Some atavistic loyalty to my old understanding of Gordon Brown as a decent politician made me happy to see him apparently emerging well from the financial crisis.

Some atavistic loyalty to my old understanding of Gordon Brown as a decent politician made me happy to see him apparently emerging well from the financial crisis. In the worst of times, he seemed at last to have found a role.

Yet there was something distasteful about the discovery of political cheerfulness at a time of acute financial meltdown. The citizens of the UK are all going to have to pay for this crisis over many years to come. Short-term financial stability may have been partially recovered, but at a colossal long-term price. This is the last time for irrelevant point-scoring, let alone trimphalist gloating. Certainly not if you aspire to be a global superstatesman for more than the shortest of seasons.

Gordon Brown managed to embrace a spirit of bipartisan statesmanship for a few days. But his deep detestation of the very idea of Scottish independence could not stop him reflecting his inner political fears. He could not retain the mask of a superstatesman. He reverted to petty partisanship, of a particularly negative kind.

There is nonsense at the heart of what he said about Scottish independence. Whoever, whatever, is responsible for the travails of the past few weeks, it obviously cannot be an independent Scotland. Whether Brown likes it or not, one politician who is clean, untainted by any personal ownership of the current crisis, is Alex Salmond. Brown and Alistair Darling may have acted effectively over the past week in terms of crisis management, but the crisis has been coming for years and was at least in part of their making.

The Tory governments between 1979 and 1997 and the New Labour governments from 1997 are to blame for banking regimes characterised by utterly inadequate regulation, a major contributor to our current woes.

And to give Brown's scaremongering a credibility it barely deserves, let's take his argument on. If there had been an independent Scotland over these past 30 years or so, would Scotland have had more stringent banking laws? Would we have had a sovereign wealth fund, built on our oil revenues? Would we be in the eurozone?

The answer to each question is probably yes. Scotland would almost certainly be in a much stronger position than the UK is now. Of course, this is speculation and cannot be proved - but Gordon Brown was indulging in speculation about the policies and capabilities of an independent Scotland.

He cannot know how tough the regulatory regime in such a state would be. And if he says he's talking about the past, not the future, he must address his own record as Chancellor, which might be regarded as one of growing recklessness.

As for the future, independence is not coming tomorrow, or even next year. So why does Gordon Brown suddenly raise his ultimate fear at this precise juncture, when he is supposed to have found a new bipartisanship? Is this diversion based on worries about the Glenrothes by-election? Surely an international statesman with an adequate working majority has more to worry about.

Or does he have such loathing for independence that he cannot resist pushing it to the top of the UK agenda for opportunistic reasons when he has far more pressing matters to confront? Or is he just a bully, who likes to kick something when he perceives it as being vulnerable?

I accept that the normally adept Alex Salmond might have erred a little in his overpraising of countries such as Iceland, Ireland and Norway. But the Irish have not overspent on the scale of the UK government, and the recapitalisation of their banks still does not take their debt to anything UK levels. Their austerity budget of Tuesday was tough and politically courageous.

How do Brown and Darling intend to deal with the gargantuan, long-standing burden they have placed on the UK taxpayer, which itself comes on top of serial overspending for several years?

The Irish have faced up to their responsibilities. Meanwhile, Brown wastes precious time knocking the notion of an independent Scotland. The man has perversely skewed priorities.

If Brown and Darling are serious politicians, they must explain how the massive overspend they have committed to is going to be managed, and put any neurotic worries about independence aside until later. Yet instead of addressing people's all-too-real fears about jobs, pensions and the cost of living, instead of admitting honestly and frankly that the present travails arose amid constitutional settlements and regulatory arrangements for which he is directly responsible, Brown makes smoke.

Some of us can see through it.

We have had enough of greedy bankers who are not subject to rigorous regulation. Many of us have also had enough of cynical politicians who play on fears instead of governing responsibly.