I’m going to do something I only do rarely and write this post in the personal pronoun, because it’s very much a personal view rather than an attempt to speak for a wider section of the independence movement. But although it’s been forming for a while, it was finally triggered by an Ian Bell comment piece in the Herald today.

You should read it all, but the key paragraph is this one:

“You have to pause, then, and ask yourself why policies that have failed for three long years cause barely a whisper of argument in Westminster. The only sensible inference, surely, is that what looks like failure to some is a very satisfactory state of affairs to others.”

That simple, understated last sentence cuts to the very heart of why Scots will stand at the edge of a terrible abyss in September 2014, with a herd of buffalo stampeding towards them, and seriously consider NOT grasping at the rope ladder dangling from the last helicopter offering to carry them safely away from the cliff edge.

It’s one of the great ironies of humanity that we so eagerly subvert and undermine our own beliefs. World War 1 was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”, but just 20 years after the appalling carnage of trench warfare we forgot the supposed lesson and plunged back into another pan-global conflict, this one even wider-ranging and four times as catastrophic.

And did we learn any better the second time? We pretend that we did, making serious, brilliant documentaries like “The Nazis – A Warning From History”, examining in the greatest detail how the war came about so that we can recognise the symptoms in future and prevent it from happening again. But what do we do then? We invent Godwin’s Law, a means by which anyone who actually points out those symptoms can be derided and dismissed.

(Or to be more accurate, a misinterpretation of Godwin’s Law. The law itself only states that at some point any debate will eventually mention Hitler, but has been twisted by the witless herdmind into the assertion that the person who does so has automatically lost the argument. As wilfully stupid blindness goes, it’s hard to beat.)

Something similar is happening right now in UK politics. The evidence that austerity is a totally counter-productive “solution” to economic crisis is so overwhelming in both quantity and quality that it’s hardly worth linking to any specific studies, because it requires no great or specialised intellect to see that impoverishing the people who actually spend most of the money in an economy cannot possibly lead to growth – it’s staggeringly obvious common sense that a child, or the IMF, could understand.

Why, then, does our political system comprise just two electable parties, both offering the same disastrous policies, stretching years into the future? Partly, of course, that’s a function of an electoral system which invariably creates two-party states where the “opponents” are in fact barely distinguishable.

But there’s also another, far more chilling possibility – one hinted at by Ian Bell, and explored in stark detail in a cultural document which suffers from its own brand of the “Godwin’s Law” curse.

In this writer’s view, George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” is the most important book ever written, certainly about politics and certainly in the UK. It’s a short book, and the crucial part is shorter still, amounting to barely 100 pages.

(Most of the text preceding – SPOILER ALERT! – Winston’s arrest is just scene-setting and human interest, apart from the extracts from Goldstein’s book which appear towards the end of the second act. Those, his conversations with O’Brien and the appendix on the principles of Newspeak are the book’s real content.)

In much the same way as Godwin’s Law, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” has been debased almost beyond the point of credibility by deliberate misrepresentation, clumsy misinterpretation and hysterical misuse. As with Nazi Germany, because the dystopia it depicts is so extreme and terrifying, people instinctively look for ways to reject it as somehow inhuman and unthinkable, and to tame its iconography by trivialising it, because facing the reality brings it far too close to home for comfort.

But I’m digressing. Ian Bell’s point, extensively elaborated on in the book, is that austerity suits both Labour and the Tories just fine. We’ll pick out just a single extract of Orwell’s work by way of illustration:

“By the standards of the early twentieth century, even a member of the Inner Party lives an austere, laborious kind of life. Nevertheless, the few luxuries that he does enjoy – his large, well-appointed flat, the better texture of his clothes, the better quality of his food and drink and tobacco, his two or three servants, his private motor-car or helicopter – set him in a different world from a member of the Outer Party, and the members of the Outer Party have a similar advantage in comparison with the submerged masses whom we call ‘the proles’. The social atmosphere is that of a besieged city, where the possession of a lump of horseflesh makes the difference between wealth and poverty. And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”

For “Inner Party” read “political elite”, for “Outer Party” read “home-owning middle classes”, for “proles” read everyone else, and for “war” read “recession” (combined, of course, with the “war on terror”). And if that’s all a bit abstract, let’s ask it in a simpler way – what would it benefit either of the UK’s two political parties if the country suddenly recovered and started to record healthy economic growth?

