IT’S tempting to start with the negatives. After all, Britain is now limping into crucial negotiations on its economic and political future led by swivel-eyed reactionaries, end-of-days fundamentalists, and a regenerated Michael Gove, the UK’s very own Captain Planet. Scarily, our best hope of tempering a hard Brexit is the DUP, the party of Ian Paisley, whose utopia looks like Saudi Arabia with rain and flute bands. Britain is currently the butt of just about every geopolitical joke.

However, weirdly, if you look on this election as an internationalist – and I do – then the positives outweigh the negatives. Yes, Theresa May screwed everything up, badly. But take nothing away from Jeremy Corbyn. He’s survived the most disgraceful character assassination in media history to emerge triumphant, gaining Labour its highest share of the vote since 2001 and its biggest swing since Clement Attlee.

If Corbyn had followed the advice of his MPs, if he’d bowed to the wisdom of liberal commentators, he’d have run a campaign solely based on getting back into the EU. Nicola Sturgeon, Tim Farron and the Greens took that approach, and it proved disastrous for them. That shouldn’t be a surprise. Academic evidence shows, time and again, that the EU isn’t popular outside the bubble of university towns and metropolitan elites, even among people who might passively vote for it.

Corbyn presented a positive, populist and – crucially – costed social democratic manifesto that addressed the crisis of living standards in Britain. And he demonstrated real resilience in leadership, refusing to break with his principles even when the polls were against him. The result makes radical left politics relevant again in Europe and beyond. If only the American Democrats had had the courage to choose Bernie Sanders over the appalling Hillary Clinton, we’d live in a very different world today.

Readers of The National will probably start with one question: where does this leave Scottish independence? I understand that temptation, but ultimately we are constrained by what happens internationally. I said three weeks ago that a victory for Corbyn would be a blow for “European neoliberalism, British militarism and the current wave of global reaction represented by Trump”. Well, he didn’t win, but his success has weakened these forces, and if you’re serious about internationalism that’s your starting point.

Nonetheless, the return of radicalism in England has been countered by a wave of reaction and right-wing revenge in Scotland. There’s clearly a backlash against the social movement represented by independence. Nicola Sturgeon won’t face a challenge anytime soon, but she is no longer a Teflon leader, and if she retracts the threat of an independence referendum it will be difficult to put it back on the table again.

The independence movement looks increasingly monolithic. Its leadership, represented by the informal Green/SNP alliance at Holyrood, doesn’t represent a radical leftist force when Corbyn and McDonnell are leading the Labour Party. Instead, with a blind love of the EU and an offer of low-tax, efficient government, it’s a centrist and small-c conservative project at a time when such projects are getting a global electoral humping, France notwithstanding.

True, there are radicals among the SNP and Green politicians. But they aren’t exactly getting pasted through the papers as dangerous Marxists and IRA sympathisers, because they play it safe and they don’t represent the primary threat to the billionaire establishment. The independence movement has lost its cavalier spirit. It looks drained. It lacks edge. Its leaders are part of the furniture.

Many people are going to blame Nicola Sturgeon for putting forward independence too early. Personally, I don’t think that’s fair, not precisely. The problem is that we’ve followed independence down the Brexit rabbit hole without answering any of the basic questions about the currency and our place in Europe. And in the process we’ve forgotten the left-populist morality that gave the independence movement its distinctiveness.

The era is rewarding persistent, bold and decisive leadership. That’s why Trump and Corbyn both succeeded. But on independence, we’re constantly flitting about between compromise – well, OK, if we stay in the single market, we’ll stay in Britain – and rupture. It’s all become a matter of technocratic bargaining. Worse, it’s technocratic bargaining with no plan, no numbers and no definite grounds for negotiation. There are no principles, no vision, and no firm answers on the big what-abouts from 2014.

That’s why I hear more and more anguish from some Radical Independence supporters. Why are we sticking with this war of position when Corbyn is offering something that reflects our values?

For now, they are still appalled by Scottish Labour. Unless you’re abnormally lucky, your average Labour candidate is at best a yawn-inducing centrist and at worst an Iraq War-supporting diehard. The latter are a beastly lot, and they’re still planning to bring Corbyn down. Structurally, it remains an unsound party. Moreover, it’s a British nationalist party, which is why Corbyn might never win the day on Trident.

There are also unanswered questions about Corbyn’s vision. Beyond the populist appeal of revamped social democracy, his team have presented little about the constitutional and democratic crisis of Britain. They’ve given over the Scottish vision to Kezia Dugdale, which leaves Corbyn with little of interest to say about the idea of Britain. Given a Tory coalition with the DUP, he can’t afford to ignore these nationality questions forever.

Nonetheless, for supporters of independence, the ball is back in our court. The rise of Corbyn has exposed our intellectual frailties. It’s fine to point out that Corbyn doesn’t have all the answers – he doesn’t – but unless we’re presenting our own, the value of this critique is disputable.

Can we revive the case for independence? It’s certainly not impossible. The idea of Britain alone, sidling up to Donald Trump, at the mercy of millenarian Orangemen, is unappealing.

But the Yes campaign has made errors. We tolerated a lot of nonsense about the Labour Party, as the expression “Red Tory” became a meaningless counterpoint to the Labourist slight against Scottish nationalists, “Tartan Tory”. Often, the explicitly socialist left were the worst offenders. They seemed determined to dance on Labour’s grave. And, true, Scottish Labour’s leaders deserved it, particularly when they lined up behind paranoiac right-wingers like Jim Murphy. But, currently, the Scottish Parliament lacks a left-right dynamic and politics here is sterile.

Sturgeon made a mistake by centralising Yes Scotland into the SNP. For a while, it worked. But now it allows the Unionists to use independence as a noose around the Scottish Government’s neck. Moreover, the SNP is so centralised that the case for independence doesn’t move forward when there's an election to fight, as invariably these days there is. Reviving the case for independence – or dropping it – is now all on Sturgeon. Until she decides, everyone is in the dark.