Scotland’s Sunday Herald today backs SNP and declares itself for separation. Will other papers join them?

There is a difference between backing the SNP and eloquently expressing a firm commitment to the cause of an independent Scotland, as the Sunday Herald has so nobly done.

The conflation of the two is of course a centrepiece of the Unionist media disinformation narrative.

It goes hand-in-glove with their attempt to inculcate the risible notion that the referendum is a vanity project of  Alex Salmond that no Scots, save a few malcontents, ever wanted.

Paul Kavanagh at weegingerdug put it beautifully when he offered that the question the Unionists want voters to read is: “Should Scotland be an alecsammin country?”

The SNP will one day fragment, probably sooner than later, when the glue that binds it’s disparate factions (achieving an independent Scotland) is dissolved.

There is a very real sense in which the policies put forward by the present Scottish Government for a post independence Scotland are irrelevant to the question of independence itself.

In 2016 after Scotland becomes independent, there will be a general election to choose an new government. At that time the People will get the last word on who will rule Scotland.

It may be the SNP if it holds together, or some other party or coalition of parties. The social, economic, and political, direction of iScotland will be determined by that government and subsequent governments carrying out their mandate granted to them by the People.

First Ministers come and go, and “Alex Salmon is mortal”, as Jim Sillars puts it, “but Scotland is immortal”.

Neither the SNP nor Alex Salmond are on the ballot. We need encourage the vital cohort of low information and unengaged voters who will decide this contest, to consider that this is at bottom a simple choice:

Whether to be masters in our own house or lodgers in someone else’s.

Fraser Nelson has already made that choice, we need not follow him there.