ALEX SALMOND’s recent call for a new referendum on Scottish independence as an “inevitable” demand of the Scottish people underlines some of the problems facing the Scottish left. Populist nationalism needs to be addressed.

To a large extent the Yes vote in 2014 was motivated by anger at austerity, with Scotland’s poorest areas voting most heavily for independence. Today big sections of the population, desperate to escape from the politics of David Cameron and George Osborne, still see an “independent” Scotland as the only way forward.

But, as the Communist Party pointed out in 2014, the independence put forward by the SNP would have delivered Scotland straight into the hands of the EU troika. Scotland’s deficit, on the basis of oil at 2014 prices, would have been twice that permitted under the obligatory EU Fiscal Compact — and monetary policy would still have been controlled from London. Since then oil prices have collapsed and the size of the independence deficit doubled.