I OFTEN failed to recognise the version of England that was held up for contempt and revulsion by some in the Yes camp during the independence referendum. In this version, England had lost its moral compass and had allowed itself to be ruled by baser instincts informed by greed, instant gratification and antipathy to the plight of people in distressed countries. While this descent into madness was supposed to be occurring, Scotland, on the other hand, was holding itself to a much more virtuous model of humanity.

In this country we were welcoming to refugees and immigrants and seeking to provide a haven for those fleeing persecution and torture. We sought to stitch a sense of fairness and equality into the fabric of the nation even as England’s threads of decency were unravelling. We didn’t simply desire to grant equality to minorities; we actively set up a posse to hunt them down and drag them, weeping with gratitude, into this Scottish dawn of enlightenment and tolerance. Everything we felt that England wasn’t we became. This was why we needed to be independent, some of us convinced ourselves, because we were better than them and we were impelled by a higher moral purpose.

It was reminiscent of the way Scotland football fans turned themselves into Franciscan friars in the 1990s as England’s hooligan supporters laid waste to those communities on the Mediterranean coast hosting their team. So docile and friendly did the Tartan Army become that at one stage I wanted its members simply to go ahead and wreck the joint … just for old times’ sake, you understand.

I have travelled throughout England in the past three years to report on the attitudes of its people both before and after their two big constitutional convulsions: the referendum on Scottish independence and the referendum on membership of the European Union.

This is not a country of frightened racists deluding themselves into believing that Britannia can rule the waves once more if only we could eject perfidious Johnny Foreigner from our company. This was still mild and reasonable England, welcoming, friendly and generous.

Nor had Scotland become a land flowing with the milk of human kindness where the beasts of the field were all pals again and swords were beaten into ploughshares. It was just that, for many on the Yes side who hadn’t previously considered the constitutional question, it seemed that Scotland’s time to become its own nation once more had come and that it had come at a time when England was turning in on itself and looking for the usual scapegoats for its economic woes.

Meanwhile, the UK model of government, which had hardly changed since the dawn of universal suffrage in 1928, simply wasn’t working and probably never had. Power and influence remained concentrated in the hands of a tiny cadre of individuals whose control was embedded in privileges won after the Battle of Agincourt. Against this and the ability of rich people and corporate entities to lobby governments and avoid taxes, it was becoming clear that we weren’t all in this together and that the UK Labour party, which had delivered the 20th century’s most profound social improvements, was simply in a state of exhaustion and had given up the ghost for an easier life.

Its great northern communities, those which the Conservative Government patronised by calling them “power-houses”, have also come to realise that Westminster – government by the few for the few – has cut them adrift. In the north, industries that had sustained communities for centuries were destroyed by Margaret Thatcher. In the south, entire urban communities were cleared from inner-city London to make way for a city in the sky for the exclusive use of the world’s money-launderers and gun-runners.

Devolution and the rise of the SNP have acted as lightning conductors for political disaffection and the sense of disenfranchisement. In England, there were no means by which those neglected and forgotten communities could register their sense of alienation; no conduit for their rage. And then along came Ukip, a party of atavistic scavengers who fed off the anger and the sense of betrayal. If the Westminster Labour Party had not been asleep on the job Ukip would have lasted about as long as its lumpen, shaven-headed brethren in the British National Party.

In Jeremy Corbyn, Labour finally, has a leader who understands this. And it’s why his shadow loomed large over the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham this week. The Conservatives claim not to be worried in the slightest about Mr Corbyn but their body language and the sinister tone of the conference would suggest otherwise. And, of course, there were those polls at the start of the week putting Labour and its leader, the man whom the right-wing press would have us believe was not fit to tie his own shoe-laces, let alone anyone else’s, ahead of the Tories. Under him the next General Election would probably be too soon, but what about the one after that? Something would have to be done.

Thus we had a glimpse of the sheer ruthlessness and unbridled thirst for absolute power that drives this party: let’s get to those Labour voters who have temporarily pitched their tents in the Ukip camp before Mr Corbyn manages to bring them back to the fold, they said. Let’s talk the language of fear and loathing and resentment and division. Let’s talk the language of Enoch Powell. Who cares if the social consequences are catastrophic? If the streets do run with blood, we’ll just blame it on multiculturalism. Good old Enoch Powell; he jolly well did know a thing or two after all.

Don’t you want a doctor who’s pure and British? Shouldn’t we have a workforce that is authentically British? And why should our armed forces be bound by the straitjacket of international law?

The Tories, however, have made a rod for themselves. Soon, it might not be enough to be authentically British; you might have to look like it and sound like it too. Where disputes arise in places of work it might also come down to birth certificates and how many generations of Britishness are in your family. Adopted? Well, only as long as you were born in a “good” or “well-behaved” foreign country that is similar to ours.

And then, once you’ve all signed up to an authentic Britain for the authentic British, we’ll protect your jobs and increase your wages and all that other stuff that Mr Corbyn’s been promising. But at least they’ll be proper British jobs for proper British wages.

With her freshly-unveiled vision of a dystopian, uglier Britain, Theresa May has provided the introduction for the next White Paper on Scottish Independence. Let’s hope Nicola Sturgeon doesn’t let it gather too much dust on the shelves of Bute House.