In a recent memoir Michael Ignatieff reflected on his ill-fated spell as leader of the Canadian Liberal Party.

"So much of modern politics is a battle of standing," he observed. "It's not a battle over content, over what you say. It's a battle over your right to be heard at all."

In Ignatieff's case his standing in the Canadian political arena was eroded by attack ads, which mercifully aren't a feature of UK politics. Nevertheless, the Yes campaign could be seen as a sustained attack upon the legitimacy of any Unionist voice.

Framing, as I've argued before, has been crucial. As soon as the referendum discourse was established as "hope versus fear", "positivity" versus "negativity" - which, to their misfortune, Better Together allowed to happen - then the standing of the No campaign was significantly eroded.

Thus no matter how legitimate a Better Together argument was, and it has made many valid points when it comes to a currency union or vague promises of social justice, it was all too easily dismissed by Yes as scaremongering or, on a more benign level, bluffing.

The events of the past week are a case in point. Several financial institutions lined up to say they'd transfer their HQs (if not jobs) to London in the event of a Yes vote. Now we can quibble over the detail and likely impact of this, but it's very difficult to argue that such an outcome would be good for Scotland or its economy.

Alex Salmond found himself in difficulty on this front, not least because for the past couple of decades he has established himself as a friend of Scotland's financial sector.

Not only that, he argued that independence and lower corporation tax would give rise to more Edinburgh HQs, rather than fewer. Suddenly reinventing himself as he's attempted to do as an enemy of corporate interests is less than credible.

Yet it didn't feel that way. As warning after warning emerged from the No campaign's unfortunately termed "shock-and-awe" offensive, at no point did it feel like the palpable hit Better Together clearly anticipated.

Rather the response was a collective shrug of the shoulder - well, Scots seemed to say, they would say that, wouldn't they?

But so clever has been this framing that the legitimacy of certain business voices has been ring-fenced. Thus members of Business for Scotland are held up as more legitimate than CBI Scotland because they're on the "right" side of the argument, unlike anyone in the Square Mile.

Similarly, one Nobel laureate, Joseph Stiglitz, is endlessly cited in support of independence while another, Paul Krugman, is ignored.

Of course in Ignatieff's case his loss of standing was due, at least in part, to his own weaknesses. When his opponents said he was "just visiting" Canada, having spent years in the US and UK, it resonated because many voters felt it to be true.

Likewise accusations that the "Westminster elite", often its own worst enemy, is aloof and self-interested - although exaggerated - strike many Scots as true, while the tendency of financial institutions (step forward, Deutschebank) to undermine perfectly legitimate economic critiques with hyperbole has been a fixture of the long campaign.

Nor is such a strategy particular to one side of the constitutional debate. In the 1980s the Labour Party went out of its way to destroy the legitimacy of Conservative governments in Scotland (even when they had 22 MPs and 30 per cent of the vote). "No mandate!" Labour cried; "Scotland's being used as a guinea pig!" the party claimed. By the 1990s, therefore, it was widely accepted by civic Scotland and a majority of voters that Conservatism had no standing north of the Border.

Oh how they must regret that now, for it has enabled Yes over the past couple of years to tar all Unionists with that Conservative brush. Labour, screamed a succession of puerile press releases, was in cahoots with the austerity Tories or, as Salmond put it to Alistair Darling so eloquently in the second televised debate: "You're in bed with the Tory Party!"

So when the Prime Minister addresses a Unionist rally in Aberdeen this afternoon his voice - his standing - has already been diminished to the point of irrelevance.

Endlessly depicted as a day-tripping interloper by the First Minister, the UK premier finds himself a stranger in the northern part of the country he (half) governs, while Salmond, on similar day trips to London, Liverpool, et al, is afforded a respectful hearing.

And such guilt by association isn't confined to politicians who are, after all, usually fair game, but also extends to the media. As the columnist Bagehot remarked wearily (but accurately) in his most recent Economist despatch, critiques of the independence proposition struggle to be heard because, "after all, Unionist politicians are liars, as are journalists".

No one could suggest the media is perfect, but its steady (and quite deliberate) delegitimisation over the past few years isn't healthy on any level. Witness the First Minister at an international press conference on Thursday, depicting the BBC's political editor as little more than an adjunct to the Treasury and fear factory known as Better Together.

Yesterday yet another flying picket rammed home the message with a banner demonising a journalist for trying to do his job.

"Bias", meanwhile, has been redefined to mean writing anything a supporter of independence doesn't agree with. Objective fact has become a matter of opinion while "balance" has replaced impartiality as the watchword of the state broadcaster Mr Salmond and his supporters so despise. Yet, paradoxically, that editorial approach has consistently favoured the Yes side of the argument, not least when the polls were against them.

For the past few weeks I've lost count of the number of calls I've had from BBC producers asking what side I'm on, with the obvious loss of interest when I make it clear I have no intention of telling the world how I plan to vote in a secret ballot.

Sometimes, probably by accident, I actually get a booking, only to be told the day before that as I'm not aligned to either camp my opinion isn't of any value.

So that's where we've got to: everyone has to choose an allegiance, everyone has to be pigeonholed, and in the quixotic quest for balance, the first casualty of the referendum war is nuance.

And, as if we'd all collectively gone through the looking glass, we now operate in a world where a view is only legitimate if it's reached a particular conclusion. If this sounds sanctimonious, then so be it.

But it's important, particularly looking ahead to the end of this week.

Whatever the outcome, Scotland will be a divided country, and in no small part due to the framing I've described above.

And while it's all very well for the First Minister to glibly assert that "Team Scotland" will come together after a Yes vote (only the most churlish would disagree), at the same time the campaign he leads has ensured the gap needing bridged is all the wider.