A LETTER from Professor Aonghus MacKechnie in this paper on Wednesday got me thinking. He is right to argue that the new indy campaign on which we are embarked will feature a great deal of lying by those opposed to Scotland choosing her own way in the world.

This is, of course, not new. UK governments have been lying to and about Scotland for a long time. “Too wee, too poor, too stupid” wasn’t an insult minted in the last decade. The idea that Scotland – a nation full of hard-working, well-educated people and rich in natural resources – was utterly and permanently incapable of achieving the normality of independence has been around for generations, even though it was always a lie.

Things did get worse during and after the 2014 referendum The Yes movement was somewhat naive – and I include myself in that – because it didn’t realise how powerful those lies could be even if it is true that their full strength wasn’t deployed until the very end of the campaign.

The No side believed it couldn’t lose and panic only set in when it became clear that they might do so. Thus The Vow – the lie writ large – was deployed.

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This time round, many things will be different and some will be even more difficult.

There are plus sides. The polls are vastly more favourable and the cause has this newspaper supporting it, something that we should always value. Brexit has presented the ultimate exemplar of what is wrong with the Union and why independence is essential.

Professor MacKechnie is also at least partially right to say that our daily experience of Westminster has made us ever more critical of what we hear from that place and its politicians.

But there are problems too. Chief among those is the level of panic that now exists at Westminster.

The consequences of that are already clear and will include lying like we have never seen before – industrial-scale lying – accompanied with threats, bullying, intimidation and subversion by an establishment that stands to lose a great deal and will wield every instrument, blunt or sharp, to try to ensure it doesn’t.

Compared to 2014, we ain’t seen nothing yet and although more Scottish voters might be able to see through what you might call the “normal lie” – the difference of opinion or presentation that frustrates the hell out of citizens trying to decide on their future but which is the politician’s stock in trade – we are now faced with something even more poisonous.

One reason is that all the UK parties have now signed on to a lie as a central tenet of how we are governed – the lie of Brexit and its opportunities. It is all around us and taints our lives.

Another, however, is that while the old-fashioned “normal lie” was the exception and had consequences, the modern political lie – the Johnson/ Brexit lie – is casually but constantly deployed and exists almost without challenge.

This week in one of the Sunak/Truss debates, the two contenders to be prime minister (to be chosen without the involvement of 99.1 %

of the Scottish population) were asked if Brexit was the cause of the delays at the Channel ports last weekend. Both immediately answered “No”.

That was the modern, supercharged lie in operation. Not an opinion, a view or a spin. A bare-faced, unashamed lie that was neither rebutted nor corrected. A lie that was allowed to become a truth, uttered by both of the contenders for the highest elective office in these islands.

The chaos at the ports is a result of the need for each passport to be examined and stamped. That did not happen prior to Brexit and happens now only because the UK is a third country in EU terms with a limit on the time any of its citizens can spend within that union.

It is an inevitable consequence of the type of Brexit that the Tory party delivered and now defends.

To contend – as another Tory minister did on television the same day – that the process of passport checking has not changed as we have always been outside Schengen (the no borders agreement between 22 EU members plus some others) simply compounds the lie, appealing to non existent facts – other lies – to back it up.

Some cynics may argue that the public does not expect politicians to tell the truth so there is already a substantial discount applied to any such statements by those who hear them. But that is not the point.

The point is that if public debate about immensely serious matters – such as independence – becomes truth-free, then no rational decision can be reached. And if no rational decision is possible, the status quo – the Union – will prevail.

Boris Johnson applied just that kind of logic to his whole political career. His survival depended on always getting the benefit of the doubt, protected in recent years by the ludicrous House of Commons convention that the green benches are full of honourable people who would never lie .

The only antidote to a lie is the truth – positively stated, evidence based and politely persisted with.

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So here is our hard but necessary task for the weeks and months ahead as we work to convert those who are not yet persuaded.

They will be bombarded with the supercharged lies that will make the first indyref look like a Quaker convention. Our response must be to ensure that we found everything we do and say on the facts and to present those facts calmly and clearly.

The world knows independence works. That’s a fact and lies cannot stand against it, particularly not ones that come from the mouths of those whose discredited obsessions have produced the crumbling society that is all around us.

Orwell may not have said it, but his much quoted remark is truer than ever in Scotland today.

In a time of deceit, telling the truth is indeed a revolutionary act.