The Tories wouldn’t be particularly happy, because by common consensus the crisis has given them the cover they need to do something they always ideologically want to do anyway – slash government spending, shrink the size of the state and cut taxes in order to enrich the wealthy, who in turn fund them.

But if austerity worked, would Ed Miliband be any more pleased? If the cuts saved the economy, everyone would gratefully vote Tory again. Labour needs poverty, because without poverty its ostensible reason for existing is gone. The party, in fact, thrives on inequality – if that inequality vanished, so would its core vote.

The fundamental change wrought by New Labour was that without admitting it, the party politically abandoned the poor and vulnerable (safe in the knowledge that they had nowhere else to go) and instead aligned itself with the “aspirational” middle classes – exactly the same people targeted by the Tories. And the middle class, more or less by definition, identifies itself not in absolute terms, but relative ones.

The British middle class – as we’ve seen by the remarkably muted response to austerity, compared to the riots in other countries – can tolerate its circumstances worsening considerably, as long as it can still see the gap between itself and the wretched poor. Having to work longer hours or cut back on holidays and new cars is bearable as long as you can say “Hey, at least I’m not being forced to work in Poundland for nothing, or socially cleansed out of this nice area where I live”.

The poor have been effectively disenfranchised since 1997, but only now are Labour fully grasping the opportunity that presents them with. They’d already realised that it was electorally safe to abandon socialism, but now they can see that it’s also no longer necessary even to exercise economic competence (the party’s traditional Achilles heel) in order to attain their only true goal – power.

As long as they’re prepared to concede the ideological ground to the Tories, Labour can safely focus on competing for the tiny handful of voters who actually decide who runs the country, now sympathetically called the “squeezed middle”. Spending on the desperate poor – who will either vote Labour anyway for lack of an alternative, waste their vote on a protest which even if successful will achieve nothing, or simply stay at home – can be sacrificed in order to bribe the middle with what little can be spared.

(Another little-examined key factor in the disintegration of British democracy is that the parties have no reason to care in the slightest about low turnouts. Indeed, the lower turnout is the better, because it means less money has to be spent on campaigning to win votes. The “perfect” election for any of the mainstream parties is one where only a single voter turns out, and votes for them. The notion of a democratic mandate is a red herring to which only lip service is ever paid – David Cameron secured the votes of just 23% of the electorate in 2010, yet effectively exercises absolute power without anyone ever raising much of a fuss about it.)

Labour can’t win any new votes by moving to the left, only to the right. And the Tories can only fight off the threat of UKIP (who can’t win power, but CAN deny it to the Tories by splitting their vote) by doing the same, pulling Labour with them as they go.

As Ian Bell notes, George Osborne will today paint a picture of a future where austerity persists to 2020 and beyond, and Ed Balls has already effectively signed up to Osborne’s budget plans, leaving the electorate no meaningful choice in 2015. But it’s much worse than that.

There is no magical windfall waiting just over the horizon, no second North Sea oil boom to rescue the UK the way the first one rescued the Tories in the 1980s. Even Labour’s token attempts at addressing poverty between 1997 and 2010 – when there were endless oceans of imaginary cash propping up the Treasury’s coffers – are now history, because there’s no money left.

The new policy consensus between all three UK parties – and more particularly the only two who matter – is forever, because there’s no need or reason for it ever to change. Austerity is the new prosperity. If you’re not already rich, be very afraid.