EU might say that...

Could the plot thin? If we are talking about the Scottish neverendum, I think so.

Last week I launched my "Aye, right" campaign - featuring if not a plague, then at least a dose of scepticism about the big claims of both the Yes and No factions in the run-up to the 2014 vote on independence.

This week the yawning indifference of the Scottish masses can only have intensified as the politicians took the referendum global.

Jose Manuel Barroso, one of the big cheeses in the EU, told the SNP government that Scotland would most definitely have to apply for membership of the Neoliberal Austerity Club if it became a new state.

Barroso was taking time out from accepting the Nobel peace prize for the EU.

Satire, which died when they gave the prize to Henry Kissinger, is now starring in an endless loop of Return of Shaun of the Dead, getting its head repeatedly mashed in by baseball bats.

In response to the Barroso knockback, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon frantically wrote a letter admonishing the EU president for not understanding his own rules, and that, yes, Scotland would automatically be in the club. Though she didn't add "and in the euro."

There are two problems for the SNP here.

One is that the future of the post-indy Scottish state is most definitely uncertain - and that is all the anti-nationalist campaigns really need to undermine any bandwagon for a Yes vote.

But the bigger problem is that damned "vision" thing.

If the EU spat shows anything more clearly this week than previously it is that Alex Salmond's vision of Scotland is for a kind of super-Ireland.

Not in the Con-Dem austerity UK, oh no - though still in the pound, whether the pound wants it or not.

Rather it will be in the Merkel-Barroso austerity EU, but with the pound not the euro, whether the EU wants it or not.

And all the while racing the Irish to the bottom of the corporation tax barrel.

Little wonder that Scottish pundits are now raising the question - why so keen to be in the EU at all?

And actually - unsurprisingly, given the way the EU continues to punish the poor in southern Europe in order to bail out the greedy bankers - the polls show Scots lining up against the EU in much the same way as other parts of Britain, with around a half of voters prepared to leave and a third wanting to stay in.

Meanwhile Salmond turned his back on the European brouhaha and launched himself on the unsuspecting US beltway, claiming in a Washington Post article that Scottish independence is in the US national interest.

Given that there are very few doves on either side on the political fence in Washington, Salmond's stated policy of driving out nuclear weapons from an independent Scotland might not seem attractive to those who decide what is in the US interest.

Of course the First Minister can now wave his Nato membership application before he pops it in the post, and hope that makes everything all right on the war front.

US nukes will enter and leave Scotland at will. Don't ask, don't tell, as they might say over at the Pentagon.

He also has that handy discount rate of corporation tax to flash at US multinationals, which would rather set up anywhere than pay their way like ordinary citizens.

It now looks as if Magic Alex has lost the page in his Tony Blair political triangulation manual and instead of being all things to all people, the SNP's strategy is all over the place.

NB: For my more indy-leaning friends who now think my Union Jack underpants are on so tight they're restricting the blood supply to my brains, can I just say I promise in due course to be having a square go at the Better Together campaign - or what I increasingly think of as Better The Devil You Know.