To most of us, it seems like an eternity ago that David Cameron stood outside Downing Street the morning after the Scottish electorate rejected independence, and declared: ‘The people of Scotland have spoken.

It is a clear result. Now it is time for the United Kingdom to come together and move forward.’

Today, however, six months on, the latest opinion poll suggests that the General Election in May could give Labour and the Tories equal representation in the Commons, with the Nationalists sweeping Scotland to hold 56 out of 59 seats, and the balance of power at Westminster.

Destined for Downing Street? Labour leader Ed Miliband (right) and Nicola Sturgeon (left) of the SNP

Following such a vote, the most plausible outcome would be a Labour minority government led by Ed Miliband, and sustained in power by Nicola Sturgeon and her tartan army.

If this sounds a nightmare scenario for the English people, and indeed for everybody with a head on their shoulders throughout the UK, it is the way events could turn out if the polls are right, and the two left-of-centre parties emerge dominant at Westminster.

Even Labour’s own strategists privately believe they are facing near oblivion north of the border, with Kirkcaldy and its vast 23,000 majority at risk when Gordon Brown relinquishes the seat.

Alex Salmond, almost a broken man last September following his referendum defeat, now intends to take a Commons seat because he sees himself as power-broker in the new parliament.

It is hard to imagine that the SNP, which espouses policies to the left of Miliband, would help David Cameron to remain in Downing Street, even if the Tories win more seats than Labour.

We thus face the bleak prospect of five million Scots determining the fate of almost 60 million people in the rest of the UK.

Nicola Sturgeon would name her price for supporting Labour, which would include a dumper-truck of English taxpayers’ cash to fund the Scottish socialist dream.

Alex Salmond (right with David Cameron), almost a broken man last September following his referendum defeat, now intends to take a Commons seat because he sees himself as power-broker in the new parliament

How on earth has it come about, in a few months, that the referendum which was supposed to silence debate about the UK’s constitution for a generation, today appears instead to have triggered an avalanche?

A string of factors, some blameworthy and others mere accidents of our times, have come together. It was, of course, a mistake for Cameron to agree to hold a Scottish independence referendum.

Throughout the western world, electorates are fragmenting, becoming harder to manage or predict as voters abandon lifetime loyalties to big parties, and instead cherry-pick policies and factions that look pretty on that night’s supper table.

Hundreds of millions of European voters reject governments that promise them balanced budgets, affordable welfare systems, the politics of prudence.

They cling instead to past entitlements and established privileges, heedless of new economic realities. This is what has happened in France and Greece — and could happen to Britain in May.

A large number of British people, and what looks like an overwhelming majority of Scots, claim the right to choose a government that will give them what they want, heedless of whether their dreams can be paid for.

Alex Salmond talked throughout the referendum campaign about how he and his party would spend, but far less about how Scotland would earn its living. He spoke as if Scottish ‘oil wealth’ could make it a new Saudi Arabia.

Since he wove his fairy tale, which was nonsense even then, the oil price has slumped, yet still Scots have rushed to embrace the defeated SNP. It is as if a whole people are rowing lifeboats like madmen to climb aboard the Titanic.

Like the French and Greeks, the Scots seem immune to rational argument about their circumstances and prospects. They simply challenge the Westminster parties to declare who will pay most for their support.

Sturgeon says the current government austerity programme is ‘morally unjustifiable and economically unsustainable’.

She wants another £180 billion in the next parliament, paid by the English for the benefit of the Scots — this, though her nation already receives a disproportionate share of UK public spending.

Ed Miliband has endorsed the proposal of Jim Murphy, Labour’s new leader in Scotland, to use some of the proceeds from its planned mansion tax to fund a thousand new nurses north of the border.

The SNP also seems sure to insist on scrapping the Trident submarine base up there, which would mean the end of the UK’s nuclear deterrent.

Miliband, as prime minister, hopes to stave off another independence referendum by driving through an immediate Scottish Home Rule Bill, which would give Sturgeon many of the powers she wants.

But the grim prospect for English taxpayers is that Miliband himself, and many of his supporters, would be more than happy to support the SNP’s almost Stalinist agenda for raising borrowing and soaking the rich, purely to sustain their Labour and Scottish client votes.

S turgeon would be pushing at an open door, because Miliband favours policies well to the left of the old Blairites.

Miliband, as prime minister, hopes to stave off another independence referendum by driving through an immediate Scottish Home Rule Bill, which would give Sturgeon many of the powers she wants

In Scotland, we see the SNP and Labour outbidding each other in plans for ‘land reform’, which threaten to impose confiscatory ownership policies on the Highlands, heedless of who wins the national election.

The Nationalists are committed to renewable energy self-sufficiency by 2025, which means a drive for subsidised wind farms and hydro-schemes on a scale even more ambitious, costly and crazy than David Cameron has allowed the LibDems to impose on Britain.

None of this is yet inevitable, thank goodness. It is too soon to despair. You may remember that Scrooge in Charles Dickens’s Christmas Carol asked the Ghost fearfully if the doom he had been shown in his dream was bound to befall him.

No, said the Ghost, there is still time to change your ways — as Scrooge did.

But it is deeply dismaying that a substantial part of the population of this island seem eager to endorse the fantasy economics which have become the policies of the SNP and of Labour.

Far from the catastrophe which has unfolded in France having frightened the Left, Ed Miliband appears entirely happy to be cast as Britain’s aspiring Francois Hollande.

There is nothing David Cameron can promise the Scots that will bring them to their senses. Indeed, he has made too many foolish commitments already — first the referendum, then the unqualified promise of increased tax powers for Scotland during his outbreak of panic a week before the September vote.

The Prime Minister said the morning afterwards that the vote ‘will be remembered as a powerful demonstration of the strength and vitality of our ancient democracy’. What tosh! The nation’s hopes for avoiding a political and constitutional disaster in May now rest on a clear majority of the English people voting Tory — there is no side-stepping this bald choice.

If they do so, the dark prospect outlined above can yet be averted. But if the English vote fragments, while the Scots and Labour’s northern dependencies cast ballots for a socialist paradise in numbers opinion polls suggest, then a historic tragedy beckons for the UK.

Should this come, the backlash in the south will prove bitter indeed. If prosperous England is obliged to bankroll improvident Scotland, and also to see the SNP’s demands imposed upon the UK House of Commons, then a storm will break.