SCOTLAND IS an independent country, the complete sovereign product. This statement is not a wish list, but the de facto operational assumption that the Scottish government hope will close the gulf between their long-term ambitions and the stubbornly low support for independence. The strategy, for one constitutional analyst, is to help turn the leap to independence into "a minor step with minimal disruption".

To be fair to Alex Salmond and his Holyrood administration, this process was already under way. Labour first ministers displayed the occasional sign that their junior partner status was limiting. But where Jack McConnell would back down - notably over his wish that the Scottish Executive be given control over immigration - and accept orders from his head office in Westminster, Salmond has created the illusion of a sovereign state whose ambitions are being thwarted by a dominant imperialist power, one that has yet to wake up to the reality that the Border is no longer just a line on a map.

With fewer than a quarter of Scots, according to the latest opinion survey, offering support for independence, and with the SNP still committed to a referendum on the issue before 2011, Salmond's strategy is a clever one, and miles away from the crude what-if fantasies that marked their earlier electoral failures.

I recall an SNP press conference in 1993 where Salmond presented what he described as "detailed research" on the number of embassies an independent Scotland would need around the world. The gathered media could barely contain their laughter.

If that event were to be repeated this week, there would be no accusations of misplaced grandiosity. The process has already started with the appointment of Robin Naysmith as Scottish government counsellor in North America. The previous representative was Michael Kellet, who held the title of "first secretary". The chosen title for Naysmith is, not accidentally, the equivalent of an ambassador.

At 3100 Massachusetts Avenue in Washington DC, the location of the British embassy, Sir Nigel Sheinwald is said to have called London and asked what the hell was going on when he heard of Naysmith's new role. Sheinwald reports to the foreign secretary, David Miliband. Naysmith reports to Salmond. Washington now regards the Scottish government as operating an embassy-within-an-embassy, and what some in the Foreign Office believe is the structure that will be rolled out elsewhere.

In politics, appearance is everything. Call yourself the government, act like the government, and you'll become the government. Such job titles matter if you want to remove the fear of independence.

Winston Churchill did not refer to himself only as prime minister. He once said: "I did not become Her Majesty's first minister so that I might oversee the liquidation of the British empire."

In Norway, while in union with Sweden, the head of their government was called the first minister. Twelve years before Norway's full independence, the first minister began calling himself the prime minister.

"Prime minister Alex Salmond, head of the Scottish government" would have sounded better to the 180 countries he wrote to last month on the subject of Trident, saying: "As a country we have every right to voice our opposition to nuclear weapons on Scottish soil".

Scotland has the right, and Salmond would be a negligent first minister if he said nothing. Denying Scotland observer status at meetings of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, if permission is blocked by London, will be portrayed as an imperialist action.

As a young producer in BBC Scotland in the early 1980s I was told the only way news and current affairs in Scotland could "work" was to pretend the Border was politically real. Devolution ended the need for the pretence. But in its place is a new fantasy: the idea that nothing is off-limits for the Scottish government. Trident will be blocked with the ministry of defence charged £1 million for every warhead carried through Scotland. The fact that authority over trunk roads is held in London is not a barrier to law, it is a political inconvenience. For those who point out political limitations, there is a reflex accusation of being a non-believer.

A conversation between the deputy first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, and the new Labour leader in Scotland, Wendy Alexander, illustrates the dangers of inhabiting what one academic called a "parallel political universe", where the world view is that everything would fit, everything would work, if only the Scottish government were the real deal. Sturgeon and Alexander were discussing the merits of Ireland and Norway. Ireland, according to Alexander, was a low tax economy with a limited welfare state; Norway had a developed welfare system with a high tax economy. Sturgeon was asked how Scotland could operate a low tax system yet promise an advanced welfare structure. Sturgeon is said to have replied: "The difference is that I believe in Scotland."

There is a danger in this political polarity, a place where independence, even if off in the distance, is good, and everything else is bad. This is too convenient for the Scottish government and limits serious examination of what they propose to do. If they don't deliver, be it smaller class sizes or more police on Scotland's streets, is the blame London's or Edinburgh's? Inside this unaccountable ideology is the claim that nationalists know the solutions, but can't deliver because Scotland isn't yet independent.

But inside this parallel universe of almost-independence there are inconsistencies. Despite having the power to amend how Scotland's fatal accident inquiries operate, the Scottish government seems hesitant to change the law.

The Scottish government's justice minister, Kenny MacAskill, is understood to have been written to over the past two months by Jack Straw, the secretary of state for justice, and asked how Scotland might cope with the changes to the coroners court system in England, allowing the investigation of deaths in the armed forces overseas to take place nearer the homes of those who have lost their lives. According to a source in the justice ministry: "We have received nothing back from Mr MacAskill."

No-one in either London or Edinburgh seems quite sure why there is hesitancy over a matter of convenient legal procedure. They may be missing the point. An independent country doesn't take orders, any orders, from another sovereign state. Now if England just asked nicely Iain Macwhirter is away