Scotland is plagued by a Parliament of morons. The vast majority of opposition MSPs are people who were directly and personally rejected by the voters – usually with good reason – but who were parachuted into lucrative jobs anyway by their parties.

And yesterday, as Theresa May formally began the process that will tear Scotland out of the EU without its permission, those opposition MSPs queued up to demonstrate their pettiness, ignorance and stupidity.

Jackson Carlaw (Conservative), for example, could find nothing of more importance to tweet about than a cretinous playground jibe about SNP MPs not being recognised by the UK public on the ironically-named gameshow Pointless.

We suspect most people would struggle to name more than 20 of the Tories’ 330-odd MPs, let alone Jackson Carlaw, perhaps precisely because he was watching afternoon television on such a momentous day rather than doing any work.

Next up was Angry Adam Tomkins, who trailed in a very distant 3rd place in Glasgow Anniesland with just 14% of the vote, yet finds himself in Parliament anyway.

Tomkins was gloating over a front-page article from Scotland’s least credible newspaper, which misleadingly span some polling data from NatCen Social Research (NCSR) about what Scottish voters wanted and expected from Brexit.

NCSR’s own Professor John Curtice caveated the poll by pointing out that it was not only up to two months old, but also a Scottish sub-sample of a UK group whose respondents are picked “entirely at random”, rather than scientifically weighted to be representative of the population as normal polls are.

But even within those parameters, the Express’s screaming story about how Scots didn’t want a separate Brexit deal managed to leave out a pretty major piece of data.

That is, a clear majority of Scots believe Scotland should be able to stay in the EU even though the UK as a whole voted to leave. They don’t want a separate Scottish deal for Brexit, they want Brexit not to happen to Scotland at all.

In other words, the Express’s headline and Tomkins’ gleeful crowing over it are both based on an interpretation of the poll data which could scarcely be any more diametrically opposed to the reality. Most Scots in fact want the most separate Brexit deal possible – not to have ANY Brexit.

The Tories weren’t alone in their idiocy, though. Hapless former Scottish Labour leader Iain Gray wanted a piece of the action too:

Astonishingly, several Labour MSPs had spent the week dragging out the absurd and endlessly-discredited 1979 “stab in the back” myth yet again – including Anas Sarwar, a list member who hadn’t even bothered giving voters a chance to reject him before sneaking into Holyrood through the back door, and who wasn’t even born in 1979.

(Sarwar’s circumventing of the electorate is, of course, entirely in keeping with his previously expressed dismissal of Holyrood as “not a democratic place”. His presence in it was dictated by the Labour Party to the Scottish people, who were denied any opportunity to refuse.)

Their leader, meanwhile, was setting new records for making a fool of herself.

The assumption proved to be extremely wide of the mark.

And the pathetic, ill-informed partisan sniping looked even worse when it transpired that Carwyn Jones had actually spent the day directly opposing Dugdale’s position by saying that Westminster should NOT block a second indyref, and should respect both the Scottish Parliament’s call for a Section 30 order and its chosen timing:

The imbecile parade didn’t end there. The grim Tory barrel-scraping Annie Wells – the MSP with the tiniest mandate in Scotland, having won a pitiful 1,769 votes in Glasgow North East in 2015 and just 2,062 in Glasgow Provan in 2016, but who was forced on the unwilling people of Scotland regardless – appeared on TV to inform the nation that she didn’t respect the sovereignty of the Scottish Parliament she sat in anyway.

(For good measure she also threw in a rendition of the flat-out lie that voters in the 2014 independence referendum knew there was going to be an EU referendum.)

The less said about the Lib Dems the better, though we can’t help noting that their idea of the most pressing thing they could be doing for their constituents yesterday was forcing Keith Brown to apologise for… well, we’re not sure for what, exactly.

(Brown’s crime was to have attempted to bring billions of pounds in investment to Scotland, a deal undermined and eventually scuppered by the hysterical reactions of, particularly, the Lib Dems and the Times. Having first demanded that it shouldn’t have happened, then actively sabotaged it, they then furiously raged at Brown for its failure, even though Scotland was no worse off than it had started.)

And we’re not even going to talk about David Coburn’s appearance on today’s edition of Good Morning Scotland, for the sake of everyone’s mental health.

But there’s a point to all this.

The woeful state of this hamfisted, intelligence-insulting clown show of an opposition – who wouldn’t in any other sphere of life be trusted to go out and collect a sandwich order, let alone formulate the legislation of a country – is transparent to anyone with an even remotely functioning brain. And yet, it’s done nothing to bring about any significant transformation in the polls.

A growing number of nationalists believe that independence is now both inevitable and imminent, on the superficially rational and reasonable grounds that any sane person could identify it as the only possible escape from the catastrophe that Brexit is going to be. That is a hugely dangerous attitude.

We live, if anyone needed reminding, in an age of post-rational politics. Donald Trump is the President of the USA and Boris Johnson is the foreign secretary. Substantial numbers of people still exist – incredible as it may seem in the face of the evidence – who believe that a UK Conservative government will bestow meaningful extra powers on the Scottish Parliament which would enable it to do any good (even though that would self-evidently reflect well on the SNP and badly on the Tories).

The independence movement will never get a better chance of securing victory than this. It starts from a position of near-parity in the polls, and with the facts heavily on its side. Staying in the EU as an independent country offers the best – indeed, the only – chance of avoiding an economic apocalypse as a result of Brexit, and is also the repeatedly-expressed preference of the largest section of the population.

But make no mistake – this is a fight that can still be lost. Even when up against spectacular morons like those above, we’re still behind. A very great deal of hard work lies ahead to turn that around. For Scotland’s sake, we better all be ready for it.