Several thousand light years from now, when the Earth lies barren amid post-apocalyptic nuclear fallout, an alien race will arrive in Edinburgh to study this lost, primitive civilisation known as mankind.
As they dig through the rubble they will discover a copy of the Scottish parliament Business Bulletin dated 6014 AD, and it will read: ‘2pm, Scottish Government Debate: Building the Case for Independence.’
I don’t know how many times Holyrood has held this debate. Dozens, at least. I don’t know what else there is to say.
But the SNP is having a difficult time and John Swinney had to toss something to the wolves. So once again MSPs gathered to relitigate the 2014 referendum.
If you didn’t tune in, and I hope for your sake you didn’t, know that you missed nothing. That’s no exaggeration.
Not a single new point was made, just the latest restatement of the same stale arguments you’ve been hearing for a decade. There are episodes of Mrs Brown’s Boys with fresher material.
Swinney said the 2014 campaign had featured ‘lively discussions’.
Oh, I remember.
There were the Labour MPs taunted in the street with cries of ‘traitor’, ‘Uncle Tom’ and grotesque impersonations of American slaves.
There was Blair McDougall, then director of Better Together and now a Labour MP, who was carrying his three-year-old daughter through Glasgow city centre when a man wearing an SNP badge spat at him and called him a ‘c***’.
The Scottish Secretary at the time, Alistair Carmichael, was warned not to travel alone on public transport in the aftermath of the vote.
Lively, indeed.
The First Minister told MSPs Scotland had been ‘the home of poets, painters, engineers, doctors and thinkers throughout the ages’. It would still be today, only they’ve all relocated to Carlisle for tax purposes.
We were ‘a nation on the cutting edge of solving many of the 21st century’s most complex challenges’.
With the greatest respect, we’re a nation that’s not even on the cutting edge of building boats capable of sailing.
The century’s most complex challenges will have to take a ticket and get in line.
Swinney said the ‘positive impact of devolution’ was ‘indisputable’. It’s had an impact, all right. Then again, so did the Chicxulub asteroid.
The SNP leader urged his opponents to agree that ‘people living in Scotland are substantially better off with a parliament that fights their corner’.
You’ll recall that when polls showed Scots were dead against the Hate Crime Bill and gender reforms, parliament fought their corner by ignoring them and passing the legislation anyway.
The more Swinney hymned the Athenian glories of the referendum (‘no better example of modern democracy in action’), the more I wondered what strength of prescription he had in his rose-tinted spectacles.
Things were different now, though. The ‘powers and autonomy of the Scottish parliament’ had been ‘eroded’ by Westminster.
The First Minister describes the most banal, benign actions of the UK Government in the blood-curdling tones of a Stephen King novel. So much so that you wish the real Westminster was a bit more like the imaginary one inside Swinney’s head.
If I have to sit through many more of these independence debates, eroding the powers of the Scottish parliament will sound pretty appealing.