Or at least they think they do. In fact, according to the hard social scientific data of the 2010 British Social Attitudes survey, Scotland is only “somewhat more social democratic than England” and “appears to have experienced something of a drift away from a social democratic outlook during the course of the past decade, in tandem with public opinion in England”. Even the late Stephen Maxwell, nationalist intellectual and founder of the modern SNP, agreed, writing shortly before his death in 2012 that there is “nothing in Scotland’s recent political record to suggest a pent-up demand for radical social and economic change waiting to be released by independence”. The fact that the current nationalist government at Holyrood has so far declined to use the Scottish Parliament’s power (granted in 1998) to raise the rate of income tax upwards by 3 per cent, so as to increase funding for public services, suggests that they know that Maxwell spoke the truth.

Still, so long as Scots think that they want greater fiscal autonomy, the clamour for independence will continue. Happily, they are about to be given more of what they want. This year and next the Scotland Act 2012 will come into effect, giving the Scottish government the power to raise income tax by 10 per cent and to borrow up to £2.2 billion per year. Moreover, the Scotland Bill currently before Parliament proposes to implement the Smith Commission Agreement, making the Scottish government responsible for setting all the rates and bands of income tax for Scottish taxpayers, as well as giving it the power to create new welfare benefits for those with “additional needs”  and to top up reserved benefits such as universal credit and child benefit, should the UK government decide to cut them. In a nutshell, the combined effect of the 2012 Act and the 2015 Bill (should it pass) would be to give Scottish ministers the power to do something substantially different if they don’t like the tax and spending decisions taken in Westminster. This fiscal effect should then generate a healthy political one: making it more difficult for nationalists to fill the airwaves with complaints about Westminster, and easier for their opponents to focus attention on the nationalist government’s actual policies. The nationalists say that they want more independence to do things differently in Scotland, and about half of Scots agree with them. Shortly they shall have it. Let’s watch what they do, and scrutinise the gap between leftward mouth and rightward money.

 Understanding what the UK is good for

The SNP, of course, is keen to keep attention fixated on the constitutional issue and Nicola Sturgeon is already pressing David Cameron to go beyond the Smith Agreement. The Prime Minister would be wise to resist, to wait and see how the Scottish government uses the rope it’s been given, and to watch how that affects the popular appetite for more.

In the meantime the UK government needs to equip itself with a cogent and confident understanding of the value of the Union, for only then will it be clear what further kinds of Scottish independence are compatible with it, what are not, and why it matters. During the referendum campaign it was deeply dismaying to witness the faltering inarticulacy of unionists in explaining what the United Kingdom is good for, and therefore why some kinds of independence would be bad for the Scottish people. In retrospect, this was a symptom, not of the Union’s intellectual bankruptcy, but rather of the natural difficulty of describing the very ground upon which we stand. One of the benefits of the referendum was that it provoked unionists like me to lift up our feet and look down.