LET’S hop in a TARDIS back to the November 23, 2013. David Cameron is in Downing Street. The UK remained, apparently securely, an EU state. And on stage in Glasgow, we can see the SNP leadership launching Scotland’s Future, the Scottish Government’s White Paper on Scottish independence. Thumb through the blueprint’s substantial 650 pages, and you’ll find that the word “Europe” – or some permutation of it – crops up some 242 times.

The White Paper’s headline commitment was that Scotland would remain an EU state after independence. Already applying the acquis of European Union law, already integrated into the common market, the Scottish Government envisaged a seamless transition out of the UK and into the EU’s 29th member, leaving free movement of goods, services and people undisrupted in the interim, securing the rights of EU citizens who live here, and Scots who work and trade abroad.

It was a sound policy in social, political and economic terms – but this headline commitment arguably undersells how much problem-solving work the commitment to join the EU did for 2014’s Yes campaigners.

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Faced with spurious Unionist arguments about the UK slapping tariffs on Scottish products after independence? The fact it would be unlawful under EU law gave you a ready reply. What about imports and exports? The latest Scottish Government figures suggests Scotland’s exports to the rest of the UK were worth £45.8 billion in 2016, compared to £105 million to the rest of the EU. But when the trade is free across the bloc, this isn’t an issue.

Menaced with the threat of border guards north of Berwick? The EU structures and the Common Travel area with the Republic of Ireland gave you a workable answer. Hit with dodgy arguments about the immigration status of Scots in the rest of the UK, or the right of English folk to stay in Scotland after independence? Four words: free movement of people. What about currency questions? The policy of retaining the pound sterling faced other political challenges, but at least we were talking about using the official currency of another major EU state, seemingly securely integrated into the common market and customs union.

But beyond the prose of ordering the business and boundaries of an independent state, in the poetry of the 2014 campaign, the vision of co-participation with the rest of the United Kingdom in the wider European community arguably did important work too. It was a subtle guarantor of the cosmopolitan character of the Scottish independence movement.

Taking up a seat at the European table underscored that this iteration of Scottish nationalism wasn’t the insular, separatist dream its critics unfairly maligned and continue to malign. The point was to recast Scotland’s relationship with the rest of the UK and the rest of Europe – not to slip our moorings and drift away. In the couthy Eckism of the time, it was about the UK “losing a surly lodger and gaining a good neighbour” in the wider tenement of the EU.

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This was why Better Together put such a power of political work into sowing confusion and doubt about an independent Scotland’s future relationship with the European Union during the campaign. With the gusto of a crackpot Brexiteer, the No campaign was just itching to talk about trade barriers, border guards, uncertain immigration statuses – but the only way they could do it was to throw Scotland’s continued participation into the EU into doubt. Through this crack of uncertainty, all these campaign demons poured.

“What is process for removing our EU citizenship?” Better Together asked in the dying days of the 2014 campaign. Their answer? “Voting Yes.” Cauld kale now, I know – but Blair McDougall’s core intuition about the political hay to be made by putting a hypothetical Scottish state on the wrong side of a border from the rest of the UK remains bang on. In 2014, Better Together wedged Scotland on the wrong side of the EU border. In 2018, depending on how precisely Brexit unfolds – the borders we’ll have to contend with may become more than hypothetical.

And as things stand, beyond emotional reactions to the mayhem engulfing Westminster and the chronic disfunction within the Conservative Party which Brexit has been exposed, it isn’t clear to me that the SNP, the Greens, or the wider independence support has really reckoned with what all this means in practice for an independent Scottish state after Brexit, and how you might persuade a majority of folk living here to back it.

In these pages last week, I argued that it remains in the interests of the cause of Scottish independence that the rest of the United Kingdom is nudged, shoved, tricked – or left alone to stumble into – the softest Brexit possible. This is why.

The old political wisdom is true: you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose. Campaign in prose and you’re likely to go home at the end of the night disappointed. But win, with only the poetry of a political campaign in your head? We know where that ends. Ladies and gentlemen: I give you Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson.

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IF Brexit has taught us nothing else, it should remind indepe-ndence supporters of the responsibilities of constitutional leadership. The Pottery Barn rule applies. You broke it? You own it. Breaking up Britain just got a whole lot more difficult.

It isn’t always appreciated that the Better Together coalition between the Tories and Labour into 2014 was built on more than Conservative cash and Labour votes. If the pope is the vicar of Christ on Earth, then during the first independence campaign, David Cameron was content to let Gordon Brown be his vicar in

Scotland. Like many English Tories who had come of political age after the big wipe-out of 1997, Cameron had powerfully internalised a sense that his party didn’t “get” Scotland. Accordingly, they relied and deferred to their Labour colleagues as translators, mediators and intercessors with the Scottish people, embodied in Better Together’s leadership team of Alistair Darling and Blair McDougall.

The result of the 2014 referendum – and the subsequent collapse in Labour Party support – persuaded many Conservatives north and south of the Border that their customary deference towards their Labour colleagues was painfully unfounded. If the 2014 referendum unmade the Scottish Labour Party, under the ministrations of Ruth Davidson, it was a shot of adrenalin for Scottish Tory political fortunes – and for their political confidence.

In contrast with her predecessor, Theresa May seems to have no deference, no consideration, no fear of putting a foot or feet wrong when it comes to Scottish matters. Like Margaret Thatcher, the Scottish Tories have given the Prime Minister the confidence to address the nation in a new imperative voice.

In some ways, the harder the Brexit, the harder it is for the UK to justify its continued existence. But don’t kid yourself ... Brexit drives a coach and horses through the SNP’s platform for independence in 2014.

Take for granted the wider impact on the wider Scottish economy and society. A no-deal Brexit which sees the United Kingdom breaking dramatically with the common European market would send Ben Hur’s chariot, 18 hearses and a fleet of articulated lorries careening after the coach and horses. It pancakes White Paper independence, depriving independence supporters of a clutch of good questions about how the whole enterprise would and could work.

Scottish independence isn’t a lifeboat away from a sinking ship. We’re getting hit by this wave, one way or the other, independent or not. Don’t believe me? Just ask the Irish what the weather’s like on their currach. The only question right now is – how high the choppy waters rise.