IT’S been just a year since the General Election in which Alexander Boris Johnson gained a crushing majority in the House of Commons, a majority which he has used to skive off while people died, to completely screw up those Brexit negotiations which he promised he had an oven-ready deal for and most recently to threaten the French with gunboats.

It’s all a very far cry from a global Britain that allows Scotland to punch above its weight. When Scotland was promised it would be Better Together, it was with the Rolls-Royce of statecraft. No-one told us that what we’d end up being allegedly Better Together with was a broken shopping trolley stuck in the mud at the bottom of an abandoned canal.

But the shopping trolley is bedecked with some bunting and a Daily Express headline saying a medium had channelled the ghost of Princess Diana, who said from beyond that a No-Deal Brexit was what the People’s Princess would have wanted. And that, apparently, counts as a Vow delivered.

It was supposed to be the easiest trading deal in all of history. The prospect of crashing out of the EU without a deal was scoffed at as Project Fear. The English exceptionalists who dominate the Conservative Party and their spineless apologists in the Scottish Tories insisted the EU needs the UK more than the UK needs the EU, and that Brussels would soon come round and offer the British everything Johnson wanted – along with a cake with a cherry on top, and a fulsome apology for not previously recognising that Britain wasn’t special.

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Because of Vera Lynn, and two World Wars and one World Cup, or something.

We have a British Government that is obsessed with grandiose claims of being world-beating when it can’t even deliver on basic competence. The only thing the UK is world-beating at is the sticking-it-to-Johnny-Foreigner rhetoric that gives the Brextremist gammons the first erections they’ve had in years without the need of Viagra.

Meanwhile, Johnson desperately tries to sell No Deal as a great victory in one photo op after another in an act which is as convincing as Matt Hancock’s tears. Johnson has the haunted face of a man whose eyes offer a window into a soul inside which farts and splurts its way around the interior of his skull like a rapidly deflating balloon. This was supposed to be his Falklands moment, but he’s only just realised that he’s the captain of the Belgrano.

Yet according to the Conservatives, it’s everyone else who is to blame for turning the UK into an abandoned broken shopping trolley, not the political party which has been in power in Westminster since 2010 which created this Brexmess in the first place, and which has systematically exclude the devolved administrations, the pro-remain parties and everyone except the ERG from any input into Brexit negotiations.

It’s all the fault of the EU for being “spiteful”. It’s all the fault of Remainers for not supporting a soft Brexit that the Tories ensured was never on the table. It’s all the fault of the SNP for undermining the British Government by refusing to get behind a Brexit that Scotland overwhelmingly rejected.

But the job losses which will result from Brexit, the economic and social devastation, the loss of freedom of movement for British citizens, the uncertainties and insecurity faced by British citizens in the EU and EU citizens in the UK, the trashing of any remaining goodwill towards the UK abroad, all these things are the responsibility of the Conservatives, no-one else.

This is their mess, they own it, and they are determined to drag Scotland down, too, all for the sake of their ludicrous and delusional British exceptionalism.

But the Conservatives are not merely content with trashing Scotland’s place in Europe. The Tories are also hell-bent on trashing Scotland’s place in the UK. They have already passed their Internal Market Bill, which unilaterally undermines the devolution settlement.

But it’s going to get even worse. Following Johnson’s remarks that devolution has been a “disaster”, and Jacob Rees-Mogg insisting that the Conservatives must undo all the “constitutional tinkering” of the last Labour government – a clear reference to the devolution settlement – we now have Michael Gove threatening that in the coming year the Conservatives will “modernise” what passes for a British constitution.

That can only mean that the Conservatives are going to take further steps to reduce and limit the powers of the Scottish Parliament and to bring Holyrood more tightly under the control of Westminster.

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They are certainly not proposing to make any constitutional changes which will strengthen Scotland’s ability to take a different path from the one dictated by 10 Downing Street. The Conservatives don’t do collaboration and co-operation as equals. All they understand is domination and submission. Scotland will be forced to submit.

Independence is no longer simply about making Scotland a better and fairer country for all its citizens. It’s now also a campaign to save Scotland from political destruction. It’s now an imperative if we want to ensure that Scotland retains a distinct political identity and a distinct political voice and culture.

The Union as it was traditionally understood is dead, and it’s the Tories who killed it. It’s now a choice between independence or incorporation into a unitary Brexit state dominated and defined by a reactionary right-wing English nationalism.

Scotland can either choose its own future, or we can watch helplessly while Johnson, Rees-Mogg and Gove choose a future for us, a future in which Scotland’s needs and interests will count for nothing, but will be subordinated to the interests of the Conservatives’ cronies, the hedge fund managers, the disaster capitalists, and the rapacious vultures who will pick clean the bones of what is left of the public sector.