The Habsburgs would have restored order with a mixture of large bribes, expulsions, prison sentences and the odd execution, because they rightly saw that there was a deeper poison in nationalism than in any countermeasure. Their reasons were self-serving, but subsequent events proved them correct. It is obviously admirable that the UK authorities cannot simply let Salmond cool his heels on the Isle of Man for a few years, but those who value the plurality and anti-nationalism of the UK have sleepily allowed themselves to drift into a situation where they find themselves face to face with something seriously malevolent which feeds off fear, misinformation, conspiracy, grandstanding and scapegoating. We have no choice but to be reasonable or we betray our own values, but this is, as so many times in Europe's 20th century, to allow ourselves to be outflanked by more single-minded forces.

Indeed it may well be already too late. It must surely be a nightmare to imagine a Scotland falling into the well-worn independence rut of a week or two of parading figures, giant flags and tiny singing children in traditional outfits, followed moments thereafter by impoverishment, a hostile border, flailing autarky and the ever widening hunt for "enemies within", those who hate and challenge the barely legitimate new state, fuelled by dissident groups in England. This is an absurd vision – except that I cannot see a way round it. Or at least, the risks around it seem far too great. No part of Europe has proved immune to nationalist violence — even the dullest regions have been filled with burning houses in their quite recent pasts. Through a miracle of geography, luck, military strength and political intelligence, the island of Great Britain almost alone has avoided this contagion. Nationalism is unappeasable, it soils everything in its path and it has been allowed to cross the North Sea.

If Salmond wants to share everything with the rest of the UK, then there is no need for independence. But this is not what he wants. The referendum is meant to be a moment of chain-shattering change — not just a mild and highly dubious redirecting of revenues to a new state's smirking functionaries. Yet it is impossible to imagine this a happy place, or one which offers any actual benefit to most of its inhabitants. It could in turn promote a disgusting new variety of English nationalism. The SNP will be unable to deliver anything real and will instead create an excluding, under-siege Volk-community, with marginally better crèche facilities. This would be a state  viewed with repugnance by most other Europeans and would be a fantastically retrograde step, one that is being managed into being with slipshod and juvenile helplessness by the "Westminster government" almost as much as it has been whipped up by the SNP itself.