YOU know they’re really rattled when they start messing around with teachers, curricula and reading lists.

That’s the obvious conclusion to draw from Tory-on-a-stick Andrew Bowie’s headline-maker this week. In his introduction to a research paper, Bowie approved of the UK Government “exposing any undue Scottish nationalist bias” in the teaching of history in Scottish schools.

Beat it, as Robert C Nesbitt was wont to utter in his opening credits. Until the Supreme Court allows Whitehall clipboarders to start stalking around the ancestral (not just devolved) halls of Scottish education – which of course won’t happen, will it? – we can consign this press release to the bin.

But we should retrieve the attached research paper. Try and read it: “How ‘progressive’ anti-imperialism threatens the United Kingdom”, by Professors Nigel Biggar and Doug Stokes. It’s one of the weirder, even sinister, interventions in Scottish indy politics for quite a while.

There’s a gigglesome Greg Moodie cartoon of Unionist doom-sayer George Robertson, wearing a magician’s turban that’s slipped over his eyes. He’s crying out “Darkness! Darkness! All I can see is darkness!” This paper is its scholarly equivalent.

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I thought the achievement of Scottish independence was about some parity with the Nordics, some integration with the Europeans, and a general rolling up of the sleeves to battle through the Anthropocene? Nope. According to Biggar and Stokes, it’s a very dagger at the heart of civilisation itself.

Well, one particular civilisation. What’s most striking about this paper is its massive, thrumming anxiety about the declining power of the “West”. The authors conjure up a world where China and Russia are beginning to expand their power and reach. The UK is assumed to be a major Western player. Scottish independence is cast as a particular threat to the UK’s soft power. The peaceful attainment of statehood is seen to damage Britain’s projection to the world as a stable political order. So it must be stopped!

Sorry, but I thought that the legality of the Edinburgh Agreement had been globally lauded as a spectacle of how to do an orderly transition to a new state?

The foam really starts to fleck when the authors render the pursuit of Scots indy as akin to an act of “decolonisation”. They believe that Scottish nationalists always want to portray the Westminster Government, and the UK in general, as an imperial power.

“The secession of Scotland from the Anglo-Scottish Union and the consequent break-up of the UK would be an act of national repentance from an oppressive imperial past”, they write. “Scotland’s new-found independence could then be subsumed within the EU’s political superstructure. Again, this discourse paints the UK as tainted, whilst the EU is seen embodying liberalism, pacifism and solidarity.” Dear readers, I doubt that any of you conceive of the British and Scottish imperial legacy in such simplistic terms.

Honestly, where have they been? For the last decade, we have been reckoning frankly with Scotland’s avid participation in the British Empire. We’re hardly in a state of denialism about it. The biggest marker laid down was Glasgow University’s 2019 calculation of the debt it owes to the West Indies, comprising the university’s benefit from the resources of slavery practitioners and advocates. The “reparations” for this are in the form of resourcing new academic institutions in Jamaica (initially to the tune of £20 million). In the future, one might imagine other institutions and sectors making the same calculations. What a powerful element of an indy Scotland’s new foreign policy that would be.

BUT we should also value that we’ve had a historians’ debate about our responsibilities in empire, colonialism and slavery. The rammy in The Herald last year between Sir Geoff Palmer and Professor Tom Devine around the new explanatory plaque attached to the Edinburgh statue of Sir Henry Dundas’ statue was deeply instructive.

Was Dundas’s proposals for a milder, more limited path to the abolition of slavery made on the cusp of the 19th century the cause of unnecessary deaths? Or were his decisions constrained by broader conditions? These two great scholars argue it to a standstill. Their discussion is at least nuanced.

British moves to abolish slavery from the early 1800s to the end of the century should contribute to a better story about contemporary Britain. One that can remove the oppressive stain that younger, indy-supporting generations can see in the contemporary British state.

The academics try some extreme moves in their attempts to remoralise the British Empire. The paper begins with an account of slave-owning empires throughout history.

They want to “normalise” the idea of being an empire. It’s really a non-exceptional form of human organisation, they declaim. And importantly, it’s not exclusive to white Westerners.

This is an alt-right line you hear everywhere. I found myself on Channel Five’s Jeremy Vine Show this Thursday, answering a young black columnist from the Daily Telegraph, Sherelle Jacobs. Jacobs was at pains to remind me of the endurance of empires through history and across the globe.

“Surely they’re all blood-soaked, Sherelle?” I sputtered. “Why does that mean we shouldn’t recognise the debts of our own massive empire?”

A “culture war” moment, undoubtedly. But to Biggar and Stokes’ credit, they’re perfectly clear and cynical as to why these debates are moving to the centre.

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In the professors’ rendering of recent history, the left used to debate the future on a “materialist” basis. By this they mean they were concerned with economic share, the control of technology and organisations. But when the New Right beat them in the 70s and 80s, the balance in societies was successfully tipped away from labour and towards capital. The left gave up on proposing alternatives to the markets, leaving economics to apolitical technocrats. They retreated into the universities and came back out fighting about identity politics. Leading political debates turned towards values, morals, ways of life. Our passions for improvement became disconnected from our material interests.

“Warriors for the West” like Biggar and Stokes are generally happy about fighting on this terrain. It’s also how they understand their opponents. They see Scottish (and Irish) nationalism as “secular religions, infusing quotidian lives with transcendent meaning”, encouraging all kinds of irrational sacrifice.

But Scottish nationalism isn’t a semi-mystical compensation for a disheartening world. We want all that “material” stuff. We want to reap the full benefit of our renewable energies. We want to equalise and make more productive Scottish land resources. We aim at a high-wage, high-tax economy. And what’s more “material” than Trident removal?

They’re not just coming after the worksheets of your local, left-nationalist Modern Studies teacher. Biggar and Stokes are to be commended for reminding us just how important – and transformative – Scots indy is.