THERE is no prize for guessing what is the front runner for the accolade of the word of the year. A succession of crisis after crisis has meant nothing has been discussed as widely and as often as anxiety.

It can be traced back to Covid, when enforced lockdowns, constant tests and family members, friends and neighbours falling foul of the virus consumed us with what seemed like endless worries.

I can’t be the only one to now look back on those days as somehow simpler, more straightforward. No decisions about where to go and what to do when we got there – we couldn’t step out the front door.

Any feelings of unease could be pushed to one side by yet another Netflix series.

READ MORE: Liz Truss tells BBC Radio Scotland Tory tax cuts would 'turbocharge' Scottish economy

Covid is still with us, of course, but we seem to have collectively decided that we are done with all that isolation and the best thing we can do now is to try and put it all behind us.

Since then, we have barely had the chance to get used to one catastrophic event – then along comes another keep us awake at night. Political uncertainty, the cost of living crisis, a UK Government paralysed by confusion over how to respond.

Our state of mind was hardly helped by the fact that the cost of living crisis had been sparked by rising energy prices, which defied logic in a country with enough renewable resources to provide us with virtually all the electricity we need. If you can’t understand something, you have no chance of working out to regain control over control over it.

We were plunged into uncertainty over how we would pay our bills. Old certainties faded away, replaced by the feeling the ground was shifting beneath our feet. Even some of us who felt no loyalty or affection for the Queen felt unexpectedly discombobulated by her death, which could hardly be described as a surprise.

There was certainly no comfort to be found in the upper echelons of the Westminster government. We knew we could not rely on Liz Truss or Kwasi Kwarteng to act in our best interests when they so clearly demonstrated their priority was to protect the gigantic profits of energy companies (and to use our money to do so).

But no-one could have suspected the full idiocy of Kwarteng’s “mini-budget”, which placed its faith in cutting the taxes of the rich to promote growth in a restatement of the potential of trickle-down economics when there is no evidence that it ever works.

The fact that the Chancellor’s grand plan requires increased borrowing sent the markets plunging. Not many of us properly understand what exactly that means but there is no misunderstanding the results.

The collapse in value of the pound to less than a dollar – its lowest ever – sparked the week’s best joke: that US rapper 50 Cent changed his name to Pound. But no-one was laughing at predictions of mortgage rate rises, a run on pension funds which on Wednesday faced mass defaults, and a plunge in the value of UK Government bonds.

It was a disaster for millions gripped by a new anxiety as they waited to find out how much extra they will have to pay for their homes. Still, there is one silver lining. We don’t need to worry about how to heat our homes if we no longer have homes to heat.

It was the latest Better Together promise to go up in flames. First “vote No to stay in Europe”. Then the No alliance campaign director vowed Boris Johnson would never be prime minister.

The next broken promise sought to persuade us not to leave the Union, but instead to lead the Union. But when we tried to do just that by strengthening children’s rights, Westminster took the Scottish Government to court to stop it.

The latest lie is the most blatant yet: we were supposed to believe that only remaining in the UK would protect our pensions. How’s that working out for us now?

Of course, some of the staunchest Unionists refuse to see even a crisis as severe as the current run on pension funds as any reason to consider the case for giving Scotland the finance powers to decide for itself the best way to avoid disaster. For these people there is never a financial case for independence.

The UK economy is either too perilous to make a fundamental change in the make-up of the Union or too successful to make such a change worthwhile.

We will be waiting for hell to open an ice skating park for these people to see any circumstances – no matter how dangerous or disastrous – which would make independence an alternative worth considering. Unfortunately, they currently include among their number the Prime Minister and the leader of the Labour Party, both of whom harbour the delusion that they have the right to block Scotland from even expressing its opinion on the matter through a referendum.

If one thing became glaringly obvious yesterday, it was that the architects of the financial crash have nothing to offer which will stop our nerves from fraying further.

The Prime Minister has been criticised for her disappearing act when all around her were thrust into the cold sweat of panic. To be honest, it would have have been better for all concerned if she had disappeared for good. That would have spared us all the terrifying experience of hearing her embarrass herself on local radio stations all over Britain yesterday morning.

Damning criticism came from all directions, including the former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, whose politeness was tested to the very limits when he said the Tory government’s mini-budget showed he was “working at some cross purposes with the bank in terms of short-term support for the economy”.

Translation: “The clueless morons in charge have really lost their shit.”

Liz Truss’s defence beamed into millions of homes around Britain went viral yesterday – and not in a good way. In short, it was a disaster.

Highlights include the Prime Minister’s utterly false claim that no family would pay more than £2500 for energy this year. This is simply not true – that figure is the amount a household will pay based on average energy usage. It is not a cap: the more you use, the more you pay.

Truss went on to lay the blame for the current crisis abroad when everyone knows the Russian president, while very, very far from the good guy in the energy crisis, can’t shoulder the blame for the Tory leader’s breathtaking incompetence.

In radio interview after radio interview, she put her fingers in her ears as her mindless repetition of support for her measures was buried under an avalanche of predictions of disaster. Again and again she insisted there would be no U-turn on the tax cuts, the last thing anybody with any sense wants to hear.

READ MORE: Liz Truss breaks silence on economic fallout in painful series of BBC interviews

The current situation has been widely compared with the banking crisis of 2008 but I do not think I have lived through a time of such instability, brought about entirely by stupidity and perhaps even corruption. Nor is there any real chance of a rescue. Truss doesn’t have the brains to ditch her plans, the Tories don’t have the courage to dump another prime minister so soon after kicking out Johnson, and Britain does not have the democratic power to force a general election without the support of the very fools who put her in charge in the first place.

Scotland’s choice is more stark than it has ever been: we can meekly accept Westminster’s refusal to stand down its undemocratic block on a second independence referendum based on the blueprint of the first, which is still widely held to be the gold standard.

We can remain roped to a Union about to plunge headlong off a cliff. We can see our saving and pensions slashed as our mortgages, heating bills and food costs soar to previously unimaginable highs. We can suffer at the hands of a government in thrall to the rich and an ideology which protects the powerful and laughs at the weak. We can allow crippling anxieties to paralyse us through fear.

Or we can support our government in democratic moves to send a message loud and clear, appropriated from the 1976 movie class Network: “We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to take this anymore.”