When last summer I first started suggesting to friends that there was something about Salmond's rhetoric that really worried me – that it could be seen as effectively fascist in its mix of flag-waving mysticism allied to socioeconomic gestures to the Left – I found few takers. But following February's UK-SNP name calling, threats and counter-threats I am much more confident that Salmond is indeed a deeply dangerous figure for the UK and a disaster for Scotland. Nationalists anywhere are never driven by reason, because their position is unrelated to reason. Salmond was already a nationalist when American, British and Dutch multinationals were investing many millions of pounds in North Sea oil exploration. His central argument about the autonomy made possible through ownership of oil royalties is therefore merely a rhetorical extra. His socialism is a fraud — he claims that these redirected royalties will make life better in Glasgow, but he intends to do this only by taking those royalties away from the impoverished of those cities outside his new borders – so suddenly the people of Newcastle, say, are flung outside the pale and Scotland's flagship role in improving the condition of the working class throughout the United Kingdom is abandoned. Driving back and forth across the Scottish border myself the other week it seemed incredible to imagine that very soon this could mark a real and hostile line. Salmond claims that a specific group has virtues which are unavailable to those south of that line. But this is only sustainable (because it is untrue) by imagining an "other".

This "other" has been somewhat vague until now. But just as I feared, the process of nationalist state-making inevitably creates and then feeds an enemy, and this phase is now apparent in  two equally important and worrying groups. It is impossible not to speculate that the apparent incompetence of Salmond's ideas about currency union and the EU were specifically designed to goad the UK government and the EU into lashing out. Until recently it was probably fair to say that the vast majority of those in most areas of the UK excluded from the referendum had no strong views, beyond a mild incredulity that Scotland could possibly find it desirable to become independent. In a composite state where so many people feel themselves to be British, the language did not really exist to conceive of a United Kingdom which might no longer include such a large element of its Britishness. The potential threat of a now predominantly English state for millions who relied on their Britishness was chilling, but remote. But the implications do now need to be thought through. They also need to be thought through for Ulster, which would become a futile exclave — a further measure of the weird, arbitrary nature of nationalism, with the SNP turning its back on an area with which Scots have as intricate and old a linkage as with England.

The second group consists, of course, of those who vote No in the referendum. The best that the Yes camp can hope for is a very marginal victory — but this would mean that a little under half of those living in Scotland, perhaps at least as passionately, do not think independence a good idea. Any separate Scottish state will have to deal with "disloyalty" on a potentially huge scale. What happens to council areas which decisively vote No? Could these secede? Any new state has to define itself by loyalty to its institutions. I can think of almost no successful examples of this happening without threats and violence. A new Scottish state will be defined against the remainder of the UK. If it is not, then there was no point in creating such a state. But a state created by, say, even 55:45 is a mockery of real democracy – real democracy is about the regular reviewing of choice, not a one-shot plebiscite. Within weeks the legitimacy of such a place could be frighteningly compromised — but the damage could never be undone. Psychologically, how could a new, smaller UK not lash out at its neighbour? How could negotiations over military bases, say, or oil not be vituperative, egged on by the millions of Scots who never wanted independence in the first place? How has this been allowed to happen?