THIS newspaper has done a great service to the national movement by making widely available not just the full text of the McCrone Report, but also a wide range of commentary upon it, where we are now and the way ahead.

Having such information to hand helps Yessers to argue for the normality of independence while demonstrating the case for those not yet convinced.

We are not too wee or too stupid, and we are certainly do not lack resources. We are where we are – fuel-poor in an energy-rich country, lagging behind our neighbours in prosperity and increasingly distant from the mainstream of Europe – not because we have chosen to be dependent, but because we have been lied to about independence.

Of course, I accept that Gavin McCrone is not a nationalist. He remains very sceptical about independence, as his most recent work shows.

But the paper that bears his name is about more than economics. It has become about governance and in particular about the undeniable fact that for the past 50 years Unionist Westminster politicians have used lies as the basis of internal statecraft in order to keep Scotland subservient and ensure Scottish resources bankrolled a declining UK.

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Governments need and get private advice from their civil servants about a whole host of issues. It would have been very surprising if, in early 1974, the then Tory government, and the Labour government that soon replaced it, had not wanted to consider the impact of North Sea oil on the whole of the UK economy.

Advice is of course just that – it is not infallible nor is it compulsory for ministers to follow it in whole or in part.

Yet once it exists and the facts on which it is based are made clear, governments have an absolute moral and political duty to be honest and open about its implications. Otherwise, how could any citizen ever trust any government again?

Successive Tory and Labour governments knew – and we now know they knew – that the case for Scottish independence had been massively strengthened by the discovery of oil. It was obvious to them that the debate about the future of the Union would change materially as a result of that fact.

But they were the opposite of honest. They deliberately, in the words of the then Labour chancellor Denis Healey, “underplayed the value of the oil ... because of the threat of [Scottish] nationalism” using every resource of the British state to do so.

“Underplay” is a nice, sanitised word. What it means is that the Scottish people were lied to by their own government, persistently and blatantly, knowing that such a lie would advantage their own political and electoral position and disadvantage ours.

The result would be – and they knew the result would be – not only a deliberate perversion of our democracy but also our impoverishment.

There is no getting around that shocking situation nor can the culpability of the media be washed away. Once they knew the truth (almost 20 years ago) they still aided and abetted the lies and they go on doing so, which makes the situation even more insulting.

For the lies are being added to every day. Having persuaded Scotland it could never afford to be a normal nation – against the clear and established facts as we now know – the process continues, with Brexit being the latest subject which is being lied about by, among others, the Prime Minister.

There is no doubt Scotland could have a status similar to Northern Ireland with access to both the UK and the EU single market.

That was the well-researched proposition made in the Scottish Government’s paper “Scotland’s Place in Europe” published in December 2016 and added to on occasion since then.

It can even be done within devolution because it is being done in Northern Ireland.

Rishi Sunak has been boasting about that fact all week, brazenly advertising the advantages of such a position.

We know the EU would have listened to the case for such treatment for Scotland during the Brexit negotiations and were expecting to hear it made.

But the UK never did so.

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Instead, Scotland was loftily and patronisingly told again and again by a succession of UK ministers – in reality so incompetent that you wouldn’t send them for the messages – that it was all impossible.

We just needed to – in those crass, rude and never to be forgiven words of the Secretary of State against Scotland – “suck it up”.

We have been impoverished by the theft of our oil. Now we are being impoverished again by the theft of our right to be European.

Of course, there are particular circumstances in Northern Ireland, not least the continuing fear that it could slide, or be dragged, back into violence.

We must all work to prevent that but we also have the right to point out the severe disadvantages that Scotland is suffering. All we ask is the democratic outcomes that the Scottish people have voted for, at all times peacefully.

We must be active in our own cause. “Scotland’s Place in Europe” needs to be re-issued, updated as necessary, and its contents and arguments need to be disseminated far and wide.

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No business of any description should be conducted with Westminster that is not topped and tailed with forcible reference to it.

Our teams in Brussels, in Paris, in Berlin, in Copenhagen and in Dublin should be on the offensive, spreading the word about it and indicating how seriously the Scottish Government takes the need for a status different to that imposed on us against our will by the UK.

And at the same time, we need to be urgently building the case for independence here, under a new leader.

What we must never accept is that Brexit is a done deal. We have been lied to about that just as we were lied to about our resources and our prospects.

Truth will always, in the end, get out. Cheats must never prosper.