MARX might have recognised some cadaveric spasms evident on the edges of Scotland's independence debate. 'The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living', said communism's ideologue of the failings of France's 1848 Revolution.

Thrust into unchartered change, the French abandoned liberal aspirations and instead gave way to Louis Napoleon's Second Empire dictatorship.

This week, sectarianism in Scotland re-emerged as an issue, this time amid warnings to a Government expert group that it was bleeding into the constitutional question.

Read more: Church and community leaders warn of 'subtle sectarianism' in Scotland's independence debate

Assumptions, church leaders claimed, are being made about political positions on grounds of faith and cultural affiliations, a 'subtle sectarianism' they said. As if four centuries of the Scottish Reformation's legacy had never existed (and indeed been a key catalyst in Ireland's history), the report gave fresh legs to the notion that Scottish politics had become 'Ulsterised'.

Not quite the Year of Revolution but Scotland is in a state of constitutional flux, its unions with London and Brussels unravelling. Centuries of certainties are being rolled back and with little by way of recognisable road maps there is a compulsion amongst the politically desperate on the edges to grasp into the past to make sense of the present. Sectarianism has become one of those touchstones.

Read more: Senior Labour figure's 'sectarianism' claims condemned by bishops and secularists

In the run-up to the 2014 Referendum its only real traces were warnings by George Galloway that independence meant a neo-Knoxian Scotland with institutionalised anti-Catholicism. Mr Galloway may have found comfort in 1950s reference points but it killed his credibility in Scotland.

But as the prospect of a second referendum looms, a new willingness to cast aspersions of religious bigotry at the political 'other' has gained traction.

Amid the fringes of the Yes movement the two million who voted to remain in the UK are routinely associated with the Orange Order, an organisation with members who see the SNP as the Jacobite wing of the IRA and its supporters as Marxist Republicans.

The world view too readily ascribed to supporters of the country's two big football teams, rightist Rangers and lefty Celtic, makes that notion of new religious tribalism an easier one to punt. (Assumptions of the latter's support for independence caused some consternation amongst credible Labour figures in the build-up to September 2014.)

And it isn't just the lunatic fringes. A prominent figure within Scottish Labour last week accused the SNP of stirring sectarianism on the basis of the BBC's interest in a Catholic MP wearing ashes on her forehead on Ash Wednesday of all days.

The Herald:

Irish Catholics were indeed more willing to support independence than not but erosion of loyalty to Labour within that community has occurred over decades and is evidence of sectarianism's decline rather than an upsurge. Similarly the voting patterns of those of a Church of Scotland background were not dissimilar to the population at large.

Scotland is at a watershed. What a paradox that at a time when centuries-old sectarianism is withering in a few social and geographic pockets, fear of what is ahead is fuelling efforts to resuscitate it.

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies said Marx. Groucho.