NOBODY I know has ever seen anything like it.

A referendum campaign? But maybe that's the wrong word. A campaign means politicians persuading people to vote this way or that. What's been happening in Scotland, in these last six astonishing months, is people persuading politicians.

Somewhere in May or April, a movement began. It didn't start with voters listening to speeches on TV or reading newspaper columnists. It began, apparently, in kitchens and lounge bars, on cold pavements where smokers light up together, in hospital canteens where nurses get a bite before they go on shift. It came out of arguments between fathers and sons, from the girl in the beauty salon who broke the rule about no politics with customers, from the cab driver who pulled over to cross-question a passenger with interesting labels on his bag: "How did you find Norway? D'ye not think Scotland …?"

The Yes campaign set up their stall, and waited for "nationalists". They wondered who all those folk on the other side of the street were. When they found that these were citizens who distrusted Alex Salmond and would never vote SNP but didn't see how they could vote No in the referendum, the Yes activists changed their campaign and widened it.

In the same way, Nicola Sturgeon - although she has been the star performer over these months - did not win over restive Labour voters by "targeting" them. Instead, she saw in early summer where they were heading and raced over to put herself in their way. The Yes campaigners didn't collect a following. They followed, trying to track and keep pace with these impetuous thousands who were making their own minds up.

That's not to say that the "mibbes aye" voters are deaf to influence. But they react angrily to threats that scunner them, rather than gratefully to bribes and promises from either camp.

People want to believe that Westminster's threat to throw independent Scotland out of the common currency is just bluff. I know a certain Argyll bus driver who asks each new passenger how he or she is voting. "Don't know? Then vote Yes because, the day after, you and I will still have the pound in our pocket and our pensions safe and sound. No big changes at all!"

Everything must change, so that everything can stay the same? On a Bus Party referendum journey round Scotland, that wasn't the mood we found: there was passionate hope for designs of a new Scotland, for a huge redistribution of power to local communities, for a "republic of equals" (a man in Wick), for a Scotland where "we stop living in a blame and dependency culture and take full responsibility for ourselves" (Montrose). But that was in late May. And now, while that current for confident reform is still flowing, a new and very startling tributary has joined it.

What that Argyll bus driver means is that you can also see independence as a way of securing what you already have. And it's a thought which may well explain the late surge in Yes intentions. In most referendums, many prospective Yes voters lose their nerve in the last week or so and revert to the status quo. But in Scotland, this process seems to be turning itself inside out. Professor Alan Renwick, expert on referendums, has a sonorous phrase for this: "Reversion Point Reversal."

In other words, the Yes campaign has actually begun to capture the status quo from the No campaign. "Vote for independence to protect the Scottish NHS, the financial resources of Scotland's education, the money for farmers and infrastructure projects which comes from the European Union, even perhaps the limited constitutional powers of Holyrood." Whereas No, once posing as a defence of "this splendid old Union of ours", suddenly looks like a vote for the aggressive gutting of Scotland's public and social institutions and the imposition of a London ideology detested by almost everyone in Scotland. So playing safe means losing your nerve and defecting from Camp No.

And that's more or less my own track towards casting a Yes vote "for an independent country". First, anxiety over Scotland's huge problems: urban prosperity contrasting with half-abandoned towns doing little trade but heroin, patches of piteously bad health, gross inequalities, great potential wealth siphoned off to pay British trade debts. Then awareness that London's remoteness and arrogance, coupled with the impenetrable but ineffectual power-blocks dominating Scottish society, ensured that nothing would be done about these problems.

Next, for me, came the "devolution decades" when Scotland's cultural and political life began to diverge dramatically from the "British" model. The Iraq war and Tony Blair showed me that the UK was no longer an independent country; the referendum campaign revealed that many Scots were breaking out of disempowerment and heading for independence as a gateway to making the big choices: "what sort of Scotland?"

The weakness of Better Together, its short-lived bluffs and lies but above all its inability to set the Union to any sort of music, was the most unexpected feature of the campaign. Sure, an establishment was fighting desperately to keep its power - a different matter. But Better Together seemed not to believe in itself. And it dawned on me that independence for this small, compact nation was, more than anything, just common sense.

Finally, in the last month or so, I saw that a No vote was not for any status quo. It was a licence for irreversible changes for the worse, for thrusting Scotland into new depths of dependency. And, last week, in the London panic over one opinion poll, I saw the inner decay, the brain-deadness, of the United Kingdom.

The tabloid abuse was routine. But how could commentators and leader-writers in The Observer and The Independent, gospel-sheets of high-minded English left-liberalism, use the words "atavistic ethnic nationalism" (or "atavistic ethnic chauvinism" in the Independent's case) - exactly the words used by white settlers in Kenya about the Kikuyu 60 years ago, or by Raj officers about Indian demonstrators?

Under the democratic skin, it seems, ancient imperial reflexes still throb. If there is a Yes, the Scottish Government will invite opposition leaders to join "Team Scotland" in the independence negotiations. But if there is a No, there will be a deafening howl of triumphant hatred from an opposition and its media who have had the fright of their lives: "Salmond to the scaffold!"

No, he should make for the TV studio instead. There is something he should say to the near-half of the voters who chose Yes.

He should say it not just to "nationalists" but to the whole wide alliance of non-political Scottish people, who became the most impressive political movement Scotland has seen for two centuries.

He should say: "This is not the end but a beginning. You have changed Scotland for ever, and its sense of what is possible. Now, live and work in the first years of this new, better country which you have created, and the rest will come in its own time."