alternative to Westminster’s world safe for bankers. And we made a solemn promise that we’d never repeat the mistakes of our recent past if we were a responsible sovereign nation.

Somehow, it worked. It succeeded because we captured the imagination of people left behind by globalisation. The shock troops of that referendum success were alienated ex-Labour voters who had been promised the miracles of free trade and had suffered only misery. We succeeded because we live in a world of payday loan gangsters, bedroom taxes and welfare sanctions, because Westminster seemed determined to blame the victims of these evils – and we succeeded because we stood up to them.

Despite the best efforts of the Scottish Government, nothing about the campaign was respectable. The liberal middle class cocked a snoot. Big businessmen threatened to up and leave. But that campaign of intimidation drew us together and created a bond of trust and solidarity.

A colleague told me recently, in jest, that perhaps I was just the “stroppy teenager of the Yes family”. I enjoyed that. Because the idea of the “Yes family” has always made me uncomfortable.

Because, in my family, we never fear to speak our minds, even if that means causing friction. Do we really want a family where the bairns cower before the breadwinner’s authority? If so, then the so-called Yes family is an oppressive family, not a nurturing one – and I prefer to think that we’re tolerant enough to welcome dissent.

That’s what made the Yes movement stronger than the brittle Better Together, that ultimate patriarchal authority, where Scottish Labour hacks refused to criticise the Tory rampage against impoverished Scottish communities.

So let me reassert something important. I don’t want to be Geneva. I don’t want to walk like the Celtic Tiger. If we’re forced to service the various needs of jet set bankers, fair enough, but it’s not an aspiration of mine.

Scotland can’t afford to risk everything on another “financial miracle”. That economic model has failed, leaving poverty at the bottom, stagnation in the middle, and shameless vulgarity at the top. 2008 can happen again. We need to cut our financial sector down to size, to make it serve human beings rather than make human beings serve it, as with Geneva.

Let’s return to the themes that made our campaign strong. Our economic model doesn’t need to involve opportunistic pouncing on every mistake in London. We can invest and plan for the long-term.

The pre-2008 growth model isn’t working. So let’s set some different aims for the economy. Let’s make targets for equality that we treat just as seriously as targets for growth. Let’s treat climate change targets as real red lines, just as serious as stock market numbers and inflation rates.

And, culturally, let’s imagine our communities as something more than safe houses for fleeing bankers. We can do better than Geneva.