UK election campaigns have lengthened in the last 30 or so years – for example the February and October 1974 elections both lasted just 20 days and even the first post-war poll, held after 10 years without a national vote, needed only 30.

This time, however, the first December UK General Election since 1924 will have taken 36, measured from dissolution.

So a “snap” election it isn’t as I know most candidates, and all voters, now realise.

However that length of campaigning time has meant that I have been able to visit quite a range of constituencies, usually speaking at well attended and often lively “Escape Brexit” public meetings in places as far apart as Fort William and Stranraer.

My tentative conclusion is that things will go well for the SNP on Thursday, though how well will depend, as ever, on the efficiency of the “get out the vote” organisation in each local campaign.

The mood in the country is very different from that prevailing in 2017 and there is a much greater openness to discussing an independent future and accepting that the choice – Brexit

Britain or Scottish EU membership – should lie with the people of Scotland and no one else.

That is the key issue at the end of these 36 days, just as it was at the beginning. My column on the first Sunday of the campaign described the Tory mantra of “Get Brexit done” as the most dishonest slogan I had heard in almost 50 years of political activism and that remains my view. It is, I am glad to say, also the view of an increasing number of Scottish voters.

Fortunately the SNP campaign has set in opposition to that false premise an honest and achievable one – the necessity to “Escape Brexit”.

The foolish hubris of the Liberals in both promoting an alternative UK prime minister without the slightest prospect of securing a majority, and in deciding to abandon the widely supported second referendum proposal, means that their claim to be the effective champions of opposition to Brexit rings hollow.

Labour’s confusion on what exactly it wants and the impossibility of believing that a party leader would have no view on the major issue of our time has also crippled them during what has been a Brexit election, though they have crippled themselves with other issues.

Thesis and antithesis on Brexit therefore lies in Scotland between the Tories and the SNP.

If you want Brexit, are indifferent to the financial disaster it will cause and untroubled by the likelihood of a hard, dislocating No-Deal departure then no doubt the Tories will get your vote ... though it will not mean that they get Brexit done, no matter how many others make the same choice.

That route, even with a Conservative-majority UK government, would lead to many more months and years of business failure, lack of investment, depopulation and workforce shortages all caused by Brexit insecurity.

And if a deal ever happens it will be a bad one which will take much longer than the deceitful Johnson will admit.

If you are opposed to Brexit then, accepting Michel Barnier’s contention that the option of returning to the status-quo no longer exists, the only way to escape it is to ensure that no UK government can ever drag us out of the EU against our will.

That means supporting the right of Scotland to chose what it wishes to do, an option that is only being offered by the SNP and the Greens. The First Minister was right to make that point forcibly during one of her many polished, entertaining, skilled and articulate appearances on leaders debates. The fault line in Scottish politics is as much about democracy as it is about Brexit and independence.

The Tory “acting” (in more senses than one) Scottish leader Jackson Carlaw demonstrated that during this last week by arrogantly asserting that he was entitled to change his mind on Brexit (he would, he admitted, now come to heel and do what Johnson wants ) but that Scotland could not assert a similar right to reconsider its verdict about independence.

The truth is we must be enabled to make up our own minds knowing beyond doubt that no one, and especially not the incompetent Tories, can “get Brexit done” and especially not in the timescale they claim. Nor should we wish them to do so.

But Scotland can escape Brexit by the simple act of voting SNP. That is what I will be doing on Thursday. Please join me ...