THERE was much unkind commentary last week about the Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Danny Alexander, getting his last outing in the TV Budget programmes before he joins the dole queue after the General Election.

His Inverness seat is theoretically safe with a majority of nearly 9,000. But no seat is safe in Scotland from the SNP terminators.

It's hard to believe that the Liberal Democrats returned nearly twice as many seats as the SNP in the 2010 general election: 11 against the Nationalists' six. It was a different world.

Nick Clegg's vainglorious conference claim that the Liberal Democrats will halt the SNP advance in May - and give Alex Salmond another failure to write a book about - may look semi-plausible in historic terms. But on the basis of the recent opinion polls it sounds like pathological detachment from reality.

Last week's Survation poll showing the SNP apparently up another two points to 47% against Labour's 26% and the LibDems on 4% may seem merely to have confirmed what other polls have been saying. And it did. But it coincided with a pre-Budget news cycle in which the SNP march should have been paused if not reversed.

Nicola Sturgeon hasn't been having a particularly good press recently with problems over the NHS, policing, Gers and her non-appearance at the Afghan war commemorations. Labour had hoped that the focus on the economy in the week before the Chancellor's Budget speech would chip away at the SNP's lead.

After all, hasn't Nicola Sturgeon admitted that the SNP got it wrong over the oil price? She has, though she insists everyone else did too. And hasn't the SNP's commitment to fiscal autonomy or devolution max been shown to be a ruinous risk comparable to independence itself?

Labour has been dusting down many of the economic arguments used against the Yes campaign, presumably in the hope of consolidating the Unionist vote. They've started to sound almost like the Barnett Party, extolling the virtues of the long-derided formula for calculating Scottish public spending.

And it is undoubtedly true that, if you abolished Barnett tomorrow and left the Scottish Parliament reliant solely on taxation raised in Scotland, then there would be a budgetary shortfall, not least because of the collapse of the oil price.

Labour is understandably perplexed that it can't seem to get this relatively simple message across to voters. Jim Murphy thought he had the SNP bang to rights when oil tumbled to half its pre-referendum highs. But it hasn't worked that way.

The Scottish Government seems to be holding the line with its much more complex argument that the deficit numbers would work if only Scotland had the power to introduce growth policies, increase borrowing and generally run things better. Some fairly heroic assumptions there, but they seem to be getting the benefit of the doubt.

Part of Labour's difficulty is the inept presentation of its message. Last week they unveiled their latest General Election image depicting a bomb with "SNP Barnett Tax Bombshell" above it. This is of course a steal from the Tory election poster of 1992 which warned of "Labour's Tax Bombshell". They might as well have made the strapline: hey, look, we're just like the Tories when it comes to tax and public spending.

Labour's response to the Chancellor's omni-payoff budget, rewarding select groups of key Tory voters, did little to help Labour's drive in Scotland. The Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls said he wouldn't change anything very much in George Osborne's Budget, except a little bit more capital spending here and a tad fewer tax breaks there. But basically we're all in the same deficit reduction boat.

Labour's rhetorical difficulty arises from its need to sound less socialist in England - to appease the Tory vote in the south-east - and more socialist in Scotland. This creates a kind of ideological schizophrenia most apparent in the political psychology of the Scottish Labour leader, Jim Murphy.

Here is a right-wing, Blairite moderniser who has had to somehow appear like a left-wing social democrat in Scotland. He's good. But he's a bit like a convincing female impersonator who gets all the clothing right but still has that tell-tale stubble when you look closely. Voters are very intolerant of inauthenticity in most democracies, but in Scotland with its turncoat political culture, it is positively toxic.

So, with only weeks to go to the election, nothing seems to be able to dent the SNP poll figures and I admit that I am running out of new things to say about it. That might sounds like an odd admission from a political commentator, but it tells you something important: that the Nationalists' political ascendancy is becoming a new normal.

The momentum that built up behind the SNP after the referendum has continued giving Nicola Sturgeon that sense of being on an effortless coast to victory. Labour morale is flagging even before the General Election campaign has formally begun. Jim Murphy is starting to sound like a deluded prophet crying in the wilderness. Across Scotland, in the public sector, trades unions, universities, people are already starting to behave as if they were in another country.

Now, Unionists and Westminster commentators understandably find this perverse. How could Scotland have voted decisively to remain in the Union only six months ago and yet now be preparing to deliver a landslide for the party of separation? But the indyref paradox is not that difficult to resolve.

Scots were exercising their celebrated financial prudence on September 18. The remarkable thing about the independence referendum was that so many actually voted Yes despite the risk of financial ruin. That was because something else was at work.

A powerful sense of national solidarity persuaded many, especially working-class, Scots to vote in a way that was not financially rational in the conventional sense. It's the same solidarity that used to motivate industrial workers to go on strike even though they realised that they would almost certainly lose out financially.

Politics is always about morality and the referendum became a contest between competing visions of society: between the competitive/market morality of the UK and the communitarian/social democratic ethic that seems to appeal to many Scottish voters.

And yes, I know that polls say many Scots think there is too much immigration and too many people on benefits. This is a different point: it is the reason why there is no party of the right in Scotland. The Scottish sense of national identity is bound up with what might be called the myth of egalitarianism. And it is a very powerful one.

Last week, Edinburgh University published the results of one of the largest opinion surveys conducted since the referendum. It suggested that, "don't-knows" excluded, 69% of Scottish voters think Scotland is going to become independent at some stage. This wasn't a measure of support for the SNP or independence. It was about something more profound than that.

Even non-Nationalists now seem to believe Scotland will become an independent country; it just seems that there is an inexorable process taking Scotland out of the Union. This is both a measure of the failure of the supporters of the Union to capitalise on their referendum victory and the extent to which Scotland's political mindset has changed.

I think therefore I am, said Rene Descartes. Well, increasingly Scots seem to think they are already independent, and as a cognitive behaviour therapist often say, what you think very often is what you become.