LIZ Truss, the Tory Chief Secretary to the Treasury, took to Twitter to demolish Derek Mackay’s Scottish Budget last Thursday, claiming:

“If you earn £50,000 in Scotland you will be paying a whopping £1500 more tax than someone south of the Border.”

The response – as one tweeter by the name of @bobobalti put it – was perhaps not what she was expecting. A quick glance through some of the thousands of replies revealed that, in Scotland at least, tax cuts for the well-to-do are as popular as a swarm of midges in a tent. “Happy to pay a bit more tax so the vulnerable get what they need,” was a typical response. Another wrote: “Those who can pay should pay – and that includes me!” A businessman who employs 25 people said he would gladly pay more in tax to help fund the level of services Scotland needs. Hundreds more drew Truss’s attention to the fact Scotland has free tuition fees, free prescriptions and free elderly care, as well as a stronger NHS.

One of the core arguments of some Unionists, especially of the Labour variety, is that there is no difference in political culture north and south of the Border. That Scotland and England share identical values. That the idea of Scotland as a more left-wing country is a piece of national mythology. But is this really a myth? Certainly, Scotland – like all other nations – is riven by political and class divisions. There always has been and always will be a strong right-wing current in Scottish society. And Scotland has its share of wealthy businessmen and landowners.

Ten minutes from the Trainspotting territory of Muirhouse, you’ll find private schools with day fees of more than £28,000 a year and a private castle on the market for £5 million.

But that’s only part of the story. Social divisions are as stark in Scotland as they are in other parts of the UK. What makes Scotland different from England is the political response to these divisions. For most of the past hundred years, the political balance has been weighted more strongly to the left in Scotland. Since 1918 the Conservative Party has won 20 General Elections in England and lost just six. In Scotland,the right has won just five General Elections and lost 21.

That pattern is still evident today. A poll at the weekend for The Observer put Labour just one point ahead of the Tories – an incredibly narrow gap considering the shambolic disarray of Theresa May’s government. In Scotland, the latest polls show the Tories as being 40 points behind the left (SNP, Labour and Greens). That’s not a nuance, but a startling divergence of political attitudes north and south of the Border.

If the Scottish Labour leadership had so much as milligramme of political imagination, they would throw their weight behind independence and work with other left-wing forces – including at least sections of the SNP – towards the transformation of Scotland along socialist lines. But they haven’t, and they won’t.

Richard Leonard’s most recent utterances on independence bring back memories of the 1990s when the Conservative Party and its allies in organisations such as the CBI and Institute of Directors warned of economic Armageddon if ever a Scottish Parliament was established. Scottish independence, says the Scottish Labour leader, would be worse than Brexit. It is astonishing that the Scottish leadership today seem to prefer an isolated, insular anti-immigration racist UK steeped in Victorian chauvinism with Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg in the driving seat than an outward-looking, pro-immigration independent Scotland with an in-built left-of-centre majority.

For Scottish Labour, independence should be a natural progression from devolution. After all, no-one today, apart from a few extremists on the right-wing fringes of the Tory party, is calling for Holyrood to be abolished. There is now an almost universal consensus that Scottish control over the NHS, education, local government, transport land and the environment makes sense. It is more transparent, more accountable, more democratic. So why shouldn’t that accountability, transparency and democracy be applied to the wider economy, to defence, to foreign affairs, to employment laws, to energy policy and reserved areas? Why is Labour so feart of Scotland taking the future into its own hands?

The answer, I suspect, is in the figures that I quoted above. Labour believes it needs Scotland to save England from itself. The party may no longer be the dominant force in Scottish politics, but the UK Labour leadership are savvy enough to understand that they will not form a government in Westminster without the support of Scottish MPs, including dozens of SNP representatives. Labour’s other arguments are just a smokescreen. They don’t really believe Scotland would wither and die outside of the UK. But they do really believe that without Scotland, Labour is destined to eternal opposition at Westminster.

That’s a pessimistic view of England. The Tory party may have been dominant for most of the 20th century south of the Border, but Labour won decisively in all three nations of Britain in 1945 – fighting on a manifesto which included public ownership of the Bank of England, the coal mines, the railways, electricity and gas, the iron and steel industry, and declared its ambition “to establish the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain”.

An independent Scotland carrying out sweeping social and economic change would strengthen the forces of the left south of the Border and help to reconnect the England working classes with a radical tradition that stretches back to the Suffragettes, the Chartists, Peterloo, the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and the Levellers.

In the meantime, Labour should pull their heads out of the sand and recognise that Scotland has the potential right now to lead the whole of this island towards a better future, free from the poverty and rampant inequality that has allowed the Little Englanders of the right to flourish.