If you were being curmudgeonly you could perhaps cavil at the most damaging of Sir John Chilcot’s conclusions in his report into the Iraq War. “The UK chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options had been exhausted.” This single sentence was devastating enough but it could have been amended thus: “A tiny, self-appointed UK elite chose to join the invasion of Iraq before the peaceful options had been exhausted.” He might also have added that, as such, this UK military adventure was no different to almost every other one in which UK governments have sacrificed the lives of our soldiers over the centuries. That many of them might have survived but for the incompetent field decisions of some of the generals running the show was almost incidental and not unsurprising.

As he is a member of the UK elite, I suppose we ought to cut Sir John a degree of slack here. In this light it would have been too much to ask that he observe further: “It’s clear that a parliament, dominated by a private-school and Oxford-attending elite, having decided to invade Iraq, then left our soldiers to the mercy of decisions in the field by a high command similarly dominated by a privately-schooled officer corps.” This is not to suggest that people who have emerged from privileged backgrounds should not be running the country: far from it; only that leaving the big decisions about our country to be made almost entirely from the midst of such a narrow gene pool is asking for trouble.

It’s been suggested by some on the Left that the timing of the eventual release of the Chilcot Report worked out better for those whose reputations it diminished than might otherwise have been the case. Imagine how much more devastating it would have been if it hadn’t had to contend with Britain exiting the European Union and the convulsions wrought by this in the UK political establishment. I don’t agree. If any doubt remained that the United Kingdom is finished following Brexit and the Tories’ race to the bottom over EU migrants then Chilcot swept them away.

If the SNP had designed its ideal framework of circumstances in which to bring Scotland out of the UK it couldn’t have imagined anything more judicious than what has unfolded since June 23.

Step One: Take a single EU referendum campaign in England and garnish it with xenophobic fear and loathing of foreigners. Step Two: Ensure Scotland votes to Remain while England opts to Leave. Step Three: Let this all come to the boil. And then watch the EU, thousands of jobs and hundreds of construction plans disappear on the whim of a bar-room demagogue and two arrogant Tories with a puffed-up opinion of themselves fuelled by the sycophancy of the right-wing press. Step Four: retreat to a safe distance and watch the resignation of a Prime Minister followed by the scarecrow faction of his party using foreign nationals living and working in Scotland as make-weights in subsequent dealings with the EU. Step Five: Add some spice with the revelation that the Labour arm of the UK establishment led the country into war on a lie and a desire to appease Washington’s right-wing hawks and construction magnates.

If Nicola Sturgeon can’t make a solid and convincing case now for Scotland leaving this eternal stitch-up behind, then she never will. What we have witnessed these last two weeks has been the unravelling of what too many of us fondly and naively imagined was a United Kingdom. This was never a country in which we all pulled in the same direction in promoting the benefits of a civilised democracy, underpinned by the values of fair play and self-sacrifice against a common enemy. It’s been clear all along that the only enemy the architects of this mirage ever recognised was the enemy within.

Anyone who furthered their true purposes of gaining wealth and influence at any cost was to be considered a friend. For several years this included Saddam Hussein and when he became just too hot to handle the US government and its unquenchable desire for new markets and customers prevailed. It is the ultimate irony that many of those who followed Tony Blair on his Iraq adventure and vied for his patronage are now trying to evict a proper Labour man who begged his leader not to go down this route. Jeremy Corbyn has survived the attempted coup by his MPs but it’s clear the party, its values having been hollowed out from within, is now finished.

In the wake of this it was intriguing to witness the distress of the former Tory MP, Matthew Parris at what has recently transpired in the UK. Mr Parris is now an esteemed political commentator and his columns in The Spectator are very often a delight. This week, he wrote powerfully of feeling ashamed to be British. “These last few months I’ve seen a Britain, specifically an England, that I simply do not like. I’ve seen a nasty side, and seen colleagues and friends pander to it in a way I never thought they would. It has made me feel lonely in my own country, and the experience has touched me irreparably. The reliance of the leaders and opinion leaders of the Leave campaign upon resentment of foreigners, dislike of immigration and — in many cases — hatred of immigrants, has been absolutely disgraceful. It should be a stain upon our conscience.”

When I read this article I immediately thought of another one that he wrote in the days before the referendum on Scottish independence. Then, Mr Parris wrote: “We English have seen our politicians and journalists on their knees on our behalf, even as we’ve watched campaigners for a ‘yes’ vote carelessly tossing out insults and false accusations that have sometimes seemed little short of racist. That ghastly second debate in Glasgow organised by the BBC left me within a hair’s breadth of shouting ‘Oh for pity’s sake, go then. Get out of our hair.’ Our patience and our unionism have been tested. In my case, and I suspect that of many others, both have faltered. Everything has soured.”

Mr Parris, if he had spent a decent amount of time in Scotland during the independence referendum, would have been forced to acknowledge that much of what he believed to be true regarding the character of the campaign was a figment of the over-wrought imaginations of some of his colleagues. He would have learned that many, including myself, were preparing to vote Yes with heavy hearts and with extreme reluctance. Many of us back then had already begun to see the seeds of that which England has become. Mr Parris is not alone in mourning the eradication of decency in England’s political debates.

The second referendum on Scottish independence will arrive sooner than he or I might otherwise have expected. And if we’re both spared until then I would invite him to spend some time here to gain a more authentic impression of how such campaigns can be conducted.