The spirit of last year's independence referendum, far from being alive and well as many claim, is dead. The open, positive, non-partisan manner in which the vast majority of Scots experienced at a personal level the debate on their country's future has disappeared. The mythologizing of the ascendency of the SNP MPs now at Westminster has turned the meaning of that experience on its head and has created, if inadvertantly, an emerging Scottish identity that is intimately associated with being on the Left, one which has the potential to monopolize national identity in terms of a single political ideology, to the exclusion of other definitions and to the danger of social and political life in an independent Scotland.