IN a corner of the Twitter universe, last week was the week of Alistair Darling's big mumble, the moment when New Statesman magazine decided that the former Chancellor had not endorsed a description of the SNP as near-Nazis, but instead - if anyone can do such a thing - mumbled inaudibly in the vital moment.

This was unfortunate for two or three reasons. First off, it was the week in which Ed Miliband, Darling's leader, had spent some time talking about zombie politics. Secondly, it came within hours of Better Together folk promoting the idea that their chairman had indeed adopted the idea that "blood and soil" nationalism is at stake in Scotland's referendum.

Thirdly, the little affair forced the New Statesman into a "clarification" that made the publication appear complicit, stupid, or both. The charge wasn't minor. In the trade in insults that characterises one part of the independence debate, the equating of nationalism with fascism, while an old favourite, comes with a premium. Pressed, the Staggers could only blame a "transcription error" and change its tune.

In a matter of hours, those who had been happy to believe the former Chancellor found fascistic traits in the Scottish Government and seemed not to know their Blut from their Erde. Darling, they reported, hadn't really said anything at all.

In the week of the Queen's Speech, "inaudible mumble" could pass as one of those handy metaphors for the relationship between Labour politics and principled eloquence. Labour's invocation of zombies would do just as well - were it not for the fact that any attempt to feed on living brains could mean mass starvation on Opposition benches. Voters alienated by mumbling living dead? Now why could that be?

Partly, perhaps, because the modern way of "doing" Westminster politics makes all those involved appear to look and sound as though they have just tottered from the grave lacking any control over their actions, or their mumbling. Party managers appear to prefer zombies to any alternatives. Party leaders, Labour leaders in particular, seem to exist at the whim of a few incantations. They make the living dead look like gadabouts.

Miliband's idea of leadership now amounts to standard practice. Find a few beans to throw at Jack and his partner, but make sure that the beanstalk doesn't give them big ideas. Labour's response to the Queen's Speech thus became the usual claim that inequality can be fixed if you ameliorate the worst abuses of zero-hours contracts, or freeze utility bills for a while, or cause rapacious landlords to pause. Labour has policies aplenty for effects, not for causes. Beyond that, the party and its leader mumble.

Responding to a barely credible Queen's Speech, Miliband seemed for a few minutes to recognise a problem. Voters, even those who can be bothered to vote, aren't buying it. Within the minority who turn out, the serial nonsenses of Ukip are more entertaining in England and Wales than anything Labour has to say. That the Tories and LibDems also sit beneath the pall of contempt simply involves the Opposition in a game of diminishing returns.

The vast majority of those who give legitimacy to governments are alienated. To call them apathetic is a mistake. There is a difference between not caring about politics as it affects your life and refusing to care about those who consider politics a freemasonry. The disdain is specific. At the start of his speech last week, Miliband seemed to recognise as much.

On behalf of Westminster's walking corpses, he asserted that there is "a battle for relevance, legitimacy and standing in the eyes of the public". Too true.

But then the Labour leader returned, as though by voodoo command, to the usual speech claiming virtue for his minor measures against the paltry offering - and in this Miliband was quite right - proposed by the Coalition. For most voters in the British islands nothing much lies between the Westminster parties when it comes to earned contempt. Politics is understood as a game of keeping the many in their places while a few, some of them born to the trade, preserve the guild of party hacks.

The many don't do well from this state of affairs. When they notice that their lives are bad or getting worse, nevertheless, they are given another tale of "reform", long overdue and always due any day. They are told to find their woes in foreigners, the sponging poor, or the "underperforming" schools that didn't teach them nothing right. Anything will do. They are thrown chump, as the shark fishermen say.

People seem to be catching on. For Miliband, as for Cameron and Clegg, a couple of notions on tenancy agreements or plastic bags no longer dim the rays of disgust. In simple terms, these politicians make nothing important happen. They carve up a diminishing electorate and keep the little Westminster show on the road while the historical graphs of Britain's inequality and decline cross like falling stars.

What did they do about the banks, exactly? I mean as in ensuring, as a contract binding all parties, that these seven lean and brutal years would never be repeated? What did one of them do, in one of those pledge things they like so much, to say that each adult on these islands who paid for the piracy of banks would in time be recompensed, in full? That would be fairness, wouldn't it? Isn't that how debts are collected?

Oh, dear; the very notion. When the busy hive of politics is taken away from the body politic, the drones become confused. Ed Miliband is a busy bee who sticks to familiar stopping places, as though by instinct, and wonders why nectar is so hard to come by these days.

Enough of metaphors and similes. I don't say for an instant, and never have done, that a vote to recommence a country is a guarantee of a new dawn/escape capsule/fresh horizon, or whatever. As to milk and honey, get your own. On those "crucial economic questions", I judge that you won't know the difference for a long decade. But we'll be fine: no miracles, no cataclysms, the usual.

What I do know from the argument over Scotland's independence is that our interest in the politics of the thing will be judged by the numbers who turn out in the referendum. Westminster no longer dreams of the figures we are going to get in September, and no longer dreams of beginning to know why people should care so much about the kind of country they live in.

In September, there will be few zombies around. Mumbling will not afflict us. We will probably wind up with another bunch of over-tutored politicians talking too much, but that's fine. Democracy exists in its practice. That's what big, decadent governments forget and little countries always remember.