Joan McAlpine: In unity is strength but no guarantee of equality

Perhaps it is because the preferred position of the Prime Minister, the so-called "stronger together" strategy, is becoming as unpredictable as America's credit rating. First they wanted to make a positive case for Britain as a unitary state. It was something about red telephone boxes, Dad's Army and M&S underwear, as though these somewhat careworn symbols of stability are threatened by giving Scots full democratic control. .

One does wonder where they are going with this. Just a week before the Scottish election, life as we know it stopped for a wedding in Westminster Abbey. Thousands of Scots enjoyed the sunshine, admired the dress (and Pippa's derriere), then duly went out and voted SNP.

We live in a world of complex identities. I watch my 21-year-old daughter busy herself for a night out. She is wearing an Andy Warhol-style t-shirt featuring the screenprinted face of Robert Burns, but is on her way to watch Hamlet in Kelvingrove Park.

She's spent four years at college in America, is off to work in India and hopes to visit her favourite Camden Market on the way - when she goes to stay with her much loved London stepfamily. But there is no doubt in her mind, that she is Scottish and that her country deserves the same political recognition as any other, that we are the equal of anyone. For her generation, the planet isn't particularly big, so Scotland isn't particularly small. Indeed our cultural and economic imprint is extraordinarily large in this incredible shrinking world.

If the positive case for the union doesn't work for globetrotting cultural magpies, why on earth would it work with the majority who are perhaps more rooted in their local and therefore Scottish institutions?

Sooner or later the sweetalk of "stronger together" turns nasty, like a toxic relationship in which one partner seeks to undermine the other as part of their power trip. So the "positive case for the union" moves away from reminiscing about Basil Brush and the Royal Mail to saying we cannot afford the welfare state. As Mr Mundell well knows, and the people of Scotland increasingly recognise, our country has been in surplus for the last four out of five years for which we have records. The UK as a whole has not been in surplus since 2001.

But that's the big picture - from a details point of view, Mundell's timing is terrible. The average person may well believe the welfare state is under threat, but not from a future independent Scotland. The wreckers are the coalition government.

I am surprised that Mr Mundell, as an elected representative, appears unaware of this. Most MSPs and MPs - of any party - are now regularly approached by extremely distressed sick and disabled people whose benefit claims have been "reassessed" for the Department of Work and Pensions. The reassessments are carried out on those claiming incapacity benefit or the new Employment and Support Allowance (ESA) to see if they are actually fit for work. A total of 11,000 people a week across the UK are currently being "processed" in this way, not by the government department, but by a French IT company called ATOS.

Quite why a French IT company is assessing complex medical and care needs is unclear. What is beyond dispute, however, is that they are getting it wrong. In Scotland, 70 per cent of decisions by ATOS for the DWP are successfully appealed. This has resulted in additional costs to the public purse as the tribunal system has had to expand to accommodate them.

It has been suggested that the mistakes are in fact deliberate, that doctors and nurses employed by ATOS are under pressure to declare people fit for work. Two medics who had worked for the company made this accusation in a BBC investigation.

Every politician, welfare rights or citizens advice worker will have their own unbelievable case. I have spoken to a person who cannot walk or even sit for longer than ten minutes who has been refused ESA despite a GP's intervention. This is not unusual. Terminal cancer sufferers have been ordered to stop shirking and do a hard days graft.

The system has been criticised by doctors, disability charities, and a commons select committee. But still the poor and vulnerable are persecuted. With fears of worse to come when the coalition's own welfare reforms become law, might Scotland be able to operate a system that was fairer than the one delivered for London by the French? After all, the Scottish National Health Service is run as a totally separate entity. While there is plenty of cross-border co-operation, we do things very differently, for example getting rid of private providers and making prescriptions free.

In many ways the Scottish Health Service is far more similar to Nye Bevan's original vision. The NHS is regularly held up by the positive unionists as "The Best of British", but the commitment to universal free care has been best protected in a Scottish context. The NHS, far from being a symbol of UK unity, is an inspiring example of how a public serviccan be delivered differently on each side of the border without problem.If this flexibility and control works for the NHS, why not other institutions? These organisations would not change overnight when we move to full independence. But the control and flexibility independence would give us - run by government more in touch with peoples' needs - would mean that, over time, they were shaped differently. Who knows, their good example may even embarrass future English governments into treating their disabled citizens with dignity and compassion.