IN THIS, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and just a few days before the fifth Holyrood election, it’s worth asking a rather hackneyed columnist question: “Stands Scotland where it did?”

Alas, and in spite of considerable hyperbole, I can’t help feeling it remains a country almost afraid to know itself. Ever since the creation of the Scottish Parliament back in 1999 we’ve been relentlessly informed by politicians and commentators that “things will never be the same again”.

Yet the same again is precisely how things have usually turned out. Of course on the surface it looks very different: the SNP in government (and likely to remain so) at Holyrood and 56 nationalist MPs at Westminster, but that is to mistake transient electoral success for something more profound.

Almost 20 years ago it was Labour who ruled the roost with 56 Scottish Labour MPs in the House of Commons. But were things really that different? Both parties preached radicalism and transformative change while practising centrist big-tent politics with telegenic leaders. Constitutional change was presented by both as a panacea: first devolution, then independence.

The fundamentals, however, remain pretty much the same: a Scottish economy neither particularly good nor particularly bad, high levels of inequality and politicians who talk big but deep down don’t have a clue how to address any of these problems beyond the political escapism of “more powers”. Stands Scotland where it did? In essence, yes.

The next five years won’t be that different, there will be further redundant talk of everything being “radical” and “progressive” when in truth it’s the sort of cautious middle-management we got from Labour and the Lib Dems between 1999-2007. And even if the Scottish Conservatives do come second on Thursday it won’t alter the status quo: every Thursday afternoon the First Minister will still spit “Tory!” at anyone wasting their time attempting to hold her to account.

At the SNP’s manifesto launch Nicola Sturgeon was honest enough to admit her next government would be about “doing things that we didn’t previously think we’d do”. Indeed, on education the First Minister displays a whiff of Michael Forsyth (standardised testing and more autonomy) and on local government – as STV’s Bernard Ponsonby put it to her last week – a hint of Margaret Thatcher (rate capping).

When the Tories proposed these things, they were accused by Labour and the SNP of being anti-Scottish, but now this ideological potpourri is presented, naturally, as standing up for Scotland. Having long chastised Scottish Labour for losing its soul and drifting to the right, Nationalists now switch seamlessly to attacking Kezia Dugdale's proposals to raise tax to spend on public services.

Traits condemned in New Labour – triangulation, spin and ideological pragmatism – are lauded in the SNP. Aren’t they clever?

Labour-to-SNP converts, meanwhile, line up to tell journalists covering the election that they’re “sick of being lied to” by Labour, but why have they aligned themselves to a party that demonstrably tells even bigger lies: independence will make everyone rich! Poverty will no longer exist! The rest of the UK (and indeed the rest of the world) will give us everything we want!

The survey evidence always highlights the same contradictions: voters are concerned about inequality but don’t want to pay higher taxes; they want politicians to be bolder but won’t vote for them if they actually are; they like Labour or Tory policies but not if they’re proposed by Labour or Tory politicians. The electorate, therefore, inevitably gets the politicians they deserve; with such woolly and unrealistic expectations, is it any wonder parties serve up big dollops of fantasy come election time?

This is by no means confined to Scotland, indeed on Thursday voters across the UK will be taking part in one election or another, and again on June 23. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Scottish nationalists, Brexiteers and Corbynistas have much in common, all utterly certain of what’s - and who’s - wrong but utterly vacuous when challenged to produce a coherent alternative. But like any party or movement that begins with a conclusion (independence/Brexit/socialism) and then works backwards, intellectual contortions are inevitable.

Their respective supporters don’t much care, too busy seeing what what they want to see, hearing what they want to hear, hypercritical of their opponents but strangely forgiving of their own tribe’s frequent lapses and lack of detail. Don’t get me wrong, I can well understand this anti-politics mood, but for those of that mindset it makes little sense to exempt one party or leader from that analysis. It’s a truism that all politicians lie, but some lie more than others.

Meanwhile enthusiasts for independence promote a “new” media that is more biased, even less financially secure and of poorer quality than the old mainstream media it seeks to replace, while others debase the point of satire by taking aim at everyone except the dominant party in Scotland. But then Scotland and, increasingly, sections of the UK are trapped in a quagmire of nationalist identity politics where talk – on all sides – is cheap and improvements always on the horizon or conveniently impeded by an “other”.

Lest anyone think this is yet another #SNPbad rant, let me make it crystal clear that they’re all, to varying degrees, as bad as each other. Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon have simply continued the grievance-fuelled political narrative begun by Scottish Labour in the 1980s and ‘90s, while at Westminster the Conservatives play their own cynical game, promoting its peculiar brand of fantasy economics while stacking up debt and contriving everything to make life difficult for Labour.

And when it comes to Scotland, it doesn’t matter whether David Cameron actually told Nick Clegg that he didn’t care about post-referendum events north of the border, for it had the ring of truth. And why should Mr Cameron care? What could he possibly do that would make any tangible difference? He simply delegates Scotland to Ruth Davidson while retreating further into the English nationalist politics that is the logical extension of English Votes for English Laws. The Prime Minister sacrificed Unionism for short-term expediency long ago.

The other week, while attempting to have a quiet drink with a friend, someone I didn’t know volunteered the opinion that my political analysis was “totally deluded”, and in weaker moments I wonder if he didn’t have a point. For increasingly, as I observe party political conferences, speeches and manifesto launches, I sometimes feel I’m inhabiting a parallel universe in which a politician saying something over and over again, however preposterous or unrealistic, actually makes it so.

Others have made this point but it’s worth repeating: Scotland is a deeply conservative country, which is why the SNP’s steady-as-she-goes approach to the last nine years will likely produce another thumping majority this Thursday. Some will no doubt venture that things will never be the same again but they’d be deluding themselves. What was it Macduff said? “Too nice and yet too true!”