DARK ironies abound in the week when Priti Patel boasted about stopping freedom of movement and Jacob Rees-Mogg declared the United Kingdom “one country” and championed the right of people to move freely within it. But his patriotism doesn’t stretch to his private affairs. The accounts of a company he founded and with which he is still associated, managed via subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and Singapore, show profit in excess of £103 million over the past five years. Global capital is borderless.

The elite glide smoothly through the world, born with silver spoons, they develop silver tongues and act as internationalists for their private finance whilst manipulating popular nationalism for their public persona. The Brexiteer frenzy to declare those advocating self-determination for Scotland as “separatists” is one of the most grotesque of the hypocrisies being imposed on us.

This week Jacob Rees-Mogg told the commons: “There are no internal borders within the United Kingdom. It is one country.” Scotland is just a “district or area”. We’ve been here before: Scotland as North Britain. The unedified subtext is not subtle: you do not exist.

Those who put up borders declare others non-existent.

But as Johnson’s regime stumbles, these crude propaganda attempts seem increasingly desperate and the belief in a sort of gross English exceptionalism seems all the more absurd in the pandemic. That exceptionalism is mirrored in the degeneracy of Prince Andrew, and in the movements of Stanley Johnson and Dominic Cummings.

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In the Government’s chaotic mishandling of the virus there lies the parallel of its Brexit fiasco – one infects the other with the triumph of rhetoric over reality. At its heart is a mythology about Anglo superiority and difference, a sort of hazy self-belief rooted in insecurity. This is the source of the obsession with the war symbolism which England must constantly return to. It’s like a childhood memory turned over and over in delirium.

As Fintan O’Toole has written: “The Brexit mindset is a binary of greatness and nothingness. Britain must be either triumphant or sunk in humiliation. Mirroring this crazy dualism, the alternative to “world-beating” efforts to rout the virus is total failure. There is no middle way, no possibility of being like everybody else, ­doing one’s best, following best international practice, learning from mistakes, paying attention to the obvious, saving as many lives as possible. In the demented logic of the ruling caste, that which is not greatness – competence, functionality, patient and honest effort – is of no account. It is all or nothing, and time and again in the tragic mismanagement of the pandemic, the first has collapsed into the second.”

And here’s the irony. Many people are critical of Nicola Sturgeon for her political caution. Yet last week, taunted by journalists at her Thursday media briefing, she stopped before answering a question and criticised the framing of it in constitutional terms. The issue at stake was the possibility of closing the Border. This is, she said, plainly “a matter of public health in a pandemic”.

I am experiencing a huge swathe of support for her in the handling of this crisis; specifically for her pragmatic and non-dogmatic approach to the situation. Some of this is being manifested in repeated opinion polls and surveys, but I have also seen it with friends who have previously been hostile to the idea of independence and are now willing it on.

So here’s the twist. Independence is the new normal, not out of exceptionalism bombast or triumph but out of competence, functionality and pragmatism. Scotland should be independent not because we are better than anyone – but because we are the same as everyone. What the pandemic is informing us of – at quite a deep level – is that having control over our borders, our physical space, is a prerequisite for self-management. It is the basis for democracy. What the pandemic is revealing is the need for full powers to cope with the oncoming economic tsunami of unemployment (already predicted to be six million by Christmas).

SNP MP Tommy Sheppard raised the issue of dealing with Scotland’s “financial straightjacket” in the House of Commons last week and was treated with complete disdain by the Leader of the House, the aforementioned tax-avoiding Rees-Mogg. But the flurry of recovery plans from think tanks across the country – the Fraser of Allander Institute, the IPPR, Common Weal and more – all point to the same need, the need for new powers and more agency. In the new world, the idea of powers to act independently becomes a matter of survival, not a matter of nationalist rhetoric, and the fact that our nearest neighbour is ruled with such casual incompetence is only fuel to that reality.

As the tragedy of the pandemic unfolds, the next stage in the unraveling of the United Kingdom arrives, the inevitable outcome of the manufactured process of non-negotiation, a No-Deal Brexit.

This is Disaster Nationalism which Prime Minister Boris Johnson has declared as a moment of “national renewal”, after which the UK would be “a great European power, and truly global in our range and ambitions”. Indeed last week Johnson said that a No-Deal Brexit would be “a very good option”, during a radio interview with LBC, a day after trade talks collapsed.

Amid the trauma of the coronavirus experience and the fear for the coming economic misery, we are missing the other mounting problems of our chaotic exit from the European Union. In the mayhem last week, the legal deadline to seek an extension to negotiations passed barely unnoticed.

A No-Deal Brexit was widely believed to be a financial nightmare for Britain, imposing massive job losses. Now it’s inevitable and will land on a society ravaged by the pandemic. We are on a collision course for an economic downturn the likes of which none of us has seen in our lifetime, and the tragedy is that most of it was avoidable.

OUR Government, the one we didn’t elect, has not only manufactured this situation – it relishes it, it embraces it and it glories in it.

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England is self-isolating through Brexit. It’s suffering from underlying conditions of deference and self-delusion, it suffers visions of a glorious future rooted in the past. Scotland must socially distance itself from these values and find ways to rebuild a society disfigured by poverty and inequality, but we will have to do this in the context of economic chaos.

Back in 2019, an explosive 14-page briefing sent to every cabinet minister about what a No-Deal Brexit would look like was leaked to the media. This was in the dog days of Theresa May’s chaotic reign. The warning came just 10 days before Britain was due to leave the EU with No Deal after May’s exit plan was rejected three times and MPs voted down various alternatives.

In the briefing, cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill told ministers that leaving the EU without an agreement would result in food prices rising by 10%, the police being unable to protect people and the economy suffering the worst recession in a decade.

Cabinet ministers had commissioned Sedwill to brief them on the risks of No Deal in “order to ensure they were meeting their duty to govern in the national interest”.

In his response, the cabinet secretary, who also acted as May’s national security adviser, said: “We believe there would be significant disruption in the short term. Food prices would increase by up to 10%, with steeper rises in fresh product prices.”

The briefing warned of constitutional as well as economic repercussions.

He said the consequences of No Deal would be “more severe” in Northern Ireland than elsewhere, stating: “The current powers granted to the Northern Irish secretary would not be adequate for the pace, breadth or controversy of the decisions needed to be taken through a No-Deal exit. Therefore we would have to introduce direct rule.”

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And raising the prospect of law and order breaking down, he continued: “Our national security would be disrupted … The stability of the Union would be dislocated.”

Sedwill said the economy would suffer the worst recession since 2008, with the subsequent fall in the value of the pound likely to be “more harmful” than in 2008 because it would affect only the UK and not other countries.

This was before the coronavirus.

Over a private lunch in his Downing Street flat three weeks ago, Boris Johnson persuaded Sir Mark that it was time to stand down. This week he did just that after months of being smeared by Conservative sources. This is part of the No-Deal set-up and what is euphemistically referred to as “government reform”, but what is widely believed to be Dominic Cummings smashing up the civil service to plough through the changes he envisages.

The world around us is changing very rapidly. The constitutional crisis is coming to a new stage. Back in 2014, the idea of “border posts” was weaponised by Better Together as a key argument against independence. Now it seems a pragmatic necessity for the protection of public health.

Without a border we are a “district” unprotected from the ideological mayhem of Conservatism and the economic tragedy of No-Deal Brexit Britain.