NEXT Thursday would have been Independence Day had Scotland voted yes in 2014.

But it didn’t, so it’s not, but 18 months after the issue was supposedly decided for a generation the subject is never far away.

It was mentioned in the budget and comes up at every party conference and barges into current burning issues.

While tens of thousands are losing their jobs in the oil and gas sector, causing real misery, the debate for some comes back to independence, broad shoulders versus an oil fund.

The European referendum about the UK and the EU, is being framed in terms of what it could mean for independence.

We are about to enter the full Holyrood election campaign where the priority should be health, education, poverty and justice but for many the most anticipated policy announcement is what the SNP manifesto will say about a second referendum.

The SNP line has been ‘only when the people demand it’ but then the people are told in which circumstances they would be expected to rise up and make this demand.

The outcome of the EU referendum is one such possible circumstance, but it is illogical.

The vote is whether the UK remains or leaves the EU. Scotland voted to stay part of the UK, there were no ifs or buts on the ballot paper.

No-one voted ‘No, but only if the UK always remains part of the EU’ or ‘No, but only is the so called vow is kept’.

The vow is held up as another trigger for a second referendum. How many people were genuinely influenced by a front page in one newspaper two days before the vote is impossible to measure but easy to overstate.

Somehow the narrative has become ‘had it not been for the vow Scotland would be celebrating independence next week’.

Those desperate for a second referendum are looking to manufacture demand among the people and are using the vow and the EU as catalysts and the election campaign is in danger of being overshadowed by a hypothetical second referendum.

Meantime we have serious unresolved issues needing action. An unacceptable attainment gap in our schools, growing child poverty, a staffing crisis in our biggest hospitals and a noticeable increase in people sleeping on the streets.

Sadly the division created during the referendum campaign has become entrenched and politics in Scotland is the worse for it. We are stuck in an independence referendum campaign and the only difference between now and 2014 is there is no end date in sight.