THERE must come a point in our early adult years when we begin to question just how democratic our democratic state really is. And then, having begun to identify the forces and privileges that distort it a little, we simply shrug and tell ourselves that, well … there isn’t really much we can do and anyway we usually get the result that most people wanted despite the shady manoeuvres and dark influences in the political world. It is what it is, British democracy, and it’s still a helluva lot better than most other versions of it, isn’t it?

And so, most of us – even on the left – simply accept that there is a two-tier system of education in Scotland that is every bit as pernicious and unfair as the social gerrymandering of education that exists in England. Even when we discover that this pattern of unearned privilege helps maintain the educational attainment gap and ensures that the key positions of influence in Scotland lie within the personal fiefdoms of an elite few, we aren’t really minded to do much about it.

Each day, we allow justice in our most serious criminal cases to be administered in the main by a judicial elite of 12 senior law lords. This all-white, Anglo Saxon bench (mainly men of course) is dominated by an assortment of people who will never have experienced or encountered the inequalities and social iniquities that poison the lives of those who appear before them and choke their outcomes.

Yet, we never question the length of the sentences they hand down; their directions to juries; the amount of weight they attach to mitigating social circumstances. As long as we all keep our noses clean then we’ll never have to worry about all that.

And we quickly become tired of those awkward few who are never done reminding us of the pattern of ownership of Scotland’s land. Yes, yes, yes; we’ve heard it all before from that bespectacled chap, whatsisname … Whiteman or Whitehead, something like that. We know that just a few anointed families own half the country, but who really cares?

After all; would anyone actually want to live in these wild places and they do seem to provide employment to the locals, especially if they become proficient at bowing and scraping and cleaning and tipping their forelocks and refilling glasses.

So long as they keep within their boundaries and don’t use their riches and connections to influence elections or interfere with the delivery of services and the granting of contracts then we’ll not root around too much in the past and ask questions about how they came by their lands.

And yes, of course our police forces are flawed but, well; aren’t they simply human and can’t we just cut them some slack in their frailty? I’m sure all these rumours about masonic lodges and their judicial brethren are just the usual paranoia from the usual suspects. And the miners’ strike was so long ago. Isn’t it best simply to let sleeping dogs lie and not re-open old wounds? I mean, there were faults on both sides, weren’t there? Scotland simply wouldn’t allow judges and the police and the employers and the Tory government to collude to ensure that the most upstart strikers and their families would be blacklisted for life and never be permitted to earn another wage.

The Panama Papers, what were they again? The McCrone Report: something about oil that the nationalists keep banging on about. The lobbying firms and cash for access: it’s all a bit complicated and we’ve always had them. Shady arms deals and the secret state, well, sometimes we’re better off not knowing. And anyway, no-one’s ever managed to invade us recently, have they? Of course it’s imperfect, this democracy, but what would you put in its place? You can’t say that Labour haven’t had a decent turn on the levers of power and if there really was something sinister going on I’m sure they would have blown the whistle and sorted it all out. Tony told us there really was nothing to see here, after all.

And so we vote in our elections and in our referendums, all in good faith, and we accept sullenly that the result is what the majority wanted. Of course, some people tried to buy influence and the almost universally right-wing press did their worst, but our system is a robust one and has always ensured that none of these could have tipped the balance significantly. Hasn’t that always been the case?

But dear Lord and all that’s holy, we’re all in a different movie now. In the past few weeks the following revelations – in no particular order – have unfolded. Thanks to the investigative efforts of The Ferret, the independent media co-operative, we know that £319,000 from the shadowy Scottish Unionist Association Trust, of no fixed abode, disbursed funds to several Conservative politicians during a period which coincided with Tory electoral gains.

We know that the Vote Leave campaign broke electoral law during the EU referendum with a massive overspend of half-a-million pounds. Criminal charges may follow. This happened on the same day that Michael Gove, one of the most prominent Brexiteers, admitted that one of the two pillars of the Leave argument was a lie and that there was no prospect of multitudes of Turkish nationals about to invade the UK. The other one, about the weekly £350m extra to the NHS, was exposed as a lie almost as soon as the referendum finished.

We know, thanks to the investigative prowess of The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr, that dark money and the deliberate manipulation of illegally obtained data influenced the EU vote and who knows how many others.

We also know that the BBC, the publicly funded arm of the British state, drew a veil over this. We also know that polling firms made a great deal of money from having prior knowledge of the likely result of the EU referendum and sold it to city speculators.

And now we learn that the head of state of our biggest ally has chosen to become the footstool of a totalitarian regime while effectively accusing his own security services of conspiracy simply for asking questions about covert Russian involvement in the US presidential elections.

Is there anyone left in Scotland who still thinks that the UK is a functioning democracy? Can anyone still say, with a degree of confidence, that their next vote hasn’t already been bought? Democracy my arse. It’s time to get out of the sewer now.